Greene calls Duvalier's Haiti a nightmare republic in London

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.

In the summer of 1964 thirteen young men of the Jeune Haiti group landed near Dame-Marie, about fifty kilometres from Jeremie. A curfew from six in the evening followed. Pastor Rocourt, who survived, remembered night after night of DKW jeeps grinding through the town, the vehicle the macoutes had used since Barbot's time, carrying people to their graves. Three families were massacred. Twenty seven of their members went into a common grave on the airfield, eight Villedrouin, five Drouin and fourteen Sansaricq. Outside the town it was worse. Nobody could move. Peasants were stopped from bringing produce to market. Anyone suspected of having sheltered or helped the thirteen in any way, including selling them food, was killed systematically, and whole peasant families were liquidated so that no witness to the terror was left. Twenty four years later the pastor's wife still could not bear the sound of a DKW.

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.

The Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best, who lived from 1934 to 2007, opened one of his central essays by taking stock. Since 1962, he wrote, the region had been shown two pictures of its future, and neither had survived contact with the world. One turned out to be an illusion. The other became a nightmare. Those who put forward the first told the islands to make what they ate. The essay is titled on independence and responsibility, with self knowledge treated as an imperative rather than a luxury. The date is chosen deliberately: 1962 is the year Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent states and the year the West Indies Federation collapsed. Best is describing the position of a Caribbean intellectual who has to work out what to do when both available scripts for the future have already been tried and have already failed. Haiti had been in that position since 1804.