Haiti's foreign ministry publishes a book to prove Greene is a spy

On 15 January 1968 the foreign minister Rene Chalmers sent every Haitian mission abroad and every foreign mission in Haiti a book length memorandum, printed in French and English, to call attention to the film. Its argument was that Greene had gone to Africa in 1938 as a secret agent under cover of being a writer, had been spotted in Indochina and Havana, and had written a commissioned novel about a republic where he had stayed less than a fortnight. A second essay pointed to a report that Kim Philby, from Moscow, had named Greene among British intelligence officers he had worked with. The pamphlet was titled Graham Greene Demasque, or Finally Unmasked. Greene was delighted, wrote to Diederich to say Papa Doc had honoured him and urged him to get a copy before it disappeared. Diederich only found one in the ministry archives after the dynasty fell in 1986.

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.

Charles Gabriel Seligman published The Races of Africa in 1930. Its organising claim was the Hamitic hypothesis, which held that any large achievement in sub Saharan Africa had been the work of lighter skinned invaders arriving from the north. Ehret describes the book as a racist tract wearing the clothes of scholarship. Oxford University Press and the International African Institute reissued it in 1957 and again in 1967, by which point no one defending it could claim ignorance. It remains available for sale. The consequences reached well beyond libraries. Belgian administrators in Rwanda used the same racial ladder to sort Tutsi above Hutu, issued identity cards on that basis, and hardened categories that had been fluid into fixed racial facts. The propaganda of the 1994 genocide, which described Tutsi as foreign invaders to be driven out, drew on that scheme. A university press had supplied the authority. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the habit of crediting African achievement to somebody else is the habit that turned Saint Domingue into a French accomplishment.

Between 1968 and 1978 the Duvalier family took 265 million gourdes out of the sale of cement alone. The figure comes from combining Haiti's national cement production statistics with the distribution commission levied on every bag. Adjusted for inflation it is about 39 million United States dollars in 2019 terms. Those were the years of the building boom, so the money came from Haitians who were putting up houses. The mechanism ran the whole length of the chain. Ciment d'Haiti held the monopoly on making and importing cement, the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes held the monopoly on distributing it, and each stage added a margin that ended in private hands. The effect on the buildings was direct. Builders who could not afford the cement used less of it than the mix required, and the houses that went up during the boom were weaker for it.