A protest cry from 1986 turns colour language into class language

Mocombe dates the modern life of the slogan to the toppling of Jean-Claude Duvalier, after whose fall the rallying cry of protest movements against dictatorship and against American economic policy became a claim to be the children of Dessalines standing against the children of Petion. His argument is that the words have changed referent. Traditionally read as mulatto elites against the black poor majority, the phrase as used by an educated black landowning and professional class has come to stand for Marxist categories of racial and class struggle within a world economy under American dominance. Petion's position now names the neoliberal outlook of mulatto and Arab elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, while Dessalines names nationalism, economic reform and social justice. He concludes that both camps want the same thing at the expense of the majority.

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.

On 26 April 1986 the Haitian army broke up a peaceful demonstration in front of Fort-Dimanche. The marchers had come to honour the thousands of people who disappeared inside the camp during the dictatorship, and the date carried its own weight, since 26 April 1963 had been the bloodiest day of the Duvalier years. Among those killed were young people aged between sixteen and twenty nine. Less than three months had passed since Jean-Claude Duvalier left the country. Gerard Gourgue, minister of justice for six weeks in 1986, described afterward what he found in the office. Letters arrived from every direction naming individuals guilty of abuses. On 25 March 1986 a commission of inquiry was set up inside the army to investigate the crimes committed at Jeremie. Most of the men sought by public clamour had protectors inside the governing council itself, and they vanished from view overnight.

Six weeks after taking power the council killed its first civilians. In Martissant a bus driver overtook an army captain's car, a thing nobody had risked under the old rule. The captain arrested him, crowds gathered, and the Leopard battalion shot five people dead. Gerard Gourgue resigned from the council over the killings and over the militiamen being helped out of the country. Alix Cineas and Prosper Avril went too, though Avril kept the chief of staff's job, which left three officers running Haiti. On 26 April several hundred people walked to Fort Dimanche after a mass for the prisoners who had died inside it. A young priest from the parish of Saint Jean Bosco, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, described the march live on Radio Soleil. The commandant had mounted machine guns on the roof. His men opened fire, a bullet cut a power line that fell on the marchers, and six died with fifty wounded. Aristide kept his microphone open throughout. The interior minister said people should behave properly at demonstrations.