Bernard Dorin proposes Creole as an easy passage to French

In July 1973 Bernard Dorin, then French ambassador to Haiti, published an article in the review Conjonction under the title of the false quarrel between Creole and French. Creole, he wrote, is and must remain the language of the country, the family, friends, relaxation and popular expression, and it must also allow an easy passage to the language of social life, business, access to other cultures, travel and international relations, which is French. Logical and easy bridges should be arranged between the two, and this was the primary task the French pedagogical mission had set itself. The proposal had a technical form, an etymological spelling for Creole that would keep it close to French, and a political content. Around 95 percent of Haitians spoke only Creole. A literacy campaign built as a ramp toward French would leave the existing hierarchy of languages, and of people, exactly where it stood.

Three sister organisations were founded in the early 1970s to carry the cultural work of the Haitian opposition abroad, all affiliated to the Marxist Patriotic Action Movement: Soley leve in New York, Haiti Culturelle in Boston, Vaccine in Montreal. The last is named for the bamboo trumpet blown in the Rara. Their reasoning was that reaching the Haitian countryside meant using Creole and the music of Vodou, since around eighty five percent of the population had learned what it knew through ritual song. So they kept the tunes and replaced the words. About 1974 in Boston the poet Koralen Jean Claude Martineau composed Ayiti demen on the melody of a well known song for Saint Jacques Majeur and Ogou Feray. They translated Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew into Creole for the first time and staged it with a live rooster and ritual drums, and their cassettes were carried back into Haiti.

The Caribbean Community was launched in 1973. Writing in 1997, Best asks whether the intellectual climate of the preceding years set limits on what the new body would attempt and achieve, in Georgetown, in St George's, in Kingston and almost everywhere else. His charge is that it gave primacy to relations between governments rather than between the peoples and islands of the region, and that it framed how those governments dealt with Cuba. He connects that to the near collapse of any working idea of sovereignty, regional or territorial. By 1994 the working slogan coming quietly out of Port of Spain was NAFTA at any price. Shridath Ramphal had by then invented the Association of Caribbean States as an invitation to the twelve English speaking members to widen their relations, on the theory that a Spanish speaking pond would teach them to swim. Best doubted they would swim, and asked whether the region had decided instead to drown.

Britain had spent years worrying that its Central African territories would go the way of South Africa, with a white settler minority dug in for good. Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament that a wind of change was blowing across the continent. Between 1963 and 1964 the Central African Federation came apart. British intervention did much of the work and so did African opposition, which Hastings Banda in Nyasaland and Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia had built. Those two territories emerged as Malawi and Zambia. Southern Rhodesia refused. Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front declared independence on their own authority in 1965, and United Nations sanctions at first helped the economy, since Portuguese Angola and Mozambique and South Africa were willing trading partners. From the early 1970s ZANU built a guerrilla war out of bases across the Mozambican border with FRELIMO support. Falling employment and worsening conditions on the reserves filled its ranks. By 1980 the settlers were beaten in the field, Smith accepted majority rule, and Robert Mugabe took power in a country renamed Zimbabwe.