Haitians are the second largest group of UN experts in the Congo

The Congo became independent from Belgium in June 1960 and the Belgian administrators went home. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold set up the Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo, which spent four years recruiting French speaking professionals from around the world to keep the country's services running. Hundreds of Haitians went, as teachers, professors, engineers and doctors. By 1962 Haitians formed the second largest national contingent of United Nations staff experts in the Congo. Maurice Dartigue was chief of the Africa Division of UNESCO. Athemas Bellerive, once director general of health in Haiti, ran the World Health Organisation medical team. In 1963 the military force of the operation was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville of Haiti. Large numbers of Haitians also worked in United Nations programmes in Benin and Cameroon, and an estimated 7,500 Haitians were living in African countries. Haitian migration is usually written as a movement towards New York, Montreal and Paris.

Under Francois Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, the men who worked for him carried the bodies of their victims out to Titayen, a stretch of desert ground at the foot of the coastal mountains a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and left them there for crows, goats and vultures. Everyone understood the choice of ground. Haitians who serve the spirits hold that a permanent link runs between a person's spirit and the physical remains, which is why tombs are built above ground with flat roofs that work as tables for offerings of food and rum on birthdays, on All Saints' Day and on the first of January, which is Ancestors Day and Independence Day at once. To withhold the body was to cancel all of that for the whole family. The name of Titayen stayed in the national memory, and in 2010 whoever picked the site of the mass graves for earthquake victims picked the same ground.

The approach to independence in Rwanda was dominated by the split between Tutsi and Hutu, which German and then Belgian administrators had hardened out of older and looser social categories into a fixed racial hierarchy with identity cards to match. In 1959 a Hutu rising against the Tutsi monarchy killed a great many people, and the Belgians restored order only to begin managing a transfer of power to the majority they had spent decades governing through its rivals. Parmehutu, the main Hutu party, swept the local elections of 1960. The monarchy was abolished the following year, and Parmehutu took the country to independence in 1962. Ethnic violence did not stop. The fear that the Tutsi were about to take power back was the trigger for the massacre in 1994 of Tutsi and of the Hutu thought to be friendly to them. In Burundi next door the Tutsi held power from independence until 1993. The categories were an administrative convenience. They became the lines along which two countries tore.

Greene spent August 1963 in Haiti and found the Oloffson almost empty, with an Italian casino manager and an elderly American couple as the only other guests, a scene he transposed almost unchanged into his novel. The gossip columnist Aubelin Jolicoeur announced his arrival on 13 August and became the model for Petit Pierre. A New York paper ran a piece on 18 August noting that Greene was thinking of writing an entertainment beginning with a hotel keeper who returns to find only two guests. His own article appeared in a London Sunday paper on 29 September 1963 under the title Nightmare Republic, a bleak account of a people living under a strange curse in which he cast Papa Doc as the Vodou spirit Baron Samedi, a figure in top hat and tails haunting the cemeteries in dark glasses with a cigar. Diederich later learned Greene had been watched day and night throughout the visit.