The first palace fight sends the president's sister to Paris

With Papa Doc gone, nobody regulated the flow of patronage and the fighting started within months. In late July 1971 Luckner Cambronne had a cousin of Max Dominique arrested for forging passports. Marie-Denise Duvalier, serving as her brother's private secretary, demanded the man's release and Cambronne's dismissal. Jean-Claude asked his mother and did as she said: Marie-Denise and her husband left for Paris, where Dominique resumed his ambassadorship. Her duties passed to Auguste Douyon, a school friend of the president known as Ti Pouche, who handled everything personal from banking to procuring women. Jean-Claude began going out with little escort or none, racing his cars at night on the Petionville and Delmas roads. Within a year of taking office he had an ulcer. The first year's books looked good: ninety thousand tourists, eight million dollars in aid, and a foreign press that had decided to be fair. In March 1972 Cambronne went to Washington with a shopping list for arms.

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.

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.