The servant is the bridge between the zones that the map never draws

Women made up most of the population of Port-au-Prince, and because of how they moved through the city they were the people who carried messages, goods and knowledge between the class zones. Comhaire-Sylvain never set out those connections as a separate finding. She left them folded into the descriptions. Of Zone IV she wrote that the rest live in other quarters in some menial capacity, often as servants. Of Zone II she wrote that households were larger, averaging four adults and five children, and that the fifth child was usually a servant. Put the two sentences side by side and the bridge appears. The Zone IV woman sleeping in a Zone II house is counted twice, once as a resident of the poorest crescent of the city and once as a member of a household that considered itself respectable. She is the link between the two, and she carries one world's labour into the other world's comfort every morning.

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.

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.