Half a million reoccupy Port-au-Prince and uproot Duvalier symbols

On the morning of 7 February a cry of joy went up across Haiti, and around five hundred thousand people of every social category converged on the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. Foreign reporters fixed on the hunting of macoutes, some stoned, some burned alive. Hurbon argues that the hunting was not the important thing. The crowd went first for the symbols: the Statue of the Unknown Maroon that Duvalier had raised opposite the palace, a calvary rebuilt by the government in Bel-Air, and the cemetery, where they exhumed the remains of Duvalier the father and the earliest famous macoutes. Rumour held that the eternal flame was fed by burning the bodies of prisoners. At the same moment neighbourhood committees formed to clean the streets and the blue and red flag replaced Duvalier's black and red. The whole operation, he argues, was a reoccupation of national space. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against foreign commentary that read the déchouquage as barbarism, Hurbon insists the crowd's targets were chosen with precision and that the Duvalierist state survived the family's departure, since the army protected most known macoutes and escorted them abroad rather than arresting them.

Haiti's 1987 constitution recognises freedom of religion, and Fleurant reads it as recognising Vodou as the national religion of the Haitian people. The status remains ambivalent all the same, because many attempts have been made to uproot the practice, and although the purges have generally failed they leave doubt hanging over its worth. The school system, which favours a cosmopolitan approach, has still not put the mythology on any syllabus. For the last thirty years, he writes, people have practised openly. The expatriate community, called the Tenth Department because the national territory is divided into nine, numbers over a million Haitians and includes many advocates of the religion, among them the writer Franketienne and the musicians of Boukman Eksperyans, Boukan Ginen, RAM and the Fugees. A religion with no centre, no dogma and no head office turns out to travel well.

Rulers of the new African states held power the way a man holds a rope in a current, tightly and for his own. Office went to relatives, to men from the home province, to allies who spoke the same language, and any opposition was treated as a conspiracy. Between the 1960s and the 1980s Mobutu held Zaire, Idi Amin held Uganda, Bokassa crowned himself emperor in the Central African Republic, Kenya passed from Kenyatta to Moi, Rawlings took Ghana and Banda had himself made president for life in Malawi. Several of them had sponsors. Britain regarded Amin as preferable to the left leaning Obote. France favoured Bokassa at the start. In Ethiopia the removal of Haile Selassie in 1974 produced Mengistu and the Dergue, which ran a political terror, moved whole populations by force, deepened the war in Eritrea and presided over the worst drought in a century. From the 1980s populations pushed back, and states broken by debt had less capacity to hold them down. The foreign sponsors mostly stayed where they were.

The popular overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier in February 1986 caught a region that had ignored the preceding decade. Smith lists what the region failed to notice: grassroots movements spreading through the provinces after 1980, the political weight of the diaspora and its part in eroding macoutisme, and a refugee crisis that kept growing. When the crisis broke it was again the Jamaican government, under Edward Seaga, that acted first, sending the education minister Neville Gallimore to negotiate with Duvalier. Smith notes drily that Gallimore was reportedly chosen because he spoke Spanish, a skill of little use in Haiti, and that many Jamaicans remained unconvinced his efforts contributed to the capitulation. CARICOM itself was slow, sending a group of Caribbean leaders to see president Henri Namphy only in December 1987 and returning again in 1989 under Prosper Avril.