Fifty thousand ask the United States for asylum and twenty five get it

About fifty thousand Haitians applied for asylum in the United States between 1972 and 1980. Twenty five of them succeeded. The reason was not hidden. At a congressional hearing in 1980 Senator Dennis DeConcini said that a boat refugee from Cuba was automatically treated by the immigration service as a refugee, while a boat refugee from the Haiti of Jean Claude Duvalier was automatically treated as an illegal alien who had come for economic reasons. Admitting that Haitians were fleeing persecution would have meant admitting in public that a government Washington supported was persecuting its people. President Jimmy Carter tried a provisional answer on 20 June 1980 by creating a status called Cuban Haitian entrant, which covered people who had already arrived. The refusals resumed after the election, and between September 1981 and March 1985 not one intercepted Haitian was found to have a valid claim.

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.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

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.