A girl of eleven dies on a bench at the Kenscoff dispensary

Poor families in the Kenscoff mountains sent children down to Port-au-Prince to work in other people's houses, hoping the child would be fed, clothed and given some schooling in return. Parents were often deceived by appearances and placed a child with people as poor as themselves who were simply better dressed and knew the city. In 1957 one woman brought her twelve year old daughter home from a shopkeeper in the capital after a friend reported that the girl had been made to carry the household's goods during a move. The child was seriously ill for about a month. A few months later an eleven year old from beyond Guibert fell ill in town after rough treatment. Her employer brought her up to Kenscoff by lorry, put her in the line at the dispensary, asked another patient to watch her, and went back to Port-au-Prince. The girl died on the bench before her turn came. A patient who knew her father sent word.

Belgium and Portugal lost control of events once fighting broke out in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and the Congo. Britain and France were shaken by war in Kenya and Algeria, both places where large European settler minorities pushed for confrontation. France conceded to the Algerian rebels. Britain destroyed the Mau Mau insurgency in the field and then handed Kenya to a moderate African elite. Across most of the rest of British and French sub-Saharan Africa, power changed hands through long and intricate constitutional negotiation. The old imperial reflex had one final outing in 1956, when British and French troops seized the Suez Canal zone after Nasser nationalised it and were forced into a humiliating withdrawal under international pressure. Settler governments in South Africa and Rhodesia dug in. Conflicts among ethnic, regional and religious groups were often nineteenth century contests sharpened by colonial rule and now fought inside a national arena the colonisers themselves had supplied. The departure was improvised at roughly the speed of the original partition.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

Having survived an attempt to take the barracks, Duvalier raised the Militia of Volunteers for National Security in 1958. Nobody used that name. Tonton Macoute is Uncle Knapsack, the figure from Haitian storytelling who carries disobedient children away in a sack, and the militia was known by it from the start. Recruits came from the poorest and least schooled black families in the countryside, and eventually there were more than twenty five thousand of them. They wore paramilitary dress and dark glasses at any hour. They carried pistols and preferred machetes, a weapon that reminded Haitians of the massacre of their people on the Dominican border in 1937. Anything done in the president's service was pardoned before it happened. Victims were left in public as notices. The macoutes encouraged the belief that they were Vodou demons, so that political fear and spiritual fear arrived together. Their strength came to match the army's, and for three decades they kept the Duvalier family safe from the generals. Soulouque had done the same thing with his zinglins a century earlier.