A leaf seller is arrested for calling out the name of a plant

Marc Bazin was installed as de facto prime minister of Haiti on 19 June 1992, nine months after the army removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Rara bands at Leogane answered by singing that Bazin was fake and illegitimate. In the business district of Port-au-Prince a woman sold medicinal leaves. Like any street vendor she sat and chanted her stock and her prices all day long. One of the plants she sold was called fo bazen. In Kreyol that is a perfect homonym of faux Bazin, false Bazin. She was arrested for shouting the name of a herb she had been selling all along. Under the coup government the meaning of a word could shift within days, and nobody had to decide that it should. Songs about going away were heard as accusations that the army had made people flee. Songs to Ogou, the warrior spirit, were heard as attacks on the army itself, and for two weeks in 1993 soldiers informally banned them from the Raras.

In November 1991 roughly three hundred and ten Haitian men, women and children were held on the grounds of the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They lived in huts with tin roofs inside barbed wire, guarded by marines with automatic weapons, using portable toilets that were rarely cleaned, among rats and vermin. They tied plastic rubbish bags to the walls to keep the rain out and hung sheets for privacy. They could leave only under military escort and could be sent to the brig without a hearing for breaking camp rules. Soldiers in full riot gear swept the sleeping quarters before dawn. Judge Johnson described these conditions in his opinion in the Haitian Centers Council case. The camp, known as Camp Bulkeley, ran from 1991 to 1993, and every person in it had tested positive for HIV. It was the only detention camp anywhere built for refugees with that virus.

The only fairly complete surviving run of Les Affiches Americaines, the newspaper of the French colony that became Haiti, sits in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In 1993 the University of Florida had that run put on microfilm. The film was later scanned by the Law Library Microform Consortium, now LLMC Digital, and afterwards by the Digital Library of the Caribbean, which put the pages online. The newspaper ran from 1766 to 1791 and carried the notices owners placed for enslaved people who had left them. Those notices hold physical descriptions, African origins, language skills and social contacts recorded nowhere else in the colonial archive. While the single run lay in one reading room in Paris, the historians able to use it were the ones who could pay to travel there, and Haitian scholars working in Haiti were the least able to reach it. Two rounds of copying, first onto film and then into a database, changed who could open the source.

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.