A new constitution writes the refusals into the basic law

Human rights organisations inside and outside the Dominican Republic argued that stripping citizenship by circular contradicted the constitution itself. In 2010 the country adopted a new constitution which says that children of foreigners in transit or living illegally in the territory are not citizens by birth. The founding document was thereby brought into line with the migration law of 2004 and with what registry offices had already been doing. The same constitution created a Constitutional Court of thirteen judges charged with enforcing constitutional justice. Because the audit of the civil registry ran backwards, a birth recorded in 1983 could be suspended under a rule written in 2010, and the government also kept the Book of Foreigners for Dominicans of Haitian descent who could not prove their parents were legally resident. Generations of children born in the country are entered in it at birth.

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Leogane on the afternoon of 12 January 2010. Estimates of the dead run from two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand. The count has never been settled, and that gap is itself a fact about the country, because a state unable to say how many of its citizens died is a state that did not know how many it had. Port-au-Prince took most of the destruction. The fault ran under the densest ground in the country, beneath buildings put up without codes, without inspection and without steel, by people who had moved to the capital because the countryside could no longer feed them. The response was the largest humanitarian mobilisation ever aimed at a single country, and within a year it had produced camps rather than houses. Girard ends his history close to this point. The earthquake killed at that rate because of two centuries of decisions about who would live on which ground, in what kind of building, under a government with what kind of money.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died in Chicago in July 2012. He was born in Port-au-Prince into a family of historians, left Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, and spent his career in American universities, the last of them the University of Chicago. His first book, written in Haitian Creole in 1977, retold the revolution for readers who spoke the language the revolution was fought in. Haiti: State Against Nation, published in 1990, described a state sitting on top of a peasantry it taxed and did not serve. Silencing the Past, published in 1995, is the work that travelled furthest. It argued that power enters the record long before any historian arrives, at the moment a fact is made, filed, retrieved and finally told as a story, and that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was unthinkable to the Europeans who had to write it down. Scholars in fields with no interest in Haiti now use his terms to ask who kept the documents and what was never written at all.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.