Sixty one bishops meet in Port-au-Prince about Protestant growth

When John Paul II came to Port-au-Prince in March 1983 he was surrounded by sixty one Latin American bishops who had gathered in the Haitian capital for a conference whose leading item was how to slow the growth of Protestant fundamentalist groups across the region. The pope said that the advance of religious groups which at times lacked the true message of the Gospel, and which used methods that did not respect real religious liberty, placed serious obstacles before the mission of the Catholic Church and before other Christian confessions. The archbishop of the city, Francois Wolff Ligonde, launched a campaign to hold the Catholic position in Haiti against what he called blind proselytising by Protestants. Richman reads the choice of city as support for the claim that missionary activity in Haiti had gone further than anywhere else in the Americas. A century earlier Janvier had written that Protestantism would never be a danger to Haiti. Rome took that long to name it as one.

In 1984 the bodies of thirty two Haitians washed up on a beach just north of Miami. Their boat, built by hand and open to the weather, had broken apart in a squall before dawn about two hundred yards from shore. Survivors said they had paid smugglers two hundred dollars a head and that forty people had crowded aboard for the run up the Windward Passage from Haiti to Florida. Most of those who died were too worn down by the crossing to swim the last stretch. Television carried the footage that evening: the wreck half buried in sand, waves breaking over it, the dead lying along the beach and shifting slightly with each wave. The station apologised the following night for having broadcast it. Those who lived were taken to the detention camp on Krome Avenue. They were not allowed to attend the funerals of the people they had sailed with.

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.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.