Infant deaths rise in Port-au-Prince while the countryside improves

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

Julius Nyerere spent the late 1950s doing two things at once. He built the confidence of the British administration in Tanganyika while turning TANU into a territory wide party with grassroots organisation as strong as any on the continent. London opened the handover with a multiracial constitution that gave the small European and Asian communities a voice out of all proportion to their numbers, an arrangement borrowed from neighbouring Kenya. Nyerere talked the settlers' representatives into supporting TANU instead of fighting it, and the party took a majority in the 1958 assembly elections. Independence came in 1961. Britain held Zanzibar until 1963, and within weeks of the island's independence African rebels overthrew the Arab government in a revolution whose violence drew on racial resentments a century old. In early 1964 Nyerere brought Tanganyika and Zanzibar together as Tanzania. The island stayed politically restless for decades, and every quarrel came back to its terms with the mainland.

In June 1964 twenty five men trained across the border came ashore east of Saltrou under Captain Fred Baptiste. They fought in the pine forest and on Morne la Selle for weeks, ambushing the units sent after them, then withdrew to the Dominican Republic because the peasants around them were too hungry to feed anyone and their weapons never arrived. On 5 August thirteen young men of Jeune Haiti landed at Cap Dame-Marie. Most came from Jeremie and from families the regime called mulatto. Their leader, Gusle Villedrouin, was twenty four and the son of an officer Duvalier had killed the year before. They marched more than two hundred miles along the spine of the southern peninsula, fought at least ten engagements, brought down an aircraft and walked through a hurricane. On 26 October the last three died at Ravine Roche near l'Asile, throwing stones once the ammunition was gone. Their heads were carried to the palace and photographed for the newspapers. Duvalier then turned the militia loose on Jeremie. The Villedrouin, Drouin, Guilbaud, Laforest and Sansaricq families were marched through their own town and shot. At least a hundred people died. The government called it nationalisation.