Politics and Power in Haiti

K. Quinn, P. Sutton, K. Quinn, P. Sutton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137311993
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312006
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Examining the political legacies of the Duvalier period and after, and revisiting the work of the late David Nicholls, Politics and Power in Haiti provides some of the keys to understanding the turbulent world of Haitian politics and the persistent challenges at home and from abroad which have distorted development.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Duvalier and After

Paul Sutton and Kate Quinn

In the First David Nicholls Memorial Lecture David was described as “a polymath: the political scientist; the theologian; the humble and caring parish priest in Littlemore; the polemical pamphleteer; the historian of the Caribbean; and so much else” (Leech, 1999). He was indeed all these things, but above all, he was for many the most well-informed academic in the United Kingdom on the political history of Haiti. Franklin Knight described his monograph From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour and National Independence in Haiti (1979) as “probably the best book written about Haitian history after its independence, a thorough, thoughtful and extremely well-researched work” (1982, p. 220) while 25 years after its publication, and to celebrate its achievement, a young academic at the University of the West Indies affirmed that “the work remains a sterling achievement in Haitian intellectual history, masterfully researched and eloquently written. . . . The book continues to spark interest among scholars and students, both for its keen insight into the intellectual and political trajectory of Haiti, and its controversial explanations of Haitian political struggles” (Smith, 2007, p. 27). A selection of Nicholls’s writings on Haiti and on the wider Caribbean collected in Haiti in Caribbean Context: Ethnicity, Economy and Revolt (1985) further enhanced his reputation as an incisive scholar of the region.

These tributes acknowledge Nicholls’s scholarship, but it is noteworthy that they also acknowledge the controversies that his work on Haiti and the Caribbean occasioned. Some of these issues were discussed in the Fourth David Nicholls Memorial Lecture given by Anthony Maingot (2002) and in the Sixth given by Leslie Griffiths (2006). They inevitably include questions of color and class—which was ascendant, when and how; foreign intervention from Europe and North America—for what reason and with what effect; and authoritarian government and revolt—led by whom and for whose benefit. They are the staples of Caribbean history and Caribbean social science and are therefore the subject of continual revision and comment as history and theory are reinterrogated and new research in the archives and in the field add to our factual understanding and insight. Haiti, in particular, has been very much at the center of such academic endeavor in recent years, and compared to when Nicholls was conducting his research, there has been an explosion of interest and publication on the country. A select bibliography presented at a Haiti Workshop at London Metropolitan University in 2008 listed some 50 books, articles, and special issues of journals devoted to the literature and history of Haiti that appeared from 2003 to 2008 (Forsdick and Douglas, 2008), more than would be available for most other countries in the Caribbean. The question this inevitably raises is whether such work confirms or refutes Nicholls’s scholarship on Haiti and what further needs to be done.

The chapters collected in this volume speak to some aspects of this challenge. They include presentations by established scholars who knew Nicholls as a person and new scholars who know of his work. They cover themes with which Nicholls would be familiar as well as some with which he would not and provide an insight into what has changed and what has stayed the same. The final chapter is an address by Reginald Dumas, a former special representative of the United Nations Secretary-General, on the situation in Haiti following the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. To set these chapters in context, we provide a brief reprise of some of Nicholls’s work on Haiti and the Caribbean, outline what the various contributors individually and collectively discuss in respect of contemporary interpretations of Haiti, and conclude with a few thoughts on how Nicholls might be read today.

Nicholls on Haiti and the Caribbean

Although Nicholls began publishing on theology and politics in 1960, his first works on Haiti and the Caribbean did not appear until 1970. When they did, they marked a departure from his earlier concerns, which were formed from an investigation of governance primarily in the British tradition, with its focus on liberty, authority, and the state, to a very different tradition in the Caribbean in which politics was sometimes violent and often fluid and unpredictable. The differences fascinated him and were well caught in his book Three Varieties of Pluralism (1974) where the discussions of English and American political pluralism, with their focus on conflicting group interests within a common social framework, contrast with an altogether different form of social and cultural pluralism in the Caribbean, in which ideas and values are not shared in a country but in which “there are distinct segments in the state, separated from each other by many social and cultural factors. The members of these groups live almost the whole of their lives within a single group, and meet other members of the group only in the market place; the whole state is kept together by force” (ibid., p. 3). This implied a very different type of politics, and it was Nicholls’s intention to make this clear to those who sought to understand the Caribbean, whether from within the region, where differences and similarities between countries needed to be teased out, or from outside, where preconceptions and understandings of politics formed in a very different milieu were transposed without due sensitivity to the history, culture, and society of the Caribbean.

