Botswana takes seventy per cent of its diamonds without nationalising

Diamonds were found at Orapa in the lands of the Ngwato people in 1967, after prospectors spent twelve years following a small collection of rough stones picked out of a dry riverbed in 1955. By 1969 the size and quality of the deposit were proven and a joint company called Debswana existed, owned 85 per cent by De Beers and 15 per cent by a new and inexperienced Botswana government. In 1973 a far larger find was made at Jwaneng, west of Gaborone. Seretse Khama said in 1973 what other African leaders said about mineral wealth, that it belonged to the nation. Then he did something different with it. After four years of very tough bargaining, in 1975 Botswana and De Beers agreed to share Debswana with revenue split seventy per cent to the country and thirty per cent to the firm. Jwaneng was later split the same way. Diamonds have since run at times to half of Botswana's annual output.

The Duvaliers held power in Haiti from 1957, and by the end of the 1970s the reckoning stood at more than thirty thousand people disappeared, victims of a daily repression built up into a system of government, and close to a million Haitians in exile for economic or political reasons. The country was kept alive by international aid that in practice protected foreign capital and the local fraction allied with it. American power on its own does not explain how one family took the state and held it. Haitian opposition groups had proved unable to produce a radical critique of the language the regime spoke, and often reproduced that language without noticing, out of fear of an analysis that would show where it came from. Explaining the regime as a natural inclination of the masses toward dictatorship was the most common form of that failure.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

Haitian censuses and surveys had counted women as married, divorced, widowed, separated or single, with placage sometimes added as a sixth box. That grid missed the commonest arrangement in the country, which is a regular sexual relationship without shared housing. For the fertility surveys of 1977 a different classification was built after long pretesting and discussion with Haitian and foreign anthropologists, doctors and linguists. Any woman who had had regular sexual relations for about three months counted as having been in a union. Five types were named. Rinmin involves no shared house, no economic support and a slight tie, and often leads on to placage. Fiyanse is its equivalent among people of higher standing. Viv avek translates as to live with, though in practice the couple usually do not. Plase generally means a shared house and real support. Marye means legal marriage. Two thirds of the women interviewed had begun in a rinmin union and six per cent in a marriage.