The Pope tells the government to its face that things have to change

John Paul II landed in Port-au-Prince in March 1983 and said, in front of the government that had invited him, that things here had to change. The regime had wanted the visit for the legitimacy it conferred. Haiti was overwhelmingly Catholic, the hierarchy had been on terms with the family since Francois Duvalier forced the Vatican to let him name Haitian bishops, and a papal appearance beside the president was worth having. What the country got was the head of that church stating in public that the situation could not stand. The sentence travelled. It was repeated from pulpits, carried by Radio Soleil, and quoted back at the government for the next three years by priests, lay organisers and eventually by crowds. Nothing in the visit obliged anybody to act. It removed the assumption that the church stood with the palace, and in a country where the church ran the schools, the radio and most of what passed for civil society, that assumption had been holding weight.

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.