Istwa Nou

Only Petion and Riche had managed it before. Duvalier served his full term and died naturally, in the palace, in 1971. He got there on suspicion that never rested and betrayal he practised without embarrassment, forgetting friends easily and enemies never. The Heinls set him beside Adolf Hitler, one white racist and one black one, sharing cruelty, fanaticism, superstition, megalomania and an appetite for power that nothing satisfied. He knew everybody in the country and everybody's secrets, and many peasants and more than a few oungan concluded that the lwa worked for him. To foreigners, whom he enjoyed misleading, he called himself an ethnologist and Vodou a folklore. He was unbelievably cruel to a mild and cheerful people, a conductor of human weakness, a xenophobe who outplayed the great powers and their organisations, an Ozymandias whose monument turned out to be rubble. He was also profoundly Haitian, in the line of Toussaint and Dessalines, and he voiced his countrymen's hopes better than anyone had. Then he betrayed them, and the hopes, and himself.

Duvalier came in as a physician who had worked on yaws eradication and written noiriste ethnology, backed by people who read him as manageable. Within three years he had the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, the Tonton Macoutes, answering to him rather than to the army, and the army itself hollowed out on purpose. Heinl's assessment is worth quoting for its ambivalence: profoundly Haitian in the mold of Toussaint and Dessalines, a master of calculated obscurity, a connoisseur and symphonist of human weakness. He served a full term, died in the palace in 1971 of natural causes, and handed the state to his nineteen year old son. Now put this entry beside Soulouque in 1847 and read them together. An elite selects a black figurehead it believes it can steer, the figurehead builds a private force, the elite is purged. Same play, one hundred and ten years apart.