A school falls on a hillside and four storms kill eight hundred

In November 2008 a school collapsed on a crowded hillside at Petionville, above Port-au-Prince, and killed dozens of people. Nothing unusual had happened to it. It simply fell. Weeks earlier the tropical storms Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike had crossed Haiti and killed around eight hundred. In 2004 Hurricane Jeanne had killed 3,306. Those figures are why the earthquake of 12 January 2010 has to be read as a social event as much as a geological one. A country that loses hundreds of people to rain, and dozens to a building standing still on an ordinary morning, has already shown what will happen when the ground moves. Port-au-Prince had grown for decades by absorbing people from a countryside that could no longer feed them, into houses raised on steep ground with sand dug out of riverbeds. Nature pulled the trigger in 2010. The way the city had been built supplied the charge.

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.

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.

At the sixteenth international conference of the Academy of Latinity, held in Lima in 2006, the Haitian writer Evelyne Trouillot began her talk by saying that she was a woman, that she was black, and that she was Haitian. About two hundred and fifty people were in the room and all of them already knew these three facts. Stating them turned the talk into a confrontation with patriarchy, with racism and with imperial geopolitics before a single argument had been made. The claim underneath was about the right to speak from a position without being taken as a specimen of it. A scholar from Germany or France is heard as a theoretically minded person. A scholar from Haiti or Algeria is expected to talk about Haiti or Algeria and to stand for the place. Trouillot took the position and refused the representative function attached to it.