Mobley resituates colonial Saint-Domingue inside a West Central African frame, on the argument that a colony where nine in ten people were enslaved and most of those African-born cannot be read without knowing where in Africa they came from. Archival research, comparative ethnography and historical linguistics are combined to trace the people sold into the Atlantic trade at Loango back toward their points of origin.

Most, she concludes, came from the coastal kingdoms themselves and from the Mayombe rainforest inland — places where exposure to European religion was slight or nonexistent, which unsettles the claim that such arrivals were already Atlantic creoles. Reading the colony's Kongolese spiritual practitioners, among them Makandal and Marie Kingué, against evidence from those same regions, she argues that what they carried was practical expertise applied to the problems of plantation life, and that it supplied the materials of independent Haiti — the lakou, and the Kongo and Petro rites.