A labour code finally counts child servants as workers

Until 1960 the arrangement that placed Haitian children in other households as servants had almost no legal shape. A law of 1947 had set out conditions to be met by families employing one or more children in domestic service, and it protected the adults more than the children. The Code du Travail of 1960 recognised children in domestic service as a category of its own. They counted as workers who had to receive certain treatment. They could not be younger than fifteen. If they received no salary they had to be educated, clothed and fed. The law described very little of what was happening. Children of three and four were placed, well under the legal age, and very few of any age got schooling or enough food for the labour they did. Legal attention went no further until 1987, when Article 261 of the new Haitian constitution stated that the law must protect every child, and that children have a right to love and understanding.

Islam is old in Africa and its place in government has been argued over since independence. South of the Sahara the argument has mostly concerned the standing of Muslims inside states with large Christian populations. Nigeria applies sharia in the northern states while national politics turns on how Muslims and Christians divide the presidency and the ministries. Islam there is local and adapted, with sufi orders predominating, which is precisely what campaigners for a pure orthodoxy attack. Where Muslims are a minority, as in Kenya and Tanzania, they have organised as a lobby around economic neglect. North of the Sahara it went differently. Sadat was killed in 1981 by Islamists who regarded his agreement with Israel as a betrayal, and Mubarak inherited the fight with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front took on the FLN and the country fell into civil war in the early 1990s. War between the north and south of Sudan ran from 1955 with one interval and had left about 1.5 million people dead by 2002.

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.

On 22 November 1960 two communiques came out one after the other in Port-au-Prince. The Department of National Education declared the unlimited strike called by the students' association illegal and communist in inspiration. The Department of the Interior and National Defence decreed martial law, saying it would allow the responsible authority to counter the anarchic effects of communist activity which had shown itself in armed disorder in the sister republics of the New World. On the same day six thousand tontons macoutes gathered on the lawns of the national palace after marching through the streets with banners reading down with communism and Duvalier or death. Duvalier's own category of communist was wide. It took in liberal democrats, social democrats, Christian democrats, personalists, castrists and socialists. Opponents on the right were exiled or executed under the same label. The order of the day was that anyone who disagreed could take ship or go under the ground.