The archbishop is flown out with one dollar and no teeth

On the evening of 18 August 1959, a thousand people gathered in the cathedral of Port-au-Prince to say the rosary for two French priests the government had just expelled. Barbot came in with a submachine gun and lines of macoutes swinging clubs, while another party went for the altar and knocked down priests and sacred vessels together. Sixty were arrested and the wounded were left bleeding in the aisles. The minister of cults told the New York Times that Christ himself had used a whip in the temple. On 22 November 1960, after a student boycott that had run eighty eight days, police entered the archbishop's house before he had shaved or put in his false teeth, gave him time to pull on a cassock, and put him on the early plane to Miami with a dollar in his hand. In January 1961 Remy Augustin, the only Haitian bishop, was woken, held at Fort Dimanche and flown to New York. The Vatican excommunicated Duvalier, the first Latin American head of state since Peron. He was unmoved.

Independence across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States produced, from the late 1950s, a large expansion of scholarly work on the African past. Historians, linguists and archaeologists filled in centuries that university syllabuses had treated as empty, and African history became a subject many universities offer. Offering is a different thing from requiring. In world history courses the African material tends to sit in a sidebar or in a chapter that gets dropped when the term runs short, few history students take an African course at all, and the courses that exist give most of their attention to the last two or three centuries while the ancient periods stay thin. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the same arithmetic applies to us. Haiti is available to be studied and almost never required, so a person can finish a history degree in the country that bought Louisiana from Napoleon without being told why Napoleon was in a hurry to sell it.

The League's leaders described women as a class defined by labour. Women did the work of producing labourers and citizens with their bodies, and every other kind of work they did was discounted, whether they were mothers, cultivators, domestic servants, intellectuals or professionals. Jeanne Perez, who edited La Voix des Femmes, wrote that women would no longer accept being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. The organisers wanted the material contribution counted. Haitian women had a share in producing the country's agricultural wealth equal to men's or larger, a claim resting on the peasant cultivators, the market women and the madan sara who moved and sold the nation's food. Women also did most of the teaching, formal and informal. Against all of it stood the Napoleonic Code inherited from the colony, which classed a married woman as a minor and denied her the right to hold her own wages. The League backed the argument with night schools and housing for working-class girls, both still running in the 1960s.

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.