Ligonde becomes the first Haitian archbishop of Port-au-Prince

In October 1966 Francois Wolff Ligonde was enthroned as archbishop of Port-au-Prince, the first Haitian to hold the office. Every archbishop before him had been French. The appointment followed the settlement reached quietly with the Vatican that year, which let Duvalier put forward names for a national hierarchy and ended the arrangement under which the Haitian church had been staffed from France since the concordat of 1860. For Duvalier it closed a fight he had started by expelling bishops and had continued through his own excommunication. For Haitian Catholics it answered a demand that was generations older than the regime. Ligonde held the see for more than forty years. He preached at the wedding of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1980 and attacked Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the pulpit at the beginning of 1991, months before the army removed him. The national church Haitians had asked for since the nineteenth century spent its first decades tied to the palace that delivered it.

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.