The word prehistory decides in advance whose past counts

Historians divide the human story into history and prehistory, and the line falls where writing begins. Ehret throws the division out. The word was coined in a Europe that treated literate European civilisation as the standard measure, so any society that carried its past in oral tradition, in material culture, in language and in inherited practice was filed as existing before history, waiting in the dark for European documents to arrive and switch on the lights. Applied to Africa the effect is brutal. Tens of thousands of years of migration, metallurgy, crop domestication, state formation, art and philosophy land in a category whose name announces that they are not quite history. The same demotion covers indigenous America, northern Eurasia and Oceania. Whatever people have done, wherever they did it, is history, and the evidence is read with different instruments rather than lesser ones. This sits on a Haitian timeline because the ancestors of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue lived almost entirely on the wrong side of that line.

An armed rebellion moved through Haiti in February 2004, and on the twenty-ninth Jean-Bertrand Aristide left the country aboard a United States aircraft. It was the second time he had been put out of the presidency. In 1991 the army did it and he spent three years in Washington. By 2004 there was no army, since he had abolished it, and the work was done instead by former soldiers and gang leaders who crossed in from the Dominican side and took town after town while the police stood aside. Girard places the departure inside a period of deep political division, which is the polite way of recording that Aristide had by then lost the students, the business class, the church hierarchy, most foreign donors and a large part of the movement that elected him. The plane carried him to the Central African Republic and eventually to South Africa. Haiti had produced another president whose exit was arranged in a foreign capital.

Hurricane Georges hit Haiti in September 1998 and took apart what had been rebuilt since the last storm. Years of foreign assistance had not produced roads, drainage or housing able to survive a hurricane, and the damage ran far past the track of the wind, because the hillsides had nothing left on them to hold water. Edwidge Danticat brought out a second novel that year, The Farming of Bones, which is built around the killing of Haitian cane cutters on the Dominican side of the border in 1937. Tens of thousands died in that week, and it had stayed largely unknown to readers of English for sixty years. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince on 19 January 1969 and moved to New York at twelve. She writes in English about Haitian lives, which means the Haitian past reaches a large audience through the language of the country that occupied Haiti for nineteen years. A history Haiti could not afford to print was getting published abroad, in someone else's language, by a writer who had left.

The Aristide administration collapsed on 29 February 2004, the culmination of a four-year campaign that intensified after the contested legislative elections of May 2000. Smith argues CARICOM misread the situation badly, partly because it had been the only foreign presence at the internationally boycotted 2000 elections, which opponents mistook for an endorsement and which Colin Granderson said did tremendous damage to the organisation's credibility. After the removal CARICOM took firm positions on Aristide's Jamaican exile from March to June and on the interim government, and objected that the appointment of Gérard Latortue as interim prime minister had been initiated by Washington without regional consultation. Its own decision to suspend Haiti in March 2004 has not helped, Smith writes, since the isolation coincides with the damage of tropical storm Jeanne in Gonaïves and deepens Haitian cynicism about the region. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that CARICOM's suspension of Haiti after the coup was counterproductive and that a hard line endangers future relations, a position he notes was already contested among heads of government.