Haitian Vodou holds that its lwa come from twenty-one spiritual nations, and Daniels reads that count as a record of who was carried to colonial Saint-Domingue. The nanchon amount to a confederation of spirits assembled by enslaved Africans of many origins, and devotion to them lets Haitians and other Africana practitioners claim a continental inheritance rather than a single ancestral line.

She works outward from Andre Pierre's painted pantheon, whose figures appear largely in ritual order along a winding path, then offers a religious genealogy of the four best-known nanchon: Rada and Nago, Gede and Petwo-Kongo, with briefer treatment of the less-studied nations. Rada is traced to Allada and Dahomey, and the Fon roots of Vodou vocabulary are set out in detail, from the word Vodou itself to the terms for priest, initiate and sacred drummer.

The argument that results is for a Pan-Africanism lodged inside Haiti's national religion.