This profile details the life of Médor. His story becomes central to the colonial record after he attempts to heal others during an illness outbreak and is accused of poisoning, leading to a coerced confession that ignited widespread panic about an alleged poisoning conspiracy and is considered the start of the “Makandal Affair.”
Médor’s tragic death while shackled underscores the brutal realities faced by enslaved people and the devastating consequences of colonial fear and misinterpretation.
Médor lived in Cap Français in the 1740s, not as a resident, but as property. He moved through the world in livery, the enslaved valet of a colonial surgeon named Philippe Delavaud—a man who cut flesh by day and claimed ownership of it by night. In the Delavaud household, Médor was one among a small group of enslaved people, watched constantly, controlled meticulously.
His African name—his first name—was stripped from him. In its place, the Delavauds stamped a French one, as if domination wasn’t complete until it reached the tongue. Whatever name he was born with, it now floats somewhere beyond the archive, a ghost in a system built to forget.
Médor was not born Médor. That name was a collar fastened later, in the shadows of Cap Français. His beginning traces back to West Africa—most likely what we now call Benin or Togo. We know this not because the archives cared to remember, but because a friend named Venus once overheard him speaking with a man called Gaou—in their language. That language, though unnamed by the record, carried the rhythm and roots of the Fon-speaking Kingdom of Dahomey, a place known more to Europeans for its military might than its people’s humanity.
Médor, Gaou, and Venus were likely torn from their homeland during one of Dahomey’s expansionist campaigns, fed into the Atlantic slave trade like so many others, their bodies turned into cargo. He probably spoke Fon, maybe Ewe, or another of the Gbe tongues—the languages that once flowed freely in the forests and markets of West Africa. In Saint-Domingue, French or Creole was what he used with his captors. But among his own, away from the ears of the Delavauds, he returned to his first languages—the ones not yet beaten out of him. The ones that reminded him who he had been before the ships.
Médor arrived in Saint-Domingue probably in the early 1730s and had survived slavery for at least twenty years by 1757. For fifteen of those years, he was enslaved in a house in Cap Français. As a surgeon’s personal servant, he likely experienced moments of autonomy and greater freedom of movement than other enslaved people, possibly leaving the house alone for errands or to carry messages. He was subordinate to Agnès, an enslaved woman who managed the household. He was part of the dynamic commercial economy of Cap Français and was given permission by Delavaud to buy and sell goods for his own profit, dealing in valuable cloth. He held debts owed to him, which amounted to roughly one-fourth of his freedom price if his enslaver had allowed him to buy his freedom, which Delavaud never did. He saw slavers docked in the harbor, which might have triggered memories of his own enslavement journey. He had friends who had helped him and others work toward freedom. He attended nighttime calendas (gatherings with drumming, dancing, and singing) where people might experience spirit possession.
Forced Relocation to Les Perches
Médor didn’t choose to leave Cap Français—he was uprooted. When Philippe Delavaud gave up the city, trading scalpels for seedlings, Médor was made to follow. The surgeon-turned-planter dragged his household up into the mountains, some forty miles inland, to a patch of land too rough for sugar but good enough for coffee. The journey itself was brutal—part wagon, part foot, part mule trail—cutting through thick terrain toward territory still being carved out by colonial ambition.
This wasn’t a move. It was exile. On that unforgiving estate at Les Perches, Médor joined twenty-four other enslaved people trying to survive conditions far harsher than the city they left behind. The mountain soil may have been fertile for coffee, but it choked the lives of those forced to work it. And in the move, Médor lost more than a familiar landscape—he lost his people. Friends like Dainé, part of the fragile web of connection he’d built in Cap Français, were left behind. In the mountains, he was cut off, isolated, and made to begin again under the same chains, only now deeper in the colony’s interior.
In 1757, the Delavaud plantation at Les Perches was unraveling. Famine gripped the mountains, and a strange illness crept through the camp—striking down both people and animals with sudden, inexplicable death. The enslaved were starving, sick, and dying, and no help was coming from the house that claimed to own them.
