Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel, silenced by Duvalier’s men, dies at eighty

Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel died of a heart attack on 28 June 1986, five months after Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country. She was born in Port-au-Prince in 1906. In 1934 she helped found the Ligue Feminine d’Action Sociale, Haiti’s first feminist organisation, and from 1935 she was one of the main editors of its paper La Voix des Femmes. She attacked Francois Duvalier in print. On the night of 5 January 1958 masked men dragged her out of her house; the next morning she was found in a Petion-Ville street, naked, beaten unconscious, covered in blood, and by most accounts raped. She spent two months in hospital and never wrote again.