A US senator calls public health work subsidising witchcraft

Jesse Helms, chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused the Agency for International Development of subsidising witchcraft, in a report by Don Bohning published in the Miami Herald on 15 March 1999. What had reached him was the 1995 annual report of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Haiti, which described a campaign to reach followers of Vodou with information about sexual and reproductive health. Working through the temples is the practical way to reach most Haitians about anything at all, since the religion is the framework through which the majority understands illness, healing and the body, and the manbo and the oungan are the healers people actually consult. The senator's word for that framework was witchcraft. The equation of Vodou with sorcery has a long institutional history, from the colonial decrees against poisoners to the antisuperstition campaign of 1941 and 1942 under Elie Lescot.

Unibank was founded in Haiti in 1993 with its headquarters in Port-au-Prince, and in 1999 it became the first Haitian multinational corporation. Its offices abroad sit along the east coast of the United States, placed where Haitian populations are dense, because its customers on both sides of the water are people of Haitian descent. The pattern is a homeland bank with branches in the diaspora, which is the reverse of an immigrant bank founded abroad by immigrants. Money transfer firms built in the diaspora moved the other way. HATREXCO, which operated from Boston, New York and Miami, merged into Unibank. The Caisses Populaires Haitiennes, the Haitian credit union federation grouped as Le Levier, later partnered with a bank headquartered in New York. A country that exports people ends up with financial institutions shaped around the routes those people take.

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.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.