A crowd at Port-au-Prince turns an American troopship around

Ten days after eighteen American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, about a hundred armed and angry Haitians blocked the landing at Port-au-Prince of two hundred American non-combat troops. The soldiers had been sent to train a Haitian police force as part of a nation-building mission whose purpose was to bring back Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president driven into exile by a coup in 1991. The men on the dock shouted Somalia, Somalia. The ship carrying the soldiers, the Harlan County, turned away. President Clinton raged at his aides and recognised what the day had exposed, which was that he had no plan for what to do if anyone resisted. Washington read Mogadishu and Port-au-Prince together as twin humiliations, and the memory of them shaped American inaction six months later when the killing in Rwanda began.

Haitians had been settling in New York for thirty years, and Rara had surfaced there in bursts: at demonstrations against the Duvalier government in the early 1980s, and during strikes involving Haitian labour groups. None of it was organised. The summer of 1990 changed that. A band called Rara Djakout was founded in Brooklyn, and a full Rara went out in Prospect Park every Sunday, the same people returning each week to dance and to add verses. Musicians from the Haitian roots movement started it after a drumming circle in the park refused to lend them a drum. They borrowed drums from a friend, came back the next day playing Rara, and walked past. Word of mouth brought hundreds of young people out. By 1995 four separate bands were playing in Prospect Park and in Central Park on summer weekends. Lifted out of Lent into July, the New York Rara had no queens, no cemetery visits and no seven year contracts with the spirits.

Competitive elections have become common across Africa since 1990. In Benin the Marxist ruler Kerekou accepted defeat at the polls in 1991 and won office back legitimately in 1996. A popular rising in Mali ended military dictatorship, and the elections held since have survived deep poverty. Botswana has held contested votes and watched incumbents retire since 1966. Ghana transferred power peacefully on a razor thin result in 2008, on the eve of an oil boom. Richard Reid treats a tally of elections as a poor measure of democratic depth. Nigerian votes are still bought by those with cash. The loser of the 2010 Ivorian election simply refused to leave. Kenya's 2007 result produced killings and an internationally brokered power sharing deal. In Ethiopia the ruling front suppressed the opposition after the disputed 2005 vote and took ninety nine percent of parliamentary seats in 2010. Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda and Isaias in Eritrea all came out of liberation armies, and all of them treat political control as something they earned by fighting.

Archaeologists working in the Caribbean have often judged the size of a pre-Columbian settlement from the spread of pottery and stone visible on the ground. Work published by Versteeg in 1993 showed that the measure is unreliable, because what reaches the surface is a small and uneven sample of what was buried and does not mark the edges of the place where people actually lived. Many island villages have therefore been recorded as smaller than they were. The finding carries a second warning. A finished artefact is the end of a process, and reading only the end product hides the labour, the movement of materials and the shifts of style that made it. Caribbean sites were reworked continually, and careful mapping and excavation are what recover that. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Taino settlements of Hispaniola were sized by the same rough method, and how many people met Columbus in 1492 has been argued over ever since.