Nearly 800,000 people were landed to build the richest colony on earth

Between 1668 and 1803 close to 800,000 enslaved Africans were landed in Saint-Domingue. That number is the colony. Its sugar, its coffee, its indigo, the fortunes it made in France and its standing as the most productive possession of the eighteenth century all rest on it. The largest share of those people came out of West Central Africa, then the Bight of Benin, then the Bight of Biafra. French merchants ran the traffic, with Nantes and Bordeaux at the front, and they kept it running without a pause for more than a hundred years. The colonial population was therefore mostly African born at any given moment, because deaths on the estates ran high enough that the planters replaced workers rather than raised them. A society of that composition, held down by a small minority, is unstable by construction. In 1791 it broke, and the war that followed produced the only successful slave revolution in history and a state called Haiti.

Beatrice had a male companion who called himself St John, and she became pregnant by him, which fitted badly with the chastity she had claimed on the Capuchin model. She left the capital to give birth and was arrested soon after the child was born, then taken for trial to the king's camp at Evululu. The Mani Vunda, Dom Manuel, appears to have led the proceedings as Kongolese custom required, while Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca interrogated her and the old woman Apollonia. Da Lucca noted that she spoke with gravity and seemed to weigh her words. At the friars' request Apollonia was spared on grounds of age and the baby was spared too. On 2 July 1706 Beatrice, aged about twenty two, and the man called John were thrown alive onto a fire. She was probably the first African woman burned for heresy by Europeans in Africa.

In May 1745 Governor Mauricius wrote that poison was one of the greatest troubles in the country and that the executions were not answering, because this population did not fear death or even the most wretched torments. Beheading, burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel had all been tried. The Society believed the condemned expected to return to their homelands after death. So in December 1745 it issued a short ordinance that changed the punishment rather than the definition of the crime. Anyone convicted of poisoning another slave or livestock would have the tongue cut out and the forehead branded, and would work in chains at Fort Amsterdam, secluded, without communication or meeting, so that they should never form a community. The target was the network. At least three men suffered it. The practice was dropped after that decade, and cases involving practitioners and their networks ran on for another thirty years.

Sailing home from Angola, Francisco Buytrago stopped at Salvador in Bahia and stayed with a relative. He found many people there, free and enslaved, described as sick of charms, with drawn out illnesses of three or four years and no prospect of recovery. His relative owned an enslaved woman who was dying, her body swollen and her pulse sluggish, and those around her believed she had been afflicted deliberately. Buytrago had nkasa bark with him from Angola. He used it, in 1729, in what he called his first exorcism, and it was judged successful enough that others came to him. He sold some of the bark and performed at least ten more treatments before he left. In the decade before that day more than 82,000 Africans had landed in Bahia, about 30 per cent of them from West Central Africa. Some of the people in that room may well have known the bark by its Kikongo name.