Haiti as a piece of West Africa run aground in the Antilles

The Heinls propose reading Haiti as a fragment of Black Africa that the slave trade tore loose and set down in the Antilles. Their comparison is Latin America, whose institutions, law and church came out of Spain and Portugal and are still recognisably Iberian. Haiti's founding materials were different. What the revolution drew on came from the Slave Coast and from the Jacobin politics of the 1790s, and the state it built refused the European inheritance it was expected to claim. Jean Price-Mars pointed at the evidence in the countryside. Haitian peasant agriculture, land tenure and family organisation follow West African patterns closely enough that continuity explains them better than local invention does. Calling the result underdeveloped measures Haiti against a standard it was built to reject. The people who fed the country for two hundred years worked with knowledge that crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, and they kept it working in a climate and a landscape that had nothing to do with the one it came from.

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.

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.

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.