A young man dies in Beaufort hours after a blow of powder

Rara band leaders in Haiti carry powders. They are mixed from itching bean, hot pepper and other poisonous plants, and they are used in two ways. A leader can leave a packet at a crossroads for a rival band to walk over, or he can lift a handful to his mouth and blow it towards the faces of opposing musicians when two bands meet. A dose is said to bring burning skin, shortness of breath, blindness, paralysis or death, and using one has long been treated as a crime. In 1981 at Beaufort, in the section of Jean Denis in the Artibonite Valley, a young man named Lucien collapsed during a Rara. His parents said he had taken a blow of powder. He fell ill and died the same day, about three hours later. A Vodou priest examined the case and said powder had killed him. Nobody else was affected, which the community explained by saying the powder had been blown in that one man's name.

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.

Britain had spent years worrying that its Central African territories would go the way of South Africa, with a white settler minority dug in for good. Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament that a wind of change was blowing across the continent. Between 1963 and 1964 the Central African Federation came apart. British intervention did much of the work and so did African opposition, which Hastings Banda in Nyasaland and Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia had built. Those two territories emerged as Malawi and Zambia. Southern Rhodesia refused. Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front declared independence on their own authority in 1965, and United Nations sanctions at first helped the economy, since Portuguese Angola and Mozambique and South Africa were willing trading partners. From the early 1970s ZANU built a guerrilla war out of bases across the Mozambican border with FRELIMO support. Falling employment and worsening conditions on the reserves filled its ranks. By 1980 the settlers were beaten in the field, Smith accepted majority rule, and Robert Mugabe took power in a country renamed Zimbabwe.

In July 1981 the government signed a protocol with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture providing for the killing of every pig in Haiti within two years, so that African swine fever should not reach the North American mainland. Peasants were to be compensated and foreign animals brought in afterwards. What the countryside saw was the forced sale, often at distress prices, of the one asset a family could turn into cash in a bad month. Some hid their animals. Others killed them as offerings to the lwa rather than hand them to the blan, and such sacrifices were reported from every part of the country. Within a year registration at rural schools had dropped by thirty percent. On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be stationed permanently off Haiti, with other vessels rotating through, to stop boats carrying Haitians toward Florida. The United Nations questioned whether it was legal. Haitian officials spent October in Washington settling their price, and in November American aid was increased.