A minister rings a hand bell to stop a speech about human rights

Jimmy Carter lost the American election of November 1980 and the Duvaliers held a party. Within weeks the government expelled some forty journalists to Miami, among them Marc Garcia of Radio Metropole, on the understanding that visas home would be issued once they had reflected. The reporters who stayed wrote more carefully. Then the figures got out. Foreign exchange reserves had fallen by about 40 million dollars in a year, and 20 million of that was said to have gone on the new first lady's shopping trips abroad. The gourde, fixed at five to the dollar for as long as anyone could remember, began to trade at six and at seven. None of this cost the regime anything. Meeting the donor governments, the planning minister Edouard Berrouet picked up a hand bell and rang it through the speech of a departing Carter appointee who had started on human rights, telling him the subject was not acceptable and to move to the technical part. The donors then raised Haiti's aid by twenty percent, to 170 million dollars for 1981.

Between 1979 and 1981 as many as seventy thousand Haitians entered Florida by boat. Many of the vessels were small open sailing craft, the kanot used for fishing. Richman notes that during the 1970s a higher share of the Caribbean population emigrated than that of any other region of the world. The traffic stopped almost at once when Washington acted. Coast Guard cutters were stationed in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to intercept the boats and burn them, to weigh claims for political asylum and to send back everyone found ineligible. Virtually every claim was rejected. Arrivals fell to a dribble through 1982 and did not resume with any regularity for nine years. The people who had landed found work almost nowhere except migratory farm labour, settling in Belle Glade, Immokalee and Fort Pierce to cut sugar cane and pack vegetables, and moving each summer with labour contractors to the farms of the middle Atlantic coast.

The borders of independent Africa were drawn in European capitals between the 1880s and the 1900s, and they cut through communities that shared a language, a history and a set of relatives. Peoples with no reason to form one state were expected to run one at once. When African leaders founded the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 they wrote the permanence of those borders into it, reasoning that opening any single line to argument would open all of them and produce a generation of war. The same governments inherited a colonial state built on force and answerable to nobody, and they used it as they found it. Parliaments with several parties were discarded quickly as unworkable, and by the early 1970s the single party state was normal, with Tanzania and Zambia keeping a limited local vote while most of the rest could only be changed by soldiers. The Big Man at the head of the one party held people by handing out money and posts, which is how ambitious men had built followings a century before.

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.