Powell telephones a Haitian businessman to restrain the rebels

Much less is known about which families took part in the second coup, but the authors find that the top private sector backers were largely the same network. Andy Apaid, who had played a catalysing role in 1991, is credited with more control over the gangs and rebels that precipitated Aristide's departure than any other member of the private sector, and together with Charles Baker, his brother-in-law and another backer of the earlier coup, he began offering money to gang leaders in Cité Soleil for turning on Aristide. One leader who accepted was paid thirty thousand dollars and offered a United States visa. Apaid also appears to have had control over the armed group that advanced on Port-au-Prince, since Colin Powell reportedly telephoned him in late February 2004 after the rebels took Cap-Haïtien and asked him personally to restrain them.

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.

Clinicians reviewing outpatient charts at five community mental health clinics in the Boston area recorded whether a child had been separated from a parent or guardian. For Haitian children the note appears in fifty six percent of charts, against twenty seven percent for African American children and twenty two percent for white children. The separations were also much longer. The Haitian average came to forty four months, roughly double the twenty three months for African American children and the twenty months for white children, and the average Haitian child had been seven or eight years old when the separation started. That is the arithmetic of chain migration written into a clinical record. One parent goes first, works, sends money home and files the paperwork, and the child follows years later after being raised by a grandmother or an aunt. The clinic sees only the arrival. The four years happened in Haiti and reach the chart as a single line.

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.