Laennec Hurbon reads Vodou as the peasant's kept African identity

Laennec Hurbon set out to interpret Vodou as the main channel through which the Haitian peasant had held on to an authentic African identity. Under slavery in Saint-Domingue and under every government since, the language, the kinship and the ritual brought from West and Central Africa had to survive somewhere, and Hurbon located the surviving structure in the religion. From that he drew a demand rather than a description. Christians, he argued, are obliged to respect the beliefs and practices of Vodou in the way they respect the other great religions of the world. The Haitian Church had spent a century treating it as superstition to be burned out, most recently in the anti-superstition campaign of 1941, and the state was at that moment claiming Vodou as its own property. Hurbon was asking for something neither side had offered: recognition on the same terms as anybody else's faith, without a campaign and without a patron.

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.

Under Francois Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, the men who worked for him carried the bodies of their victims out to Titayen, a stretch of desert ground at the foot of the coastal mountains a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and left them there for crows, goats and vultures. Everyone understood the choice of ground. Haitians who serve the spirits hold that a permanent link runs between a person's spirit and the physical remains, which is why tombs are built above ground with flat roofs that work as tables for offerings of food and rum on birthdays, on All Saints' Day and on the first of January, which is Ancestors Day and Independence Day at once. To withhold the body was to cancel all of that for the whole family. The name of Titayen stayed in the national memory, and in 2010 whoever picked the site of the mass graves for earthquake victims picked the same ground.

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.