Weary from war with the formerly enslaved rebel army and having lost thousands of French troops to fighting and yellow fever, by the end of 1802, the infamous expedition of General Victoire Leclerc to reimpose slavery in Saint-Domingue was failing. Approaching death himself, that fall Leclerc sent several desperate letters to the mainland requesting additional resources and reconsideration of the mission, including one in which he pleaded:

The statement reads as a deathbed confession of a military incursion gone embarrassingly awry in part from having underestimated enemy forces. But a deeper excavation of Leclerc’s sentiment reveals a potential moment of awakening from Europe’s three-centuries-old ontological belief in the supposedly inferior nature, identity, and intellectual capacity of the “negro.” As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Reference Trouillot1995) has argued, until – and indeed, even after the Haitian Revolution, Europeans failed to conceive of Africans as humans, as thinkers, as planners, or as revolutionaries. Early nationalistic chauvinism embedded in both early Christianity and capitalism fueled the reimagination of African polities, cultures, and individuals into a flattened, singular “negro,” or black identity void of any distinctions (Robinson Reference Robinson1983: 99–100; Wynter 2003; Bennett Reference Bennett2018). Cedric J. Robinson’s (Reference Robinson1983) now foundational Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has offered that the “negro” was an invention of racial capitalism, manufactured through Christianity, commodification and the transatlantic slave trade, and enslavement in the Americas.

Enslavers’ imposition of an inferior racial identity did little to alter the self-defined identities of diasporic Africans who, in many ways, retained knowledge of and appreciation for who they were and the ways they understood the world – despite the traumatic experience of the Middle Passage and enslavement. Africans embodied their own biographies, histories, and worldviews that shaped their human activities – especially within political, economic, and military realms – and this ontological and epistemological core with which Africans operated represented the source of their opposition to racial capitalism (Robinson Reference Robinson1983). Scholars have increasingly given attention to the dimensions of West African and West Central African cultural, religious, militaristic, and political influences on the Haitian Revolution (Thornton Reference Thompson1991, Reference Thompson1993b; Gomez Reference Gomez1998; Diouf Reference Diouf2003; Mobley Reference Mobley2015). This turn provides a growing baseline of historical data that problematizes previous beliefs that France alone bestowed Enlightenment ideals upon enslaved African people. Reading the archives of enslavers’ records that labeled captives according to their geographic locations – though oftentimes incorrectly – reveals that African ethnicities and cultural identities were not only linked to specific locations of origin, but to political projects.

Africans were not able to fully retain entirely cohesive social, political, or religious structures due to the trauma of separation from their homes and the Middle Passage; but they re-created elements of their institutions and transmitted them through interactions on plantations, in ritual spaces, in self-liberated maroon communities, and in the bellies of slave ships. Prior to the colonial situation, African captives began bonding around coping with the horrifying conditions of the Middle Passage. The long voyages on foot or in small river boats from hinterlands to coastal port cities, and the waiting period in slave castles at the ports, could take several months to a year. In addition, slave ship voyages across the Atlantic Ocean also took up to three to four months. Ship captains, traders, and sailors tightly packed captives into ships, usually head-to-foot to fit as many people as possible into the ship’s belly. Food was meager and the sanitary conditions were loathsome. The Middle Passage was a harrowing experience where physical abuse, disease, and death; psychological disorientation; and sexual exploitation were ubiquitous. Captives commonly attempted suicide and at times collectively revolted on the ships (Richardson Reference Richardson and Diouf2003; Smallwood Reference Smallwood2008; Mustakeem Reference Mustakeem2016). Interactions between “shipmates” on the way to the ports and on slave ships were the only sources of human affirmation, and the beginnings of the social ties that would spawn collective identity formation and cultural production after disembarkation (Mintz and Price Reference Mintz and Price1976; Borucki Reference Borucki2015).

This type of violent extraction from families, communities, and societal structures would have stimulated in slave trade victims an affinity for their real (rather than mythical) homelands that was the basis of their attempts to actively preserve, re-formulate, or construct oppositional consciousness, identities, network relationships, and cultural and religious practices to maintain self-understanding and integrity in host societies that were hostile to their presence (Vertovec Reference Vertovec1997; Shuval Reference Shuval2000; Butler Reference Butler2001; Brubaker Reference Brubaker2005; Hamilton Reference Hamilton2007; Dufoix Reference Dufoix and Rodarmor2008). As such, maintaining a sense of self and creating community relationships, behaviors, norms, and ideologies to affirm the collective was essential to African Diasporans’ survival and acts of resistance against enslavement (Hamilton Reference Hamilton2007: 29–31). African ethnic or “New World” identities that were linked to specific cultural, religious, and racial formations influenced several collective action rebellions throughout the Americas. Rather than assume these formations were “backward-looking” or somehow lacking progressive ideals as Eugene Genovese (Reference Genovese1979) suggested, I argue that rebellions among the enslaved and maroons were based on the political, economic, and cultural practices of those who themselves were avoiding capture or otherwise resisting the violence of the transAtlantic slave trade. Rebellions and revolts like Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica and the Haitian Revolution were indeed progressive, transformative factors that altered the course of European struggles for hegemonic power (Santiago-Valles Reference Santiago-Valles2005) and broadened discourses around freedom, equality, and citizenship.

Who were the “negroes,” “rebels,” “brigands,” “insurgents,” and “masses,” as C. L. R. James ([1938] Reference James1989) referred to them, of the Haitian Revolution? From where did they originate, what was the shape and character of the social forces into which they were socialized, and how did elements of their African origins inform collective action? This chapter attempts to contextualize forms of resistance tactics that appeared in Saint-Domingue from the perspective of Africans who “lived in their ethnicity as much as anyone else” (Winant Reference Winant2001: 55), and therefore were influenced by their respective socio-political and cultural worldviews. Though it was a French and white creole colony in name and political economy, the social world of Saint-Domingue was essentially African. Approximately 90 percent of the colony’s population was black, and over two-thirds of those black people were of immediate African extraction. Enslavers purchased or kidnapped captives from several African societies that practiced indigenous forms of enslavement, although these systems were qualitatively different from the racialized slavery Europeans implemented in the Americas. African forms of slavery add another dimension to the socio-economic and political realities that captives lived with on the continent, and it constituted part of their collective consciousness. Yet the incongruence between African and European slaveries, the commodification that rendered human life expendable, and processes of racialization were radicalizing forces that further heightened and politicized collective consciousness. The persistent influence of African social, political, and religious formations – especially the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa – helped inform the ways enslaved people in Saint-Domingue coped with their situation and attempted to reconstruct their lives in ways that were alternative to the dictates of Western modernity.

The transAtlantic slave trade and African rulers’ responses to it were leading causes of societal transformations that affected the everyday lived experiences of women, men, and children who were either victimized by the trade in some capacity or were aware of the potential to be victimized. African state leaders increasingly consolidated power and wealth, which they gained from trading captives with Europeans. The growing chasm between the elite classes and those who were most vulnerable to capture led to conflict and revolt over the trade, making eighteenth-century African wars and uprisings an important scene of the Age of Revolutions (Ware Reference Ware and Rudolph2014; Green Reference Green2019; Brown Reference Brown2020). Discontent over the trade, warfare and upheaval, and shifting paradigms over the nature and scope of African rulers’ absolute power created space for more egalitarian political philosophies to emerge “from below” and challenge existing regimes. Politically progressive ideals sought to place limits on monarchal authority through decentralized governance, and placed higher expectations on kings to act with fairness, unselfishness, and restraint. These changing beliefs were often understood and articulated through socio-religious idioms as people attempted to rectify societal imbalances through ritual, resistance, and the development of egalitarian social forms on both sides of the Atlantic (Thornton Reference Thompson1993b). Individuals responded to the increasing encroachment of the trade by attempting to defend or fortify themselves or their communities. Africans’ discontent over violent capture and strategies for attempting to resist the trafficking process were also expressed through coastal marronnage and slave ship insurrections. Those who were unsuccessful at self-protection and funneled into the trade carried with them not only the trauma of their personal experiences, but undoubtedly held anecdotes about neighbors, kith, and kin affected by the trade and attitudes about whether they were justifiably or unjustifiably being held captive according to local custom, and for what reasons. Many of the rituals and spiritual beliefs, political ideas, and acts of rebellion that would later become prominent during the Haitian Revolution predated the Middle Passage and therefore serve as important antecedents that deserve exploration. What follows is an attempt to explicate and trace the Black Radical Tradition to Saint-Domingue, from its inception in African political formations and socio-religious worldviews, its containment and transformations due to commodification and contact with the French Atlantic slave trade, and expressions during coastal and slave ship rebellions.

Domestic African Slavery and the French Trade

Slavery was part of many African societies and was based on inequality, but it operated differently than the racialized slavery Europeans initiated in the Americas. Domestically enslaved Africans – and their labor – were a concrete form of privately-owned property and were considered subordinate family members. Despite not owning themselves or their labor value and performing labor that would be considered degrading, enslaved people typically were not denied their humanity and at times were allowed relative freedoms, social mobility, and property ownership. Various societies had their own socially constructed norms surrounding eligibility for enslavement. Captives included prisoners of war, the financially indebted, and cultural or religious outsiders. For example, those who had knowledge of the Qu’ran at areas of Senegambia could be protected from the slave trade; native-born Dahomeans were not supposed to be enslaved; and Kongolese bondspeople were typically from outside the kingdom and could be physically punished for disobedience or for being absent without prior permission.² Buying people was a way of accumulating wealth and state officials used many of the enslaved for government or military services to increase their political power. It was relatively easy for enslavers to trade with Europeans, since they were likely to be wealthy merchants, rulers, or state officials. In exchange for European manufactured guns, alcohol, salt, clothing and jewelry, African kings and merchants sold war captives from neighboring polities, criminals, and other individuals who were most peripheral to centers of power.³ As the demands for enslaved labor on Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations increased and trade with Europeans became costlier, African kings resorted to waging wars to meet the demands for more captives.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to sustain contact with parts of Africa through trade and conquest in the mid-fifteenth century; they first explored the Bight of Benin in 1472 and were shortly followed by Spaniards who procured slaves from Portuguese and Dutch traders. With the founding of the Dutch West India Company in 1625, the French West India Company in 1664, and English Royal African Company in 1672, captive Africans quickly became the foremost form of capital – even more valuable than land or gold by the eighteenth century, according to Walter Rodney – and the international slave trade accelerated.⁴ The French slave trade was relatively obscure and illegal during this period. Early in the eighteenth century, French ships supplied Spanish colonies with African captives, but few of these voyages resulted in trafficking bondspeople to French territories in the Americas, leaving a dearth of French slave trading records. Before the Treaty of Utrecht officially sanctioned the French slave trade in 1713, the Dutch and English sold many Africans to French Caribbean islands, and the French took other captives during raids on English ships and territories. The number of slave ship voyages and disembarked Africans gradually increased in the early part of the century, then exploded in the 1770s and 1780s.

