Geggus replies at length to three critiques of his Kongomania essay, from John Thornton, Christina Mobley, and James Sweet.

The response works through the evidence behind the various claims and hypotheses at issue, with demographic figures and the inference from them to cultural influence at its center. Disputed ground includes how ethnonyms such as Creole, Congo, and Mondongue should be used, how Vodou came into being, what weight to give the Vocabulaire Congo of Baudry des Lozieres, and how the uprising of 1791 and the Haitian war of independence were organized and what they aimed at.

Thornton addresses a puzzle in Vodou and in a number of other African American religious traditions: how Catholic saints came to stand alongside deities drawn from Yoruba and Fon practice.

Two claims carry the argument. The first is that the saints came primarily out of the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo. The second explains why it was the Yoruba-Fon gods in particular who joined them: most religions of Atlantic Africa attach their spirits to a specific place or people, but this tradition has deities that travel and whose authority can extend anywhere, which made them fit company for saints in a way other African deities were not.

Historians from Thornton to Dubois have suggested that Saint-Domingue's late-century influx of West Central African captives, many of them soldiers taken in the Kongo civil wars, helped make the 1791 insurrection possible. Davis tests that claim comparatively rather than restating it.

Working from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, he charts the regional origins of captives landed across the French Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and the smaller colonies alongside Saint-Domingue — and finds that only in Saint-Domingue did West Central Africans come to outnumber every other group by a wide margin, and only after mid-century, as Senegambia stabilized and the Kongo did not. Since Saint-Domingue was also the one French colony to produce a general slave revolt, he treats the overlap as strengthening the case. He is candid about the limit: the database records where captives were bought, not where they came from, so the argument leans on other evidence to close that gap.

When the insurgent commander Macaya told a French commissioner in 1793 that he was subject to the kings of Congo, France and Spain, historians from Madiou onward took it as proof that the rebels were burdened with an African attachment to monarchy, something backward that Louverture had patiently to talk them out of.

Thornton takes the statement seriously instead. Perhaps two-thirds of Saint-Domingue's enslaved population had been born and raised in Africa, many of them in Kongo, and he reconstructs what kingship meant there in order to read their politics as a coherent ideology rather than nostalgia.

His evidence includes insurgents electing kings and queens quarter by quarter as they took territory, a ceremony at L'Acul conducted by a Capuchin, which points to Kongolese Christianity, the conqueror-king manner of certain commanders and the terror they used, and the Kikongo chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery, whose translation scholars have fought over for decades.

Eighteen case studies make up this collection, each concerned with women who held power in Africa. Kaplan's subjects are royal and elite women, brought into their positions by inheritance, by their own choosing, or by circumstance, and the volume examines the ritual and political offices through which they came to wield authority and sway, at home as well as in public life.

Around twelve ethnic groups from sub-Saharan Africa appear, most of them southern or West African.

Contributors are drawn from across the disciplines: religion, women's studies, art history, comparative literature, political science, history, and African as well as African American studies.

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.