Duvalierism settles into middle age with four hundred prisoners

By the mid-1970s Duvalierism had become an institution with a stake in its own survival. Its enforcers had grown grey and prosperous. For the sake of foreign visitors the regime behaved, and the machinery kept running. Madame Max Adolphe put militia members to work planting trees at weekends and still ordered beatings when she wanted them. In the countryside the section chiefs ruled as before; nobody near Gonaives believed anything had loosened while Zacharie Delva was in place. Between Fort Dimanche, the Dessalines barracks and the Port-au-Prince police station, about four hundred political prisoners were held in conditions meant to kill them slowly, by tuberculosis, hunger or madness. Interrogations happened at the barracks or at the downtown station known as the Cafeteria, away from the palace. One macoute, Luc Desir, taped his sessions and played them back in quiet moments. A diplomat called the president a pleasant young man surrounded by hyenas. He took no pleasure in the cruelty and he stopped none of it.

Tanbou Libete was founded in New York in 1971 by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and other Haitian activists. It was a theatre group and its purpose was political education. The plays and songs were in Kreyol, which meant they addressed the whole of the emigrant population rather than the small share of it schooled in French. New York by then held tens of thousands of Haitians, many of them people the Duvalier government had driven out, and it was one of the few places where Haitians could organise without the militia arriving. Groups like this one supplied what the country itself no longer had: a public argument, conducted in the language people actually speak, about who should govern and by what right. The work was cultural because nothing else was available. Trouillot became a historian, and the questions about power and silence that run through his later books were first worked out on those stages.

Duvalier survived three attempts to remove him, in 1968, in 1969 and in 1970. Part of the reason sat in his hangars. In September 1964, while the American economic squeeze was officially still running, the United States allowed military aircraft to be exported to Haiti, two T-28 trainers among them, and began helping to rebuild the Corps d'Aviation. It later licensed one more F-51 fighter and paid in some fashion for commercial overhauls in Miami of every Haitian F-51 and of other planes that had been sitting grounded. In November 1970 the Nixon administration gave up the pretence of an arms ban altogether, issuing licences to private dealers for light weapons and six patrol boats for the coastguard. By 1971 more than a million dollars of private American arms sales to Haiti had been approved. None of it passed through Congress. Duvalier voted with the United States against Cuba at the Organisation of American States, and that was the service being paid for.

The National Party's laws after 1948 sorted South Africans by colour and fixed where each group could live, work and travel. A small African elite came through the system anyway and organised against it. In the 1950s the African National Congress, until then moderate and slow, was taken over by a younger group around Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. The defiance campaign of 1952 and 1953 brought mass breaking of the pass laws and mass arrests. By the middle of the decade African, Indian and coloured organisations had come together behind a demand for a democratic South Africa with no racial qualification at all. The alliance was fragile. Zulu crowds had attacked Indians in Durban in 1949, and inside the ANC some leaders resented the influence of white liberals and of communists. A breakaway group formed the Pan Africanist Congress at the end of the decade. A state that had spent ten years dividing people by colour had given them one thing to agree on.