A journalist disappears and the amnesty is timed to an American election

By 1975 the arrangement suited everyone inside it. Simone Duvalier kept the old Duvalierists quiet, enough loosening happened to satisfy the foreign donors, and Jean-Claude handed the tedious parts of governing to a younger and lighter-skinned set. Executives of a Dallas property firm then told the United States Senate that a small man resembling a film gangster had asked them for two hundred thousand dollars for the president's widows and orphans fund in return for permission to develop La Tortue; the widow and the orphan were Simone Duvalier and her son. Washington was turning. Jimmy Carter's candidacy alarmed a palace that remembered Kennedy. Jack Anderson wrote that American aid was being misused and that the government was refusing donated clothing for the drought-stricken Northwest. In July 1976 Gasner Raymond, a young reporter investigating labour unrest, disappeared. In October the president announced that 261 prisoners would go free on 17 November, days after the American election.

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.

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.

Gus Pantel re-excavated several important stone tool sites in the Caribbean in 1975 and 1976, meaning to describe their assemblages properly. He found that large blades became more common the deeper he dug, which implies that toolmaking changed over time. He also found that saying when was close to impossible. Modern building and erosion had disturbed many of the deposits, so the layers no longer sat in the order they were laid down. At some sites stone tools turned up together with pottery, which is awkward, because Caribbean archaeology had split the islands' past into an Archaic age of stone and a Ceramic age of pots. Mixed deposits mean either that the two overlapped or that the ground has been churned, and often there is no way to decide between them. Pantel's report is still cited for that problem. The tidy sequences printed in textbooks rest on fewer undisturbed sites than most readers assume.