Police shoot demonstrators in the back at Sharpeville

In 1960 South African police fired on an unarmed crowd at Sharpeville, and most of the dead were hit from behind as they ran. The government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, which pushed the opposition underground and into exile. The ANC formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and in 1963 Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were sentenced to life. Resistance came back through trade unions and through Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. In 1976 police fired on fifteen thousand schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting against the schooling designed for them, and parts of the country stopped being governable. Biko died in police custody. Botha declared a state of emergency in 1985. In 1989 F W de Klerk repealed the Population Registration and Group Areas acts, lifted the bans, and released Mandela in February 1990. The first election open to every adult was held in 1994 and Mandela won it. Political rights changed hands that year. The ownership of the economy did not move.

Early in 1964 army officers began passing round petitions asking that Francois Duvalier hold the presidency for life. A commission produced the text. It gave him the office for as long as he lived and the power to name his successor, and it called him the Sovereign throughout. He installed himself on 1 April and explained that a revolutionary of his kind turns up once in fifty or seventy five years. The ballots handed to voters were printed in advance with the word Oui on them. Two point eight million came back in favour. Three thousand two hundred and thirty four people found a way to vote against, and most of them were arrested for defacing a ballot. Official decrees began capitalising the pronouns that referred to him. A magazine ran a picture of Christ with a hand on Duvalier's shoulder, captioned as a statement that this was the chosen one. Paul Blanchet issued a catechism in which the five founders of Haiti were declared to be one man, and the man was the president.

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.

In the spring of 1981 American newspapers carried short reports of an illness killing gay men, which they called gay related immune deficiency. Within a year it had a new name, AIDS, many more victims and no explanation. Physicians in south Florida noticed that a number of their heterosexual patients with the disease were Haitian immigrants, and the observation hardened into a category. Haitians were listed alongside homosexuals, haemophiliacs and heroin users as a group at risk, a classification Haitians shortened bitterly to the four H's. Journalists supplied mechanisms: Vodou ceremonies involving blood, ritual scarring, whether the men had caught it from New Yorkers on holiday or given it to them. The epidemiology arrived later and pointed the other way, indicating that the virus had reached Haiti from North America and moved through the population the way it moved in African cities, by heterosexual contact. By then it made no difference. This did more damage to the Haitian economy than the scandals, the human rights reports and the boat people together.