Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

“So the Bizango presidents work actively with the government. What happens when …”

Leophin interrupted somewhat indignantly. “The government cooperates with us. They have to. Imagine what would happen if some invaders landed in some remote corner of the Department of the Northwest. They would be dead before they left the beaches. But not by the hand of the government. It is the country itself that has been prepared for such things since ancient times.

“The people in the government in Port-au-Prince must cooperate with us. We were here before them, and if we didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be where they are. There are not many guns in the country, but those that there are, we have them.”

This last statement of Jean-Jacques Leophin was no idle boast, at least if we are to judge by the zeal with which prominent national politicians, most notably Dr. François Duvalier, have courted the Bizango societies. The Duvalier revolution, often misrepresented in the Western press and remembered only for its later brutal excesses, began as a reaction on the part of the black majority to the excessive prominence of a small ruling elite that had dominated the nation politically and economically for most of its history. When Duvalier was first elected in 1957, he was unable to trust the army—indeed by the end of his tenure in office there would be over a dozen attempted invasions or coups d’état—and thus he created his own security force, the Volunteers for the National Security, or the Ton Ton Macoute, as they became known. (The latter name, incidentally, comes from a Haitian folktale that admonishes misbehaving children that their Ton Ton, or uncle, will carry them off in his macoute, his shoulder bag.) To date, however, nobody has adequately explained the genesis of the Ton Ton Macoute as a national organization, or the remarkable speed with which it was established and emplaced in virtually every Haitian community. An explanation may lie in the network of the Bizango societies discussed so candidly by Jean-Jacques Leophin.

François Duvalier, a physician by training, was a keen student of Haitian culture. A published ethnologist, he was in his youth a pivotal member of a small group who put out an influential journal called Les Griots , and it was within its pages that the germ of Duvalier’s movement was sown. Though themselves scions of the elite, well educated and thoroughly urban, the intellectuals galvanized by Les Griots were responding to the humiliation of the American occupation and the flaccid acquiescence of their bourgeois peers. They did so by espousing a new nationalism that openly acknowledged the African roots of the Haitian people. At a time when drums and other religious cult objects were being hunted down and burned, and the peasants forced to swear loyalty to the Roman Catholic church, the members of Les Griots declared that vodoun was the legitimate religion of the people. It was a courageous stand, and one that earned Duvalier the unqualified support of the traditional society. During the 1957 election that brought him into power, Duvalier actively sought the endorsement of the houngan, and in certain sections of the country vodoun temples served as local campaign headquarters. With his success, François Duvalier became the first national leader in almost a hundred years to recognize the legitimacy of the vodoun religion and the rights of the people to practice it. During his term in office, he appointed houngan to prominent governmental positions. At least once he had all the vodoun priests in the country brought to the national palace to confer with him. And he was himself rumored to be a practicing houngan. It was an extraordinary transformation of official government policy. A year or two before the accession of Duvalier, vodoun drums were still being burned; a year after, a vodoun priest was serving as minister of education.

Critically, François Duvalier knew that he was surrounded by enemies, and he recognized with equal clarity that his strength and the ultimate power of any black president lay within the traditional society. Throughout his time in office, he went out of his way to penetrate the network of social control that already, as Jean-Jacques Leophin had suggested, existed within that society. He openly courted prominent houngan, and it is no coincidence that a man such as Herard Simon—a man both deeply religious and deeply patriotic—became the effective head of the Ton Ton Macoute for a full fifth of the country. Before Duvalier, blacks had limited access to public or governmental positions. In some cities there were parks where by unwritten agreement blacks were not permitted to walk. For men like Herard, Duvalier seemed like a savior. That was why, when I once asked him if he had had to kill many people during the early days of the struggle, he could reply sincerely, “I didn’t kill any people, only enemies.”

Undoubtedly Duvalier’s close contacts with the houngan put him directly in touch with the Bizango societies and their leaders. Significantly, he was the first national president to take a direct personal interest in the appointment of each chef de section. It is also intriguing that the Haitian peasantry came to regard Duvalier as the personification of Baron Samedi, a spirit prominently associated with the secret societies. In his own dress and public behavior Duvalier appeared to affect that role quite deliberately: the ubiquitous black horn-rimmed glasses, the dark suit, and narrow black tie are the apparel that show up time and again on the old lithographs of the popular spirit. In short, whatever his motives, François Duvalier succeeded in penetrating the traditional vodoun society on a number of levels. The leaders of the secret societies almost inevitably became powerful members of the Ton Ton Macoute, and if the latter was not actually recruited from the Bizango, the membership of the two organizations overlapped to a significant degree. In the end, one might almost ask whether or not François Duvalier himself did not become the symbolic or effective head of the secret societies.

Josephine, the old woman who had befriended us that night at the ceremony, sold beans in the Saint Marc market, so she wasn’t hard to find. By then we were recognized by most of the Shanpwel, and a dozen familiar but peculiarly anonymous faces guided us through the cluttered market stalls. It made for a strange sensation, weaving past the telling smiles, being known but still not knowing.

When we reached her shop—a simple wagon with an awning of tattered cloth, a rusty measuring tin, and a few neat piles of speckled beans—it was untended, but within moments Josephine came scampering back like a schoolgirl, so surprised and delighted that she could scarcely keep still. Leaving her business in the care of a neighbor, she marched us back through the market, pausing often to caper about the stalls of her friends until finally by the most circuitous route imaginable we reached the jeep. Then rather than taking the most direct road to the home of the president of her society—for that was the point of our visit—she managed to have us drive not once but twice through the market.

Eventually Josephine directed us along a dirt road that ran through the irrigated land east of Saint Marc. The valley, like so many along the central coast of Haiti, is an oasis in the midst of a barren man-made desert, and as we reached just past the edge, where the lush fields gave way to scrubland, we stopped. It was a melancholy place—a few tired trees leading up to a small compound literally carved into the porous sidehill. There were two main structures, both small, linked by a tonnelle and surrounded by a wattle fence. Though not old, the mud surface of the temple had already cracked into a thousand pieces. Overhead, a limp Haitian flag hung on a long staff.