A crowd throws Columbus into the harbour at Port-au-Prince

On the Port-au-Prince waterfront stood a statue of Christopher Columbus, who reached this island in December 1492 and whose arrival began the destruction of the people already living on it. In 1986, in the weeks after the Duvalier family fled the country, a crowd pulled the statue down and pushed it into the sea. Someone painted a line on the bare plinth: pas de blan en Haiti. No whites in Haiti. Michel-Rolph Trouillot uses the episode to show where public memory actually sits. It sits in what stands in a public square and in who is willing to move it. A monument occupies ground and states, without needing to argue, whose story the ground belongs to. Taking it down is an argument made with rope and shoulders. The same crowds that year were opening tombs, renaming streets and burning barracks. Columbus went into the harbour because the harbour was where he had been put.

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.

The Haitian writer Sanba Gregory Sanon, known as Azouke, was among the worshippers attacked during a crusade against the religion in 1986, in which a number of people were killed. He wrote about the building afterwards. Spirits had come to that small run down house from the four corners of the country, and inside it the members wrote poetry, composed songs, learned to dance and argued politics. They lost one of their brothers, a man Sanon calls very dear to the struggle, and from that day they decided to move the house elsewhere. The spirits, he says, visited them wherever they went. Anti-Vodou crusades ran from the colonial period into contemporary times without a long enough break for anyone to grow up without seeing one. Abandoned temples stand in the Artibonite valley, and they are as much a record of Haitian religious history as the ones still in use.

In 1986 hundreds of Vodou worshippers were killed at Soukri, near Gonaives. Desir places the killing in a long line of attempts to stamp out the religion, and records the answer given by a practitioner named Herard Simon, who improvised a response inside a ceremony that was part prayer, part protest and part warning. Simon told the gathering that a revolution was under way and that every religion would have to take a position in it. The Catholics, he said, had shown they were not interested in Vodou, that they wanted to break it and to kill, and that more than a thousand of its priests had died across the country. He named Catholics, Protestants, Baptists and Adventists together as holding a single plan, to destroy a work that was giving them trouble, and answered that the religion had come out of Africa and would be left where it stood. The song was recorded by the scholar Marie-Jose Alcide Saint-Lot.