Last night, the second installment of our monthly dominoes game was in full effect—just men, bonding, exhaling. The tiles slapped the table like punctuation marks in a conversation that wandered, as it always does, from the mundane to the eternal.
And then, like some specter from the old world, dictatorship crept into the room. One of the brothers wouldn’t let it go. Kept pressing. Kept insisting. The only thing that could save our people, he said; the only thing that could save the Global South, the Black Atlantic.
He wasn’t wrong—history nodding in agreement. But being right and being persuasive are not the same thing. One wins arguments. The other wins people.
I didn’t argue then. Distance has given me the time to process what was, in the moment, a fleeting exchange. I kept thinking of that old Histomap you see below—the grand sweep of human history distilled into a single visual, a tapestry of conquest and empire, of dominion and submission. Look at it long enough, and you start to see the pattern: for most of the 4,000 years that we have been arranging ourselves into groups, we have called our leaders kings, emperors, monarchs. Democracy, in comparison, is a newborn, still learning to walk.
So when I hear Haitians say, Bring back Duvalier, he’ll fix the gang problem, I don’t clutch my pearls. I don’t gasp in horror. This is what we have known. Not just Haiti, but humanity itself. It is the model that has governed us longer than anything else.
But what always gets me is this: when we speak of strong rulers, of iron-fisted governance, we rarely speak of some grand vision for our people. We often are speaking of solving something now, of the immediate, of the gang terrorizing the block, of greedy elites raiding the treasury, of the crumbling schools and empty bellies growling in the night. We want a problem fixed, and we often reach for the oldest tool in the box.
But dictatorships, as history reminds us, are blunt instruments. There is no fine-tuning option for the governed, no delicate hands to adjust the oppression dial to just the right amount. No, it is all or nothing. And once power is seized from the people, it is rarely returned.
But here’s where I land: I don’t care what we call it. I don’t care what structure we drape over the bones of a society. Just give me four things—shelter, full bellies, security, education. Guarantee me that. Do that from the bottom up, not the top down. Build a world where the people are not afterthoughts to power. Do that and you can call it whatever you want.
