Vacant parishes go to priests who say mass wearing a pistol

Expelling the bishops emptied posts, and the government filled them. In Gonaives the senior militiaman of the town, Zacharie Delva, who was also a boko, held a public ceremony in the cathedral doorway with a chalice of warm pig's blood, staged as a repeat of Bois Caiman. Expulsions of ordinary clergy went on for three years and reached Protestants too, among them the Episcopal bishop Voegeli, an old friend of the president. In February 1964 the whole Jesuit order was put out of Haiti, two centuries after Saint-Domingue expelled it the first time. The livings that fell vacant went to priests of the regime. Jean Hilaire said mass with a pistol on his hip. Bouillaguet commanded the militia at Leogane. Albert Dorelien went from parish priest to cathedral canon after announcing in public that Duvalier had brought 1804 up to date, which was an accurate description of what was happening. In the same years Clement Barbot, the president's closest friend, sat in a cell at Fort Dimanche.

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.

Islam is old in Africa and its place in government has been argued over since independence. South of the Sahara the argument has mostly concerned the standing of Muslims inside states with large Christian populations. Nigeria applies sharia in the northern states while national politics turns on how Muslims and Christians divide the presidency and the ministries. Islam there is local and adapted, with sufi orders predominating, which is precisely what campaigners for a pure orthodoxy attack. Where Muslims are a minority, as in Kenya and Tanzania, they have organised as a lobby around economic neglect. North of the Sahara it went differently. Sadat was killed in 1981 by Islamists who regarded his agreement with Israel as a betrayal, and Mubarak inherited the fight with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front took on the FLN and the country fell into civil war in the early 1990s. War between the north and south of Sudan ran from 1955 with one interval and had left about 1.5 million people dead by 2002.

By 1971 money had started to move again. The finance minister and the head of the bank knew that foreign donors would not reopen the taps while tax receipts kept vanishing into the unaudited tobacco monopoly, and their attempts at reform ran straight into Luckner Cambronne, Simone Duvalier and the whole militia structure that the monopoly had been feeding. There was more to work with than before. The new jet airport brought tourists back, including a new kind sold package deals by New York agents. Twelve hundred dollars bought two days in Haiti, a lawyer, a hotel and a divorce decree to hand to a spouse who had not been consulted. Haitians abroad sent home about 14 million dollars in 1971 alone, and the country ran its first balance of payments surplus in years. The generators at Peligre, begun under Magloire, came on line in July and the chronic blackouts ended. Foreign investors put up factories on the edge of the capital for the cheap labour, some 7,000 jobs by midyear. Port-au-Prince had held 200,000 people in 1957 and was approaching a million.