Duvalier's men wreck Bellegarde's library and scar a doctor for life

Dantes Bellegarde was the senior historian of Haiti, a diplomat and a writer whose name stood for the old liberal elite of Port-au-Prince. Early in 1960 the door of his small house full of books was forced open and he found himself looking at a Sten gun. The men holding it were militiamen of the government, and he had no need to ask who had sent them. They went through his papers, pulled his books down, tore the telephone out of the wall, cuffed him, and walked out over the wreckage without saying anything. In the same season Doctor Elie Villard was beaten until his head was split and his nose broken, and he carried the scars until he died. Nobody ever told him the charge. Francois Duvalier had been president for two years and was consolidating. The purpose of the exercise was not to find anything out. It was to establish that no reputation in the country worked as a shield.

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.

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.

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.