Asked to mark the quincentenary, Haiti's senior historian refuses

Fouchard reports being asked to take part in a celebration of the Columbus voyage and refusing outright. His reasons are historical rather than ceremonial. Columbus had written asking that resisting captives be mutilated. There was no discovery to mark, because the island held a million people when he arrived and the Americas as a whole held two hundred million, all of them descended from people who came from elsewhere, so that they and not Columbus discovered the place. And the name Haitians carry is an Indigenous word meaning high land or land of mountains in the language of the Marcorix, chosen by the founders of the nation after they defeated Bonaparte's troops as a tribute to the Indigenous people who were destroyed and who resisted enslavement. Fouchard calls the discovery a historical myth that should stop being taught to children.

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 Governors Island agreement required a United Nations force to land before Aristide could return. Opponents used that requirement to revive memories of the American occupation of 1915. A new organisation called FRAPH, whose acronym sounded like the Creole word for a blow, gathered the sons and grandsons of macoutes under Toto Constant, the forty year old son of a former army chief of staff. Many of its members had studied in the United States, spoke English, and staged demonstrations sized for American television. They had watched the American casualties in Mogadishu in early October 1993. When the USS Harlan County arrived off Port-au-Prince with lightly armed American and Canadian troops, about a hundred FRAPH men filled the dock with placards and weapons and blocked the diplomats sent to watch. Captain John Butcher had orders to land in a friendly environment, saw none, and sailed away. Aristide's justice minister Guy Malary was shot dead on 14 October. Clinton reimposed the embargo and sent warships to patrol.

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.