Two thirds of the people who became Haitians were born in Africa, and Mocombe builds his account of Haitian society around what that majority carried with them. Drawing on Carolyn Fick's figures for affranchi landholding, on colonial administrators' complaints about the wealth of free people of colour, and on the ethnography of maroon settlements, he describes two incompatible ways of organising life on the island. One is oriented to accumulation, private property and disciplined labour, carried by whites and the free coloured elite. The other is oriented to balance, subsistence farming and communal obligation, carried by the African majority and led by oungan, manbo, herbal healers and elders. Bois Caiman is read as the moment the maroon groups federated. Independence then becomes a contest between these two orders, and the poverty that followed 1804 is explained by the victors' long campaign to suppress the losing one, including the anti superstition laws, instead of governing through it.