Two religious chants recorded by colonial writers and published in 1797 and 1814 are the hinge of this study of slave religion in Saint-Domingue. Geggus shows that their vocabulary is Kikongo rather than Fon, a finding awkward for the long consensus that the Aja-Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin shaped Haitian vodou above all others. He traces how the chants were mistranslated, including the stirring oath to destroy the whites that C. L. R. James lifted from another author and attached to the wrong song, and how indigenist writers later read revolutionary or Arawak meanings into them. What the linguistic evidence supports is the joining of West and West Central Africans in the worship of an aggressive Kongo deity associated with initiation and war. On the larger question he is cautious, suggesting that colonial slave religion may have defused tensions or hardened ethnic divisions as readily as it fed revolt.