Kreyol gets an agreed spelling and the religion changes how it writes its name

Until the early 1980s there was little agreement about how to spell Kreyol, the language spoken by almost everyone in Haiti. It grew out of seventeenth century French laid over a West African syntax, and its grammar follows the African pattern: the article comes after the noun, plurals take no s, and tense is carried by context rather than by the ending of the verb. Roughly eighty per cent of its speakers have been held in chronic illiteracy by the minority who run the country, so a language everyone speaks has stayed largely unread. Once the orthography settled, most scholars moved from the old spelling to Vodou, both to point at the Fon root of the word, which means ancestral spirit and drums, and to put distance between themselves and the habit foreigners have of talking down Haitian culture. Spelling a word correctly is a small act with a long history behind it.

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

The papal aircraft landed at Port-au-Prince on 9 March 1983 in front of tens of thousands of people. John Paul II came down the steps, walked off the red carpet imported for the occasion, and kissed the ground. Answering the president's speech of welcome, he addressed the crowd in Creole, getting through the unfamiliar sounds well enough to be understood, and spoke about misery, hunger and fear. Then he said it: Fok sa chanje. Things must change. He celebrated Mass in the open at the closed airport, declined the food the government had flown from Miami and ate with Haitian priests instead, and stopped at the palace only long enough to bless the Duvaliers' six week old son. Port-au-Prince enjoyed the details for weeks, including the fact that the first lady had not worn a hat. The Vatican had a purpose of its own. Liberation theology was spreading through Latin America, young Haitian priests in the movement called Ti Legliz were among the most militant of its adherents, and Rome wanted the church's moral authority back from bishops who had spent a generation with the government.

The Catholic church in Haiti had long served whoever held the country. It was staffed largely by foreign priests, it educated the elite and neglected everyone else, and after 1966 its bishops were appointed with the approval of Francois Duvalier. The papal visit of March 1983 ended that arrangement in public. Below the hierarchy a different church had been growing for a decade: priests, nuns, catechists and lay organisers working in the slums of Port-au-Prince and in the countryside, running literacy classes and small farming groups, reading scripture with people who had been told for two centuries that their condition was ordained. After 1983 they had cover. One of them was a Salesian named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached at St Jean Bosco in one of the poorest quarters of the capital, who was eventually expelled by his own order for his politics, and who was elected president of Haiti in December 1990 with two thirds of the vote.