Six of the ten fastest growing economies are African and the poverty holds

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.

An armed rebellion moved through Haiti in February 2004, and on the twenty-ninth Jean-Bertrand Aristide left the country aboard a United States aircraft. It was the second time he had been put out of the presidency. In 1991 the army did it and he spent three years in Washington. By 2004 there was no army, since he had abolished it, and the work was done instead by former soldiers and gang leaders who crossed in from the Dominican side and took town after town while the police stood aside. Girard places the departure inside a period of deep political division, which is the polite way of recording that Aristide had by then lost the students, the business class, the church hierarchy, most foreign donors and a large part of the movement that elected him. The plane carried him to the Central African Republic and eventually to South Africa. Haiti had produced another president whose exit was arranged in a foreign capital.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.

At meetings in Kingston with CARICOM officials, Aristide appeared calm and tried to convince the regional leaders that the opposition was weak and posed no real challenge to his presidency. He willingly accepted the confidence-building measures the leaders proposed to break the stalemate, agreeing to disarm gangs and permit political demonstrations. The opposition, led by elite businessmen but drawing on a wide cross-section of Haitians, remained unwilling to accept any negotiation short of the president's immediate removal, and CARICOM's attempt to broker talks in the Bahamas failed. Smith argues that the resulting Kingston Accord drew severe criticism inside Haiti from people who had expected CARICOM to force a resignation, and hardened a local view that Aristide had manipulated the organisation to preserve the Lavalas hold on the state. He doubts earlier intervention could have changed the outcome.