Trouillot writes a history of Haiti entirely in Kreyol

In 1977 Michel-Rolph Trouillot published Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti, the first work of nonfiction written wholly in Haitian Kreyol. Two decisions are packed into that. The first is linguistic. Haitian scholarship had been produced in French, a language most Haitians could not read, so the country's history circulated among a few thousand people while the millions it concerned were shut out of it. Writing in Kreyol made the history available to the people who had lived inside it. The second decision concerns content. Trouillot took apart the great man version of the revolution, in which Louverture, Dessalines and Christophe make the events while everyone else waits to be freed, and put the mass of enslaved people at the centre as the agents of their own liberation. He was twenty eight years old. He went on to write Silencing the Past, which asks how some events enter history and others are buried, and the method was already working here.

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.

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.

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.