A 1950s song makes Dessalines the enemy of the Ibo nation

Dubois sets two versions of one Vodou song against each other. A version recorded in 1901 has Dessalines coming to the North carrying a new ouanga, bringing muskets, bullets and cannon to drive out the whites, which Dubois reads as suggesting that the combination of guns and moral leadership had made a new kind of spiritual power. A version heard and transcribed by the anthropologist Odette Mennesson-Rigaud in the 1950s has him coming from France with the same new ouanga, in order to kill Jean-Pierre Ibo, and then to kill the Ibo nation, the singer's mother's nation and the singer's father's nation. The mechanism is the layering of memory. Another song in the same collection calls Dessalines the bull of Haiti, and the bull is the greatest and most lavish offering made to Ogou.

The state of siege that Kebreau ran seemed to restrict every candidate except one. The press, which had said what it liked since Magloire fell, was curbed. Two days before the vote Jumelle withdrew from a contest he had lost, and Luc Fouche stood down from a senate race in Cap-Haitien, remarking that a careful look at the realities of the hour left him no illusions. About 950,000 Haitians voted on Sunday 22 September 1957, in a ballot the army had organised in full. Jean-Pierre Gingras called it the perfect peacefulness of fixed bayonets. Duvalier took 679,884 votes and Dejoie 266,992. Duvalier's candidates swept the senate and took two thirds of the lower house. Port-au-Prince, home to both the elite and Fignole's crowds, was the one place he lost badly. Duvalier told the New York Times that the great issue was honesty. Dejoie put the crooked share of the ballot at eighty five percent. The president-elect's favourite proverb held that since Guinea a black man has always betrayed a black man.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.

In 1968 Michel-Rolph Trouillot left Haiti for Brooklyn to get away from the Duvalier regime. He was one of a great many student activists who went that decade, into a New York that was becoming the second city of Haitian intellectual life. He came from a family of historians and had grown up inside the argument about what his country was. In exile he trained as an anthropologist, and the books he wrote afterwards changed the terms in which Haiti could be described. Haiti: State Against Nation set out the Duvalier state as a system rather than a personality. Silencing the Past asked why Western historians had treated the Haitian revolution as an event that could not have happened, and it is now read in universities that teach nothing else about Haiti at all. He held a chair at Chicago and died in 2012. The dictatorship that drove him out produced, at one remove, the historian who explained it.