Jean Dominique is shot dead on his way in to work

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.

Researchers pulled 252 outpatient mental health charts from five community clinics in the Boston area covering treatment that began between 2000 and 2005. Eighty one of the children were Haitian, eighty two African American and eighty nine white. Twenty nine percent of the Haitian children attended exactly one session, close to the twenty eight percent among African American children and far above the eight percent among white children. Among children who met the study's threshold for clinical need, Haitian patients averaged 5.7 visits in six months where white patients averaged 8.0. Twenty seven percent of the Haitian children were uninsured or covered by the state pool for the uninsured, against nine percent of African American children and four and a half percent of white children. Adjustment disorder was the diagnosis most often recorded for Haitian children. Treatment meeting national guidelines for attention deficit disorder reached eighty eight percent of white children and thirty eight percent of Haitian children.

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.

After independence most African governments put money into schools, primary enrolment rose sharply, and there was deliberate effort to get girls into classrooms. The gains were uneven and then partly reversed. Adult illiteracy south of the Sahara is higher than in any other region of the world, the economic crisis that began in the 1970s cut state education budgets, and the gap between boys and girls is widest in the countryside. Health followed a similar curve. Malaria remains the heaviest disease burden on the continent and sleeping sickness was spreading again by the 1990s. More than two thirds of the world's HIV cases are African, with about 34 million people infected since the early 1980s and over 11 million dead, concentrated in the east and the south. Illness tracks poverty, thin food, bad sanitation and dirty water. Clinics decayed and trained staff left for better pay abroad. Vaccination programmes still cut infant mortality sharply after the 1960s and life expectancy rose, which shows what small sums can buy.