Duvalier receives Oral Roberts at the national palace

Francois Duvalier received the American evangelist Oral Roberts at the national palace in 1969. By 1965 more than a third of Haiti's schools were run by Protestant missionaries. Duvalier had trained as a physician and an ethnologist, belonged to the group that made peasant religion the ground of Haitian identity, and named Louis Joseph Janvier as his mentor. He also acquired a reputation for using Vodou and its priesthood inside his politics. The man who sponsored North American Protestants was therefore sponsoring the tradition most hostile to Vodou, more hostile to it than the Catholic Church had ever been. Harold Courlander and Remy Bastien concluded that his dealings with religion should be read as relations between church and state. Duvalier broke the power of a Catholic hierarchy staffed and directed from France, using violence against it, and found that encouraging Protestant missions worked better, since they could be relied on to stay out of politics while bringing development in with them.

The film, shot in Dahomey after the director toured the Caribbean and West Africa looking for a country that could stand in for Haiti, was released late in 1967 with Greene's own screenplay. On 1 November 1967 the Haitian embassy in Washington issued a long statement attacking it on the government's black and red letterhead, which Diederich says may be the first time an embassy has officially protested against a movie. An American newspaper devoted an editorial to the comedy of the protest at the end of that month. Diederich adds a coda Duvalier is likely to have enjoyed. Four weeks after the film opened, on Christmas Day 1967, President Soglo of Dahomey was removed by his own subordinates, and while there were ordinary explanations there were also those who blamed the long reach of Papa Doc in revenge for the filming. Greene said Vodou deserved some credit.

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.