Five words for a Haitian union and one of them means married

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.

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.

From the early 1960s both superpowers took part in African wars directly, and hardly a conflict on the continent stayed local. John F Kennedy launched a doctrine of counter insurgency, and the CIA played a large part in raising Joseph Mobutu. The energy crisis of 1973 made central Africa more urgent still. Angola and Mozambique carried rival guerrilla armies with rival paymasters, and South Africa took Western weapons on the argument that the ANC leaned to the left. By the early 1970s the map divided cleanly. The United States held security agreements with Kenya, Zaire, Ghana, Liberia and Senegal. The Soviet Union supplied Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, and signed friendship treaties with Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. China had arrangements with Cameroon, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania, Cuba with Congo Brazzaville, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Government without accountability was funded by both blocs rather than merely tolerated, and African leaders in turn used the foreign backing to keep bankrupt administrations upright and to jail their own opponents.

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.