A commission of sixty one sits down to write a new charter

Eight months after Jean-Claude Duvalier flew out of Port-au-Prince, the military council governing Haiti convened a body to write a new constitution. Twenty of its members were named by the government and forty one were chosen at a special election in October 1986. Barely five percent of eligible voters took part in that election, which says how much faith the country had left in ballots. The delegates worked anyway. Over four months they produced a charter aimed squarely at the machinery that had kept one family in the palace for twenty nine years. It cut the powers of the president, created a prime minister to share them, barred prominent Duvalierists from office for ten years, pushed authority out to the communes, and took from the army the right to run elections. Haiti had written many constitutions before. This was the first drafted by people who had just watched a hereditary dictatorship pack its luggage and leave.

Michel records, on information from the Marine Corps, that Brigadier General Hermann Hanneken died aged ninety-three in California, where he had long been retired, and notes pointedly that he had for years absolutely refused to let the historian Roger Gaillard interview him. Michel places the death in the year of the hundredth anniversary of Peralte's birth and collects other coincidences of dates in history to frame it, including two American presidents dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration they had both signed. He allows himself one question and no answer, wondering whether Hanneken saw his victim as he passed out of life. The dating carries a small internal problem, since Michel's own chronology of birthdays and the book's subtitle both point to 1885 rather than 1886. Michel gathers further coincidences, including a Swedish count killed on the anniversary of a royal flight and a Russian prince who died soon after helping film the killing he had committed. Where this account departs from the standard one: Michel dates Peralte's centenary to 1986 here, while his own birthday arithmetic and the book's subtitle place the birth in 1885.

Light assembly manufacturing grew fast in Haiti from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s and was for that whole stretch the one part of the economy that worked. In 1990 it employed 46,000 people spread across some 250 firms. The workforce was mainly women, and each employee supported about three or four other people, mostly in the capital. The industry ran on imported raw materials, sold into the American market, and made toys, electronics and textiles on the strength of Haiti's one comparative advantage, low wages. Its share of total export value rose from under five percent in the mid 1960s to over two thirds by the mid 1980s. After the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, international sanctions sent energy costs up, removed spare parts and inputs from the market, and took the customers away. By the beginning of 1995 no more than 5000 workers were left in the sector.

Richard Reid argues that the collapse of the Soviet bloc changed what Western governments said they wanted from Africa. Human rights, good governance and elections replaced anticommunism as the stated test. Guilt drove part of the shift. The Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s became the defining image of the continent, and the failure to act in Rwanda in 1994, where about a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed while foreign governments watched, sat badly beside the readiness to intervene in the Balkans. The offer put to African states was that accepting structural adjustment, meaning political and economic liberalisation, would bring investment and World Bank money. Reid points out that intervention aimed at remaking African societies runs back to the abolition campaigns of the early nineteenth century. Bill Clinton toured the continent in 1998 announcing a renaissance. After September 2001 the old bargain returned, and governments that helped against Islamist movements found their conduct at home overlooked. Africa remained a problem for outsiders to fix, and the fixing carried no memory of how the problem was made.