Haitian exiles in New York build a theatre against the dictatorship

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.

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.

Settlers in Southern Rhodesia held self government from 1923, more power than settlers ever won in Kenya, and successive white administrations copied South African segregation. In 1953 the territory was joined to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the Central African Federation, whose purpose was to place the regional economy, above all the Northern Rhodesian copper belt, under a single white authority. African nationalists opposed it as the guarantee of their permanent exclusion. Protest was already organised. Workers' movements ran a crippling general strike in 1948, and rapid expansion of white farming radicalised the countryside. Joshua Nkomo, a trade unionist, founded the African National Congress in 1957, which became ZAPU in 1962. Nkomo held back from harder tactics, and in 1963 Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe broke away to form ZANU, a split running along the line between Nkomo's Ndebele support and ZANU's Shona base. After the white government in Salisbury declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965, ZANU took up arms and launched its first guerrilla attacks the year after.

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.