The designers of a Haitian website choose English first

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.

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.

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.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.