Three exiled officers attack and Duvalier builds himself a militia

On 28 July 1958 three officers dismissed from the army and driven into exile, Captain Alix Pasquet and Lieutenants Philippe Dominique and Henry Perpignan, attacked in Port-au-Prince. The next day a militia answerable to Francois Duvalier alone was constituted. It took over from the hooded squads the regime had already been using to silence opponents. Recruited from civilians of the poor classes, it became the body known officially as the Volunteers of National Security and popularly as the tontons macoutes. The American doctrine of national security, current in those Cold War years, served the same regime twice, first as an argument for military aid from Washington and then as cover for an order of terror. The army was purged, weakened and broken in. Its weapons came under the direct control of the president. It had to live alongside a second armed body that existed to limit its privileges and to make any move against the regime unworkable.

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.

A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system came from harassed Marketing Department officials who were listening to small farmers whose system was collapsing, while consumers paid high prices that never improved the producer's lot. The second, on the twenty third, said that few higglers in any category made much money, and that their willingness to work for tiny margins had blocked the growth of greengrocers with telephones and delivery vans. The two charges pull against each other. In one the trader takes too much out of the chain. In the other she takes so little that no better paid trade can establish itself. Jamaica had no formal plan to abolish higglering at the time. The criticism came from middle class townspeople in conversation and in the press, some of whom also complained to visiting researchers about the rudeness of market women.