The Unknown Maroon faces west towards a wasteland of bullet-pocked buildings and desolate, litter-strewn streets.
To the statue’s left, armored cash transit vans race down Barracks Street towards Port-au-Prince’s waterfront as the sound of gunfire rings out.
To its right sits a deserted school, whose principal was not long ago kidnapped, and a dilapidated concrete panel that once held a plaque honoring the rebel slave celebrated by the bronze sculpture. “In his deeds he was like a lion … and his memory will be blessed forever,” that stolen tribute used to read.
Nearly 60 years after its unveiling, the statue of the Unknown Maroon – or the Nèg Mawon as Haitians call it in Kreyòl – stands almost entirely alone on the front line of a forgotten conflict. He has become one of the most powerful symbols of Haiti’s catastrophe and its determination to resist.
Such is the violence gripping Haiti’s capital that reporters must don bullet-proof helmets and vests to get within a few metres of a sculpture that sits between some of the city’s most important buildings, including the presidential palace, the army HQ, and the currently vacant national pantheon museum and supreme court.
“The whole downtown is unaccessible,” lamented Frederick Mangonès, the son of Albert Mangonès, the architect and sculptor who began designing the Unknown Maroon in the 1940s.
Mangonès fought back tears as he considered the plight of his father’s masterpiece and the violence-stricken country.
“[I feel about the Nèg Mawon] the same way I feel about Haiti – very sad, and discouraged and angry,” the 79-year-old said, leafing through albums of his late father’s sketches and plans. “And hopeful,” Mangonès added, unexpectedly. “We are resilient, you see.”
The Nèg Mawon has witnessed – and survived – many Haitian upheavals since he was placed outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace in December 1968: a monument to Haiti’s revolutionary fight for freedom that, perplexingly, was commissioned by one of the 20th century’s most ruthless dictators, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
Claire Payton, a US historian who is researching the Nèg Mawon, said Duvalier had commissioned the work in an attempt to bolster his tyrannical rule by posing as a maroon-style revolutionary who challenged the US during the cold war. “He was claiming Haiti’s resistance history as the reason he should be in power,” Payton said.
At the statue’s inauguration, Duvalier waxed lyrical about the “indomitable courage” of the runaway slaves who resisted foreign domination and the “insane conviction that the Negro was not a human being”.
“You are the Great Blacksmith of our independence!” the dictator declared, according to documents Payton unearthed.
In 1986, the Nèg Mawon saw the Duvalier family dictatorship collapse, when Papa Doc’s son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, was overthrown. “I’ll never forget that,” said Mangonès, who remembers racing to the palm-lined plaza around the sculpture with his father to witness scenes of public celebration over Duvalier’s fall.
That joy quickly turned to anger – some of it directed at the Nèg Mawon, because of the statue’s association with the Duvalier clan. “The crowd shifted in like 30 seconds … and they started beating the Mawon and shaking it and getting really very, very angry … From this joyful warm thing, it became very, very ugly,” Mangonès said, describing how protesters grabbed the machete in the statue’s right hand and shook it until it broke off. It is missing to this day.
The Nèg Mawon, however, remained standing: his muscular left arm defiantly raising a conch to his lips to summon others to the struggle, a broken chain around his ankle symbolizing Haiti’s escape from subjugation.
The statue survived another upheaval in 2010 when a devastating earthquake reduced the city to rubble and killed tens of thousands of Haitians.
In a book about the aftermath of the quake, the American doctor Joia Mukherjee recalled entering the square outside Haiti’s collapsed presidential palace, “where thousands [of homeless victims] had already made their homes”. “There, rising from the dust of the still trembling earth, stood the statue of Nèg Mawon,” Mukherjee wrote.
As the doctor stood weeping near the sculpture, she was embraced by an elderly lady, and told her: “Nèg Mawon toujou kanpé!” (“The free man is still standing!”)
“Cheri, Nèg Mawon p’ap janm kraze!” the woman replied. “My dear, the free man will never be broken!”
Fifteen years after the earthquake, the Nèg Mawon again finds himself embroiled in a moment of historic turmoil, although this time it is a human-made disaster to which the statue has a front-row seat.
Port-au-Prince has been plunged into chaos since a politically charged criminal insurrection erupted last February, with heavily armed gangs seizing ever-greater chunks of the city.
Thousands have been killed and more than a million forced from their homes, according to the UN, among them the residents of the no-man’s land just west of the Nèg Mawon.
“If I go back, they’ll kill me,” said Jean Théophile Torbeck, a 54-year-old local who was loitering outside a ministry of defense building just behind the statue – one of the last outposts of government control in the city centre. As Torbeck told his story to journalists, a man approached, lifted his shirt and brandished a black handgun at the group. Fearing kidnap, they beat a hasty retreat.
On another afternoon, a cluster of soldiers stood guard across the street, by a statue commemorating another independence icon: the revolutionary leader Henri Christophe, who became Haiti’s first and only king after the country gained independence in 1804. “Once this was a great country but nowadays we are on our knees,” one of the soldiers lamented as gunshots rang out nearby. “We’re in a country that is upside down.”
Mangonès struggled to explain his “contradictory” feelings about Haiti’s predicament, which many historians trace back to the crippling reparations the country was lumbered with after achieving independence from France and to the centuries of foreign meddling and occupation that followed.
“It’s hard to imagine it having turned out otherwise,” said Marlene Daut, the author of a new book about Henri Christophe. “If you create instability and chaos … then when you see chaos, you can’t act surprised, right?”
Thanks to Haiti’s security breakdown, Mangonès has not visited his father’s most famous creation for years – or the nearby Haitian heritage institute which he helped found. Last month, Haiti’s biggest public hospital, a few blocks from the Nèg Mawon, was torched by the gangs, who killed two journalists and a policeman during an attack on the same building last December.
“I dream about just driving around town,” Mangonès said wistfully.
Like most Haitians, he has first-hand experience of the violence. Once, he was driving back into the town when his car came under fire and he was shot in the hand and chest, miraculously surviving. “It went across my spine without touching anything,” he said.
Even so, the septuagenarian architect said he had decided not to abandon his country, as thousands of fellow citizens have done: “It’s very depressing … but I’m Haitian. I’m here – and where am I gonna go now at my age?”
As Mangonès and his country wait for the violence to subside, he said the grit of his father’s unbreakable subject offered inspiration and hope. “He’s the symbol of Haiti’s fight for its liberty,” he said of the Unknown Maroon. “He’s the guy who never let go.”
