A crowd marches on the Trou Sen Jak carrying concrete

In the spring of 1986, weeks after Jean Claude Duvalier left the country, a crowd of fundamentalist Christians marched on the Trou Sen Jak at Plaine du Nord. They had been called out by the anti Vodou broadcasts of the Protestant station Radio Lumiere and they meant to seal Ogou away for good by filling his hole with concrete. The hole is a set of ruts in a dirt track beside the church of Saint James which fills with water in the early summer rains, and which Vodouists hold to be the place where the spirit comes out of the earth. Practitioners met the marchers with drawn machetes and cocomacaque sticks and turned them back. Their ancestors had done the same when Cincinnatus Leconte sent his Anti Vodou League against the same shrine a century before. Ceremonies at the pit run most Thursdays of the year, excepting November and the season of Lent.

Haiti's 1987 constitution recognises freedom of religion, and Fleurant reads it as recognising Vodou as the national religion of the Haitian people. The status remains ambivalent all the same, because many attempts have been made to uproot the practice, and although the purges have generally failed they leave doubt hanging over its worth. The school system, which favours a cosmopolitan approach, has still not put the mythology on any syllabus. For the last thirty years, he writes, people have practised openly. The expatriate community, called the Tenth Department because the national territory is divided into nine, numbers over a million Haitians and includes many advocates of the religion, among them the writer Franketienne and the musicians of Boukman Eksperyans, Boukan Ginen, RAM and the Fugees. A religion with no centre, no dogma and no head office turns out to travel well.

From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.

Light assembly manufacturing grew fast in Haiti from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s and was for that whole stretch the one part of the economy that worked. In 1990 it employed 46,000 people spread across some 250 firms. The workforce was mainly women, and each employee supported about three or four other people, mostly in the capital. The industry ran on imported raw materials, sold into the American market, and made toys, electronics and textiles on the strength of Haiti's one comparative advantage, low wages. Its share of total export value rose from under five percent in the mid 1960s to over two thirds by the mid 1980s. After the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, international sanctions sent energy costs up, removed spare parts and inputs from the market, and took the customers away. By the beginning of 1995 no more than 5000 workers were left in the sector.