Nèg Mawon Podcast

Episode 2/11 of our walk through "Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Haiti: Key Recent Developments, March through September 2026", by IJDH and BAI. The report documents armed groups moving out of the capital and into the countryside in what it calls lightning raids: 70 people killed in Jean-Denis alone, and 164 killed in the Kenscoff massacres of July and August. We look at how armed groups govern the areas they hold, the nearly 1.5 million people displaced, and the journalists who were abducted and killed for their work.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/deep-dive/2026-10-24/transcript

Episode 1/11. This series walks through the whole of "Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Haiti: Key Recent Developments, March through September 2026", the October 2026 report by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and its Haiti-based sister organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). We begin with the report's big picture: more than 3,300 people killed from January to July 2026, nearly 1.5 million displaced, and a diagnosis of state capture, corruption and impunity as the root causes. We follow the change from the Kenyan-led MSS to the Gang Suppression Force, the record of Prime Minister Fils-Aimé's government, and an election that, the report finds, would leave most Haitians out.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/deep-dive/2026-10-23/transcript

Two lifelong friends and Haiti's leading class analysts sit down together for the first time on the show. Dr. Alex Dupuy and Dr. Robert Fatton argue that Haiti's ruling class chose to rebuild the plantation and to pay the 1825 indemnity, and was no mere victim of it. They explain why that matters for reparations, and test Jean Casimir's "counter-plantation" against the 20th century. They also make the case for reading gender through class, and for evidence over what Adolph Reed calls race reductionism.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-17/transcript

Dr. Chris Bongie, translator of Vastey's The Colonial System Unveiled, explains why Vastey can't be separated from the power he served. He looks at Vastey as Christophe's scribe and how Césaire and Walcott saw themselves in him. He covers what the archives reveal about Haiti after 1804, and how to read the violence of 1804 through Jean Fouchard. He shows how Vastey answered the question "who are we?" with "we are all Haitians." He also previews Phoenix Rising, his book on the emergence of early Haitian literature.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-15/transcript

Born in Grenada, a youth at the Battle of Savannah, the general who set Cap-Français on fire as Leclerc arrived, then King of the North. Dr. Marlene Daut talks about her biography of Henry Christophe. She covers what is known and what is guessed about his origins, his friendship and break with Capois-La-Mort, and the French plot to set him against Pétion. She also covers the free press and culture of his kingdom. At the heart of it is one question: what path did Haiti lose after Christophe's death and the indemnity?

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-12/transcript

Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels walks us through the foundations of Haitian Vodou: its roots in the vodun of Dahomey and the Fon language, why Vodou has no pope, the Kongo Catholicism that most of the revolutionaries of 1791 brought with them, the nations of Rada, Petwo-Kongo, Gede and Nago, the differences between northern and southern Vodou, and the language of the songs. She also says why we need more Haitian scholars of Vodou.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-10/transcript

Was independent Haiti really isolated? Dr. Julia Gaffield shows how Dessalines dealt with Britain and Jamaica, going over a governor's head to London when he had to. She explains how failing to win recognition from other nations left Haiti with no options in 1825. Along the way: the footnotes, her mentor Laurent Dubois, and the biography of Dessalines she was finishing at the time.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-08/transcript

Part 3 of 3. How do scholars live with a history this violent? Dr. Daut talks about hope and about the people of independent Haiti who carried their former enslavers' names on their bodies. She explains how Haitian sovereignty was compromised from outside, and what reparations would mean. She closes with what she left out of the book: Saint-Domingue as a carceral colony, an idea she takes up again in her biography of Christophe (#80).

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-05/transcript

Part 2 of 3. Dr. Daut tells the story behind her essay on Napoleon Bonaparte and the backlash that followed. Then we see how Haitian intellectuals argued long ago that the revolution was being silenced, and how they tied it to resistance going back to 1521. We also see why Toussaint Louverture's constitution made the most radically free laws of the age. We end with Goman and the maroons of the Grand'Anse, and how Haitian sovereignty took shape and began to come apart.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-03/transcript

Part 1 of 3. Dr. Marlene Daut talks about Awakening the Ashes, the Haitian Revolution told through the words of Haitian writers themselves. She explains why she calls it her most Haitian book, why it now exists in Kreyòl, and how Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey kept the receipts for the world. We follow the revolution's laws, from the 1801 constitution's abolition of slavery "forever" through the constitutions of Dessalines, Pétion and Christophe, to see how Haiti opened the door to the age of abolition.

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-04-01/transcript