Depestre calls the regime's negritude a delirious mystification

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 1969 the International Monetary Fund estimated that the annual income of the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes came to about 50 million gourdes. In 2019 money that is roughly 68 million United States dollars, and at the time it stood at approximately 40 percent of Haiti's entire national budget. The Regie held monopolies on the distribution of cement and of dozens of other goods, among them flour, tomato paste, soap and beer, and it added a commission to each unit sold. Almost none of that revenue entered the public budget or paid for anything public. It went into personal accounts held by members of the Duvalier family, and bought cars, villas and shopping trips abroad. An American diplomat called the office an untouchable instrument of personalist rule. Its books were among the closest guarded secrets of the regime, so no full accounting of what passed through it exists.

The new Malawian flag, red, green and black, was raised over the stadium at Zomba shortly after midnight on 6 July 1964, ending British rule in what had been Nyasaland. The night was bitterly cold. Independence had been won by politicians who spent years organising for it and going to prison for it, among them Henry Chipembere, Kanyama Chiume and the Chisiza brothers. By the time the flag went up, the state they had built carried a flaw at its centre. Kamuzu Banda had been taking every decision affecting party and government for some time. In early 1963, before Chipembere was let out of prison, Banda demanded and was given absolute discretion over the affairs of the Malawi Congress Party and its members, and declared the party supreme. Julius Nyerere did the same in Tanzania soon afterwards and Kenneth Kaunda did it in Zambia ten years later. Malawi got a flag and a man nobody could contradict.

In the second edition of The Black Jacobins, published in 1963, C. L. R. James gave the chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery this reading: the singers swear to destroy the whites and everything they possess, and to die rather than break the vow. The line has been quoted ever since as proof that the religion of the enslaved carried a revolutionary programme. James had taken the words, without attribution, from a book brought out in Paris in 1814 by the planter Drouin de Bercy, where they were attached to a second chant altogether and were already wrong there. The chant Moreau wrote down is in Kikongo, a language of the western Congo basin, and it calls on the deity Mbumba to render harmless the blacks, the European and the witches. It was sung when a new member was initiated into a cult, and its enemies are supernatural as much as human.