Another indicator of oppositional consciousness and racial solidarity were the connections between enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color during revolts and ritual gatherings that helped the beginnings of the Revolution. The Bwa Kayman ceremony spiritually solidified alliances between West Central Africans and Bight of Benin Africans; and the struggle of the formerly enslaved rebels and maroons propelled racial solidarity between Africans, creoles, and free people of color. I recount mobilizations that occurred in Saint Domingue’s northern, western, and southern departments, and attempt to identify patterns of racial, gender, and labor politics that would inform post-independence social, economic, religious, and political formations. The first post-independence Constitution declared “the Haitians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks,” making Haiti the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas.

The first chapter of this book begins with understanding of African histories as the headspring of cultural and political expressions in Saint Domingue, with the hopes of uncovering Africans’ and African descendants’ epistemological and ontological core. The chapter gives an overview of the African origins of slave trade captives through the lens of several themes: religion, warfare, rebellion, slavery, and anti-slavery sentiment. The chapter focuses on regions and ethnic groups most affected by French trading to Saint Domingue: Aradas and Nagô/Yorubas from the Bight of Benin, and KiKongo-speaking peoples of West Central Africa. A survey of those political cultures, African slavery and the French Atlantic slave trade, and coastal and slave ship resistances demonstrates that Africans’ consciousness was imbued with complex localized ideas about the nature of slavery – and legacies of resistance to it – before disembarking at Saint Domingue.

A historical background of Saint Domingue within the wider context of the European colonization will be the focus of the second chapter, which frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. Less than twenty years after arrival, enslaved Africans were constantly escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taíno in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions were reactions to the brutal treatment of Taíno and Africans in the encomienda labor system, the emergence of the slave plantation-based sugar economy and processes of racialization, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining the immediate social world of enslaved people, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

The project of modernity, how, when, and where it began and who produced it, continues to plague historians and sociologists alike. Writing in 1925 as she accepted her diploma for completion of the doctoral dissertation L’Attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la révolution [Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805], Anna Julia Cooper’s remarks instruct us to be constantly in search of self-defined expressions of humanity and development beyond the scope of the Western world. Cooper’s dissertation did just that in expanding study of the French Revolution to its imperial territories in the Caribbean – Saint-Domingue specifically – to make the case that without consideration of racial slavery in the colonies, the political and philosophical ideals propagated by the Declaration of the Rights on Man and the Citizen were woefully incomplete. That Cooper used water, currents, and the ocean to symbolize human movement toward new, liberated, modes of being is perhaps an irony, given that movement across the Atlantic Ocean was largely a voyage toward unfreedom for captive Africans. Still, even the lives of those who survived oceanic journeys and were enslaved in the Americas were not without alternate flows, bends, and radical turns that would alter the course of human history; the “currents” of which Cooper spoke were and are not linear.

Colonialism and plantation slavery were primarily geographic endeavors of conquering and staking claim to land and space. Rather than focus on the transience or permanency of escape, that is to say the debates about petit and grand marronnage, this chapter argues that maroons were spatially pervasive in Saint Domingue and employed their knowledge of geographic settings and geopolitical borders to subvert locations delineated for plantation development and imperial expansion. Mountains, sinkholes, caves, and rivers provided physical pathways for maroons to secretly traverse the colony or to stake out hiding spaces. The geopolitical border dividing French Saint Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo also represented a form of cultural knowledge that Africans in Saint Domingue exploited for well over a century by taking up arms against both empires and fleeing to Santo Domingo, seeking freedom from enslavement or better treatment and quality of life.

This chapter integrates findings from micro-level patterns of marronnage with macro-level conditions and examines how the rates and nature of marronnage changed according to broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors. I consider the evolution of marronnage and slave rebellion from the early 18th century within the context of exploding sugar and coffee industries, the expansion of the slave trade and rapidly increasing African population, structural cleavages created by war and famine, as well as other environmental factors. I also give particular attention to the presence of the maréchaussée fugitive slave police and the ways in which they did or did not successfully repress the presence and threat of maroons in the colony.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter uses analysis of over 10,000 runaway slave advertisements in an in-depth look at marronnage through the lens of network building, identity formation, and race and solidarity work. Nearly half of the thousands of runaways described in the Les Affiches américaines advertisements fled within a small group of two or more people. Many were racially or ethnically homogeneous maroon groups that rallied around their collective identity, while groups composed of diverse ethnic backgrounds bridged their differences to forge an emerging racial solidarity. The chapter also explores the complex relationships between enslaved people, maroons and free people of color since absconders often had previous relationships with and sought refuge with people beyond their immediate plantation, highlighting the importance of social capital in finding success at marronnage.

This chapter focuses on the spiritual world of enslaved people and the ways in which politicized consciousness and resistance were infused in ritual practices. This chapter is theoretically grounded by insights from the social movements field related to the politicization of social spaces and the role of cultural artifacts in social movements. I frame spiritual and ritual gatherings as free spaces where participants’ oppositional consciousness and sense of racial solidarity was enhanced through holding audience to anti-slavery and racial consciousness rhetoric; employing spiritual technologies to protect oneself and attract good fortune, usurping ultimate power from white plantation owners and asserting personal agency; and using marronnage to organize and recruit new ritual participants.

Here I introduce the text’s main argument, that the web of networks between African and creole runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color built through rituals and marronnage was a key aspect to building the racial solidarity that made the Haitian Revolution successful. The theoretical framework for this comes from my attempts to bridge thoughts from Sociology and African Diaspora Studies, more specifically using insights from scholarship on the Black Radical Tradition to correct and contribute to the sociology of collective consciousness, social movements, and revolutions.