[Scholar Series-Ep. #83]"Killing the Elites: Haiti, 1964." A Conversation w/ Dr. Jean-Philippe Belleau

Like my guest today, I’ve never found it particularly useful to cast François Duvalier as some frothing, otherworldly monster. That story is too easy. It offers too little. Once you wrap him in the veil of pathology, the conversation dies. You’ve exiled him to a place beyond history, beyond explanation, beyond us. But what haunts me still—what lives in the marrow of Belleau’s work—is not the spectacle of evil, but its intimacy. The way Duvalier wrapped the Haitian state around himself like a second skin. The way repression was not distant, not sterile, but close. Whisper-close.

This week on the Nèg Mawon Podcast, I sat with anthropologist Jean-Philippe Belleau, and we waded deep into the dark waters of the Duvalier regime—not for the thrill of horror, but to understand the anatomy of power when it is warm, personal, and woven through the lives of the very people it crushes. Here are three strands we pulled from that knot:

1. Power in the First Person
Belleau unearths a truth many prefer buried: that Duvalier’s rule was not built in cold, bureaucratic chambers, but in bedrooms, churches, courtyards. It lived in nods and whispers, in godfather promises and godson debts. This was not Orwell’s 1984—this was something older, more Haitian, more intimate. The regime was not an iron wall; it was a web, spun from relationships and obligations, holding the country not at gunpoint, but by the soul.

2. Who Gets to Be a Victim?
There is a comfort in believing the elite escaped unscathed, that they watched from balconies while the poor bled. But Belleau complicates that myth. His research pulls us toward a difficult truth: the violence had no clean class lines. Elites, too, were crushed, sometimes precisely because they presumed immunity. Belleau invites us to reconsider how history renders victims—how it decides who gets remembered as broken, and who gets blamed for surviving.

3. The Ties That Bind (Even in Hell)
And still—amid the surveillance, the fear, the Tonton Macoutes—Haitians clung to each other. Kinship, friendship, neighborhood, lakou… these weren’t just sentimental relics. They were lifelines. Belleau shows us that even in the shadow of dictatorship, the social fabric didn’t unravel. It tensed, stretched, contorted—but it held. And in that, there is something both tragic and profoundly human.

To understand Duvalier is not to exorcise a demon, but to study a mirror. We cannot afford to look away—not when the terror came wearing a neighbor’s face, a cousin’s smile. Not when history walks so close to home.