European slave traders relied on established commercial networks and a range of actors who facilitated negotiations, financial exchanges, and the procurement of human bodies, typically through brutal means. The levels of violence used to extract and traffic Africans to the coasts and onto slave ships cannot be understated. Sowande Mustakeem’s (Reference Mustakeem2016) Slavery at Sea has illuminated the micro-level processes of the Middle Passage, beginning with the moment of capture and ending at the point of sale at ports of the Americas, emphasizing the effects of violence, illness, and psychological despair on individual captives as well as the larger collective of captives as they witnessed traumas inflicted on others. In addition to engaging in warfare, captors leveled raids on families, communities, and villages unexpectedly, and by the eighteenth century nearly 70 percent of captive Africans had been victims of kidnapping. Though by some local conventions slavery was associated with criminality or being born within a low status group, increasing demand from plantations in the Americas during the eighteenth century meant that on the African continent, “escalating value placed upon black bodies created a threatening environment in which every person in African society, regardless of status, became a potential target.”⁵ It is estimated that during the eighteenth century, the French transported between 1.1 and 1.25 million captive Africans, bound for port cities of the Americas. Of those captured, nearly 800,000 embarked on ships headed to Saint-Domingue but only 691,116 survived the Middle Passage and were counted among those who disembarked.⁶ The loss of life during the voyages is only part of the total experience of African deaths, which also included fatalities “between the time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast … [and] the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound.”⁷

As the trade ratcheted up around mid-century, a seemingly unending stream of Africans were brought to the colony, resulting in the enslaved population approaching 500,000 just before the Haitian Revolution, two-thirds of whom were continent-born.⁸ In the first half of the eighteenth century, the majority of captives were taken from the Bight of Benin with West Central Africans and Senegambians, respectively, representing the second and third most common groups. After 1750, however, French slave trading moved southward along the West Central African coast. These inhabitants became the largest proportion of captives to Saint-Domingue and were increasingly desired to labor in the colony’s quickly growing coffee industry. For example, one family in Port-au-Prince stated in 1787 that their affairs were so prosperous that the estate went from owning 5 to 36 slaves in a matter of only 18 months.⁹ Once a ship was financed to take sail from one of the French ports, most likely Nantes since it was the busiest slaving port, the captain took wares to be sold for African captives at the coast. Guns were one of the most highly valued trade items, as they gave the perception of technological advancement and amplified strength and power in warfare to capture more slaves; for example, a petition from a “citoyen,” Sudreau, appears to request permission to exchange African captives for 700 guns.¹⁰ The growing abundance of captives at the coast meant that prices for slaves were cheaper than in the Caribbean colonies. Eighty Africans from the Guinea coast destined for Les Cayes were bought for 800 livres, approximately half the value that planters placed on healthy enslaved adults.¹¹ Other highly valued captives were black sailors and other ship hands, whose nautical skills and familiarity with coastal cultures could aid slave ship captains in completing transactions. One sailor, described as a “Frenchified” black, was valued at 2,400 livres, significantly higher than the average price of a Saint Dominguan enslaved person.¹² In order to ensure the voyages’ profitability, ship captains procured as many slaves as possible, sometimes tarrying along the African coast and visiting multiple ports to find available human cargo, but typically slavers secured captives from one African port to reduce the length of the voyage and the probability of illness and insurrection.

Archival data show a clear dominance of African men over women during the height of the French trade to Saint-Domingue, consistent with findings from other European nations’ trading activity more generally. Between 1750 and 1791, the highest level of gender parity existed among captives from the Bight of Biafra, where 53.9 percent were male and the remaining 46.1 percent women and children. Children represented a sizable proportion in French slaving records, accounting for nearly 27 percent of captives. Lower sex ratios were often due to raiding and kidnapping, and women and children were often the victims of these activities, as seen in the Bights of Biafra and Benin areas. Higher levels of gender imbalance occurred between captives from the West Central and Southeastern African regions. This disparity, especially among West Central Africans, can be attributed to women’s value as local agricultural laborers, which kept them from being vulnerable to the trade in higher numbers. Other reasons for the low presence of women in the French trade relate to local needs for women in matrilineal societies; additionally, the hardships of the journey from the interior to the coasts made women and children less desirable to slavers.¹³ Such gender dynamics – as well as responses to the slave trade – varied by culture, political structure, and region. What follows is an exploration of those variations, and considerations of religion, economy and political systems in areas that were most impacted by the French slave trade to Saint-Domingue.

Political Systems, The Slave Trade, And Religion

During the height of the slave trade, several African polities were consolidating power and wealth at the highest levels, leaving communities, clans, and towns vulnerable to warfare and raids. Popular contestations to abuses of power not only influenced revolts and resistance to the slave trade, they informed political consciousness about the nature of rule, inequality, and unjust forms of slavery. As Africans from various regions encountered each other in Saint-Domingue, they found compatibility and solidarity in their experiences and perspectives on the imbalances of power and resources that resulted in enslavement. In the Dahomey Kingdom, ancestral and nature-related deities indicated the religious reach of monarchal rulers into the everyday lives of their subjects, including the enslaved. These imperial deities, as well as local spirits, migrated with people through the Middle Passage to the Americas. Other coastal African religious systems were less tolerant of the realities of slavery and informed ethical dimensions against the slave trade. Muslims at Senegambia, as well as Vili traders based at the Loango Coast, exemplify a major thrust of this chapter: that African peoples had local conceptions of slavery and the damage caused by the European slave trade, and that spiritual sensibilities informed those ideas. Yet, despite these systems of thought that opposed the fundamentally exploitative and dehumanizing nature of the slave trade, African participation in the vast commercial network allowed the European slave trade to function by relying on local knowledge and trade relationships. These and a multitude of other African-born people represent the complexity of local complicity with the trade, the power imbalances between Europeans and Africans, and opposition to the slave trade.

The Middle Passage and Resistance to the Slave Trade

Conclusion

The “false idea of the negro” against which General Leclerc cautioned belied the rich histories and traditions of African political ideas, spiritual inclinations, and collective resistance actions to enslaving. Due to the rise of the transAtlantic slave trade, expanding inequality in various African societies caused economic, political, social, and religious chasms that engendered new forms of political thought on the continent. For African captives who were the victims of raids, warfare, and greed, the Middle Passage compounded these experiences. Slaving practices on the African continent varied depending on geographic region and socio-political formations, however the Middle Passage process was the first step in homogenizing the experiences of “the negro.” Middle Passage survivors, no matter their place of origin, endured incredible trauma but also carried their worldviews with them on the voyages across the Atlantic. Moreover, while the stark realities of violence and greed that undergirded enslavement in Saint-Domingue may have harkened to the African past, the added components of racialization likely further enflamed the collective consciousness of Middle Passage survivors. As Africans interacted with each other and formed respective ethnic clusters, collective oppositional consciousness and solidarity began to take shape.

This chapter has highlighted the ways in which coastal Africans responded to the rapidly changing conditions around them that shaped their lives in irreversible ways. To understand racial capitalism as a social process and a mode of economic production, the commodification of Africans from humans to cargo must first be considered (Robinson 1893, chapters 4–5). Conversely, as Robinson argues, the origins of the Black Radical Tradition lie in Africans’ worldviews and their epistemological opposition to racial capitalism. Slavery existed in Africa, as in many human societies, but it was not premised on racialization and did not operate with the intense brutality involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Those who were unfortunate enough to already have been familiar with domestic slavery would have faced an entirely new set of circumstances as a captive on a slave ship destined for the Americas. As the slave trade intensified throughout the eighteenth century, its victims were increasingly people who were free and, according to local customs, should have been invulnerable to capture. Africans’ understandings about the ethics and limits of slaving would have informed a sense of indignation at the experience of displacement and bondage. Many interpreted their circumstances through supernatural terms, since oftentimes African leaders were also spiritual leaders, and social, economic, and political forces were believed to be either the consequences of happenings in the non-physical realm or violations of sacred rules of order. Accordingly, later in Saint-Domingue, resistance was articulated through idioms and rituals of the sacred, as will be explored in Chapter 3. Sacred rituals, and other forms of resistance, were often collective efforts between maroons and plantation slaves.

Though it is not yet possible to directly link African slave trade resistance to events in the Caribbean, it is important to recognize that the realities of the slave trade, and resistance to it, was part of the socio-economic and political context from which captives emerged and should be understood as part of their world. Moreover, this helps us revise our ideas about the making of revolution and modernity, when and where it occurred, and to decentralize Europe as its singular birthplace. Recent historical sociologists (Magubane Reference Magubane, Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Go and Lawson Reference Go and Lawson2017) have argued for transnational analyses of modernity, abandoning previous generations of scholarship that tended to overlook colonial relationships in favor of methodological nationalism. As works by Anna Julia Cooper and C. L. R James have shown, the French Revolution perhaps would not have happened without the wealth from the Caribbean colonies, namely Saint-Domingue, and the ideological push of the Haitian Revolution. It then follows that due to the triangularity of the European slave trade, the Haitian Revolution most certainly would not have happened without Africa and Africans.

Africa, as a site of unfreedoms and freedoms and the foremost source of natural resources, lifeblood, and human labor in the Atlantic world, was a critical contributor to modern capitalism and must therefore be brought from the margins closer to the center when we consider the making of modernity. This is not even to speak of the Africans who were trafficked through the Arab slave trade across the Indian Ocean, but who yet labored on European plantations that contributed to capitalist development (Rodney Reference Rodney1982: 97). Further, European colonial domination of Africa lasted well into the twentieth century, after the 1885 Berlin Conference divided the continent and access to its resources, ensuring that “African economies are integrated into the very structure of the developed capitalist economies” (ibid.: 25). It is more historically accurate to place Africa and other parts of the formerly colonized world at the center of how we conceptualize the capitalist world economy rather than at the periphery. A recapitulation of the ways European capitalism developed through the exploitation of Africa and Africans is beyond the scope of the current work, but this understanding – as well as the ways that Africans re-defined freedom and emancipation through their self-initiated actions – means we can think of the existence of multiple modernities that developed in various times and places (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2011).

