Aristide leaves accusing Washington of carrying him away

Jean-Bertrand Aristide came back to the presidency in 2001, after a disputed election the year before. Early in 2004 violent unrest spread through the country. American and French forces arrived, stating that they had come to restore order. Aristide left Haiti and said the United States had kidnapped him and driven him out. From June 2004 United Nations peacekeepers policed the country. The arc from 1991 to 2004 runs through a coup, an exile, a restoration carried out under American threat of invasion in 1994, an American withdrawal two years later, a return to office and a second departure. Each stage was decided in part in Washington. That is the reason a survey of United States politics written for American readers mentions Haiti at all, and it is also the reason Haitians have spent a generation arguing about who actually chooses their governments.

From 1929 the Dominican Republic gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil unless the parents were in transit, a phrase that covered the children of diplomats and of people in the country for ten days or less. In 2004 the General Law on Migration, numbered 285-04, added temporary foreign workers, migrants whose residence permits had expired, people brought in without authorisation and anyone unable to prove lawful residence. Since almost all the workers recruited for the cane fields were Haitian, the new categories caught Haitian families more than any other group. Registry offices had been refusing birth certificates to children of Haitian parents informally for years, a practice well documented by the 1990s and fought by Dominican civil society. After 2004 the refusals had a law behind them, and the children of people who had cut cane for decades were treated as though they had just crossed the border.

Researchers pulled 252 outpatient mental health charts from five community clinics in the Boston area covering treatment that began between 2000 and 2005. Eighty one of the children were Haitian, eighty two African American and eighty nine white. Twenty nine percent of the Haitian children attended exactly one session, close to the twenty eight percent among African American children and far above the eight percent among white children. Among children who met the study's threshold for clinical need, Haitian patients averaged 5.7 visits in six months where white patients averaged 8.0. Twenty seven percent of the Haitian children were uninsured or covered by the state pool for the uninsured, against nine percent of African American children and four and a half percent of white children. Adjustment disorder was the diagnosis most often recorded for Haitian children. Treatment meeting national guidelines for attention deficit disorder reached eighty eight percent of white children and thirty eight percent of Haitian children.

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.