Georges wrecks the coast and Danticat puts 1937 into English

Hurricane Georges hit Haiti in September 1998 and took apart what had been rebuilt since the last storm. Years of foreign assistance had not produced roads, drainage or housing able to survive a hurricane, and the damage ran far past the track of the wind, because the hillsides had nothing left on them to hold water. Edwidge Danticat brought out a second novel that year, The Farming of Bones, which is built around the killing of Haitian cane cutters on the Dominican side of the border in 1937. Tens of thousands died in that week, and it had stayed largely unknown to readers of English for sixty years. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince on 19 January 1969 and moved to New York at twelve. She writes in English about Haitian lives, which means the Haitian past reaches a large audience through the language of the country that occupied Haiti for nineteen years. A history Haiti could not afford to print was getting published abroad, in someone else's language, by a writer who had left.

Decolonisation happened inside the Cold War, and the continent was treated the way Southeast Asia and Central America were treated, as ground where the two blocs could fight without meeting. African governments and liberation movements tried to use the rivalry, taking money and weapons from whoever offered them, and became its casualties. The effect was to start some conflicts, extend others, and give Western governments a public reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended, from Mobutu in Zaire to the apartheid government in Pretoria to Mengistu in Ethiopia while Moscow was paying him. In the Horn, Ethiopia sold itself as the Western position against communism, which is part of why Eritrea was refused independence and why the Americans built a large base on the coast. In Angola and Mozambique the wars of liberation turned into competitions between Soviet, American, Cuban, South African and Chinese interests, and lasted longer for it. When the Cold War ended the money stopped, and several of the governments it had propped up fell over.

Archaeologists long assumed that the first settlers of the Caribbean preferred the larger islands, reasoning that a small island holds fewer animals and less ground to farm. The excavated evidence does not support that. Land animals were never a large part of the diet in these islands. The food came from the sea, and many small islands sit on banks more productive than the water around their bigger neighbours. Saba is one of them. A village of this period worked a catchment of about five kilometres around itself, which an island of five square kilometres supplies without difficulty. Once that is understood, the distribution of Early Ceramic Age sites stops being puzzling. Settlements turn up on islands that earlier scholars had dismissed as too small to hold anyone permanently, because the calculation was being made from the land rather than from the water. People who lived by sailing between islands did not measure them the way people who live on continents do.

Global Health Action, a small American organisation, has run a goat programme in the countryside around Leogane since the late 1980s. Its Haitian staff buy local creole does and breed them to an improved buck, usually a pure Boer, on the theory that the crossed kids are hardier, wean earlier and grow bigger. Every four to six weeks zone leaders pick new participants, who come to the goat park at Darbonne for two days of instruction in feeding, grooming and basic veterinary care. At the end each person draws a numbered tag and takes home the pregnant doe that matches it. The one firm condition is that the household own no goats already. Zone leaders keep bucks and can deworm and vaccinate. Participants are meant to build a herd, sell animals for school fees, food or medicine, and give one kid back. Over twenty five years the programme reached about four thousand households.