“The stranger in San Domingo was awakened by the cracks of the whip, the stifled cries, and the heavy groans of the Negroes who saw the sun rise only to curse it for its renewal of their labours and their pains”, this quote from C. L. R. James’ foundational text The Black Jacobins ([1938] Reference James1989: 9–10) serves as a helpful entry way point through which to understand colonial Haiti, known in the eighteenth century as French Saint-Domingue. As African captives disembarked at Saint-Domingue’s ports – after surviving social, economic, and political upheaval in their homelands and months of trauma in the form of dislocation, violence, death, and illness – traffickers branded them and sold them off to plantations across the colony. From that moment forward, forced labor, daily acts of brutality and other indignities, and death characterized everyday life for the enslaved. The horrors of Saint-Domingue are infamous to readers who are already familiar with “New World” plantation societies, but sociologists who specialize in the study of race might be less familiar with Haiti’s centrality in the making of racial capitalism. To fully understand the significance of a major rebellion like the Haitian Revolution in the context of what was once the most profitable and deadly slave colony in the Americas, it is important to understand the complex set of social relations that eventually led to the astounding collapse of racial slavery in Haiti. This chapter does not merely attempt to recount what is now a fairly well-known historical narrative about the colony’s economic prosperity from sugar and coffee production, but to locate the experiences of enslaved Africans and African descendants within the island space on which Haiti sits (Ayiti/Española/Saint-Domingue/Haiti) – the nucleus of several “firsts” in early the modern history of the Americas:

• the first site of European “discovery,” colonization, and indigenous genocide

• the first site of black enslavement

• the first site of indigenous and African collective resistance to European dominance

• the first site of a successful black revolt against slavery, and

• the first free and independent black nation.

Four tenets – human commodification, labor exploitation, death, and resistance – of Haiti’s structural reality have persisted beyond Spanish and French colonial systems to the period of the United States’ imperial influence. It might be argued that understanding Haiti from this perspective illuminates the ways in which black life throughout the Americas was and continues to be circumscribed by structural forces rooted in colonial encounters, slavery, and anti-blackness. After surviving the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans and their descendants experienced similar material conditions in Saint-Domingue. Africans also encountered each other and their respective cultural, social, and political heritages, and a landspace that was imbued with the Taíno presence and legacy, resulting in a deeper cultivation of collective consciousness and solidarity. To further comprehend how enslaved Africans responded to their newfound conditions in the Caribbean, I examine the immediate social world of enslaved people by looking at their social lives and recreation – particularly cultural and spiritual creations surrounding death – considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival. These sacred ritual practices and symbolic remembrances of the dead eventually formed the “medium of the conspiracy” among enslaved Africans and African descendants to free themselves from slavery.¹

Ayiti

Prior to Spanish arrival to the Caribbean, autochthonous Taíno AmerIndians of the Arawak family inhabited several islands, including Quisqueya – meaning “vast country,” or Ayiti, “land of the mountains” – the second largest island of the Greater Antilles. Moreau de Saint-Méry estimated that there were between 1 and 3 million inhabitants on the island, and during his travels noted the presence of indigenous ritual artifacts in the north.² The Ayitian indigenous population was divided into five kingdoms, each headed by cacique chiefs who were often connected to one another, and Taíno caciques from other parts of the Caribbean, through kinship networks.³ Cacique Guarionex led the Kingdom of Magua, which began at the north-central shore and extended east. The Marien Kingdom, governed by Guacanario, occupied what later became the northern department of Saint-Domingue. A third kingdom, Higuey, was in the south-east portion of what later became the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. The island’s south-central zone was held by the Kingdom of Maguana, whose cacique was an indigenous Caraïbe of the Lesser Antilles named Caonabo, husband of Anacaona. Anacaona was the great-aunt of the famed rebel leader Enriquillo, and sister of one of the island’s most powerful caciques, Behechio, who ruled the Xaragua Kingdom based on the island’s southwestern peninsula, extending east toward what the French later dubbed the Cul-de-Sac plain.⁴

When Christopher Columbus and the European conquistadors arrived in 1492, they claimed ownership of the island from the indigenous people and renamed it Española. After his initial arrival, Columbus returned to the Americas on three occasions and visited Española, Cuba, the Bahamas, and the South and Central American coasts in search of gold before his death in 1506.⁵ These first moments of contact between the Taíno and Europeans set in motion patterns of interaction and structures of dominance that shaped societal relations in the Americas for centuries to come. Religious sanctioning from the Catholic Church and European racialization of “others” informed the white supremacist logic of colonial conquest, which anchored the genocide of indigenous peoples of Española (Smith Reference Smith, HoSang, La Bennett and Pulido2012: 69). By the first years of the sixteenth century, other Spanish conquistadors had invaded Española and bound the Taínos, and other indigenous captives from neighboring Caribbean islands, within a labor system to work in gold mining, agriculture and, later, sugarcane cultivation. However, slaughter in combat, starvation, and infectious disease stemming from contact with Europeans swiftly devastated the Taíno population.⁶ To replenish their supply of an uncompensated labor force, the Catholic priest Bartholemé de las Casas suggested to the Spanish crown that the indigenous were “noble savages” that should not be enslaved. Instead, Africans who were not protected by negotiated agreements between the Spanish and Taíno caciques would be imported.⁷ This second logic of white supremacy, slaveability, or anti-black racism, anchored capitalist development within one population pool – black people – who were seen as particularly vulnerable and suited to commodified labor (ibid.: 68–69).

The earliest of these Africans were free ladinos who were assimilated Catholics from the Iberian Coast of Spain; and later legal and illegal channels of the slave trade carried African continent-born bozales.⁸ Records of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transAtlantic slave trade to Española are minimal, but the earliest Africans that Spaniards brought to the island worked in gold mines. As the mines became unproductive, sugar production signaled the rise of “New World” slave economies using involuntary African labor. Enslavers did not officially target African women as potential laborers until 1504. But in June 1527, the king of Spain permitted traders to bring in African women captives to close the population gap between black men and women and to encourage marriage and families, which the king hoped would increase an overall sense of contentment and dissuade men from escaping to the mountains or staging uprisings.⁹ The African population had overtaken the Spanish and Taíno population as early as 1509, and by the 1540s, Española held between 20,000 and 30,000 enslaved Africans and African descendants, with Senegambians, West Central Africans, and Biafrans making up the largest portions of captives during the sixteenth century (Table 2.1).¹⁰

The rise of exploitative and oppressive social structures in Española engendered the social conditions that the small population of Taíno and growing number of Africans faced: forced removal from their homelands, the experience of being used as exploited labor for European resource extraction and protoindustrial production, commodification as a human being, and exorbitant death rates. The deeply penetrating reach of these structural realities shaped the terms of everyday life and everyday death, yet despite foreboding structural determinism, human beings can and do exhibit agency, as did the Taínos and Africans. Structures and agency are co-constituted and only exist in relationship to each other. Structures shape the lives of social actors, who in turn rely on elements from their symbolic world and social interactions to generate collective actions that minimally agitate or, at maximum, transform those structures (Hall Reference Hall, Howard and Becker1990; Sewell Reference Sewell1992; Kane Reference Kane2000; Diehl and McFarland Reference Diehl and McFarland2010). Even with the institutionalization of social death at Española and alienation from human connections, identity, and labor value (Patterson Reference Patterson1982) in gold mines and on sugar plantations, some Taíno and enslaved Africans exerted collective agency by consistently escaping, fleeing to the densely forested mountains, and participating in organized attacks against the Spanish encomienda labor system.

The island of Ayiti – and its subsequent geopolitical designation, Española – can be thought of as a contact zone, a “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”¹¹ Taínos and other indigenous AmerIndians from the circum-Caribbean, Iberian black ladinos and African-born bozales, and Spanish and French colonists converged on the island and contributed – voluntarily and involuntarily, and to varying degrees – to Ayiti’s culture, language, and legacy of resistance that eventually culminated in the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution. As the island’s original inhabitants, the Taíno influenced the enslaved African and African descendant population’s collective consciousness, which was transmitted intergenerationally through sacred ritual practice and the memory of sixteenth century revolts against Spanish colonization (Beauvoir-Dominique Reference Beauvoir-Dominique, Hayward, Atkinson and Cinquino2009, Reference Beauvoir-Dominique2010).

Less than 20 years after the arrival of enslaved laborers, slave resistance became a mainstay of Ayiti that coincided with the emergence of the Spanish sugar economy racialization processes, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. By the early seventeenth century, however, Africans’ persistent struggle against slavery in the form of maroon raids on plantations, combined with the Spanish policy of depopulating much of the island, directly contributed to the essential collapse of the growing sugar industry.¹² The first plantation society in the Americas was undermined by black insurgency, representing what we might thus think of as the first of several “Ayitian Revolutions” and new sites and temporalities of modernity. By the late seventeenth century, the Spanish Empire incorporated new laws into the Siete Partidas code regulating enslaved and free people of color, legalizing the racialized slavery and oppression that had already been in existence.¹³ These policies not only concretized the racial order, they were mechanisms of social control to prevent the kind of resistance from maroons and the enslaved that had undermined the Spanish sugar enterprise. The French soon resumed and expanded sugar production – as well as their own version of laws and mores that codified racial hierarchy in the Code Noir – overwhelming its own plantation economy a century later with excesses that undergirded economic, social, and political crises that helped to spark the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution.

