African debt runs from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion in 1997

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.

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.

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.