The state won fear from Haitians and never won respect

Through 1960 the regime widened both the militia and the talk that justified it. Violence stopped being an emergency measure and became a normal instrument of administration, carried out by armed men in the neighbourhoods rather than by soldiers under orders. Alongside it went a way of speaking about politics as a field where the ordinary rules about how you treat people did not apply. Trouillot enters a qualification worth keeping. The regime succeeded in making brutality politically ordinary and never managed to make it legitimate, because Haitian ethical life, and above all the idea of respe, would not grant it. People obeyed the macoute at the door and withheld from him the thing every Haitian household knows how to give and how to refuse. A government can extract silence, attendance and payment by force. Respect has to be handed over, and for thirty years it was not.

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.

Work on the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral began in the autumn of 1951 and immediately opened a rivalry at the Centre d'Art between the trained painters upstairs and the self taught painters downstairs. Philomé Obin, Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud and others covered the walls with a biblical cycle set entirely in Haiti: a black Christ, a Haitian Nativity, a Last Supper in which the only white figure in the room is Judas. Alongside it Liautaud was cutting sculpture out of oil drums, Jasmin Joseph was making figures that look Etruscan, and André Pierre was painting as an oungan rather than about one. The murals were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and three fragments were saved. Everything in that paragraph is one argument stated in paint: the sacred is local, the artist need not be trained abroad, and the betrayer is the one who came from outside.

Work began on the walls of Holy Trinity in the autumn of 1951, and it set the trained artists upstairs at the Centre d'Art against the self taught painters downstairs. Somebody scrawled a line on the Centre's privy wall telling the advanced men above that they had not yet reached the level of a preliminary primitive. In the cathedral a parishioner looked at Toussaint Auguste's Adam and Eve and said the Creator had done better the first time. Tourists asked why the only white face in Philome Obin's Last Supper belonged to Judas. Prefete Duffaut put a voluptuous Ezili into a church and the faithful objected. One night three unfinished murals were streaked with pitch. Bishop Voegeli answered every complaint about conflicting images of Christ by pointing out that there were already four gospels. The same energy went into iron. Georges Liautaud, a blacksmith at Croix-des-Bouquets who had been decorating cemetery crosses for years, cut flat figures out of oil drums and founded Haitian metal sculpture.