Duvalier answers the army with a militia in the red sashes of Ogoun

Duvalier knew that since 1806 almost every change of government in Haiti had been settled by generals, and he intended to leave office alive. His clear out at the end of 1958 raised the 1941 academy class over the heads of their seniors, opened blocks of junior vacancies he filled with young black officers, and kept the new American mission from getting close to anyone. In late 1959, using his palace guard as the parent body, he began enlisting men from the slums into a civil militia, later renamed the Volunteers of National Security. Within two years it was twice the size of the army. Its village platoons, led by peasant strongmen who gave orders to the local soldiers, wore the big straw hats of the old Cacos and the red sashes of Ogoun, the warrior spirit. In June 1961 he closed the military academy for good. That November the macoute chief at Hinche murdered Colonel Max Deetjen and nothing happened. On 1 August 1960 the capital woke to handbills carrying Sonthonax's words to his black militia in 1793: these muskets are your liberty, make good use of them.

Islam is old in Africa and its place in government has been argued over since independence. South of the Sahara the argument has mostly concerned the standing of Muslims inside states with large Christian populations. Nigeria applies sharia in the northern states while national politics turns on how Muslims and Christians divide the presidency and the ministries. Islam there is local and adapted, with sufi orders predominating, which is precisely what campaigners for a pure orthodoxy attack. Where Muslims are a minority, as in Kenya and Tanzania, they have organised as a lobby around economic neglect. North of the Sahara it went differently. Sadat was killed in 1981 by Islamists who regarded his agreement with Israel as a betrayal, and Mubarak inherited the fight with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front took on the FLN and the country fell into civil war in the early 1990s. War between the north and south of Sudan ran from 1955 with one interval and had left about 1.5 million people dead by 2002.

In January 1965 Diederich met Greene at the airport in Santo Domingo and set out before dawn with the exiled priest Jean-Claude Bajeux in a chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle to drive the length of the Dominican side of the border. Their cover was that they were checking Dominican jails for missing Haitians. Bajeux was six months from the disappearance of his own family. Diederich's purpose was to get Greene close enough to Haiti to write about it, since Greene could not return. Greene later wrote in the American edition of his novel that the best he could do in January 1965 was to make that trip along the border in the company of two exiles and pass along the edge of a country they loved. The final chapter of the book, in which the guerrillas cross into the Dominican Republic, comes directly out of those three days.

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.