A book claims Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade

The historical research department of the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in Chicago in 1991. Its claim was that Jews had dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Through the late 1980s and the middle 1990s the same claim was preached on American college campuses by Nation of Islam speakers, among them Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, who described Jews as bloodsuckers, and it was taken up by Afrocentric professors such as Leonard Jeffries. This happened as the alliances between Black and Jewish organisations formed in the civil rights years were falling apart. Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders denounced the charge, and historians of slavery including David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher published refutations. The book did not go away. A reader looking for material on Blacks and Jews still meets it first, together with a supply of reviews praising its research.

On 16 December 1990 Haitians went to the polls in an election that international observers judged clean. It was the first time in the country's history that the outcome was genuinely open and the count genuinely honest. Since independence in 1804 Haiti had held rigged plebiscites and army managed successions, and the presidency had passed by coup far more often than by ballot. The winner was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a parish priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince who had entered the race two months earlier. He took roughly two thirds of the votes cast, about three times the share of his nearest rival, the World Bank economist Marc Bazin. The margin mattered as much as the result. A president chosen by that many poor voters carried a mandate for land reform, higher wages and the prosecution of the old regime's killers, and everyone who stood to lose by those things understood it the same day. Aristide would hold the office for seven months.

Through the autumn of 1992 nobody in the exiled Haitian government would say publicly what should happen if negotiation failed. Calls for armed resistance came mostly from people at a safe distance. Foreign military intervention was the one proposal nobody would make aloud, though debate at the United Nations was moving toward it. Nor did anyone suggest cutting off the money Haitians abroad sent home, which ran to 250 million dollars a year and was the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Aristide worked the constituencies open to him, speaking at rallies in Central Park and with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency, called himself appalled that the Bush administration was sending Haitian boat people home. On 3 November 1992 he won. The Caucus counted for more in a Democratic administration, and Clinton had promised to change the refugee policy. One Haitian in four now lived outside Haiti. Who ruled in Port-au-Prince had become a question that American voters could be asked.

Until the early 1980s there was little agreement about how to spell Kreyol, the language spoken by almost everyone in Haiti. It grew out of seventeenth century French laid over a West African syntax, and its grammar follows the African pattern: the article comes after the noun, plurals take no s, and tense is carried by context rather than by the ending of the verb. Roughly eighty per cent of its speakers have been held in chronic illiteracy by the minority who run the country, so a language everyone speaks has stayed largely unread. Once the orthography settled, most scholars moved from the old spelling to Vodou, both to point at the Fon root of the word, which means ancestral spirit and drums, and to put distance between themselves and the habit foreigners have of talking down Haitian culture. Spelling a word correctly is a small act with a long history behind it.