Sixty five percent of Haitians live below the poverty line

United Nations estimates around the turn of the century put sixty five percent of Haiti's population below the poverty line, and eighty one percent of the rural population below it. Life expectancy at birth stood at fifty one years for men and fifty six for women. Mortality among children under five was 125 per thousand, which is one child in eight. Haitians have a name for the people these figures describe. They are the san non, those who have no name. Above them sits a French speaking minority, largely light skinned and cosmopolitan, that treats politics as a contest to be won or died in and keeps the majority out of its privileges entirely. The two are locked together. Scarcity at the bottom sets the terms of the fight at the top, because holding office has been the most reliable route to income in Haiti, and losing office has meant losing everything.

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.

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.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.