The army smuggles abroad the militiamen who knew the most

The new council named a cabinet of nineteen on the first Saturday. Gerard Gourgue took justice and Rosny Desroches took education, which gave the list respectability. Williams Regala took the interior, which mattered more. The council dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the constitution and announced that it would rule by decree. It restored the red and blue flag that Francois Duvalier had replaced, and Henri Namphy raised it over the palace himself. Under cover of the curfew the army was busy with something else. Soldiers moved militiamen to safe houses and then out of the country, taking care of those in most danger and those who knew the most. Madame Max Adolphe surfaced overseas. Albert Pierre, the police chief called Ti Boule for the cigarette lighter he used on prisoners, was helped to Brazil. The militia was declared abolished, and then Avril allowed that many of its members could join the army. Exiles came home by the thousands with foreign currency, and Haiti acquired a word for them, diaspo.

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.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.

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.