Duvalier removes the houngans who will not concede his occult rank

From 1957 Francois Duvalier began eliminating houngans who declined to acknowledge that his own occult power outranked theirs. A houngan is a Vodou priest, and in a Haitian town or village he is often the person people actually obey, the one who settles disputes, keeps track of who owes what to whom, and holds a following that owes nothing to the government in Port-au-Prince. That is precisely why they were removed. Duvalier had built his public reputation partly on the defence of Haitian popular religion against the Catholic hierarchy and the Haitian elite, and he was now dismantling its independent centres one at a time. Nicholls treats the campaign as political consolidation rather than belief. Any local authority that did not derive from the president was a rival, and the priesthood was the densest network of local authority in the country. The regime absorbed what it could use and destroyed the rest.

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.

Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was flying to negotiate a ceasefire in the Congo war in 1961 when his aircraft came down in Northern Rhodesia. His bodyguards were Haitians and they died with him. Elizabeth Wilson, who was born in the Congo while her father Arnauld Wilson worked there as a public health engineer for the World Health Organisation, has written that several hundred people serving under the United Nations flag in the Congo were killed, many of them unnamed anywhere, and that the Haitian bodyguards were among them. She asks for a monument in Kinshasa, raised in the name of the United Nations, to everyone who lived and died there for an impossible ideal. Her own father is absent from the official record too. That absence is what she is arguing against, on behalf of a family memory and of a Haitian presence in Africa that nobody wrote down.

Mrs. N. farmed with her husband on about four acres near Brown's Town in Jamaica and had five children, four of them still at home. She decided the local market paid too little and began travelling to Kingston. Each journey took planning. She borrowed or saved capital, guessed at demand, bought eggs, avocados, soursop, pumpkins and fowls in her own district, loaded them on a donkey and met a truck on the road on Sunday afternoon. Her daughter walked the donkey home and took charge of the baby. The truck cost twelve shillings out and six back. The market opened at midnight and charged a gate fee and a handcart fee of one shilling sixpence each. More than a pound sterling went on transport and fees before she made a single sale, and about three pounds more had gone on the produce itself. She chose light goods with a high unit price because fares rose with bulk. Her capital was often borrowed from market butchers at a shilling per pound for three days. Losses on a few successive trips could end her business.