called the camera for tomorrow and would find something to shoot. We needed to establish contact with the inaccessible Papa Doc. “Once we’ve been seen with him, talking to him, we’ll be all right,” said my Australian researcher, Ted Morrisby, who as usual had tuned in cleverly. “Then the Tontons and the rest of the town will know he accepts us. That means we shan’t get hassled, or shot.”
Well, he convinced me. In a land where we had no friends for protection, no embassy to turn to, there was a convincing argument for establishing contact before any more shots rang out.
Certainly Papa Doc was not easy to reach. His massacres had generated terror and despair and hidden fury, so every day he prepared to face some sort of counter-attack. He rarely left the white American-built National Palace, the only important building in town which could be instantly switched into a floodlit armed fortress, yet he did not feel secure even behind its walls and guarded gates.
The President had ousted Paul Magloire, who had twice sent in old B25 aircraft on bombing runs. The grounds were ringed by anti-aircraft guns and elderly armoured cars. The President also beseeched protection from a new prayer of which he was author. He sought support from all sides:
Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for Life,
Hallowed be thy name, by present and future generations Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti-patriots…
By a stroke of Whicker’s luck we discovered that next day Our Doc was making a rare expedition into the anxious surroundings outside his palace. He was to open a new Red Cross centre, a small building a few hundred yards from his fortress.
We left our silent hotel at dawn and reached the area as troops and armed men began to assemble for the ceremony. There were hundreds of soldiers in well-pressed khaki with medals and white gloves, and of course a lot of armament. Militia wore blue denim with a red stripe for the occasion, like army hospital patients; more guns, of course. Mingling with authority among them were men in thin tight suits, snap-brimmed fedoras and shades, like Mods heading for Brighton Beach and waving light automatics around casually: the Tontons.
As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.
It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.
The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.
To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.
So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.
The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.
They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.
A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.
He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “So sorry, do you mind?”
In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.
Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.
Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.
He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”
“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”
His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.
In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.
All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”
The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.
By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence.