Duvalier burns a strip of his border and calls it a sanitary cordon

To stop guerilla incursions, Duvalier ordered in June 1963 that a strip three to five miles wide be cut along the central section of the Haitian side of the frontier. He called it a cordon sanitaire, declared it a war zone and warned that trespassers would be shot on sight. Greene, hearing this on the border trip, called it the Voodoo Curtain. Militia drove peasants and their animals out of the cleared ground. For days the sound of machetes felling trees carried along the border and a cloud of smoke from burning houses, corn, grass and scrub hung over the region. Diederich adds the local memory that fixes the place, the warning of an old survivor of the 1937 massacre that the frontier is an evil place abandoned by the spirits where you never hear drums, which Greene confirmed after three days of travelling it.

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.

In West Africa constitutional change had been shifting power toward African representatives. In Kenya the British treated white settlers as the territory's future and designed multiracial councils that guaranteed those settlers a majority. Rural violence began in the late 1940s and by the early 1950s included the killing of prosperous Kikuyu as well as white farmers. The fighters were mostly Kikuyu, with Embu and Meru among them, bound to each other by oaths, drawn from squatters pushed off land and from the urban poor, and operating in the forests and hills of southern-central Kenya. In 1952 Britain declared a state of emergency, arrested the leadership of the Kenya African Union including Jomo Kenyatta, and brought in the army. Villages were targeted and indiscriminate sweeps put thousands of Kikuyu into detention camps. The brutality drove more young men into the forest, while Kikuyu loyalists were armed as a home guard. The revolt was suppressed by 1956 and never built a base beyond the Kikuyu, and the world read it through British reporting as tribal savagery. By the middle of the decade officials were questioning whether the settlers belonged at the centre of Kenyan politics.

C. L. R. James remarked at the time that the region was proceeding to independence as if to a funeral. Best quotes the line about 1962 and joins it to James's account of his own schooling at Queen's Royal College in Trinidad before 1932, where the masters, the curriculum and the code of morals all started from the position that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and where the pupil's job was to admire, to wonder, to imitate and to learn, with success measured by how close he came to a standard he could never reach. Best's claim is that the same problem of imperial education was as strong among the region's decision making class in 1962 as it had been in that classroom thirty years earlier. James was appalled by how little theoretical and philosophical work was being attempted at the university. The absence of a philosophy department was the smaller matter.