In the face of this crisis, Médor stepped in—not as a doctor trained in European medicine, but as a healer rooted in a different tradition. He tried to care for his fellow enslaved, drawing on what knowledge he had and reaching beyond the plantation walls for help. He turned to three enslaved men on nearby ranches—Gaou, Daouin, and Ferou—each steeped in African healing practices and local botanical knowledge. These men were more than herbalists; they were memory keepers, carrying the science of survival across an ocean and into the hills of Saint-Domingue. Where colonial medicine saw mystery, they saw patterns. Where it saw contagion, they saw imbalance. And while the plantation withered, they tried, in their way, to hold life together.
Accusation & Interrogation
Médor tried to heal—but healing, in the world he inhabited, could turn lethal. The medicine he gave to the sick enslaved on the Delavaud plantation killed rather than cured. Within days, his patients were dead. Whatever knowledge he carried, whatever advice he had received, had failed him. And with that failure came not just grief, but rage—directed at the men who had given him the remedies: Gaou, Daouin, Ferou. His trust, his effort, his hope—all of it had turned on him.
By May 1757, the weight of suspicion had shifted fully onto his back. His enslaver accused him of poisoning. Not healing. Poisoning. The difference was life or death—not just for those who had died, but now for Médor himself. For two days (May 25, 26, 1957), he was interrogated, not by a court, not by law, but by Philippe Delavaud and six neighboring planters. They demanded answers, and he gave them one: the medicine he’d used was “bad.” He called it poison.
That word ignited panic.
They locked him in a room, shackled him to a bed. And his confession—filtered, paraphrased, distorted—spread like fire. There was no transcript of his words. No record of the questions. Just a summary in French, crafted by men who had already decided who he was.
Médor knew the stakes. If they handed him over to the court in Fort Dauphin, torture would follow. He’d seen it before. He understood what “justice” meant to the colony. So he played for time. He named others. He redirected blame. He tried to survive the only way an enslaved man accused of sorcery and murder could—by convincing the men who owned his body that he was worth more alive than in pieces.
Testimony and Revelations
Testimony and Revelations
When Médor spoke of poison, he wasn’t necessarily speaking the language of the Code Noir. He was speaking in the layered idioms of West Africa, where a single word could hold multitudes—healing and harm, medicine and magic, resistance and risk. In his confession, filtered through the ears of colonists and the pens of planters, he admitted to giving poisons to the Delavauds for years. And yet—Philippe, Augustine, and their children lived. The implication lingered like smoke: if he had intended to kill, he had failed. Or he had chosen not to.
But then came the deeper revelation. Médor spoke of a “secret among the Blacks,” a murmur that had grown into a quiet movement among the free Black community in Cap Français. He claimed they were using powders—remedies, poisons, medicines—to increase their numbers, to fortify their position. The endgame wasn’t slaughter—it was negotiation. A shift in the balance of power. A collective recalibration of who got to speak, and who got to rule.
The powders, he said, came from many hands. From Dainé in Cap Français, a free Black man. Later, from Gaou, Daouin, and Ferou in Les Perches—men steeped in the knowledge of herbs, roots, and resistance. Médor named names: Jean Yoquo. Adrien. Christophe. André Carbon. Jupiter. Quessy. Each one a node in the web, a carrier of knowledge deemed dangerous because it had not been sanctioned by whiteness.
He spoke, too, of Angélique—an enslaved woman who had secretly dosed her enslaver in a desperate bid for freedom, not just for herself, but for her family. And of Agnès, long dead, who Médor claimed had once poisoned Philippe Delavaud’s wine. He said she had been shielded by the household conspiracy, with blame cleverly redirected toward Augustine Delavaud. A quiet revolution, staged in the shadows of the domestic sphere.
And then there was Marie Jeanne, the child of a Delavaud domestic and André Carbon. Médor claimed she had been rescued from Augustine’s abuse, hidden away by Gérard Carbon’s people—a counter-kidnapping in the name of protection.
Finally, Médor offered advice, not as a servant but as a man who had seen the architecture of resistance from the inside. He told the colonists what they feared most: that the night was not theirs. That freedom traveled by footpaths and whispers. That knowledge was being passed, and power was being built. If they wanted to stop it, they would need to sever the bonds between plantations, silence the night, and shut the gates—not because they were safe, but because they no longer were.