The First Ayitian Revolution: African Resistance and Marronnage in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

Enslaved Africans rebelled against their new circumstances from the moment of their arrival on what was then called Española. As early as 1503, the governor of Española, Nicolás de Ovando, lamented to the Spanish crown that the ladinos were consistently escaping after having learned “bad customs” from the Taíno.¹⁴ Some of these self-liberated ladinos took up residence with members of the remaining Taíno population and participated in the cacique Enriquillo’s war against the Spanish that lasted from 1519 to 1534. Proximity to the Taíno while working in the gold mines was assumed to have instilled in the ladino bondspeople a growing sense of discontent with enslavement; Ovando suggested that they be replaced with bozales – captive Africans born and socialized on the continent – assuming they would be easier to control because of their lack of exposure to the Spanish culture and language, and the Christian religion.¹⁵ Ovando’s presumption was also based on a growing belief that “Europeanness” was the pinnacle of human superiority, while its opposite – non-Christian Africanness – was solely eligible for the opposite of freedom – slavery. Spanish colonists racialized enslaved ladinos and bozales in contrasting ways that nonetheless denied their intelligence and the essence of their humanity. Colonists described runaways as cimarrons, meaning wild or untamed in Spanish. The denial of runaways’ inherent impulses to be free by relegating their actions to those of unruly animals established a false dichotomy in slaveowners’ thinking about enslaved people that would last for centuries to come: the notion that freedom was a foreign concept to African people and therefore any of their attempts to self-liberate were dismissed as impossible (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995).

This sentiment was proven incorrect when, on Christmas Day of 1521, African bozales staged the first black-led uprising against enslavement in the Americas. A group of twenty Wolofs from Diego Columbus’ sugar mill recruited several other enslaved Africans and autochthonous individuals from a nearby plantation in an attempt to seize the town of Azua and then join Enriquillo in the Baoruco mountains.¹⁶ By the second day of their escape, the rebels had secured weapons, killed several Spaniards, and mobilized a force of at least 400 black and indigenous people. The insurgents intended to kill all the “Christians” at the sugar mills, farms, and towns, including those at Enriquillo’s former home at San Juan de la Maguana.¹⁷ The early presence of Wolofs in the Americas was a result of Spanish-controlled commercial trading through the Damel of Kajoor in the Senegambia region during the early sixteenth century.¹⁸ These Wolofs were part of region-wide warrior traditions, and possibly were Muslims who may have been carrying out a continuation of jihad against the Spanish Christians as vengeance for their bondage.¹⁹

Archival records indicate that even after the 1521 revolt, colonial officials downplayed repeated uprisings and Africans’ active participation in them to conceal a gradual loss of control over the enslaved population and the countryside outside the capital city of Santo Domingo, where maroons increasingly reigned. For example, a group of Wolof runaways attacked various plantations on horseback; their riding skills impressed, or embarrassed, Spanish representatives in Española.²⁰ King Charles V of Spain wrote a letter in December 1523, suggesting colonists in Española arm themselves given the growing African population.²¹ In April 1528, the Crown received notice that there were

The king issued an order to the governor of Española to investigate the number of escaped Africans in the colony so that they could be returned and placed under surveillance.²² Some runaways were captured, jailed, and sentenced to execution, which the Spanish crown attempted to expedite as they awaited their punishment.²³ The Spanish implemented waves of ordinances aimed at controlling the enslaved and implemented new taxes to finance military expeditions, but these were largely unsuccessful. Well-known leaders Diego Guzman, Diego Ocampo – who negotiated his freedom along with some 30 others – Miguel Biafara, Juan Criollo, and Juan Canario descended from the Baoruco mountains and constantly harassed the Spanish. These incursions prevented Spanish expansion into the countryside and kept settlements contained to Santo Domingo.²⁴ Accounts from 1532 describe a privileged enslaved man who killed his owner, then prompted others to begin a “killing spree” – but the perpetrators went unpunished because no one wanted to admit the uprising had occurred.²⁵

By the 1540s, there were as many as seven thousand maroons living, mining, and trading independently in the eastern country and mountains, and population imbalances between the increasing number of enslaved Kongolese and plantation personnel left sugar plantations vulnerable to raids.²⁶ Maroon presence had spread beyond the city of Santo Domingo and the Baoruco mountains, reaching as far northwest as what later became Môle Saint Nicolas.²⁷ Maroons developed subsistence spaces – called montes by Spanish colonists – for raising livestock, agriculture, and collecting drinking water. These spaces were attractive to enslaved people, runaways, and indigenous people who were seeking not only freedom but additional food to subsidize the inadequate provisions they received on plantations. Maroons shaped the island’s ecological landscape by subverting Spanish authority, waging war, and financially benefitting from their production through trade.²⁸ In 1544, military squads were sent to fight two maroon groups roaming the island; one group was composed of 15 rebels and the other group had 37 members, but most were killed or captured then returned to their owners. These maroons seem to have had nearly complete control over the countryside and, in April 1545, Prince Philip of Spain expressed concern that there were so many rebellious blacks occupying the island’s central zone that local Spaniards feared leaving their farms unless they were in groups, and that they had to sleep in shifts with weapons in their hands. Yet, despite the overwhelming presence of rebellious Wolofs in the 1521 uprising, Prince Philip continued to insist that the menace was due to ladino activity rather than that of the bozales, whom he believed did not have the ability to organize a revolt.²⁹

Throughout the 1540s, black rebellion was so widespread that by 1548 maroons had destroyed two-thirds of the island’s sugar plantations.³⁰ One such African rebel was Sebastian Lemba, a feared Kongolese maroon who led Baoruco encampments for 15 years. Spanish sources described him as a highly skilled blacksmith with extensive military knowledge, which he used to organize West Central African-style raids on nearby plantations, dispersing his forces of 140 small groups to attack from varying directions.³¹ During one such incursion for food, clothing, salt, and women, he kidnapped another KiKongo-speaking blacksmith to aid with the production of weapons.³² The Spanish initiated convoys into the mountains, where they found many Taínos and Africans; Lemba was caught and executed in 1547. Colonists propped his head on a city wall in Santo Domingo – Porta de Lemba – as a warning to repress other potential rebellions. Years after the execution, residents of Santo Domingo remembered Lemba as a military leader, regarding him as “Captain Lemba” whose confrontations with colonial forces were a “war.”³³ Other rebels who rose up met a similar fate. Fernando Monteros and, later in Spring 1554, Juan Vaquero “the cowboy” were hung and quartered, and Monteros’ body parts were displayed along the roads leading to Santo Domingo and in the city plaza.³⁴

By the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, the Spanish presence in western Española was declining, in part due to the constant threat of African rebellion. Maroons continued to establish strongholds throughout the island, especially in the regions that would become part of French Saint-Domingue. Not only were maroons a mainstay in the Baoruco mountains and Môle Saint Nicolas, they also settled in areas including Fort Dauphin, the Artibonite Valley, and the Grand Anse southern peninsula.³⁵ The Spanish could no longer sufficiently defend themselves against the encroachment of the English and the Dutch, but more particularly the French. A greater number of French travelers and boucaneer sea raiders descended on Tortuga, a small island off the northwestern coast. There the French boucaneers met and began trading with Senegambian and West Central African runaways who had made their way from the island’s Spanish side. Two African maroons, presumably Senegambians based on their ethnonym-based surnames – Cristobal Fula and Antonio Mandinga – spoke in court testimonies that they hunted and skinned cattle and brought the skins to the island’s northern coasts, where they traded textiles with the Portuguese and the French.³⁶ Kongo-Angolans were brought to the island in part because of the 1580 union between the Spanish and the Portuguese, who for over a century already had trade relations and presence in the Kongolands, resulting in West Central African captives becoming the dominant group transported to the island in the seventeenth century. In the 1590s, the Spanish sent cavalry troops against the absconders in the north, where they captured several of the most “dangerous” Angolans: Louis Angola, who ran away with his pregnant Biafran wife, Antonin Angola, and Sebastian Angola. Subsequent expeditions to capture maroons in the north were unsuccessful, and in the face of defeat the Spanish organized a program to depopulate the north and to relocate to the south in 1605, essentially ceding the west to the French – and to the maroons.³⁷

The Española census indicated that black and white populations steeply decreased after the forced relocation policy and also after the decline in new African arrivals: in 1606 there were almost 10,000 free and enslaved people, then only 4,500 in 1681.³⁸ As early as the mid-seventeenth century, the French informally settled on the island’s western region in larger numbers and illegally trafficked Africans to develop sugar enterprises in what was soon to become Saint-Domingue. This included raids on Spanish towns; for example, a ladino maroon was said to have participated in a 1644 French incursion on Azua where several enslaved people were taken.³⁹ African and African descended captives posed as much of a threat to the French as they had been to the Spanish, and as Chapter 6 will discuss further, they quickly took note of the contestation over the west–east border and exploited it and French–Spanish tensions to their benefit. A “gang of warriors,” comprised of over 30 Africans, was captured in the Baoruco mountains; many of these were Senegambians, as signified by their names: Juan Faula, Juan Mandigo, Beatriz Mandinga, Maria Mandinga, Francisco Mandinga, Anton Xolofo, and Ana Mandinga.⁴⁰ In 1662, a Spanish archbishop was sent to peacefully reduce the number of runaways in the Baoruco mountains. There he found 600 self-liberated families encamped in four palenques, another Spanish term for runaway communities, along the southern coast. The archbishop attempted to compromise with them; however, these maroons were self-sufficient and did not feel the need to negotiate surrender. They had corn and other crops, livestock, and the women searched for gold in the rivers. The men traded these goods in Santo Domingo – possibly with various African ethnic Catholic brotherhoods – and made weapons from iron and steel they acquired.⁴¹

There is no official count of maroons on the island in the seventeenth century, but it is likely that the settlements in Môle Saint Nicolas, Fort Dauphin, Artibonite, and Grand Anse expanded like the Baoruco mountain communities. Once the French officially claimed lands in a largely deserted western Española, the island’s population majority were politically and economically autonomous black people who had already waged a century-long struggle against enslavement on sugar plantations in the form of marronnage. Geographic spaces like Tête des Nègres at Môle Saint Nicolas and Fonds des Nègres in Grand Anse reflect the historical presence of maroons who probably remained in their settlements and reproduced families. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle against slavery had quickened the disruption of the Spanish colonial sugar industry, leading to broader legal and repressive measures in the 1680 Siete Partidas to constrain all black people including free blacks, ladinos, and bozales. Repression of free, enslaved, and maroon black people continued in the early eighteenth century as the French colonial state created its maréchaussée fugitive slave police force to support plantation economy development (also see Chapters 6 and 7). The historical memory of the maroon struggle, early collaboration with indigenous Taínos, and the significance of the Baoruco mountains and the countryside surrounding Santo Domingo as geographic scenes of action continued to be part of the cultural landscape that welcomed newly arrived Africans under French rule at the turn of the eighteenth century.

