Eight men take the army headquarters in a borrowed taptap

The three soldiers sent down from St Marc were shot on the beach at Deluge, though one of the raiders took a bullet in the thigh first. The party finished unloading and stopped the first vehicle on the road, a blue camionnette lettered with a name and two mottoes, one of them Malgre Tout. Word reached the capital, and General Flambert waited on the Champ de Mars without alerting the garrison. The jeep failed near Arcahaie and the little bus went on. At the gate of the barracks Alix Pasquet announced he was delivering five white prisoners, and the sentry presented arms and let them in. They shot the officer of the day, killed two more men crossing the parade ground, and locked fifty sleeping soldiers in their squad rooms. Then it stopped working. The weapons they expected to capture had been moved to the palace cellars. They telephoned army posts to announce themselves, spending the only two things they had. Duvalier packed cash for the Colombian embassy. A soldier sent out for cigarettes told the truth to a man at the gate.

The end of colonial rule did not clear the board. African states came out of it carrying colonial administration, colonial economies and colonial borders, and at the same time older arrangements returned that colonial rule had only held down. A large share of what gets called a postcolonial problem is a nineteenth century one, above all the militarisation of politics that spread across the continent before any European army settled there. The Cold War made this worse, starting some conflicts, extending others, and giving Western governments a stated reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended. Economic weakness ran back further, through colonial extraction to the terms of nineteenth century legitimate commerce and behind that to the Atlantic slave trade. Government by patronage drew on precolonial practice while distorting it. One year holds the whole ambiguity. In 1994 South Africans of every description voted together for the first time, and in the same months about eight hundred thousand people were killed in Rwanda in a hundred days.

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.

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.