A documentary lets Haitian masisi describe serving Ezili

Anne Lescot settled in Haiti in 1997 and spent more than ten years studying Vodou as an anthropologist, using video as her tool. In 2001 she and Laurence Magloire started a production company, and its first release was the documentary Of Men and Gods. Its subjects are Haitians whose gender and sexuality sit outside the ordinary categories, and who call themselves masisi, a Creole word that joins male femininity or womanness to desire for other men. The camera follows them to markets, beauty salons, churches, peristyles, living rooms, nightclubs and pilgrimages, and records what they say about the place religion holds in their days. Many of them serve Ezili, the pantheon of spirits that carries love, sexuality, pleasure, femininity and creativity. The film screened at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festivals in twelve countries, from Barbados and Puerto Rico to Norway, Indonesia and New Zealand, and in 2003 it took the Voices of Women Trophy at the Festival Dwa Famn in New York.

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.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.

Archaeologists long assumed that the first settlers of the Caribbean preferred the larger islands, reasoning that a small island holds fewer animals and less ground to farm. The excavated evidence does not support that. Land animals were never a large part of the diet in these islands. The food came from the sea, and many small islands sit on banks more productive than the water around their bigger neighbours. Saba is one of them. A village of this period worked a catchment of about five kilometres around itself, which an island of five square kilometres supplies without difficulty. Once that is understood, the distribution of Early Ceramic Age sites stops being puzzling. Settlements turn up on islands that earlier scholars had dismissed as too small to hold anyone permanently, because the calculation was being made from the land rather than from the water. People who lived by sailing between islands did not measure them the way people who live on continents do.