An American ambassador becomes an honorary Tonton Macoute

Washington's new envoy to Haiti, Ambassador Knox, was the first Black American to hold the post since Dr. Furniss. He praised the government in public, pressed for fresh United States loans, and told reporters the mood in Washington had turned favorable. Port-au-Prince took his measure quickly and began calling him an honorary Tonton Macoute. Money followed the goodwill. Tourists returned, and assembly work arrived: the baseballs sold in the United States were being stitched by Haitians. Then, in the summer of 1970, students came home from schools abroad wearing beards and Afros. Duvalier ordered his militia to collect every one of them. The young men sat for hours in police stations until barbers arrived and cut them bald. The next morning their parents were herded into the palace to hear the president lecture on dress and conduct, closing with the remark that he disliked having to repeat himself. He was dying, and he was policing haircuts.

The film, shot in Dahomey after the director toured the Caribbean and West Africa looking for a country that could stand in for Haiti, was released late in 1967 with Greene's own screenplay. On 1 November 1967 the Haitian embassy in Washington issued a long statement attacking it on the government's black and red letterhead, which Diederich says may be the first time an embassy has officially protested against a movie. An American newspaper devoted an editorial to the comedy of the protest at the end of that month. Diederich adds a coda Duvalier is likely to have enjoyed. Four weeks after the film opened, on Christmas Day 1967, President Soglo of Dahomey was removed by his own subordinates, and while there were ordinary explanations there were also those who blamed the long reach of Papa Doc in revenge for the filming. Greene said Vodou deserved some credit.

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.

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.