Haitian bodyguards die in the crash that killed Hammarskjold

Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was flying to negotiate a ceasefire in the Congo war in 1961 when his aircraft came down in Northern Rhodesia. His bodyguards were Haitians and they died with him. Elizabeth Wilson, who was born in the Congo while her father Arnauld Wilson worked there as a public health engineer for the World Health Organisation, has written that several hundred people serving under the United Nations flag in the Congo were killed, many of them unnamed anywhere, and that the Haitian bodyguards were among them. She asks for a monument in Kinshasa, raised in the name of the United Nations, to everyone who lived and died there for an impossible ideal. Her own father is absent from the official record too. That absence is what she is arguing against, on behalf of a family memory and of a Haitian presence in Africa that nobody wrote down.

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.

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.