French Slavery and Race in Saint-Domingue

Structures and processes of human commodification, labor exploitation, death, and resistance were present in the Spanish colonial period and escalated under the French. While African resistance contributed to dismantling the Spanish sugar industry at Española, French forces took advantage of the vacuum of imperial power and ushered in an intensified, crop-diverse plantation system that relied on human commodification, labor exploitation, and racial hierarchy, and engendered an invigorated wave of death and resistance among the enslaved. French imperial expansion began in the seventeenth century and spread to several colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Plantation owners and colonists included few settlers compared to the growing number of enslaved African laborers, furthering the economic productivity of slave-holding Caribbean colonies. Early seventeenth-century French slave trading activity was largely clandestine and/or illegal, thus much evidence for this period is lacking. Still, the French established several trading companies and claimed various locations within the Caribbean, including Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Christopher and western Española, or Saint-Domingue. The development of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (West Indies Company) in 1664 expanded and elevated slave trading and commercialism for the French crown.⁴² The king of France deemed enslaved labor in the Caribbean islands as an “absolute necessity” to increase cultivation of cocoa, indigo, coffee, tobacco, and especially sugar, so he issued “a government bounty … on every African slave exported to the Americas.”⁴³ As profits from the Caribbean colonies, especially Martinique, grew, the French Crown’s 1685 Code Noir implemented mandates to dictate the slave trade and the people who were trafficked as enslaved labor.

After decades of raids from French, British, and Dutch pirates on western Española, and conflict between the French and Spanish, the Spanish officially ceded the contested territory to the French with the signing of the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick (Figure 2.1).⁴⁴ Chapter 6 will explore in more depth the position of enslaved Africans during ongoing contestations over the borderlands between the Spanish and the French – struggles that continued even after the treaty’s ratification. The treaty formally recognized French presence in the island’s western area, which they named Saint-Domingue – while the eastern territory still under Spanish rule was generally referred to as Santo Domingo. As Julius Scott has argued, during the seventeenth century several Caribbean islands, including Española, were essentially frontier zones populated by members of the “masterless class” – maroons, pirates, and European immigrant laborers. The turn of the eighteenth century, however, marked the rise of sugar production in the Caribbean and the unprecedented surge of the transAtlantic slave trade.⁴⁵ Though more research on early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue is needed, the French presence in western Española was solidified by the turn of the eighteenth century, and sugar and indigo production expanded. The steady output stimulated a growth in the enslaved population. In the century’s first decade and a half, just over 10,000 African captives disembarked at Saint-Domingue. By 1716, the yearly number of Africans arriving was over 14,000, which more than doubled between 1736 and 1745. Cap Français was a main port site for the French trade, receiving over 9,000 ships in 1790 alone. In 1728 there were 50,000 enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue; in 1754 that figure increased to 172,000, then reached 500,000 by the end of the century.⁴⁶ Approximately one-third of these newly arrived Africans arrived in the northern port city Cap Français, and other ports such as Port-au-Prince and Jérémie were used to a lesser extent. There remained a gender imbalance between enslaved men and women and the colonial living conditions for the enslaved were so deadly that the Africans did not sustain and reproduce themselves, which led plantation owners to continually replace that pool of laborers with new, Africa-born captives.⁴⁷ The unnaturally enormous and rapid growth of sugar production and of the enslaved African population transformed Saint-Domingue into a full-scale plantation-based slave society – completing the sugar revolution first initiated by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.

Figure 2.1. “Carte de l’Isle de St. Domingue”

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

In contrast to slavery in Africa, or any other known slave society where social or economic status was usually the primary factor in being enslaved, the European slave trade introduced racial dynamics that drastically altered the nature of bondage in the “New World,” simultaneously ushering in unequal power relations that permeated the fabric of the modern era (Winant Reference Winant2001). Supported by evolving ideological and religious beliefs that Africans, especially those who were not baptized as Christians, were uncivilized, barbaric, and backwards, chattel slavery in the Americas generally operated on a polarity of opposing racial identities where blackness was equated with slave status, whiteness with liberty and freedom, and indigenous, Asian, and multi-racial individuals occupied intermediate spaces. The global political and economic forces of enslaving and capitalist development that deliberately precluded black people from power and other institutional resources to create change in their respective locations shaped the collective experiences of Africans in the early modern diaspora (Hamilton Reference Hamilton1988, Reference Hamilton2007). European colonies in the Americas, particularly sugar producing islands that were wholly dependent on slave labor, actively prevented African descendants from having full participation in or access to decision-making liberties within spheres of political representation, education, and social or economic development (Stinchcombe Reference Stinchcombe1995).

As competition between the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French for control of the slave trade and demands for sugar intensified, so did the exploitation of unfree labor and the hardening of racial lines using legal and coercive means. Violence was the primary idiom that upheld economic, social, and political powerlessness among enslaved people and repressed acts of rebellion. The Code Noir, the French statute on slavery, legally codified the brute force of slavery as well as the racialization of freedom and slavery. The Code Noir allowed European men to marry enslaved and free African and African-descended women, creating a paternalistic racial structure that distributed power and resources according to racial identity and biological connectedness to whiteness. Coerced interracial relationships produced a small mixed-race population, the gens du couleur libre – or free people of color – who inherited wealth, land, and social mobility from their fathers. Though some mixed-race African descendants remained enslaved, many obtained manumission, educational opportunities in France, financial capital, and prosperous plantation estates and numbers of slaves that at times rivaled that of rich, white Saint-Dominguans.⁴⁸ Racial categorization of those who were not “purely” white was an obsession of sorts in Saint-Domingue – so much so that writer Moreau de Saint-Méry developed an elaborate schema describing 128 combinations of black, white, and AmerIndian mixtures, based on “classes” of skin tones, facial features, and hair types. Even the small number of free and enslaved sub-continental Indians were included in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s model; though he compared them to whites in character, he also implied their susceptibility to downward mobility due to their darker skin or any intermingling with Africans.⁴⁹ The resulting overarching categories included the mulâtre, who was half-white, half-black; the quarteron, one-quarter black; and the griffe, three-quarters black.⁵⁰ Among the population of those who descended from Africans, there was considerable stratification according to skin color, ethnicity or lineage, slave status, and social class, which would later inform political struggles in the colony during the late 1780s and early 1790s.

The free people of color numbered over 27,000 and comprised 47 percent of the entire free population, accounting for a little over 5 percent of the colony. They found success in the coffee and, increasingly, the indigo niche markets, which required less start-up funds and smaller workforces, making them safer investments than sugar plantations.⁵¹ Free women of color were especially entrepreneurial in Saint-Domingue’s urban centers. Their economic activities in domestic work allowed them to accumulate capital and shift toward the buying and selling of slaves, real estate, and luxury goods distribution.⁵² During the late eighteenth century, French laws increasingly excluded free people of color from various occupations and prevented them from accessing full political representation in France. Despite their small numbers, the frustrations of this wealthy and powerful group triggered their campaign for citizenship led by quarterons Vincent Ogé and Julian Raimond, who challenged the French national assembly in 1790.⁵³ In addition to the gens du couleur, some enslaved Africans and creoles in urban areas with artisanal trades could purchase their freedom or receive manumission from a family member. These former slaves – affranchis – were a modestly wealthy group who often maintained connections to the enslaved population through family, ethnic identity bonds, and work relations. For example, Toussaint Louverture was an affranchi before the Haitian Revolution, and his innermost circle was mostly comprised of free and enslaved Fon-speakers of the Arada nation.⁵⁴ In 1789, there were over one thousand free women and men of color living in Cap Français, many of whom owned homes, businesses, and enslaved Africans.⁵⁵ Cooks, carpenters, hairdressers, tailors, and other such workers from the Kongo and the Bight of Benin bought their liberty. Enslaved seamstresses also occupied the higher echelons of the bonded labor force. They trained in France to learn about the latest fashion trends and their owners leased them to other enslavers, allowing them to freely travel to markets or to see their clients. These women then used their geographic mobility and earned income to manumit themselves.⁵⁶

No singular racial identity existed among the African-descended population in Saint-Domingue due to the colonial hierarchy and stratification. Though free people of color faced racial discrimination and oppression, only the lives and labor of enslaved Africans and African descendants were commodified and exploited for the profit of others. Enslaved people, formerly enslaved affranchis and privileged gens du couleur, and self-emancipated maroons were mostly disconnected, though there were moments and situations where cooperation and solidarity, however fraught, among these groups was forged. Except for a few, most gens du couleur separated themselves socially, economically, and politically from Africanness and blackness. Free people of color held economic interests grounded in plantation slavery and virulently fought against abolition until it became painfully clear that civil rights for free people of color were only viable with the contributions of an army of emancipated slaves. Before, during, and after the revolutionary era, racial solidarity between enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color was highly situational and vulnerable to cleavages along economic or political lines. Chapter 4 will explore aspects of solidarity building among maroons, and Chapter 7 will examine the temporal nature of marronnage and the interactive patterns forged through collective escape and rebellion. As this book argues, these were key processes that enhanced racial consciousness and solidarity, and informed both the struggle for independence in 1802 and post-revolutionary conceptions of race and citizenship. By declaring blackness as the undergirding qualifier for freedom and citizenship in the constitution, the Haitian revolutionary state became a “maroon nation” that had broken away from and subverted the racial capitalist order of the early modern Atlantic world (Roberts Reference Roberts2015; Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2019).

