The teachers' union president goes to prison and the campus is next

In April 1959 the president of the National Union of Secondary School Teachers was imprisoned. The arrest opened a campaign against the university and against every independent intellectual body attached to it. There was a reason for the priority. Haitian students had helped bring down Elie Lescot in 1946 and had been part of the unrest that removed Paul Magloire in 1956, and the schools and faculties of Port-au-Prince were where the country's political language was made. Teachers were the connective tissue of that world. They stood between the lycee and the neighbourhood, they were literate, organised and poorly paid, and their union was one of the few structures Duvalier had not yet taken apart. Jailing its president told every other association in the capital what the year would be like. The union itself was outlawed four months later, and the university lasted eighteen months more before the government dissolved it and put a new one in its place.

White settlement in Kenya took the best farmland out of African hands and pushed the people who had worked it into crowded reserves. Colonial officials then blamed African methods for soil erosion and imposed farming rules that made the reserves harder still to live in. Those who left for Nairobi joined a growing urban poor the authorities treated as a criminal class. In 1947 the Kenya African Union was founded under Jomo Kenyatta and expanded quickly into a mass movement, run by moderates and filling up with people who owned nothing and were prepared to fight for land. Killings in the countryside began at the end of the 1940s and became sustained war through 1951 and 1952. The Kikuyu split along the same line. Kenyatta wanted peaceful change. The leaders of the landless wanted land and freedom. When the fighting spread across the White Highlands the British banned the KAU and imprisoned Kenyatta, who had had almost nothing to do with it.

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.

Having survived an attempt to take the barracks, Duvalier raised the Militia of Volunteers for National Security in 1958. Nobody used that name. Tonton Macoute is Uncle Knapsack, the figure from Haitian storytelling who carries disobedient children away in a sack, and the militia was known by it from the start. Recruits came from the poorest and least schooled black families in the countryside, and eventually there were more than twenty five thousand of them. They wore paramilitary dress and dark glasses at any hour. They carried pistols and preferred machetes, a weapon that reminded Haitians of the massacre of their people on the Dominican border in 1937. Anything done in the president's service was pardoned before it happened. Victims were left in public as notices. The macoutes encouraged the belief that they were Vodou demons, so that political fear and spiritual fear arrived together. Their strength came to match the army's, and for three decades they kept the Duvalier family safe from the generals. Soulouque had done the same thing with his zinglins a century earlier.