Istwa Nou

While the plebiscite was being staged, the decisions that mattered were taken inside the palace. A council of advisers was appointed to guide Jean-Claude Duvalier. Luckner Cambronne headed it. With him sat General Claude Raymond, the president's godson; the general's brother Adrien Raymond on foreign affairs; Antonio Andre of the bank; and Herve Boyer. Nobody bothered to list Simone Duvalier or her daughter Marie-Denise, who had taken over the president's secretariat in 1969 and walked the corridors carrying a submachine gun. Francois Duvalier appeared briefly on 16 March, his face pinched and his skin drawn tight. Days later the headaches returned and he lost consciousness. When he came round, one side of his body was paralysed and he could hardly form words, which is how Henry Christophe had ended a hundred and fifty years before. Fourteen years of personal rule were about to pass to a teenager whose qualification was his father.

Foreign reporters began arriving in Port-au-Prince early in April 1971 because the president had not been seen. De Catalogne, who spoke for the palace, told them there was nothing to report: the president was resting, he was quiet, everything was in order. Then he added a line that reads differently now. Duvalier was president for life, and five minutes before his death he would still be president. The sixty-fourth birthday fell on 14 April and the state staged its usual celebration, with Jean-Claude standing expressionless on the balcony. His father did not appear and sent no radio message, which had never happened before. De Catalogne kept talking. He saw the president every day, he said, and had told him to rest and to work less, though whether he would listen was another matter. None of it was true. Francois Duvalier was dying upstairs and the men around him were arranging what came next.

Francois Duvalier died on the evening of 21 April 1971, after dark, having tried to speak and failed to make himself understood. What happened next was arranged in the ounfo of the Cul-de-Sac plain. The rite is called desounen, and it separates the dead from the lwa that has ridden them in life. Edner Day is the oungan named. He traced a large cross in maize flour on the floor, the length of a body, then climbed onto the bed past the doctors and nurses, straddled the corpse under the sheet, and called on the met tet to withdraw and leave the dead in peace. Only when it has gone can the spiritual inheritance pass on, and it passed to Jean-Claude, standing silent at the foot of the bed with a candle. The body was seen to shift very slightly. The men in the room took that for the departure. Papa Doc had gone to Ginen.

Duvalier lay in state in a refrigerated glass case fitted with fluorescent light, his spectacles in place, his collected writings arranged beside him, twenty-two soldiers and twenty-two militiamen standing guard. The burial fell on Saturday 24 April, the day of Bawon Samdi, who keeps the cemetery. The morning was still and unusually hot; peasants said hell had opened its doors. Archbishop Ligonde and his bishops, all Haitian by then, sang the requiem inside the palace. Fort National fired a hundred and one guns, one every two minutes. Guy Durosier was flown from Paris to sing a hymn of thanks to Francois set to the choral movement of Beethoven's ninth. A judge of the high court called him the Messiah. Machine gun crews lay in the shrubbery at each corner of the palace in case the crowd turned. At the cemetery gate a column of dust rose howling out of the ground and blotted the sun, and the mourners ran.

Nothing was left to chance. A refrigerated glass box with fluorescent lighting was brought in secretly so the president could lie in state with his spectacles on. Twenty two soldiers and twenty two miliciens attended, the number chosen because Duvalier's political numerology ran on twenty two. A 101 gun royal salute was fired for a republic. Beethoven's Ninth was performed with lyrics rewritten in his praise. The burial fell on a Saturday, which belongs to Bawon Samdi, who holds the cemetery, and as the cortège reached the gate a violent wind came up and scattered the crowd. Everyone present read it, and they did not all read it the same way. The regime had spent fourteen years staging itself in the visual language of Vodou, and at the funeral the language answered back in a register the staging did not control.