Famine kills three thousand people and the answer is a study

In 1977 three thousand people in Haiti died of famine. Emigration abroad and large injections of international aid had not pushed the threat away. The agricultural sector had reached a point that even the institutions financing it called intolerable, and the response was a wave of technical studies. A report by the Organization of American States on an integrated technical assistance mission to Haiti announced in its preface that its first purpose was to reorient Haitian agriculture. The direction of that reorientation was stated plainly enough inside it. The report denounced the archaism of the public administration with the declared aim of making efficient use of surplus labour which was, in its own words, available at extremely low wage levels. Hunger in the countryside and cheap hands for the assembly plants were the same fact described from two ends.

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.

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.