Africa becomes the ground where other people's wars are fought

Decolonisation happened inside the Cold War, and the continent was treated the way Southeast Asia and Central America were treated, as ground where the two blocs could fight without meeting. African governments and liberation movements tried to use the rivalry, taking money and weapons from whoever offered them, and became its casualties. The effect was to start some conflicts, extend others, and give Western governments a public reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended, from Mobutu in Zaire to the apartheid government in Pretoria to Mengistu in Ethiopia while Moscow was paying him. In the Horn, Ethiopia sold itself as the Western position against communism, which is part of why Eritrea was refused independence and why the Americans built a large base on the coast. In Angola and Mozambique the wars of liberation turned into competitions between Soviet, American, Cuban, South African and Chinese interests, and lasted longer for it. When the Cold War ended the money stopped, and several of the governments it had propped up fell over.

Francois Duvalier died in office in April 1971, having already named his nineteen-year-old son Jean-Claude president for life. Observers abroad expected the country to come apart within weeks. It did not. The army accepted the transfer, the United States accepted it, and the government carried on with the same ministries and the same militia. What the succession settled was the character of the state. Haiti now had a presidency that passed by inheritance, and no mechanism remained by which anyone outside one household could compete for it. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reads the moment as the end point of a process rather than a rupture, the formalisation of a crisis already under way. Every step that made the handover possible had been taken earlier, when the constitution was rewritten to suit one man, the parliament reduced to an audience, and the militia built as a private force answering to the palace. A system arranged for permanence produced an heir because that is what it was for.

By 1980 some two hundred thousand Haitians were living in the Dominican Republic, some for a season and some for good. Movement across that border is old and has taken three forms. The first people to go were maroons, escaping slavery on the French side during the colonial period for the Spanish side, where treatment was often better. After independence in 1804 the pattern changed. Haitian occupation of the Spanish part of the island and the invasion attempts that followed emptied the border districts on the eastern side, and Haitians filled the space. The third and largest movement came from sugar. American and other foreign firms built plantations and mills in the Dominican Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century and could not find enough local labour. In the 1950s the two governments signed an agreement that formalised the traffic. Observers compared the cane workers' conditions to slavery, and expected earnings there still beat those on a Haitian farm.

L. Antonio Curet and Joshua Torres challenged the habit of describing every pre-Columbian Caribbean society as a Taino chiefdom. The label began as a convenience for sorting sites and hardened into a statement about how those societies were organised. Once hardened it did work of its own, flattening local difference and hiding the particular sequences by which each island arrived at its own arrangements. The evidence points to a mosaic. Political authority, settlement layout, craft production and ritual varied from island to island and within single islands, and communities a day's sail apart managed power in ways that reduce to no single type. Research since has concentrated on local sequences in place of regional labels. The stakes reach past archaeology. The Spanish arrived carrying categories for reading the people they met, decided what a chief was and who held the office, and governed accordingly. A discipline that inherits those categories is still working with an instrument built for conquest.