Miami rice arrives and twelve thousand assembly jobs vanish

Leslie Delatour, the finance minister, tried to restart an economy that had been drained for three decades. He closed the state cooking oil monopoly, was picketed by its sacked workers, cut the price of oil by thirty percent and got no credit for it. Nobody knew where the Duvalier accounts were. In the four months after the family left, roughly twelve thousand assembly jobs disappeared from Port-au-Prince, a fifth of the total, as foreign owners went looking for quieter workforces. Unions asking to raise the daily minimum from three dollars twelve to six dollars twenty four were met by men who looked very much like the old militia. In the countryside the section chiefs still ruled. Provincial ports stood open and smugglers poured in American rice, cheap enough to ruin Artibonite growers, who put up roadblocks. Namphy took to his bed with what he called extreme fatigue. Floods in June carried away bridges near Cayes that were less than five years old.

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.

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.