The Social Conditions of Labor Exploitation

The major city of Saint-Domingue, and the wealthiest of all the French colonies, was Cap Français, usually referred to as Le Cap, a port along the northern coast. Known as the Northern plain, an area that spanned 75 kilometers from east to west and 25 kilometers from north to south of Le Cap, the districts surrounding and including the bustling port were the most affluent and opulent in the colony.⁵⁷ The city was home to a mixture of people – poor and wealthy whites, enslaved people who leased themselves out for contracted work, the gens du couleur, and affranchi artisans. Its social life was vibrant and included masonic lodges, philosophical and scientific societies, cafés, dance halls and theaters, rum shops, and churches. The city was also an attraction for visitors and runaway slaves who sought refuge there by passing as free. In the years of the North American War for Independence, some 200 runaways were found renting rooms in houses owned by free people of color during a police sweep of the Petite Guinée (Little Guinea) neighborhood on the west side of Le Cap.⁵⁸ The city was home to the marché des négres, or the negro market, where, especially on Sundays, enslaved people from rural districts brought foodstuffs to buy and sell. The enslaved population for this region was about 170,000. Table 2.2⁵⁹ shows the population distribution of Le Cap’s surrounding parishes as well as those outside Port-au-Prince, the colonial capital and next most populated city.⁶⁰

By 1789, the nearly 500,000 enslaved African and African descendants in Saint-Domingue were held on over 7,800 plantations: over 3,000 that grew indigo; 3,000 coffee producers; nearly 800 that cultivated cotton; and nearly 800 plantations that were producing sugar, which was the key to the colonial economy. Enslaved women, men, and children in this plantation economy lived within distinctly oppressive conditions. They were considered chattel that were commodities and forms of capital, typically counted alongside furniture and animals; they received no wages, nor did they have any political or legal rights or representation.⁶¹ Depending on crop growth and geographic location, plantations had as many as 250 enslaved African and African-descended women and men who performed a range of tasks that were hierarchically ranked according to the level of arduousness associated with the work. “Field hands” were those who spent the most time performing physical tasks: cultivating the ground, cutting and harvesting crops, then processing crops in preparation for sale and transport. Commandeurs, or slave drivers, were typically enslaved men who sometimes carried a whip to monitor and discipline the work gangs in the stead of the plantation’s owner. The commandeur was one of the most important positions on most plantations, since owners relied on them to guide the everyday labor practices and prevent any problems with enslaved workers. Though there were examples to the contrary, enslaved creole men typically occupied higher- ranked positions, including those that required artisanal apprenticeship, while women and Africans made up most of the field hands.

Men typically outnumbered women on plantations due to preferences for men during the early phases of the Atlantic trade, though the sex ratio came into balance in the years approaching the Haitian Revolution.⁶² Despite, or perhaps due to, the apparent dominance of a male presence, the division of labor between enslaved men and women had little variance. Few women occupied the domestic arena labor force that had responsibilities for cooking, cleaning, laundry, and healthcare; generally, women rarely occupied specialized positions compared to those who performed strenuous field hand labor. Conversely, there were an array of specialized areas that enslaved men occupied, such as drivers, sugar boilers, watchmen or valets. On sugar plantations, it was regular for women and men to cut cane side-by-side as well as perform other tasks in the distilling and refining processes.⁶³ Gender compositions and divisions of labor were largely dependent on crop growth, as were ethnic divisions of labor. What follows is a description of plantation life, focusing on Saint-Domingue’s major commodities: sugar, coffee, and indigo.

Human Commodification and Death

Enslavement in the Americas forced people to work for no compensation, thus they were alienated from the value of the agricultural items they produced. Based on the work of scholars like C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, it is generally accepted that the wealth generated from the trade of products extracted using slave labor is a clear connection between slavery and capitalist development in Europe. Recent scholarship also has given attention to the processes of trafficking and converting human beings into commodities to be bought, sold, traded, leased and disposed at the whims of the plantocracy. As the previous chapter discussed, the French procured African captives at coastal ports in exchange for rum, guns, and various other wares. Warfare and violent raids produced an abundance of captives available at African enslaving ports, which entailed a lower price point for human life on the continent than in the colony. Purchasing captive Africans was relatively cheap – according to records from the slave ship Marie-Séraphique, between the years 1770 and 1780 the average purchase price of a captive at the Loango Coast was 348 livres.⁷⁹ Survivors of the Middle Passage were purchased based on their potential productivity as laborers; during the time of the Marie-Séraphique voyages, the average price for enslaved people in Saint-Domingue was over four times the selling price in Africa (Table 2.4). The inflation of slave prices between the point of the slave ship’s departure and disembarkation further shows that enslavers were interested in maximizing profits at each stage of captivity between the Middle Passage to the Americas (Smallwood Reference Smallwood2008; Berry Reference Berry2017). Not only were African lives perceived as inferior to European lives, they were considered to be worth less in economic value until enslavers stripped them of every aspect of their African-ness and converted them into racialized chattel. Planters protected their financial investments in enslaved people by branding their initials to indicate ownership of an enslaved person. To obfuscate their ownership, or the shame of having been commodified and branded like cattle, bondspeople in Saint-Domingue used herbs to heal their scabs and make the brands illegible.⁸⁰

The newly emerging world capitalist system was in part dependent on the expendability of human life (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2011), and nowhere was this truer than Saint-Domingue where the deaths of enslaved people was inescapable. Early sources claimed that between one-third and one half of Africans brought to the colony perished in a short time frame, making it one of the deadliest colonies in the Americas.⁸¹ Mass fatalities were not uncommon. For example, an account about an aspiring coffee planter in Dondon claimed that he “set out with a coffee plantation and sixteen negroes; at the end of eighteen months … he found himself reduced to a single negro, the fifteen being dead in so short a space of time.”⁸² Rather than examine plantation records to calculate death rates as a lens through which to understand the lack of value of black life, I compare commodity prices to the monetary values associated with enslaved people to gain a glimpse into the ways economic trends reflected the lived reality of bondspeople who were similarly regarded as a commodity. Table 2.3, originally published in Nouvelles de Saint Domingue, compares the revenues from the sales of enslaved people (“Slave sales revenue”) and the “sale prices of coffee in the colony.”⁸³ The visualization of the relationship between “slave sales revenue” and “sale prices of coffee in the colony” represented in Figure 2.2 shows a slow growth of slave revenues while coffee sales quickly climbed toward the late 1780s. From these data points, we can speculate that the higher commodity prices rose, the relative value of black life declined. The growing demand for coffee and sugar in a global market stimulated the slave trade and likely was the cause for worsening conditions on plantations.

Figure 2.2. Slave sales revenue and sale prices of coffee in the colony

Table 2.4, originally published in Les Affiches américaines, similarly allows us to see the relationship between slave and sugar prices by showing the trajectory of average slave prices over time, beginning with 1,000 livres in 1730 and ending with 1,968 livres in 1786.⁸⁴ While the price of slaves almost doubled over the 50-year period, the average price of raw sugar nearly quadrupled. The table column labelled “Representative of the value of négres in quintals of sugar” displays the ratio between the average prices of enslaved people and average prices of raw sugar, and indicates a steady decline of the slave value–sugar price ratio. Therefore, when the value of sugar increased, the value of enslaved people decreased in relation to that of sugar. This ratio was not merely an economic statistic; it had real-life implications, especially given the well-known rigor and dangerous life on plantations. The increased sugar and coffee prices created incentives to increase production, which meant more forced labor, longer workdays, and more brutal practices to squeeze every ounce of energy from the enslaved workers. Figure 2.3 displays the ratio between slave and sugar prices, “representative of the value of négres in quintals of sugar”; the ratio’s decrease reflects the reality that the abundance of low-priced African captives combined with rapidly increasing demands for sugar essentially cheapened the value of black lives in Saint-Domingue, especially in the years leading to the Haitian Revolution.

Figure 2.3. Representative of the value of enslaved africans in “quintals” of sugar

The 1685 Code Noir was the official royal policy that claimed to provide protected treatment of slaves in the French colonies, and it included a minimum ration of food, clothing, and medical care for the disabled. Yet planters disregarded the Code, and plantations provided insufficient clothing, food, shelter, and little to no medical assistance. Only after the king of France reinforced Code Noir in 1784 were plantation owners required to provide the enslaved with land plots for cultivation. Newly arrived Africans were given a transition period of six to twelve months of “seasoning,” which was a process of structured care to acclimate the captives to the unfamiliar environment. Despite these efforts, newly arrived Africans died at rapid rates – to the extent that death rates exceeded birth rates throughout the eighteenth century.⁸⁵ African women’s fertility and overall health were particularly vulnerable to deterioration due to the trauma and violence of capture, the Middle Passage, and the relentless labor regimes on plantations.⁸⁶

Death was ubiquitous in Saint-Domingue and was particularly unkind to the enslaved population. Diseases such as smallpox, typhoid and yellow fever, dysentery, syphilis, scurvy, and scabies were widespread in the Atlantic zone and prevalent on slave ships due to lack of nourishment, supplies, and sanitation. Sick captives from ships sometimes brought these illnesses to the colony; for example, a slave ship that arrived at Le Cap in 1772 held several smallpox-infected captives who spread the disease, which eventually killed nearly 1,200 people.⁸⁷ In addition near unending work schedules, and illness and hunger, brutality toward slaves was commonplace. Enslavers sexually exploited women and girls with regularity and they even sexually violated men. In Trou, group of enslaved domestic laborers killed a planter named Poncet – he was their biological father, who had castrated his sons and committed incest with and impregnated his daughter. Sannite, Poncet’s pregnant daughter, was sentenced to a public hanging after the delivery of what was presumed to be his child.