Loss of Hope and Death
By the second day, Médor knew the tide had turned. Whatever fragile hope he had clung to—of surviving, of navigating the tightrope between confession and condemnation—had begun to slip. Maybe it was the presence of Philippe Delavaud, his enslaver, now seated among his interrogators. Maybe it was the testimony of Venus, someone he had once trusted, now twisted by fear or force. Whatever it was, something in him broke.
They made him face the people he had named—Gaou among them. He retracted some of his claims. The story began to fray. The performance of self-preservation was unraveling under the weight of the lies they needed and the truths he couldn’t afford to tell.
Médor saw what was coming. Fort Dauphin loomed in his mind not as a place of judgment but as a chamber of torture. So he sent word—a message of understanding, or perhaps surrender. He knew what it meant to be Black, enslaved, and accused. The math of survival no longer added up.
By Saturday morning, Médor was found dead. Still shackled, still imprisoned, but now silent. A knife in his ribs. A chain around his neck. His body bore the evidence of past brutality—healed scars on his buttocks from earlier whippings. Delavaud said Médor had taken his own life. That he had done it out of guilt, out of some redemptive desire to protect the innocent.
But the record, thin as it is, betrays that claim. Médor’s death was too convenient, too timely. There were people with power and motive, people who had more to lose if he made it to court. His voice, alive, was a threat. Dead, it was controllable. Quiet. Finished.
Whatever truth Médor carried died with him—bled out on a pallet, shackled and silenced in the name of colonial order.
Significance
Médor’s confession—wrenched from him in a locked room, under the weight of chains and the threat of torture—became the spark. The moment when fear metastasized into full-blown hysteria.
The colonial record would later mark it as the beginning of the Makandal Affair, but in truth, it was the colony itself, already brittle with anxiety, that needed little more than a whisper to fracture. Tyranny requires constant effort: it breaks, it leaks.
His words—distorted by pain, pressure, and translation—described a secret movement, a vision of freedom cloaked in the language of healing and survival. He spoke of free Black communities preparing to confront the whites. To the colonists, these were not warnings—they were declarations of war. The idea that Black people, enslaved or free, were organizing not just for escape but for revolution, ignited their worst fears. They heard poison and saw rebellion. They heard medicine and saw murder.
The confession fed a colonial narrative eager for villains, not complexity. What Médor said, or what they needed him to say, became the blueprint for a spiraling campaign—an all-consuming investigation into poisoning that swept up scores of free and enslaved Black people. His voice, broken under duress, was made into evidence. And the fear it unleashed would shape Saint-Domingue for years to come, casting suspicion not just on those who healed, but on the very act of resistance itself.
The colonists in Saint-Domingue were not fearless rulers. They were terrified men in white linen, gripping tight to a crumbling order that they knew—deep down—could not hold.
Médor’s case shook them not because he was powerful, but because he reminded them how little power they truly had. All it took was one man, one confession, one whisper of organized resistance—real or imagined—for the entire colonial edifice to tremble.
This is the paradox of tyranny: it looks like dominance, but it is built on fear. It must be policed, maintained, surveilled. It demands confession, spectacle, and blood. It cannot rest. Because to rule over others against their will is to live in permanent dread that they will one day remember who they are. And who they are is free.
Freedom is not granted by decree. It isn’t issued like papers. It does not come from the crown or the code. It is innate, elemental. We are born with it—wrapped in it like skin. It requires no justification, no ritual. And that terrifies the oppressor, because it cannot be owned, only denied.
The colonists misread every sign. They saw healing and called it poison. They saw mourning and called it rebellion. They saw community and called it conspiracy. But what they really saw—what haunted them—was the fragility of their rule. They were perched atop a volcano and pretending it was a throne.
Médor’s death, and the panic it unleashed, reveals that slavery was never stable. It was a system forever on the brink, held together by brutality and the desperate need to believe in its own permanence.
But you don’t beat and chain a people unless you’re afraid of what they might do without those chains. You don’t ban drumming and dance unless you know that rhythm carries memory. You don’t silence a man like Médor unless you’re terrified of what his voice might awaken.
Oppression is not the mark of strength. It is the mask fear wears when it’s too ashamed to speak its name.
