A priestess in Jacmel marries the spirit of love and then marries two more

Manbo Esperancia Federic, a priestess in the coastal town of Jacmel, made her first spirit marriage in 1959, to Ezili Freda, the light-skinned Kreyol spirit of love who is fond of luxury. She later married Ezili Danto and Ezili Je Wouj in a single ceremony, since as she put it the two of them walk together. Each spirit comes with a specification. Freda takes pink and white, sweet pale food such as rice cooked in cinnamon milk, sweet drinks, mild cigarettes and a particular French perfume. Danto is a hard working and fiercely protective mother associated with the black pigs of the Haitian countryside, and takes fried pork, Florida water, strong rum and unfiltered cigarettes. Je Wouj takes her name from the red pepper her devotees rub into their eyes when she manifests. Esperancia keeps a shrine to all three in her bedroom and credits them with carrying her through personal disaster.

The approach to independence in Rwanda was dominated by the split between Tutsi and Hutu, which German and then Belgian administrators had hardened out of older and looser social categories into a fixed racial hierarchy with identity cards to match. In 1959 a Hutu rising against the Tutsi monarchy killed a great many people, and the Belgians restored order only to begin managing a transfer of power to the majority they had spent decades governing through its rivals. Parmehutu, the main Hutu party, swept the local elections of 1960. The monarchy was abolished the following year, and Parmehutu took the country to independence in 1962. Ethnic violence did not stop. The fear that the Tutsi were about to take power back was the trigger for the massacre in 1994 of Tutsi and of the Hutu thought to be friendly to them. In Burundi next door the Tutsi held power from independence until 1993. The categories were an administrative convenience. They became the lines along which two countries tore.

Under Francois Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, the men who worked for him carried the bodies of their victims out to Titayen, a stretch of desert ground at the foot of the coastal mountains a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and left them there for crows, goats and vultures. Everyone understood the choice of ground. Haitians who serve the spirits hold that a permanent link runs between a person's spirit and the physical remains, which is why tombs are built above ground with flat roofs that work as tables for offerings of food and rum on birthdays, on All Saints' Day and on the first of January, which is Ancestors Day and Independence Day at once. To withhold the body was to cancel all of that for the whole family. The name of Titayen stayed in the national memory, and in 2010 whoever picked the site of the mass graves for earthquake victims picked the same ground.

One evening in 1959, as the light went off the Cul-de-Sac plain, trucks of soldiers surrounded Croix-des-Missions and Croix-des-Bouquets, the towns at the heart of Haitian Vodou. Through the night the detachments collected every oungan and every manbo in the district, the priests and priestesses who serve the spirits, and drove them at gunpoint toward the capital. The convoys came together in the inner courtyard of the National Palace. At midnight the prisoners were pushed up a dark back staircase into the Hall of Busts, where Duvalier stood by himself in the blood red robe of the Secte Rouge. He told them he was the supreme authority of the state and from that night their only master, and then sent them away without another word. He had announced the principle the year before, saying that to seek his destruction was to seek the destruction of Haiti herself. In October he emptied six Senate seats. The one senator who stayed in Port-au-Prince and kept speaking was taken by macoutes within the year and never seen again.