Three men drive the border and a novel gets its last chapter

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.

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.

The new Malawian flag, red, green and black, was raised over the stadium at Zomba shortly after midnight on 6 July 1964, ending British rule in what had been Nyasaland. The night was bitterly cold. Independence had been won by politicians who spent years organising for it and going to prison for it, among them Henry Chipembere, Kanyama Chiume and the Chisiza brothers. By the time the flag went up, the state they had built carried a flaw at its centre. Kamuzu Banda had been taking every decision affecting party and government for some time. In early 1963, before Chipembere was let out of prison, Banda demanded and was given absolute discretion over the affairs of the Malawi Congress Party and its members, and declared the party supreme. Julius Nyerere did the same in Tanzania soon afterwards and Kenneth Kaunda did it in Zambia ten years later. Malawi got a flag and a man nobody could contradict.

In the second edition of The Black Jacobins, published in 1963, C. L. R. James gave the chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery this reading: the singers swear to destroy the whites and everything they possess, and to die rather than break the vow. The line has been quoted ever since as proof that the religion of the enslaved carried a revolutionary programme. James had taken the words, without attribution, from a book brought out in Paris in 1814 by the planter Drouin de Bercy, where they were attached to a second chant altogether and were already wrong there. The chant Moreau wrote down is in Kikongo, a language of the western Congo basin, and it calls on the deity Mbumba to render harmless the blacks, the European and the witches. It was sung when a new member was initiated into a cult, and its enemies are supernatural as much as human.