A letter to Jimmy Carter fills the jails of Port-au-Prince

Jimmy Carter won the American presidency in November 1976. In the wealthier streets of Petionville the result arrived by satellite dish, and Haitians who had prospered under the Duvaliers understood at once that the understanding Washington had kept with the family since 1963 was now in doubt. There were dishes in poorer quarters too. Luc Neree, a Baptist pastor in the capital, wrote to the president elect as a fellow Baptist and set out what was being done to prisoners in Haiti. Carter answered, promised his support, and offered to preach in Neree's church. Once the exchange became known the government arrested more than a hundred people in Port-au-Prince before the year ended. In January it released ninety of them, timing the gesture to the nomination of Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations, which Port-au-Prince had received badly. Amnesty International went through the names and reported that most of those released had never been political prisoners, and that few of the rest had been seen at liberty anywhere.

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.

Haiti Observateur, the oldest newspaper of the Haitian community in New York, was founded in 1971. In that first year it carried seven classified advertisements. By 1978 it averaged more than fifty. Pierre-Louis reads the count as a measure of an exile population turning into a settled one, with businesses to advertise and customers to reach. The same years produced the Bottin, a Haitian business directory published from the 1970s into the 1990s, and L'Heure Haitienne, a radio programme broadcast every Sunday from Columbia University with offices in Flatbush, which became the flagship entertainment of the exiles. The Haitian Fathers, Holy Ghost priests expelled by Francois Duvalier in the early 1960s, taught Kreyol classes and published a magazine written entirely in that language. Cultural associations wrote songs about a Haiti that would be beautiful once it was free.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.