A group founded on a message board lasts a single year

The argument on the Haiti Global Village board produced an organisation. Two men who had never met, one studying in Tampa and one living in New York, wrote to each other privately through the summer of 1999, drafted a mission statement about rebuilding Haiti, and opened a discussion list. The Coalition of Haitians for the Advancement of Haiti held its first conference in January 2000. Members were in Florida, New York and Boston, and the plan was for a local group in each place to affiliate with the list and trade ideas and resources. The conference summary was never circulated. The New York founder stopped writing and vanished. A meeting in Tampa in June 2000 opened with a prayer and the Haitian anthem after Sunday mass at Our Lady of Peace church. A second meeting in July drew fewer people, and the Tampa organiser had gone to Haiti for the summer. Nobody took his place.

Jean Dominique was shot dead by gunmen on the morning of 3 April 2000 as he arrived at his radio station. He was born on 30 July 1930 and founded Radio Haiti Inter in 1968, the first station in the country to broadcast news in Kreyol. That decision changed who counted as an audience. Until then the press addressed the French-reading tenth of the population, and Dominique put the other nine tenths inside the national conversation by speaking to them in the language they actually used. He was driven out of Haiti twice, once under the Duvaliers and once under the Cedras junta, and came back both times. He supported Aristide and criticised him, which widened rather than narrowed the field of people with a motive. The case was never solved. Jonathan Demme filmed his life and released The Agronomist in 2003. Dominique had trained as an agronomist before he took up broadcasting, and he treated a radio station the way he treated soil, as something that had to be worked every day.

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.