Namphy takes a room below the president he had overthrown

The massacre at Saint Jean Bosco was too much even for the Haitian army. A week later junior soldiers flew General Henri Namphy out of the country. He checked into the Concord Hotel in Santo Domingo, one floor beneath Leslie Manigat, whom he had deposed in June and sent to that same city. Franck Romain, who had ordered the church attack, walked into the Dominican embassy and claimed asylum. The soldiers who had made the coup then discovered they could not agree on a leader. The man who emerged was Prosper Avril, who two and a half years earlier had been forced off the first military council because the crowds would not accept a Duvalier insider. Haiti had reached the point where the same men rotated through power, exile and power again, and where each government arrived denouncing the excesses of the one before it while preparing its own. Four governments had come and gone since February 1986. Two of the four were now in the same hotel.

Joseph is careful about priority in the debate that now dominates Haitian revolutionary studies. In a Sorbonne dissertation of 1989 titled Hegel, critique de l'Afrique, Pierre-Franklin Tavares argued that the revolution in Saint-Domingue and the birth of Haiti, taken as a double event, were the principal historical source, though not the only one, of the famous figure of consciousness entitled domination and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a figure Tavares follows Kojeve in saying is improperly called the dialectic of master and slave. Joseph presents Susan Buck-Morss's later work as building on this thesis, and notes that Tavares extended his argument in further studies on Hegel and the Abbe Gregoire and on Hegel as an anti-slavery philosopher, including a lecture at the College de France in January 1996. The point restores a francophone genealogy to an argument usually credited to an American book. Where this account departs from the standard one: Assigns the Hegel and Haiti thesis first to Tavares in 1989, ahead of the Buck-Morss article of 2000 with which it is usually identified.

Haiti voted on its new constitution in March 1987 and nearly ninety nine percent of those who turned out approved it. The charter had been drafted after the fall of the Duvaliers by a commission elected the previous October. Among its provisions was one that had waited since independence in 1804. French had been the sole official language of the republic for one hundred and eighty three years, in a country where roughly nine people in ten spoke only Kreyol, the language that had formed on the plantations. The 1987 text gave Kreyol official standing alongside French, and the constitution itself was printed in both so that a voter could read what he was voting for. That decision reached further than any of the political clauses. A law nobody can read is a law written for somebody else. Making Kreyol official meant the state had to answer, on paper at least, in the language its citizens used to argue, pray, trade and complain.

In Haiti the power that decided who governed was the power to run the vote. The constitution put to the country on 29 March 1987 took that power from the army and handed it to an independent electoral council. More than half the electorate turned out and over ninety nine percent voted yes, in a poll that foreign observers judged fair. The text was published in Kreyol as well as French so that ordinary voters could read it, and a former minister remarked that Kreyol had become the political language. Anticipating what was coming, the council promoted Williams Regala to general, bringing the number of generals over an army of seven thousand five hundred men to seventeen. Meanwhile a New York law firm hired to chase the money Jean-Claude Duvalier had taken abroad, put at somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred million dollars, ran into French courts that refused American jurisdiction and Swiss banks that cited their tradition of discretion. In France the exile was spending ten thousand dollars a month on telephone calls.