Famine is usually a decision about who eats

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.

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.

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.