1957, September 22: (The Election of François Duvalier: The Perfect Peacefulness of Fixed Bayonets, 679,884 to 266,992, and Depi nan Ginen Nèg ap Trayi Nèg):…

1957, September 22: (The Election of François Duvalier: The Perfect Peacefulness of Fixed Bayonets, 679,884 to 266,992, and Depi nan Ginen Nèg ap Trayi Nèg): Perhaps because Kébreau administered the state of siege, it seemed to inhibit all candidates save Duvalier. The press, whose saturnalia since Magloire’s fall had gone unchecked except when its plants were sacked or burned, was sharply curbed. Two days before the election, Jumelle resigned a contest hopelessly lost — Luc Fouché, Magloire’s able lieutenant, stood down from a senatorial race in his native Cap, remarking drily that after careful scrutiny of the realities of the hour he cherished no illusion about the outcome. On Sunday, September 22, some 950,000 Haitians went to the polls for a vote that had been thoroughly organized by the army. In what Jean-Pierre Gingras called the perfect peacefulness of fixed bayonets, the elections came off smoothly enough: Duvalier received 679,884 votes, Déjoie trailed with 266,992, Duvalier candidates made a clean sweep of the Senate and won two-thirds of the députés. Only in Port-au-Prince, stronghold at once of the elite and Fignolé’s masses, was the little doctor decisively beaten. Duvalier told the New York Times correspondent that the biggest issue was honesty; Déjoie said eighty-five percent of the election was crooked. To himself, perhaps, the president-elect might have agreed — one of his favorite Creole sayings had always been: Depi nan Ginen nèg ap trayi nèg — from time immemorial in Guinea, every man betrays his neighbor. The proverb that Duvalier chose as his private motto — a maxim that located the origin of betrayal not in colonialism or slavery but in Africa itself, in the very Guinea that was the spiritual homeland of Vodou and the ancestral source of Haitian identity — revealed the cognitive architecture of the man who was about to govern Haiti: a worldview in which trust was an illusion, solidarity a tactical fiction, and the only durable relationship between human beings was the relationship of power, a philosophy that owed nothing to Marxism or liberalism or any Western ideology but everything to the darkest reading of the Haitian experience itself — the experience of a people who had been sold by their own, enslaved by strangers, liberated by violence, and governed ever since by men who understood that the first lesson of Guinea was that no one could be trusted, and the second lesson was that the man who understood this best would rule.