American troops land to cheers and find no one left to surrender to

The first American soldiers came down at the civilian airport in Port-au-Prince at half past nine on the morning of 19 September 1994, in full battle gear, and found thousands of Haitians cheering them through the perimeter fence. Lieutenant General Henry Shelton commanded them. Haitians renamed him Shelltox, after the insecticide. Over the following days troops spread out to Cap-Haitien and across the country, and in most places there was nobody to take a surrender from, because the Haitian army had changed into civilian clothes and gone home, leaving its barracks and offices standing empty. Evans Paul came out of hiding after three years. Legislators flew back from exile so that parliament would have a quorum for whatever Washington needed passed. Fifty Special Forces men moved into the Casernes Dessalines and spent their first days cleaning the latrines. On 4 October soldiers raided the headquarters of FRAPH and carried off some sixty thousand pages of documents, which the public learned about a year later. Within days it emerged that the FRAPH leader Emmanuel Constant had been on the CIA payroll. Cedras handed over command on 10 October and flew to Panama.

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.

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.