Malawi loses its economic planner on a bridge outside Blantyre

Dunduzu Chisiza was building the first economic plan for the territory about to become Malawi. He had drawn in experts from across the world to prepare an ambitious five year programme of economic recovery. One night in September 1962, racing home from a meeting in Blantyre, he drove into the abutments of a high level concrete bridge and was killed. Mourners came from the whole country to the funeral. He had been part of the group that did the practical work of government through 1962, when Kamuzu Banda formally held only the ministry of lands, natural resources and local government yet decided policy, approved legislation and directed the other ministers. In those months they widened secondary schooling, remade the native courts, improved conditions for agricultural labour, reformed the marketing of produce and replaced chiefs with elected district councils. The one man who could argue with Banda about the economy was gone two years before the country became independent.

The militia that had been operating around Francois Duvalier since 1958 was formalised by a presidential order dated 7 November 1962 and published in the official gazette Le Moniteur on Thursday 15 November. The body was named the Volunteers of National Security. Its members wore blue and were drawn from the poor classes, and Haitians called them the tontons macoutes. The corps included women, some of them in senior rank. Its declared purpose was the security of the nation. Its working purpose was to reach into every quarter and every rural section on behalf of one man. Every source of power in the country was brought under the same arrangement. The cabinet was submissive, the administration was macoutised, rank conferred no authority of its own, and whatever power an individual held came from his personal and direct relation to the chief of state. The legislature and the courts were placed in the same position.

The Haitian communities abroad that now send money home began as an escape. Through the 1960s educated Haitians left in numbers as Francois Duvalier fastened his grip, and the Haitian population of the United States grew from about five thousand in 1960 to about thirty thousand in 1970. The people who went were the ones a poor country can least spare: lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, civil servants and owners of businesses. Schools and hospitals lost the staff who ran them and the state lost the people who knew how to make it work. The movement never stopped. By the early twenty first century more than 2.5 million Haitians lived outside Haiti, roughly a million in the Dominican Republic and roughly a million in the United States, about three hundred thousand in Cuba, and close to a hundred thousand each in the Bahamas, Canada and France. Money sent back by those households became one of the largest sources of income in the Haitian economy.

The article treats the vote as the concrete yield of the cold war bargain. Having received military, financial and technical assistance without which the article judges Duvalier would probably not have lasted fourteen years, Haiti voted with the United States to expel Cuba, supported economic sanctions against Cuba in 1964, and backed the creation of an inter-American peacekeeping force that legitimised American intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Duvalier had earlier offered Washington sites for a naval base should Guantanamo be dismantled. The mechanism the article isolates is an exchange in which a weak state sells diplomatic alignment and buys immunity from scrutiny of its domestic practices, so that the defence of human rights was made to look contrary to the American national interest for authoritarian rulers across the Caribbean.