The Neptune goes down and a Cite Soleil band sings the loss

In 1993 a ship called The Neptune sank between Jeremie, on Haiti's southern peninsula, and Port-au-Prince. She was carrying more than two thousand people, and almost everyone aboard died. Among the dead were members of a community from Jeremie who had resettled in Cite Soleil, the seaside slum of the capital. That community had its own Rara band, and the band answered the wreck in the one public form available to it, which was song. The lyric names the ship, names the crossing, and turns on a single domestic image of a cooking pot going over. Its refrain says the singer has no family left to bury the dead. The same band had members who had tried to leave Haiti by boat, had been held at the American naval base at Guantanamo, and had been sent home. They made a second song about that, counting up the pigs and the goats they had sold to pay for the passage.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.

Emmanuel Constant, known as Toto, founded the Front pour l'Avancement et le Progres Haitien in 1993 to break popular support for the deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Constant was a paid informant of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1992 to 1994. He said that Patrick Collins of the Defense Intelligence Agency had urged him to create the organisation. The Clinton administration denied any American role, and evidence later emerged that the United States had a hand in setting FRAPH up and in paying for it. Human rights groups attribute more than three thousand deaths to the group. Its signature method was to peel the skin from a living victim's face with a machete. Antoine Izmery, the businessman who had financed Aristide's campaign, was murdered on 11 September 1993, and the justice minister Guy Malary on 14 October. Washington was imposing sanctions in the name of Haitian democracy while paying the man who was killing the people who had voted for it. That was the policy.

Johnson takes her baseline from an earlier article on teaching the Haitian Revolution in world history. That piece appeared before the surge of research that followed the bicentenary in 2004 and was written for teachers at every level, so much of it simply explained the event. Its section on global impact ran to a single paragraph and confined itself to the Atlantic world and the French colonial system. What Johnson takes from it is the count. Of twenty-one Western civilisation and world history textbooks reviewed, only six included the Haitian Revolution. She uses the number as the measure against which to set her own later survey, and notes that the earlier author had already proposed classroom discussion of the ethnic and religious dimensions of the revolution, including religious syncretism. She also cites a later article arguing for teaching the French and Haitian revolutions together, which she judges too source-heavy for a survey course.