The main way Nicholls sought to highlight differences and achieve a deeper understanding was to set the argument within the historical context. Most of his work on Haiti demonstrates this conclusively. In regard to that country, he was not alone in asserting the historical dimension as crucial to its contemporary understanding. Two of the most acclaimed scholars with extensive fieldwork experience in the country, Mats Lundahl (1989) and Sidney Mintz (1995), also made this point forcefully in articles seeking to explain the current political problems of Haiti to audiences of fellow academics and policy influentials, but it was Nicholls who was the most insistent on this point to the primarily English-speaking audience to which his academic output was mainly directed. In particular, he also wished to demonstrate to them “that Haiti is part of the Caribbean and, indeed, that much of her early post-colonial experience is of relevance to the more recently independent countries of the region” (1985, p. 5). In other words, a study of Haiti’s past not only provided explanations for Haiti today but also generated insights into the contemporary problems of other Caribbean countries.

Nicholls was also insistent, given his sensitivity to culture, that politics in Haiti could also only be appreciated through a knowledge of the principal books and texts on the country written in French by Haitians, who were themselves often participants in the events they described. The bibliography and references within From Dessalines to Duvalier are a testament to the numerous sources in French he consulted, some dating back to the early nineteenth century, as well as to a wider depth of reading on the history of ideas and on the social sciences, in several languages.¹ The lengths to which he would go to track down the sources are wittily expressed in the Preface to the first edition of From Dessalines to Duvalier where he acknowledges his appreciation to Henock Trouillot, the director of the Archives Nationales in Port-au-Prince, “for his unintended kindness in refusing to allow me access to the archives. If he had, I would probably have been faced with such daunting practical problems that this book might never have been finished.” (1996, p. xliii). If so, we are indeed obligated to M. Trouillot for his obduracy.

Given both the breadth and depth of Nicholls’s knowledge on Haiti, and more generally his work on Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean, it is clearly almost impossible to summarize his key findings. We have chosen three findings, which we have already identified as “the staples of Caribbean history and Caribbean social science” and which appear most often to be discussed by others in commenting on Nicholls’s work and on which Nicholls reached some controversial conclusions.

The first and one of the most cited and most criticized is his interpretation of color and class in Haitian politics. Nicholls claimed that “much of Haiti’s political history in the nineteenth century is to be seen as a struggle between a mulatto, city-based commercial elite and a black, rural, and military elite” (1996, p. 8) and “that these colour divisions developed out of the ‘caste’ distinctions of colonial Saint Domingue” (ibid.). He did not see mulattoes and blacks as “distinct social classes” but as “two factions of a single class” (ibid., p. 9). Nicholls’s history of the nineteenth century is interpreted within this framework, notably his conception that color led to two distinct ideological statements of Haiti’s past: the mulatto legend and the black legend, which were deployed by their adherents to define and, where necessary, justify, their political actions. Mulattoes in the nineteenth century wanted representative government and liberal values to prevail, portraying black leaders “as either wicked or ignorant,” while black leaders “portrayed themselves as the champions of the poor black rural workers and small peasants” and argued “in favour of an authoritarian, populist government which would realise the hopes of the masses in the face of intrigue by mulatto politicians” (ibid., p. 11).

These two contrasting viewpoints provide valuable traction in coming to grips with the twists and turns of Haitian politics in that period, but as Nicholls recognized, some blacks ascribed to the mulatto legend and some mulattoes, to the black. There was also the development and practice of “la politique de doublure” where a black president was controlled by mulatto politicians (ibid., p. 79), confusing the picture further. “Colour prejudice,” he writes, “having come into being for whatever cause, develops a dynamic of its own and often leads men to act in ways which are in conflict with their own material interests” (1985, p. 183). In short, life is never that easy to comprehend, and someone like Nicholls, who relished the contradictions and confusions of life, would have been appalled if it had been. His two books at numerous points therefore seek to qualify or otherwise comment on the color distinction he makes as it is applied to different and later circumstances, demonstrating that while he thought the importance of color a useful point to make, it was not a sole explanation for any circumstance.

The same emphasis on qualification can be said of his discussion of class: “I have called colour the badge of class: but it is not the constitutive element of class” (ibid., p. 5), he wrote, and it is clear that he thought class played a more important role in twentieth-century than in nineteenth-century Haiti. There were several reasons for this. One was the US occupation, which saw the US attempt to encourage the growth and participation of “a new middle class” to anchor its interests in the country (Nicholls, 1996, p. 147). Similarly Nicholls’s lengthy discussions of Duvalierism and the noiriste legend (a development of the black legend) provides at numerous points a discussion of the role of the emergent black middle class and its role in politics. This could take a number of forms including political critiques by noiristes and socialists, which eroded the hegemony of mulatto liberalism, and the project by François Duvalier, once in power, to achieve what he called “a ‘new equilibrium’ in the country, by which he meant a major shift in power from the established, predominantly mulatto, elite to a new black middle class, which was said to act in the interests of the mass of peasants and workers from which its members had emerged” (ibid., p. 212). In such situations color and class could play not only independent roles but also subordinate and variable roles. Nicholls could thus assert that in the Haiti of the 1970s “colour, which has never been the sole factor in determining allegiance, is less significant today than in the period from 1946 to 1966” (ibid., p. 240) or, more generally, “that colour normally becomes significant in Caribbean politics only when it is reinforced by other factors, real or imagined” (1985, p. 183). It is therefore important to note that “there are clearly situations when colour must be recognised as a significant and independent variable in explaining the course of events” (ibid.) and situations where it is not. “In most conflicts” in Haiti, he argues, “colour is one issue among many and frequently takes second place to economic class, regional loyalty and political allegiance in determining the lines of battle” (ibid., p. 219). In short, a simplistic explanation in terms of color or class is no explanation at all.

