Nine men die in one day inside Fort-Dimanche

Patrick Lemoine entered Fort-Dimanche on 10 January 1974 and survived it. He recorded 2 June 1975 as the day nine deaths were registered inside the prison. Fritz Dezagon, called Castro, died suddenly. After prayers and songs the men in his cell knocked on the door and shouted death, death, death. Voices from another cell answered at once that one of theirs had just gone. An hour later a third cell took up the same call. The man who removed the bodies had barely left with one when a fourth death was declared. The day went on that way, with blows against doors and walls added to the shouting, and after the ninth announcement the whole prison panicked and began to cry that they were being killed. Lemoine was certain the shouting carried the three kilometres to the sugar works at HASCO. Nobody outside reacted.

An estimated 540,000 hectares of good arable soil existed in Haiti in 1938. By 1954 the figure had shrunk to 370,000. By 1970 it was 225,750 hectares, and the figure reported for 1985 was 205,000, with no sign afterwards that the trend had reversed. In the mid 1980s between six thousand and ten thousand hectares of arable land were being lost each year, and in the early 1990s the range ran from six thousand to fifteen thousand. The mechanism is a substitution. As the rural population grows, labour intensive food crops replace land intensive export crops, above all replacing coffee, whose roots and canopy hold the soil, on steep hillsides. Food crops are cleared and replanted in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, and the downpours then wash the soil into the valleys and streams. Once running, the process feeds itself without further population growth.

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.

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.