A play about an earthquake is written weeks before the earthquake

In December 2009 Franketyen wrote a play called Melovivi ou Le piege. Its subject is an earthquake in Haiti. The text describes ground that sways, staggers and zigzags, that turns and capsizes, that twitches with fright and derails with terror. In January 2010 an earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince. On the day it struck, the Port-au-Prince daily Le Nouvelliste had declared 2010 the year of Franketyen. His own house was destroyed and he survived it. International coverage of the disaster presented Haitians as helpless people unable to govern themselves, and some prosperous Haitians dismissed the offers of foreign assistance as a threat to national sovereignty. His answer from Port-au-Prince had a different shape. He proposed writing and negotiating, and asked that Haitian interests be counted alongside everyone else's. He had produced more than ten thousand pages of plays, poetry and fiction, and several thousand paintings.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.

After independence most African governments put money into schools, primary enrolment rose sharply, and there was deliberate effort to get girls into classrooms. The gains were uneven and then partly reversed. Adult illiteracy south of the Sahara is higher than in any other region of the world, the economic crisis that began in the 1970s cut state education budgets, and the gap between boys and girls is widest in the countryside. Health followed a similar curve. Malaria remains the heaviest disease burden on the continent and sleeping sickness was spreading again by the 1990s. More than two thirds of the world's HIV cases are African, with about 34 million people infected since the early 1980s and over 11 million dead, concentrated in the east and the south. Illness tracks poverty, thin food, bad sanitation and dirty water. Clinics decayed and trained staff left for better pay abroad. Vaccination programmes still cut infant mortality sharply after the 1960s and life expectancy rose, which shows what small sums can buy.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.