Scarcely an African war after 1960 stays outside the arms race

From the early 1960s both superpowers took part in African wars directly, and hardly a conflict on the continent stayed local. John F Kennedy launched a doctrine of counter insurgency, and the CIA played a large part in raising Joseph Mobutu. The energy crisis of 1973 made central Africa more urgent still. Angola and Mozambique carried rival guerrilla armies with rival paymasters, and South Africa took Western weapons on the argument that the ANC leaned to the left. By the early 1970s the map divided cleanly. The United States held security agreements with Kenya, Zaire, Ghana, Liberia and Senegal. The Soviet Union supplied Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, and signed friendship treaties with Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. China had arrangements with Cameroon, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania, Cuba with Congo Brazzaville, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Government without accountability was funded by both blocs rather than merely tolerated, and African leaders in turn used the foreign backing to keep bankrupt administrations upright and to jail their own opponents.

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.