A papal nuncio returns to a president Rome had excommunicated

In November 1966 the new papal nuncio, Monsignor Lemieux, was formally received by Francois Duvalier at the National Palace. Two years earlier Duvalier had been excommunicated. The ceremony marked the end of that quarrel and the return of an ambassador from the Holy See to a capital that had been without one. Duvalier used the occasion to say that the highest moral authority in the world had recognised the justice of his cause. Diplomatic recognition and moral endorsement are separate things, and every government that has ever received a nuncio has been tempted to confuse them on purpose. For a regime that had spent 1963 and 1964 killing people in public, the photograph was worth a great deal. The priests who had opposed him were in exile or dead. The bishops now were Haitians he had helped choose. A framed portrait of Paul VI went up behind the president's desk, and visitors could decide for themselves whether they were looking at an icon or a trophy.

Greene told Diederich in a letter of 20 December 1965 that a novel about Haiti was coming out at the end of January, and a copy reached the Diederich house in the middle of the Dominican civil war. In the prefatory letter Greene wrote that poor Haiti and the character of Duvalier's rule were not invented, and that the latter had not even been blackened for dramatic effect, since it was impossible to deepen that night. Diederich read it in one night and concluded that Greene had protected everyone concerned and had breached no confidence, and that the book gave the poor of Haiti something the dictatorship had taken from them, a voice. He identifies the models as he knew them, Jolicoeur as Petit Pierre, Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe behind the young Philipot, Bajeux as the refugee priest, and Doctor Camille Lherisson, a revelation Greene made only in 1980, as Doctor Magiot.

Belgium gave up the Congo in 1960 after years of unrest, and moved so fast that the nationalists themselves were caught unready. Parties multiplied, most of them regional and built on one language group. Patrice Lumumba tried to hold a national coalition together while the army mutinied under him and Katanga, which held the copper, declared itself separate. Americans, Russians, Chinese and Belgians all involved themselves. The United Nations sent its first large African force, and the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, died when his plane came down in Zambia in September 1961. Peacekeepers brought Katanga back under central control by 1962. Lumumba was gone by then, kidnapped and killed, with American knowledge and to American satisfaction, since Washington feared both his politics and his ability to hold a crowd. The army commander Joseph Mobutu, backed by the Americans, took power outright in 1965 and kept it for thirty two years. He renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and the West paid the bills until the Cold War ended.

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.