A 1963 footnote splits Toussaint's camp from his rank and file

In a footnote added to the 1963 edition of his history, and stressed again in his later lectures, C. L. R. James distinguished the Jacobins from the sansculottes and mapped that distinction onto the Haitian conflict. The Jacobins he treats as authoritarian enlightened despots, while the sansculottes wanted a dictatorship over the aristocracy and a free democratic state among themselves. On this reading the labourers who rose against Toussaint were not simply avengers, they wanted to hold the former masters down while governing themselves democratically. Ciccariello-Maher uses the point to argue that repressing an avowed enemy is compatible with popular democracy and does not forfeit any future claim to universal equality. He notes that this distinction is missing from Buck-Morss, who treats every identity based opposition as brutality feeding an endless cycle of victim and aggressor.

Early on 26 April 1963 an attempt was made on Jean-Claude Duvalier and his sister Simone as they were being driven to school. It failed. Radio announced the attack and called on all duvalierists to take up arms. Macoutes and members of the presidential guard made Thursday 26 April the bloodiest day of the Duvalier years. A manhunt ran through the streets at random. Anyone with the face of an opponent could lose his life for being in the wrong place, or, like the Benoits, for carrying a compromising name. Duvalier had named as authors of the attack a list of potential enemies headed by Lieutenant Francois Benoit, who had recently distinguished himself in the marksmanship competition of the Americas. Every member of the Benoit family was struck. Days earlier Jacques Fourcand, the president's adviser and new head of the Red Cross, had publicly promised a Himalaya of corpses. A year later the allied Duchatelier family disappeared.

Most of British and French tropical Africa reached independence with little organised violence. Kenya was the exception, because land dispossession and urban poverty had made its political situation explosive by the early 1950s. Its decolonisation falls into three stages. From about 1945 to 1952 the crisis built until the colonial government declared a state of emergency. From 1952 to 1956 came the main period of Mau Mau fighting, which the British defeated militarily while learning that neither their own position nor the settlers' could be sustained. From the mid 1950s into the early 1960s, with the emergency lifted in 1959, the settler polity was taken apart and the colony moved toward the independence it received in 1963. The rebellion failed as a military campaign and achieved what decades of petitioning had failed to achieve. It demonstrated that dispossession would keep producing violence, and that holding white privilege in place would cost Britain more than the privilege returned.

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.