Fifty thousand people have watched two men argue in a basement

Franketyen rewrote Pelin-tet and published the second version as Pelentet in 2002. It reached the stage first. The new text ran at the Rex Theatre in Port-au-Prince from 9 December 1999 to 9 January 2000, then from April to June of 2000 in New York, Miami, Tampa Bay and Montreal. Through those six months the author played Polido, the French speaking intellectual, with Ricardo Lefevre as the factory worker Piram. The first version had already been performed thirty three times at the Rex, and in Cap Haitien and Jacmel, and in Boston, Washington, New York, Orlando, Miami, Tampa Bay, Montreal, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Adding the two together, about fifty thousand people have sat in a theatre and watched it, more than for any other dramatic text in the Haitian language. The figure leaves out everyone who heard it on the radio or watched a recording of a performance.

By 1994 income per head in Haiti had fallen to 270 dollars a year. The Heinls set that figure against 1789, when the French colony of Saint-Domingue produced roughly three quarters of the sugar sold in the world and was the most profitable possession any European power held. The modern country buys its sugar abroad along with its fuel. Adjusted for inflation, Haitian exports in 1995 were worth less than the colony's exports in 1788. Across the same two centuries the population grew to eight million while the ground that will grow anything shrank, because the topsoil has washed off the hillsides into the sea. The authors call the whole arc a regression measured in centuries, and read it as the compound result of foreign greed and deliberate isolation imposed on the first state founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. Chronic hunger is the ordinary condition of the country that once paid for Bordeaux and Nantes.

Seymour Drescher published a study of Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade in 2001 and attached a figure to the question. It is unlikely, he wrote, that more than a fraction of one percent of the twelve million Africans enslaved and relayed across the ocean were bought or sold by Jewish merchants even once. At no point along the chain of that trade were Jews numerous, wealthy or powerful enough to affect its structure or its flow, or to lessen the suffering of the people carried in it. The number matters because a very large claim had been made in the opposite direction and had spread widely. One percent of twelve million would be a hundred and twenty thousand people, and the estimate is that the real share fell well below even that. Schorsch reaches the same conclusion from a different direction, finding Jewish slave owning and slave trading minimal in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean alike.

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.