Istwa Nou

One evening in 1959, as the light went off the Cul-de-Sac plain, trucks of soldiers surrounded Croix-des-Missions and Croix-des-Bouquets, the towns at the heart of Haitian Vodou. Through the night the detachments collected every oungan and every manbo in the district, the priests and priestesses who serve the spirits, and drove them at gunpoint toward the capital. The convoys came together in the inner courtyard of the National Palace. At midnight the prisoners were pushed up a dark back staircase into the Hall of Busts, where Duvalier stood by himself in the blood red robe of the Secte Rouge. He told them he was the supreme authority of the state and from that night their only master, and then sent them away without another word. He had announced the principle the year before, saying that to seek his destruction was to seek the destruction of Haiti herself. In October he emptied six Senate seats. The one senator who stayed in Port-au-Prince and kept speaking was taken by macoutes within the year and never seen again.