Half of Port-au-Prince lives in Zone IV and builds its own houses

Zone IV held the largest share of the city, 49 percent, about 91,000 people. It ran across the northern part of the old town near the business district, taking in the hill of Bel-Air, the cathedral, and LaSaline, a stretch of alluvial ground recently taken from the sea. Inside that crescent Comhaire-Sylvain counted eighty seven ounfo, the temples where Vodou is served, seven Protestant churches and ten night clubs, and recorded a strong African presence in the celebrations and in the exclusive use of Kreyol. In LaSaline she collected 2,721 questionnaires. Most of the respondents described themselves with pride. They could not read, they owned the houses they lived in, and they had built those houses themselves. They preferred plasaj, the recognised union outside church marriage. Most worked for themselves, and three quarters of the women gave their profession as trading. The women of LaSaline were not waiting for a league of educated ladies to define them. They had already named their work and chosen their households.

Brussels intended to hold the Congo. Local elections in 1957 and 1958 were meant to satisfy the demand for reform, and instead they gave Congolese politics a structure it had lacked. Nationalist parties multiplied. The broadest of them formed around Patrice Lumumba, who in most respects was the only Congolese leader trying to build an organisation covering the entire territory rather than one region or one ethnic base. Political rallies in 1958 and 1959 turned into riots and the violence spread. The Belgians started losing control. They had delayed elections too long to manage the transition on their own terms or even in an orderly way. The colony had been run first as Leopold's personal estate and then as Belgium's, and it entered independence with almost no trained administrators and no political machinery of its own. The chaos that swallowed the Congo after 1960 was already implied in the way the last three years were handled.

In 1959 Duvalier gave his paramilitary force a formal existence as the Volunteers of National Security, the body Haitians called the Tontons Macoutes. Its declared purpose was to put down political opposition. Its real purpose was structural. Every Haitian government since 1806 had held office at the pleasure of the officer corps, and a president who wanted to finish his term had to keep the generals content or replace them faster than they could organise. Duvalier did something else. He built a second armed body, recruited outside the army, paid outside the army, and answerable to him alone, so that the regular soldiers were no longer the only people in Haiti with guns. From that year the VSN was the instrument through which the state reached into neighbourhoods and villages, and it did the work of surveillance, extortion and killing that a professional army might have refused or bargained over. The arrangement held until 1986, which makes it the most durable political invention of the twentieth century in Haiti.

The general instructions prepared by the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs before the ministerial conference on the Alliance for Progress in June 1961 set the American objective in Haiti as keeping the country in our camp, and the line of action as living with Duvalier. Dean Rusk, who called Haiti the cesspool of the western hemisphere and its government enormously repugnant, argued for support anyway, on the ground that a Castro type regime might be no worse for Haitians and would be bad for the United States. Adolph Berle argued the opposite case and lost. What Duvalier delivered was concrete. Communists in Haiti were hunted actively. He offered Eisenhower and then Kennedy a military base in Haiti to replace Guantanamo. During the missile crisis he let American ships patrol Haitian waters to enforce the blockade of Cuba. His vote at Punta del Este gave Kennedy the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States.