Rural birth certificates carried the word peasant

Until the early 1990s a Haitian child born in the countryside and a Haitian child born in a town did not receive the same birth certificate. The rural document carried the word paysan, peasant, and it marked the holder as moun andeyo, one of the people outside. The same division ran through the schools. Town schools answered to the Ministry of Education while country schools were placed under the Ministry of Agriculture, an arrangement that lasted into the 1970s or the 1980s. Roads into the rural districts were left in ruins, and the political class in Port-au-Prince had an interest in keeping them that way, because bad roads held the countryside apart from the capital and from anyone arriving from outside it. The rural majority grew the coffee and the food the economy ran on and dealt with the central government one person at a time, when at all. They governed themselves because nothing else reached them. That is the condition the Constitution of 1987 set out to end.

By 1995 New York carried thirty hours of Haitian television a week. Miami carried eight, New Jersey four, and Boston, Chicago and Hartford two each. The best known programme made by the diaspora in New York was a magazine show that ran on one public channel in 1988 and 1989 before moving to another. Its producer, J. Raynal Louis, also made a teenage show, an education show that covered bilingual teaching, a programme about the United Nations, an arts hour, and monthly programmes for Asian American and Jewish American audiences. Three of his programmes were in French and Creole for African and Haitian immigrants, among them a Creole talk show and a community news show. Some were broadcast simultaneously in Miami and the tapes were shown again in Montreal, so a Creole programme made in Brooklyn was watched in three countries.

The American ambassador met the winner at once, and a State Department official explained that the point was to warn the Duvalierists and the army off any thought of undermining him. Aristide told foreign businessmen they were welcome in Haiti, though word had spread that he had stood outside a rich man's house on election day and remarked that a dozen families could live in it. Roger Lafontant promised on Christmas Eve that Attila the Hun would not get through the gates. On New Year's Day 1991 Archbishop Ligonde used his sermon to warn against authoritarian rule and Bolshevism. On the evening of 6 January Lafontant and a band of macoutes took the National Palace, the interim president and the broadcasting stations, and he announced on television that he held power. The army stayed loyal and retook the palace at noon the next day. Crowds then hunted macoutes through Port-au-Prince, burned the eighteenth century cathedral, sacked the papal nunciature and killed thirty seven people.

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.