Thirty three Haitians drown off a Florida beach

In October 1981 a boat carrying Haitians broke up off Hillsboro Beach, near Fort Lauderdale, and thirty three people died. Television carried pictures of black bodies washing onto Florida sand. The Reagan administration was already caught in a comparison it could not win, granting political asylum to Cubans who arrived by sea while jailing Haitians who arrived the same way, when both groups were leaving dictatorships. Its answer was to go on incarcerating the Haitians. The crisis had been building since 28 November 1980, when the Duvalier government arrested opposition leaders and expelled them, sending a fresh set of exiles to New York and more people onto boats. Haitian organisations in New York of every political stripe used the drownings and the jailings, the left to show the hypocrisy of American policy and the right to show its contradictions.

An estimated 540,000 hectares of good arable soil existed in Haiti in 1938. By 1954 the figure had shrunk to 370,000. By 1970 it was 225,750 hectares, and the figure reported for 1985 was 205,000, with no sign afterwards that the trend had reversed. In the mid 1980s between six thousand and ten thousand hectares of arable land were being lost each year, and in the early 1990s the range ran from six thousand to fifteen thousand. The mechanism is a substitution. As the rural population grows, labour intensive food crops replace land intensive export crops, above all replacing coffee, whose roots and canopy hold the soil, on steep hillsides. Food crops are cleared and replanted in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, and the downpours then wash the soil into the valleys and streams. Once running, the process feeds itself without further population growth.

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.

In 1960 South African police fired on an unarmed crowd at Sharpeville, and most of the dead were hit from behind as they ran. The government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, which pushed the opposition underground and into exile. The ANC formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and in 1963 Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were sentenced to life. Resistance came back through trade unions and through Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. In 1976 police fired on fifteen thousand schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting against the schooling designed for them, and parts of the country stopped being governable. Biko died in police custody. Botha declared a state of emergency in 1985. In 1989 F W de Klerk repealed the Population Registration and Group Areas acts, lifted the bans, and released Mandela in February 1990. The first election open to every adult was held in 1994 and Mandela won it. Political rights changed hands that year. The ownership of the economy did not move.