From 10,000 enslaved in 1681 to half a million in 1791

A census in May 1681 recorded 10,000 enslaved people in Saint-Domingue. The official figure for 1791 was 500,000. The Haitian historian Thomas Madiou argued the true number ran above 700,000, because planters concealed workers from the rolls to avoid the annual head tax charged on each one. By 1789 the colony held 60 percent of all the enslaved people France owned in the Americas, and two thirds of them had been born in Africa. Their origins were mixed. A Bantu majority came from Congo and Angola, with large numbers from the Guinea coast, and Senegalese captives whom the planters called warlike and priced accordingly. Aradas from Dahomey were also sought after, and Henry Christophe would later recruit Aradas into the royal police of his kingdom and call them Dahomets. Two thirds African born is the figure to hold. The revolution of 1791 was made largely by people who remembered another country.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.

In October 1741 the Conseil Superieur of Martinique told Paris that the deaths of enslaved people and livestock came from particular slaves misusing medical knowledge, making powders and drugs from plants and handing them round as remedies. It warned that such practitioners might turn their skills on owners, argued that medicine could not be told apart from poisoning because the composition was kept secret, and said other slaves would never denounce them for fear of becoming victims. It concluded that slaves should be barred from giving any remedies, powders or drugs for any illness. Before the royal answer came, the court had to deal with Jean Francois, who admitted in January 1742 to distributing remedies across many quarters of the island. No accusation of harm could be found, and with no law the court could not execute him, so it argued about irons and deportation. The royal declaration arrived on 1 February 1743 on precisely the terms requested.

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.