Jeanne drowns Gonaives seven months after the rising began there

Hurricane Jeanne passed north of Haiti in September 2004 and emptied its rain over the Artibonite. Gonaives flooded and thousands of people died, most of them in the town where Dessalines had proclaimed independence in 1804 and where the rising against Aristide had started seven months earlier. The storm never came ashore on Haitian territory. The water ran off deforested slopes above the town, gathered mud as it fell, and arrived in the streets as a moving wall. The Dominican Republic, on the same island under the same storm, counted a small fraction of the deaths, because its watersheds still carried trees. Haiti had a transitional government four months old, no army, a foreign force still arriving, and no way to warn anyone in advance or reach them afterward. Hurricanes are a standing fact of the Caribbean. How many people a hurricane kills is a fact about the state that governs the ground it lands on.

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.

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.