Drought, debt and the lenders who rewrote African budgets

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.

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.

In 1978 the Haitian writer and painter Franketyen published Pelin-tet, a play whose whole action happens in a basement flat in New York City furnished with a bed, a table and one bare bulb. Two men share it. Piram is an unschooled factory worker who speaks only Kreyol and holds legal papers. Polido is a French speaking pseudo-intellectual who left Haiti after the tontons macoutes tortured him and who lives in fear of deportation. They argue through a single afternoon. The most quoted line in Haitian theatre comes out of it, when Piram says he wants to see flies, meaning the rubbish and the noise and the ordinary liberty of the street he grew up in. Writing in Kreyol put theatre within reach of everyone in Haiti whatever their schooling. The first Port-au-Prince run was interrupted when the authorities telephoned the author with threats. He started again two weeks later. In 1979 he stopped writing in French.

By 1978 about 250 assembly plants in Port-au-Prince employed some 60,000 people making baseballs, clothing, wicker furniture and electronic parts for North American buyers, and one economist reckoned a third of the capital lived off that work in one way or another. New roads ran from Jacmel to the Cap and west toward Les Cayes. Club Med opened on a beach fifty miles north of the city, where guests ate imported food behind a chain link fence. The country underneath was failing. Plots divided among heirs and then divided again had become too small to feed a family, so people walked to the towns. Coffee exports in 1977 came to 450,000 bags, half what Haiti had shipped in 1910, and after the hurricane of 1979 cultivators began cutting down coffee bushes and mango trees for charcoal. The island that had once supplied Europe with sugar was buying sugar. In 1978 African swine fever crossed into the Dominican Republic, and the pig in the yard was the savings account of a countryside that had no banks.