Haiti becomes the world's largest producer of baseballs

From 1968 Haiti began taking in assembly industries. They worked semi-finished goods into articles re-exported to the United States, sporting equipment above all, along with shoes, gloves, clothing, toys, leather goods and electrical parts. Their profitability rested on cheap labour, tax exemption granted by the host country, proximity to the American market and a customs code that taxed only the value added by assembly. By 1973 the sector employed fifteen thousand people full time along with ten thousand trainees, many of them women working in the plants or at home. The nominal wage in 1971 was one dollar sixty for an eight hour day, against a minimum wage of one dollar, which still left firms saving thirty to forty per cent on their American production costs. Trade unions were repressed. The number of plants went from forty three in 1971 to two hundred in 1974. In those years Haiti became the largest producer of baseballs in the world.

Tanbou Libete was founded in New York in 1971 by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and other Haitian activists. It was a theatre group and its purpose was political education. The plays and songs were in Kreyol, which meant they addressed the whole of the emigrant population rather than the small share of it schooled in French. New York by then held tens of thousands of Haitians, many of them people the Duvalier government had driven out, and it was one of the few places where Haitians could organise without the militia arriving. Groups like this one supplied what the country itself no longer had: a public argument, conducted in the language people actually speak, about who should govern and by what right. The work was cultural because nothing else was available. Trouillot became a historian, and the questions about power and silence that run through his later books were first worked out on those stages.

Francois Duvalier died on the evening of 21 April 1971, after dark, having tried to speak and failed to make himself understood. What happened next was arranged in the ounfo of the Cul-de-Sac plain. The rite is called desounen, and it separates the dead from the lwa that has ridden them in life. Edner Day is the oungan named. He traced a large cross in maize flour on the floor, the length of a body, then climbed onto the bed past the doctors and nurses, straddled the corpse under the sheet, and called on the met tet to withdraw and leave the dead in peace. Only when it has gone can the spiritual inheritance pass on, and it passed to Jean-Claude, standing silent at the foot of the bed with a candle. The body was seen to shift very slightly. The men in the room took that for the departure. Papa Doc had gone to Ginen.

The National Party's laws after 1948 sorted South Africans by colour and fixed where each group could live, work and travel. A small African elite came through the system anyway and organised against it. In the 1950s the African National Congress, until then moderate and slow, was taken over by a younger group around Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. The defiance campaign of 1952 and 1953 brought mass breaking of the pass laws and mass arrests. By the middle of the decade African, Indian and coloured organisations had come together behind a demand for a democratic South Africa with no racial qualification at all. The alliance was fragile. Zulu crowds had attacked Indians in Durban in 1949, and inside the ANC some leaders resented the influence of white liberals and of communists. A breakaway group formed the Pan Africanist Congress at the end of the decade. A state that had spent ten years dividing people by colour had given them one thing to agree on.