Machine guns wait on the roof of Fort Dimanche

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.

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.

Francois Duvalier won the presidency of Haiti in 1957 and never gave it up, and in 1971 his son Jean-Claude took it over at nineteen. On 7 February 1986 the son, his wife and their household boarded a United States Air Force jet and flew to France. Twenty nine years of family rule ended in a morning. What followed was called the dechoukaj, the uprooting. Crowds went after every mark the regime had left on the country, and after the men who had enforced it. Former militiamen were hunted through the streets and more than a hundred were killed, many of them burned inside tyres. General Henri Namphy stepped in and formed a military government. The constitution written the following year did something no Haitian charter had done before. It made Kreyol an official language beside French, in a country where almost everyone spoke only Kreyol, and it split executive power between a president and a prime minister so that no single office could be held the way the Duvaliers had held it.

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.