A national federation claims to speak for Haitian Vodou

Max Beauvoir founded the Federasyon Nasyonal Vodouyizan Ayisyen in 2005 and became its Ati Nasyonal, a national head for a religion that had never had one. Its stated aims included putting priests and priestesses in the place they deserve and, in a country where temples run independently of each other, giving the practice a known liturgy. Beauvoir already had a temple at Mariani in Carrefour, on the edge of Port-au-Prince, and a second congregation in the United States. Under Duvalier, when Haiti still had a tourist trade, he had staged Vodou dances at Carrefour for visitors, and it was at one of those performances that the writer Wade Davis first met him. The federation never commanded the temples. Many priests kept their own liturgy and ignored it. What the founding did create was a single office that foreign governments, journalists and churches could address whenever they wanted the religion to have a spokesman.

From 1929 the Dominican Republic gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil unless the parents were in transit, a phrase that covered the children of diplomats and of people in the country for ten days or less. In 2004 the General Law on Migration, numbered 285-04, added temporary foreign workers, migrants whose residence permits had expired, people brought in without authorisation and anyone unable to prove lawful residence. Since almost all the workers recruited for the cane fields were Haitian, the new categories caught Haitian families more than any other group. Registry offices had been refusing birth certificates to children of Haitian parents informally for years, a practice well documented by the 1990s and fought by Dominican civil society. After 2004 the refusals had a law behind them, and the children of people who had cut cane for decades were treated as though they had just crossed the border.

Clinicians reviewing outpatient charts at five community mental health clinics in the Boston area recorded whether a child had been separated from a parent or guardian. For Haitian children the note appears in fifty six percent of charts, against twenty seven percent for African American children and twenty two percent for white children. The separations were also much longer. The Haitian average came to forty four months, roughly double the twenty three months for African American children and the twenty months for white children, and the average Haitian child had been seven or eight years old when the separation started. That is the arithmetic of chain migration written into a clinical record. One parent goes first, works, sends money home and files the paperwork, and the child follows years later after being raised by a grandmother or an aunt. The clinic sees only the arrival. The four years happened in Haiti and reach the chart as a single line.

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.