Gonaïves erupts and Radio Soleil carries it

In May 1984 a CARE warehouse was stormed at the Cap. Radio Soleil, the Church station, broadcast it, and Gonaïves went up after a pregnant woman was beaten to death by police. The food riots turned political within days, with crowds calling for the expulsion of the Bennetts and the president's divorce. Michèle gave Jean-Claude an ultimatum over Roger Lafontant and he chose Lafontant. School enrollment was collapsing, and the phrase that stuck was cochons blan, the white pigs, the imported swine that lived better than the people did after the Creole pig eradication had wiped out the peasantry's savings account. Two things to hold. The radio is infrastructure, and killing the Creole pig removed rural liquidity in a country with no rural banking. Gonaïves 1984 is where those two facts meet, and 7 February 1986 is fourteen months away.

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.

Rulers of the new African states held power the way a man holds a rope in a current, tightly and for his own. Office went to relatives, to men from the home province, to allies who spoke the same language, and any opposition was treated as a conspiracy. Between the 1960s and the 1980s Mobutu held Zaire, Idi Amin held Uganda, Bokassa crowned himself emperor in the Central African Republic, Kenya passed from Kenyatta to Moi, Rawlings took Ghana and Banda had himself made president for life in Malawi. Several of them had sponsors. Britain regarded Amin as preferable to the left leaning Obote. France favoured Bokassa at the start. In Ethiopia the removal of Haile Selassie in 1974 produced Mengistu and the Dergue, which ran a political terror, moved whole populations by force, deepened the war in Eritrea and presided over the worst drought in a century. From the 1980s populations pushed back, and states broken by debt had less capacity to hold them down. The foreign sponsors mostly stayed where they were.

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.