Carter talks past the deadline and the invasion becomes a landing

On 15 September 1994 President Bill Clinton told Americans that his country had to act in Haiti, naming the murder of Jean-Marie Vincent and the rapes carried out under the junta. General Raoul Cedras answered from Port-au-Prince that he would sooner die than leave his country in dishonour. Nine warships already stood off the coast with an amphibious task force of eighteen hundred Marines aboard, and the carrier Eisenhower was steaming south with combat elements of the 10th Mountain Division. Into that situation walked Jimmy Carter, who had appointed himself envoy, with Senator Sam Nunn and Colin Powell alongside him. They worked on the junta through Saturday night and all of Sunday while Clinton granted one extension after another. At half past six on Sunday evening Clinton gave Carter thirty minutes. The junta signed. President Emile Jonassaint, eighty-one years old and old enough to remember the first American occupation, went on television before midnight to tell Haitians an accord had been reached. The landing set for one minute past midnight went ahead as a permissive entry.

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.

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.

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.