Aristide comes back to a palace stripped of its toilets and wiring

Jean-Bertrand Aristide landed at midday on 15 October 1994 with two aircraft full of dignitaries behind him. Almost no Haitian saw him touch the ground. The airport was sealed and helicopters carried him straight to the National Palace, where a crowd had been waiting since dawn for a look at Titid. He spoke from behind a sheet of bulletproof plastic, quoted Martin Luther King, said the dream of democracy had become real, and asked that every weapon fall silent. Then he shook hands with General Jean-Claude Duperval and inspected an honour guard. The building he had come back to was picked clean of its telephones, its air conditioners, its light fittings and its toilet bowls. He carried pledges of close to a billion dollars over five years, none of it available for three to six months, while the government cost about fifteen million dollars a month to run. Something like two hundred thousand small weapons stayed in macoute hands. Smarck Michel became prime minister and Leslie Delatour took the central bank.

In the Dominican presidential election of 1994 supporters of Joaquin Balaguer and national media outlets circulated pictures meant to fix the figure of the Haitian onto his opponent Jose Francisco Pena Gomez. One showed a destitute migrant with exaggerated lips crossing the frontier while a large white hand held him back. Another showed the Dominican side of Hispaniola with white feet running away from the black feet of the Haitian side. A third had Pena Gomez pointing and promising to order the country set on fire if he were assassinated. A fourth showed him dancing with Haitian supporters under a caption in misspelled Creole while Dominicans knelt beside them, one of them gagged. The fifth put his face over a map of the island dotted with Haitian faces, with a caption saying he hated the Dominican Republic over the 1937 massacre of Haitians and of his parents, that Clinton and the European countries would back him, and that he was not black, he was Haitian.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.

From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.