Haitian women kept their record in dress seams and under beds

Mimi Sheller defines citizenship as a bundle of practices: who may occupy public space, who may speak in public, who may carry a weapon, who may vote. Grace Sanders Johnson adds one more, which is who is permitted to keep the record. Black women's archives rarely sat in state repositories. They were sewn into the inside seam of a dress, tucked between the pages of a valued book, marked with a knotted cord, braided into hair, stitched into a family quilt. Haitian women worked the same way across borders. Copies of La Voix des Femmes went by post to subscribers in the United States, in France and in the Belgian Congo. Self-published feminist essays sat in dented filing cabinets and in libraries kept under beds. Memories were parked in community centres wherever Haitians had settled. Women photographed each other, wrote each other down and held the evidence for a generation that had not yet asked for directions. Tina Campt calls this grammar the future real conditional, an attachment to what ought to be true.

On 28 November 1985 soldiers and tontons macoutes killed three schoolchildren in Gonaives. The country caught fire from that town, and the burning ended with the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier on 7 February 1986. Twenty six years later, on 16 December 2011, the law faculty of Gonaives invited the former president for life to sponsor its graduating class. He came, and he asked the audience for a minute of silence in memory of the three children. The bar association of Port-au-Prince made no comment, although its own head had joined the first defence team for the former dictator. Through the twenty nine years of the dictatorship young people of both sexes went to the front line for liberty more than any other group. One survivor described the regime by a single act, the turning of the only library in a provincial town into a barracks for its militiamen.

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.

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.