Jean-Claude Duvalier marries a Bennett and the country asks why

Michele Bennett met Jean-Claude Duvalier at College Bird in 1962. Her father Ernest was a mulatre merchant whose dealings had earned him a prison term under Francois Duvalier, and he sent her abroad to school, where she married a son of Alix Pasquet, one of the officers who tried to overthrow Duvalier in 1958. She had two children with him, worked as a secretary in the New York garment district, and returned to Haiti in 1978 separated. The president fell hard. When his mother had macoutes drive the young woman to the airport to put her on a plane, Michele reached him on a private line, the order was cancelled, and he told Simone Duvalier what he thought of it. Officers who tried to limit her access to him were dismissed. They married on 27 May 1980 in the cathedral, the earlier marriage set aside by Archbishop Ligonde, who was her uncle. Two thousand invitations, imported champagne, three florists flown in from Miami, five million dollars. In the poor quarters people watched on government television sets and asked why he could not have married one of them.

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.

By the 1970s most of newly independent Africa was in economic crisis. Populations had grown fast since the 1950s while states still lived on the sale of one or two commodities, so when agricultural export prices fell through the 1970s and stayed low through the 1980s there was nothing to fall back on. Copper dropped and took Zaire and Zambia with it. The oil price rises of the early and middle 1970s wrecked importers and let road and rail systems rot. Governments made their own contribution. Convinced that development meant repeating European industrialisation, and inclined to treat peasants as an embarrassment, they starved agriculture. Ghana built the Volta dam and let cocoa production collapse, which helped end Nkrumah. Tanzania moved whole villages at gunpoint under Nyerere. Factories needed foreign machines and foreign loans, the debts grew, and servicing them meant exporting still more crops and minerals. Independence had changed the flag above an arrangement built in the nineteenth century.

William Hodges was a medical missionary at Limbe who dug in northern Haiti on his own time. He located En Bas Saline, a large settlement site near the north coast, and professionals took it up after him. Kathleen Deagan directed the excavations that followed, using electromagnetic conductivity survey, systematic surface collection and test pits laid out on a grid. The work produced a detailed topographic map of the village and identified features within it, among them residential mounds and a structure resembling a well. The object was to test the written record of Columbus's first voyage against material evidence, since the Spanish account of the settlement at La Navidad and of the Taino town beside it had stood unchecked for centuries. En Bas Saline is among the most important archaeological sites in the Caribbean, and it was found because an amateur living nearby paid attention. Professional archaeology in Haiti has never been funded to do that work on its own.