The church changes sides and a Salesian priest is noticed

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.

Between 1981 and 1989 United States immigration officers working from Coast Guard cutters stopped 21,461 Haitians at sea. Six of them were carried to the United States for a fuller interview. That is under one quarter of one percent of the people they questioned. The written standard was not demanding. Officers were told to stay watchful for any sign, including a bare claim, that someone aboard an intercepted vessel might qualify as a refugee. A senior immigration official with direct knowledge of the program later said the interviewers had received no instruction and no training, that they went on whatever they felt at the moment, and that everyone in front of them was black. Former colleagues of his said much the same. Nobody supervised the interviews. A judgement was reached on a deck in the Windward Passage, written into a file, and almost never read again. The boats went back to Port-au-Prince.

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.

William Hodges was a medical missionary at Limbe who dug in northern Haiti on his own time. He located En Bas Saline, a large settlement site near the north coast, and professionals took it up after him. Kathleen Deagan directed the excavations that followed, using electromagnetic conductivity survey, systematic surface collection and test pits laid out on a grid. The work produced a detailed topographic map of the village and identified features within it, among them residential mounds and a structure resembling a well. The object was to test the written record of Columbus's first voyage against material evidence, since the Spanish account of the settlement at La Navidad and of the Taino town beside it had stood unchecked for centuries. En Bas Saline is among the most important archaeological sites in the Caribbean, and it was found because an amateur living nearby paid attention. Professional archaeology in Haiti has never been funded to do that work on its own.