Soldiers mutiny over pay and cocaine and Avril survives

On 2 April 1989 the troops of the main barracks and the Leopard battalion rose against Prosper Avril. Their stated grievance was the constitution he had gutted, and in particular the article protecting soldiers from arbitrary dismissal. Their real grievances were pay and the American pressure to shut down the cocaine traffic that had become the officer corps' best business. The fighting ran on for a week in fits and starts. Avril won, and the victory cost him. He now owed his position to the men who had stayed loyal, which left him less room to move than before. He appointed his own electoral council and grew impatient when it produced nothing. Having failed to get an agreement out of Haitians, he invited foreigners to impose one. In August a delegation of Caribbean Community foreign ministers came to Port-au-Prince, met the council and announced that elections would be held in November 1990, there being too little time to arrange them for that November. Eighteen more months of military government.

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.

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.

Roger Lafontant, the Duvalierist enforcer, came home from Santo Domingo once Avril was gone and spent the autumn of 1990 rebuilding his following. The electoral council barred him from standing, and he answered with threats to wreck the vote as the 1987 election had been wrecked. Among the candidates who qualified, Marc Bazin was seen as Washington's man and the leading leftist, Victor Benoit, was thought dull. On 18 October the priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he would run, and the campaign changed shape overnight. His platform came to three words in Creole, participation, transparency and justice, with no mention of reconciliation. A grenade thrown into one of his crowds on 5 December killed seven people and wounded fifty three. More than a thousand foreign observers came, Jimmy Carter among them. Voters queued before the polls opened to mark the small fighting cock that was the symbol of Lavalas, and went home with a thumb stained in indelible ink. Aristide took sixty seven percent, three times the share of Bazin.