A second theme is Nicholls’s discussion of Duvalierism. In this he was keen to assert that Duvalierism could not be labeled as fascist or totalitarian but rather, along with the political experiences of other postcolonial and economically dependent countries, should be understood as sui generis:

Duvalierism is to be seen as a further development of that post-colonial pattern which emerged in nineteenth century Haiti and from which the country has not entirely freed itself. The Duvalierist phenomenon is allied to certain movements in Latin American politics, and perhaps constitutes a sort of model toward which many of the former British colonies in the Caribbean are tending. . . . In all these countries [he cites Guyana, Grenada, Dominica, St Kitts and marginally Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago], as in Haiti itself, ethnic or colour factors are readily available for exploitation by the political leaders, so the attention of the masses can be diverted from economic issues. (1996, p. 214)

The subsequent institutionalization of liberal democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean demonstrated that he was mistaken in his political prognosis but was right on economic issues since economic problems remain an intractable and a continuing source of simmering discontent, in Haiti and in the rest of the Caribbean.

Nicholls was also keen to show that accounts of Haiti under Duvalier “as a country in which five million ignorant discontented and rebellious peasants were forcibly held down by a handful of ‘cut-throats’ are the product of wishful thinking and bed-time reading rather than the conclusion of careful academic research” (ibid., p. 215). His intent here was to show that Duvalier did enjoy some support and he states, “At Duvalier’s funeral, which I attended, there were numerous scenes of sadness and distress” (1985, p. 224). These mourners may have been misguided (and Duvalier’s tomb was quickly trashed) but they could nevertheless be genuine, especially if they were from the predominantly black middle sectors of the Haitian population who were the bedrock of the regime and the beneficiaries of Duvalier’s limited political patronage: “medium-sized landowners and speculateurs in the countryside and lawyers, doctors, small-business people, civil servants with other professionals and skilled working people in the towns” (1996, p. xii). Nicholls also claimed that “the principal tonton macoute organisation served not merely as an instrument of terror but also as a means of recruiting support for the regime” (ibid., pp. 211–12) and that the advantage to Duvalier of the black middle classes was that they “were not accustomed to receiving many benefits from the state and their loyalty could therefore be purchased at a modest price” (ibid., pp. 222–23). The fact that “fourteen years of Francois Duvalier’s iron rule saw few fundamental changes in the economic and social structure of Haiti” (ibid., p. 236) was thus of no great importance to them and certainly of none to the masses, who had no expectation of any government, present or in the past, doing anything to benefit them.

It also explains why the mantle of power passed seamlessly from Duvalier father (Papa Doc) to Duvalier son (Baby Doc). The expectations abroad were that Haiti would quickly collapse into chaos. Nicholls, through the medium of his macaw, poured scorn on this viewpoint, especially when held by a distinguished fellow academic at Oxford.² Such a person simply did not understand Haiti. The regime not only had its supporters, as we have seen, but Duvalier had also previously astutely removed, silenced, or later reached an accommodation with his many enemies. These included army officers, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the US embassy, the business elite, intellectuals, and the trade union leadership. “One by one their wings were clipped” such that by 1971, when Duvalier died, “the opposition had effectively been eliminated through murder, imprisonment or exile and there remained no major group capable of constituting a centre of political resistance or revolution” (1985, p. 223). More to the point, Duvalier had begun as early as 1966 to seek an accommodation with some of these groups such that they had concluded “they could live with Duvalierism and that attempts to improve their position within the parameters of the system were preferable to the confusion which might result from revolution” (ibid., pp. 223–24). They therefore supported “a smooth transfer of power to his son” (ibid., p. 224) allowing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1   Introduction: Duvalier and After
• Chapter 2   True Dechoukaj : Uprooting Bovarysme in Post-Duvalier Haiti
• Chapter 3   From François Duvalier to Jean-Bertrand Aristide: The Declining Significance of Color Politics in Haiti
• Chapter 4   The Macoutization of Haitian Politics
• Chapter 5   The Moody Republic and the Men in Her Life: François Duvalier, African-Americans, and Haitian Exiles
• Chapter 6   Haitian Exceptionalism: The Caribbean’s Great Morality Play
• Chapter 7   Haiti and France: Settling the Debts of the Past
• Chapter 8   Haiti and the Regional and International Communities since January 12, 2010
• Postscript
• List of Contributors
• Index