Indiscretions of any kind were met with violence and torturous acts, some of which was documented by Baron de Vastey. Writing in 1814, de Vastey relayed horrific stories of planters’ treatment of enslaved people, which occurred frequently and often with impunity. Bordering on sadism, planters buried slaves alive, used their blood to clarify sugar, mutilated their genitals and cut off their limbs, while bloodhounds were commonly trained to hunt and capture enslaved runaways.⁸⁸ Enslaved people escaped for a myriad of reasons, one of which was torturous and even murderous plantation owners. In 1741 a wealthy colonist was charged with murdering over 200 of his own slaves, five of whom had been mutilated. His restitution was a 150,000-pound donation to the public works fund.⁸⁹ At the Dame de l’Isle Adam property in Plaine du Nord, a former runaway named Thomas was interviewed about his experiences and the reasons he escaped. Thomas was a creole commandeur who fled before All Saint’s Day in early November 1774, then returned in early January 1775. He fled because he feared retribution from the plantation agent M. Chapuzet for killing a mule, and the agent had a penchant for murdering enslaved people suspected of harming animals. Thomas testified that part of the reason he left was because he was trying to avoid the same fate as his own father, whom Chapuzet murdered for allegedly killing an enslaved woman.⁹⁰

Conceptions of death in popular Kreyol sayings like “moun fêt pou mouri” (people are born to die) point to the overwhelming volume and nature of death that began with the mass casualties of the Taíno and extended into the French colonial period.⁹¹ Death during the Middle Passage, from being overworked, illness, suicide or murder was a commonplace, and they were given the spiritual significance of death in West African and West Central African cosmologies, as were commemorations of the dead. Reverence of deceased familial ancestors and African royalty were and continue to be central to Haitian religious belief and practice. The Guedevi were the indigenous inhabitants of what later became the Dahomey Kingdom and may have been among Dahomey’s first victims to slave trading upon losing power to the kingdom’s growing imperial dominance. Known as the “children of Guede,” individuals and spirits from the Guedevi formed the Guede rite of lwa, or Haitian deities, which today rules over and protects matters concerning the life cycle to ensure collective survival: life, death, health, children, and fertility.⁹² Not only can the dead communicate important messages to the living about the mysteries of the material and non-material worlds, but death also represents freedom in the form of repatriation to Africa. The idea that one’s soul would return to Africa upon death was a commonly held belief among enslaved people, and in Haiti this notion is made most explicit in that the sacred, “other-world” of spirits and the dead is referred to as Guinea – the West African coastal region from which most captives from the Bight of Benin were taken.⁹³ Rituals related to death or the dead figured prominently in the sacred practices of the enslaved, and the next chapter will further explore how death intersected with an ethos of liberation. Though we do not have many records of African Saint Dominguans’ funerary practices, the few extant accounts give insights into the re-creation of ritual life in the colony.

African-inspired Cultural Creations in Saint-Domingue

Members of the African Diaspora did not lose their inherent understandings of themselves or the social and symbolic world(s) as they grappled with forceful separation from their African homelands and their respective social, economic, political, and religious institutions; new geographic locations; new societal structures; and unfamiliar human groups such as Europeans, AmerIndians, and other African ethnic groups. African Diaspora members constructed new and distinct identities and cultural formations that were largely rooted in their homeland worldviews and reformulated and re-articulated in the host society. Their collective ritual life connected them to Africa and to each other, and death rites and other practices helped integrate newly arrived enslaved people into the existing social fabric of the population, enculturating new arrivals and establishing the basis for collective consciousness, solidarity, and means of survival in the colony. Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, when out of sight from plantation personnel, displayed unseen facets of their personalities through laughter and joking, satirical song, gossip, and storytelling.⁹⁴ Some plantation workers employed a communal style of hoeing, timing their strokes to African rhythms. Pierre de Vaissière noted food preparation and eating styles, reverence for the elderly, and cultural expressions through song, dance, and death rites as distinctly African and connected to non-Christian beliefs.⁹⁵ Enslaved women practiced extended breastfeeding, a common method of birth control in West and West Central African societies, and even referred to themselves as the mother of their oldest child, suggesting motherhood bestowed a sense of honor. There were strong emotional bonds and affectionate relationships between mothers and their children; enslaved mothers were meticulous in caring for children and took considerable pride in children’s hygiene, appearance, and health.⁹⁶

Saint-Domingue had no formal educational opportunities for the enslaved population, and enslavers and some commentators assumed Africans were intellectually inferior. Yet, the enslaved indeed exemplified intelligence and many were literate in their native languages, including Arabic.⁹⁷ African descendants brought to Saint-Domingue from other colonies were familiar with European languages spoken within the Atlantic world. Many advertisements placed in Les Affiches américaines made note of runaways’ French, Spanish, English, Portuguese, or Dutch reading and writing skills as a form of human capital that could help the person pass for free. Enslaved Africans and African descendants had a “public face” in their contact with whites, but also shared an inner symbolic universe to which whites were not privy (Berger and Luckmann Reference Berger and Luckmann1966; Gomez Reference Gomez1998).

Death Rites

One significant way that enslaved people humanized themselves and expressed their African-inspired practices was through funeral rites (Wynter Reference Wyntern.d. :77–83). Enslaved people died rapidly and there were several burial sites for unbaptized blacks in Saint-Domingue, although they were not well tended. The law required the enslaved to be buried in alignment with the Catholic faith, but blacks often appropriated these rituals in their own styling and held funerals at night. Whites eventually abandoned the cemeteries, leaving Africans and African descendants to freely practice their sacred traditions for the dead. In a funeral procession in the southern Aquin, people carried with them garde-corps, or small figurine “bodyguards.” Women followed the body, singing and clapping their hands, while men came behind, playing slow drums. Afterward, family, friends, and members of the same ethnic group gathered for a repast. For several days after the funeral, mourners wore all-white clothing with kerchiefs on their heads.⁹⁸

As a public practice, enslaved peoples’ death rites were perhaps more visible to European eyes than other African-inspired cultural practices. As practices unfamiliar to European observers, they were still notable and thus survive in written records. In the 1760s, indigo planter Elias Monnereau documented a funeral ritual that culminated with a unique practice. Family and friends of the deceased invited associates to a Sunday ceremony to which everyone brought something to share, either food, rum, or another alcoholic beverage. As each person arrived, they paid respects and compliments to the dead, then formed a circle at the door opposite to where the corpse lay to collectively celebrate the person’s life with drink. Participants then knelt and recited prayers one after the other, then laid down to kiss the ground. After another drink, they danced in pairs until dinner, at which time they consumed a sacrificed pig.⁹⁹

Michel Descourtilz also observed a funeral that involved the calenda dance. A creole woman named Ursule had lost her friend François, and approached Descourtilz begging for a sheep, saying they already had the banza guitar and bamboula drums prepared for the dancing portion of François’ burial ceremony. Ursule sang and wept for her friend: “François, he has gone! Poor François! Poor man who has died!” She suddenly began to dance the chica, which Moreau de Saint-Méry identified as having Kongolese origins, saying “let me dance for him, let me dance for him.”¹⁰⁰ After the funeral proceedings, loved ones carefully cleaned and tended to corpses in preparation for sending them to burial sites. At times children led the procession in front of the coffin, carrying a large wooden cross to the feast and calenda dance.

Peyrac family plantation papers from Croix-de-Bouquet describe an interesting burial ritual wherein observers thought the ceremony was a spectacle or a game rather than a final farewell. Four men carried the deceased in her or his coffin on their shoulders and walked around

with a frightful spell, all at once running in zigzags, sometimes right, sometimes left, pretending that the spirit of the dead did not want to go through this or that road. The women uttered frightful cries, they wept, and conjured the evil spirit not to torment the soul of the deceased. Sometimes the carriers stopped, saying that the dead man did not want to go any further. Soon they resumed their contortions and pretended to let the coffin fall on the ground, but after a thousand exercises of address[ing the community], the body was restored to equilibrium and…deposit[ed] in its last abode. In reality, this strange race, corpse on the shoulder, [is to] “disorient the dead one to prevent him [from] find[ing] the way of his house.”¹⁰¹

This funerary practice of allowing the dead person’s spirit to visit members of the community before their final departure remarkably mirrors burial rites recorded in nineteenth-century Jamaica (Figure 2.4), where Bight of Biafran Igbos and Gold Coast Coromantees were most culturally influential. Processions for the dead on the Anglophone island had a social function of shaping values in the slave community by affirming the social status of the deceased, or by admonishing evil spirits and wrongdoers who were still alive. Some Africans in Jamaica believed that evil spirits could lure the newly dead into haunting the living, and that it was the responsibility of loved ones to ensure a proper burial so the spirit could peacefully transition to the other world.¹⁰² Bight of Benin/Gold Coast Minas in Saint Croix reported to a missionary named Christian Oldendorp that only those who “belonged to God” could receive a proper burial and that opposing forces would prevent the bearers from carrying the corpse forward.¹⁰³ These beliefs would help explain why the women and pallbearers in the ceremony at the Peyrac plantation in Croix-de-Bouquet allowed the spirit of the deceased to maneuver its way around evil spirits toward its final resting place.

Figure 2.4. “Heathen practices at funerals, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture”

In northern Saint-Domingue, funerals were held at a burial mound called Croix bossale at Fossette in the south end of Le Cap. Fossette was a heavily used cemetery, averaging almost two burials per day and completely turning over the cemetery grounds every three years.¹⁰⁴ Fossette, along with the public square in Le Cap, was a gathering space for African-Saint Dominguans to hold services that were infused with Africa-inspired and Catholic practices. In accounts from 1777, Fossette was a center of dance and musical activity on Sunday nights and holidays.¹⁰⁵ The burial processions were organized affairs, and leaders were ranked as kings and queens with

sashes of different colors with different types of gold and silver braid that they wear on their jackets, and the women wear around their waist. They pay a subscription of several portugaises and burial fees which the others inflate as they feel like it. These funerals give rise to big processions, at which the sashes are worn.¹⁰⁶

There was an informal system of inheritance, where a person’s belongings were distributed in a hierarchical fashion to her or his children first, other family members second, then to other blacks who also had children.¹⁰⁷ The large parade, mutual aid effort, and uniform costumes are indicators of a lay brotherhood/sisterhood organization for and by black Catholics, as was the case in Afro-Iberian-influenced places like Brazil, Cuba, Rio de la Plata, and even New York and New England. These confraternities held ritual celebrations on Sundays and major holidays, ensured a proper burial for the dead, served as informal banks for enslaved blacks to purchase their freedom, and often were the nexus of identity formation and rebellion organization.¹⁰⁸

Death was an inescapable reality in Saint-Domingue; therefore, commemorating it, preventing it, and at times inflicting death were core components of African-Saint Dominguans’ ritual life. Naturally, the preoccupation with death was accompanied by supernatural powers that enslaved people drew upon to not only address personal concerns, but to critique and rectify the societal imbalances created by racialized enslavement. Thus, death rites, as a mode of enculturation, functioned as platform for resistance to the very racialized enslavement that commodified, exploited, and killed enslaved people. The François Mackandal affair (discussed below and in Chapter 3) and subsequent ritual events stand as examples of spiritual activities intersecting with seditious notions of freedom and liberation. However, participants of these rituals, as well as those rituals described below, came from various African ethnic backgrounds and statuses in the slave community, suggesting solidarity was beginning to form a collective identity around blackness and anti-slavery sentiments.

