A model town at Cabaret is built out of monthly shakedowns

In early 1961 Luckner Cambronne launched a national renovation movement, and its showpiece was Duvalierville, a model town to be built next to Cabaret. Haiti had done this before, since Dessalines had renamed Marchand after himself a hundred and fifty seven years earlier. The construction was the smaller half of the project. The collection was the point. Businessmen in Port-au-Prince were assessed at five thousand dollars each to begin with and provincial firms at a thousand, while government clerks, soldiers, deputies and schoolchildren were signed up for monthly contributions. Tonton macoutes put tollbooths on the road at Cabaret to tax passing traffic for the fund, which is what Soulouque's men had done a century earlier. One contributor got his cancelled cheque back from the bank and found the endorsement on it was Cambronne's mistress. After four years of work the site held a handful of one room concrete boxes on a dusty plain, a cement playground, and a cockpit big enough to look like a coliseum beside them.

Independence across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States produced, from the late 1950s, a large expansion of scholarly work on the African past. Historians, linguists and archaeologists filled in centuries that university syllabuses had treated as empty, and African history became a subject many universities offer. Offering is a different thing from requiring. In world history courses the African material tends to sit in a sidebar or in a chapter that gets dropped when the term runs short, few history students take an African course at all, and the courses that exist give most of their attention to the last two or three centuries while the ancient periods stay thin. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the same arithmetic applies to us. Haiti is available to be studied and almost never required, so a person can finish a history degree in the country that bought Louisiana from Napoleon without being told why Napoleon was in a hurry to sell it.

In January 1965 Diederich met Greene at the airport in Santo Domingo and set out before dawn with the exiled priest Jean-Claude Bajeux in a chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle to drive the length of the Dominican side of the border. Their cover was that they were checking Dominican jails for missing Haitians. Bajeux was six months from the disappearance of his own family. Diederich's purpose was to get Greene close enough to Haiti to write about it, since Greene could not return. Greene later wrote in the American edition of his novel that the best he could do in January 1965 was to make that trip along the border in the company of two exiles and pass along the edge of a country they loved. The final chapter of the book, in which the guerrillas cross into the Dominican Republic, comes directly out of those three days.

In 1961 a student strike paralysed the school system in Haiti. Francois Duvalier answered by dismembering the students' association. One of the measures he imposed required each student to produce a police certificate attesting that he belonged to no communist group or association suspected by the state, along with a certificate of good conduct from the civil court. The courts issuing those papers were staffed with the president's own supporters. Duvalier added that a parent would be held responsible if a child was absent from school without a doctor's note. He had already used the Cold War to pass anticommunist laws banning most civic organisations and political parties, and a series of American governments backed those laws, which became the legal base of a family dictatorship lasting twenty nine years. Students, union members and party leaders left the country in numbers to avoid arrest and torture, and many of them landed in New York.