The creole pig was a savings account and it was killed

The creole pig was small, black and hardy, and it lived on household waste and whatever it could root out of a yard. A family kept one the way people elsewhere keep a bank account. It was sold when school fees came due, when a roof went, when somebody fell ill. African swine fever had crossed from the Dominican Republic in 1978, and in 1981 the extermination of the entire Haitian pig population began, on the argument that the disease would otherwise reach the herds of North America. Compensation was promised. Much of it never arrived, and what did arrive bore no relation to what the animal was worth to the household. Replacement stock was imported later from temperate farms. Those animals could not live on garbage, needed bought feed and a concrete pen, and were therefore useless to the people whose pigs had been destroyed. Registration at rural schools fell by roughly a third within a year, because the thing that paid the fees was gone.

By early 1981 a group of faculty physicians at the University of Miami had worked back through every Haitian patient admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital over the previous year. What they found fitted neither tuberculosis nor poverty nor hunger. The patients were young, had lived in the United States for a few months to a few years, held ordinary jobs and had been well nourished before falling ill. They arrived with fungal infections in the nervous system, viral infections of the gullet, parasites in the brain, yeast in the mouth, swollen glands in several places and Pneumocystis in the lungs, frequently two or three of these in one person. Pneumocystis appears only where immunity has already failed. One of the group, Margaret, connected the pattern to reports of the same infections in previously healthy gay men. The Miami patients included women and heterosexual men. The condition had no name yet outside a billing category.

From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.

Through the 1970s and early 1980s Haiti's apparel plants employed between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand people in more than a hundred factories, and only money sent home by Haitians abroad brought in more. Baseballs belonged to the same trade. Until 1987 every ball used in a major league park in the United States had been sewn in Haiti. Then the end of the Duvalier governments, the struggles that followed Aristide's election and a long trade embargo took the industry apart. By 2009 twenty three factories were left, employing twenty five thousand people, about sixty eight per cent of them women. Thirteen belonged to Haitian companies, four to South Koreans, three to American firms and three to Dominican ones. All but one stood in the capital. The exception was CODEVI, owned by Group M, in the free trade zone at Ouanaminthe on the Dominican border.