Nganga sets out to establish that the largest single African contribution to the population and culture of Saint-Domingue, and therefore to Haiti, came from the Kôngo of Central Africa. He assembles slaving voyage records for Nantes, Dunkirk and Le Havre armaments to the Loango coast, colonial and parish sources, the work of Haitian and North American historians, and Haitian oral tradition and Vodou practice, which he treats as the only available evidence where the written archive is silent. On the African side he follows the Portuguese arrival of 1482, the Christianisation of the kingdom, and the movement led by Kimpa Mvita, burned in 1706, whose followers he argues were deported to the Americas and carried the same fight into the colony. Haitian marronage, the Kôngo commanders of the 1802 resistance, and much of the Vodou pantheon are traced to that source. He frames the book as a restoration of dignity to the African in Haitian history.