The constitution comes back thirty seven articles lighter

Prosper Avril spent the start of 1989 trying to satisfy the opposition, the Duvalierists and the Americans at once. He proposed a forum to build a new electoral council. Marc Bazin, Hubert de Ronceray and others were willing to work with it. Sylvio Claude and Louis Dejoie demanded that he leave instead. In February his government announced measures against the smuggling that was starving the treasury, and demonstrations promptly broke out in Cap-Haitien, Gonaives and the Goaves, the ports that lived off it. Marchers chanted a pun on his name: Avril verra-t-il avril. Will April see April. He then brought a former Leopard commander into the interior ministry while exiled Duvalierists quietly came home to their money. On 13 March he reinstated the constitution Namphy had suspended, minus thirty seven articles he found incompatible with military government. He had taken the form and left the substance. On television he complained that a year of good behaviour had bought him only a resumption of wheat shipments.

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.

In 1986 the Save the Children Federation, financed by the United States Agency for International Development, began a watershed project at Maissade on Haiti's central plateau. It formed peasant groups and promoted tree planting and soil conservation on individual plots. Two years in it started treating small degraded watersheds, each averaging nine hectares. After two more years across twenty two of them, farmers had built 590 check dams, about twenty seven to a watershed. The main ravine was completely treated in ten watersheds, partly in seven and barely in five. Fifty four per cent of landholders contributed labour. The striking figure is who else turned up. People who owned no land at all inside a watershed supplied fifty seven per cent of every recorded work event, and ninety per cent of them belonged to a groupman, a peasant labour group, although the project had never tried to recruit through those groups. Surveys taken in August, September and December 1990 covered 268 people.