Worldviews and Ritual Life

Analysis of enslaved populations’ lifeways, particularly religious practices, in the Americas must begin with an historical study of Africa – a difficult and complex task due to African geo-political processes and gaps in slave trade data (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1997; Morgan Reference Morgan1997). Africa was and continues to be extremely diverse, with thousands of languages and cultural groups. However, many of these distinct cultural expressions and identities were mutually intelligible through geographic proximity, political allegiance, and trade relations. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, the slave trade did not randomly distribute captive Africans, it trafficked them in homogeneous clusters alongside peoples from neighboring regions (Hall Reference Hall2005). Further, several African groups shared undergirding worldview principles that informed their behaviors and practices (Herskovits Reference Herskovits1958; Mbiti Reference Mbiti1990). Christian Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary in eighteenth-century Danish St. Croix, documented findings from his observations, interactions, and conversations with enslaved Africans about their identities, homelands, cultures, and religious beliefs. While he acknowledged variance in Africans’ beliefs and practices, there were several areas of overlapping spiritual tenets, including: (1) one supreme, benevolent deity; (2) lesser gods associated with forces of nature, territories, and family that mediate between humans and the supreme god; (3) the use of material objects imbued with sacrality; (4) the performance of prayers and sacrificial offerings to the supreme and lesser gods; (5) ritual leaders, male or female, who also operated as community healers and diviners; and (6) the transmigration of spirits post-mortem.¹⁰⁹

This historical overview of African worldviews and emergent cultural connections focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ouidah port on the Bight of Benin Coast provided the largest number of slaves to Saint-Domingue. The vaudoux – derived from the Fon term vodun – was the most well-known ritual in the colony, and the term was probably liberally applied to rituals and practitioners that may have been performing rites from another region. Due to the dominance of West African cultural and religious continuations in historical and contemporary accounts of Haitian Vodou, scholars argue that Bight of Benin groups (Arada/Fon, Nagô/Yoruba) established the mold for religiosity among the enslaved in Saint-Domingue into which later-arriving groups would be incorporated (Hebblethwaite Reference Hebblethwaite2014). After the 1750s, ports along the West Central African Loango Coast were most used in the French slave trade, and the broadly defined “Kongolese” became the majority ethnic group in the prosperous colony. Recent research has focused on the cultural influence of the Kongolese (Thornton Reference Thompson1993b, Reference Thompson1991; Vanhee Reference Vanhee and Heywood2002; Mobley Reference Mobley2015) and sheds new light on how their activities may have reflected a sense of militancy, particularly given the contentious history of the Kongo and its surrounding kingdoms in the late eighteenth century.

Members of the various African ethnic groups, along with creole African descendants born in the colony, formed ritual sects that were distinct from each other yet shared common worldviews. These groups were described as “nations,” and were distinguished by dances, songs, association with spirit forces, and the use of flora and fauna that facilitated healing, divination, and protection. Among others, the calenda, chica, wangua, and the Dahomean vaudoux and Kongolese petro rites were the predecessors to what would become the Haitian Vodou religion.¹¹⁰ Initiation processes and vows of secrecy characterized several of these rites. Sacred practices often occurred when Africans and African descendants gathered in wooded areas after dark, in unused churches or burial processions, as these were protected places away from plantation authorities.¹¹¹ These assemblies were not merely spiritual in nature but were protected spaces for Africans and African descendants to express their intentionality for liberation.

Along with spiritual gatherings, individuals used ritual artifact technologies in their daily lives to mediate conflicts, to bring about good fortune, to heal sickness, or for protection from negative spirits. Ritual leaders who created these artifacts held privilege within the enslaved community but lived and worked alongside other laborers and runaways. Their esteem within the community was based on their efficacy in using spiritual power to make things happen in the natural realm. When leaders or their respective spirits were not efficacious, followers shifted their allegiance to more powerful rites. This would have been particularly true for newly arrived Africans whose traditions included the veneration of familial ancestors in sacred spaces such as burials or shrines. These Africans would not have had access to their familial spirits due to their forced migration to Saint-Domingue; therefore, they would have gravitated to spirits that were associated with universal forces, for example the Yoruba orisha. Given the ethnic pluralism of the colony, we can assume there was a rapidly changing spiritual landscape of shifting loyalties between competing sects and shared symbols between cooperative sects, all of which contributed to the forging of a collective consciousness and a cultural repository of ideas, histories, and practices.¹¹²

Islam

A scant but growing amount of archival data, in addition to what has already been uncovered and interpreted by Emilie Diouf (Reference Diouf1998) and Michael Gomez (Reference Gomez2005), further indicates there were a number of enslaved Muslims in Saint-Domingue. Slave trade records, as discussed in Chapter 1, indicate that captives from Senegambia and other Muslim areas on the Upper Guinea Coast were the third largest group brought to Saint-Domingue in the early eighteenth century. Though their numbers declined in the latter half of the century, a disproportionately high frequency of insurrections on ships leaving Senegambia headed to the Caribbean occurred in the years surrounding the Futa Jallon jihad and the short-lived Futa Tooro revolution that banned the slave trade. The influence of anti-slavery sentiments in Senegambian Islamic thought and practice may have influenced rebellion in Saint-Domingue. Accounts described maroon and famed poisoner François Mackandal as a Muslim from the Upper Guinea region, and several of his associates were Nagô/Yorubas also from the Bight of Benin. The notes from the prosecution trial against Mackandal include descriptions of his gris-gris sacred amulets, which contained written Qur’anic prayers. During his late seventeenth century religious movement, Nasir Al Din similarly instructed Senegambian soldiers of the Islamic faith to carry their talismans with them in battle to symbolize the power of the Qur’an.¹²⁵ Over one century later, Colonel Charles Malenfant reported finding African rebels during the Haitian Revolution in 1792 who carried macoutes, a type of basket or sack that enslaved people carried over their arms or chest, which contained Arabic writings believed to be prayers in text.¹²⁶ Swiss traveler Pierre Du Simitière visited Saint-Domingue, mainly Port-au-Prince and Léogâne, in the 1770s. In January 1773 at Léogâne, he recorded that an enslaved man of the Mandinga nation wrote a Qur’anic prayer in Arabic. A photograph of the text remains and appears in Figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5. “Arabic fragment, a West African gris-gris, Library Company of Philadelphia”

Memorizing, reciting, and re-writing the Qur’an was an important way of proving oneself to be an upstanding Muslim.¹²⁷ Some enslaved Muslims in Artibonite attempted to fashion writing utensils using lemon juice, bamboo, wood tablets, and parts of palm trees.¹²⁸ Du Simitière found a second prayer that cast blessings on believers and castigated scandal mongers, back-biters, and those who piled up wealth.¹²⁹ This prayer was likely contained in a macoute ritual packet, and seemingly reflected a spiritual castigation of the type of unethical trading practices that were rife during the height of the transAtlantic slave trade. The little evidence of these writings that exists further proves there were captives from Islamic regions of Africa who were taken to Saint-Domingue. A group of four runaways escaped a St. Marc plantation in 1768; possibly at least two of them were Muslim: Simon of the Tapa nation and Sultan dit or “the so-called” Alla, a 45–50-year-old commandeur of Aguia ethnicity.¹³⁰ Simon and Sultan’s ethnic origins suggest they were from regions of the Bight of Benin that were influenced by Islam.¹³¹ Given that Sultan, in particular, retained an Arabic name along with the nickname “Alla,” meaning God, it is possible he had been targeted during the Futa Jallon jihad for being a Muslim cleric who was against slavery – presumably because he escaped his bondage. Sultan’s spiritual power and leadership qualities may have been considered an asset to maintain order in the plantation economy, thus he was put in the position of a commandeur.

Conclusion

Moreau de Saint-Méry’s early observations of the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue indicated that Africans of different ethnicities did not interact and opposed one another for worshipping different gods, and that creoles overall dismissed continent-born Africans. The above examples of ritual life in Saint-Domingue, however, show that Africans of various ethnicities performed rites that typically are associated with other groups; for example, the Mozambicans who danced the vaudoux, or the Igbo man seeking entrance to an Arada ceremony. These cases suggest that white observers probably incorrectly labeled or misunderstood the ritual practice or the identity of the Africans themselves. This book uses primary source evidence to propose the idea that creoles and Africans of various extractions were not as self-segregating as previously assumed, since labor regimes largely dictated their social interactions. The newly arrived needed sources of human affirmation from a community of individuals sharing the same positionality, facilitating biological ties between creoles and their first-generation African kin. Recent plantation and slave trade studies have shown the demographic makeup of the enslaved population with a focus on ethnic dominance in particular geographic areas, for example the large numbers of West Central Africans on Saint-Domingue’s northern coffee plantations. But these approaches neglect the existence of enslaved people of other ethnic identities and the ways in which they were enculturated into plantation-based communities during ritual practices and marronnage.

Due to the rigors of the plantation workday, it was not easy for enslaved Africans and African descendants to find time to engage in their sacred rituals. Field hands especially, who were overwhelmingly women and African, spent long days performing arduous labor under the strict supervision of the commandeur plantation driver. The commandeur, though usually an enslaved person, held a place of authority and was responsible for keeping order among the work gangs and doling out punishments with a whip. His authority in the fields often translated to authority in marronnage, which will be further explored in later chapters. The workday generally ended at sundown, although sugar plantations ran in 24-hour shifts, so there were only pockets of time when laborers were not heavily monitored, such as in their shared housing quarters, during assigned errands, or at the weekly Sunday market at the urban centers Cap Français and Port-au-Prince. Artisanal laborers, mostly males and creoles, such as carpenters, shoemakers, and hairdressers, had more flexibility to traverse the colony as part of their quotidian work duties. These everyday forms of mobility, along with slaves’ escapes, allowed enslaved people to foster and maintain relationships, and to surreptitiously exchange sacred objects and organize ritual gatherings.

Ritual activity and marronnage were not only ways for enslaved people to gather and communicate, they were also vehicles through which long-standing traditions of resistance challenged the commodification, forced labor, and death that pervaded and shaped their lives in grotesque ways. The following chapter will explore further the spiritual worlds of the enslaved who, in conjunction with and sometimes organized by maroons, used sacred objects and their sacred understandings of their social conditions to mediate the realities of enslavement in Saint-Domingue and castigate its most oppressive and exploitative dimensions.