A woman possessed by Saint Anthony tries to heal the kingdom of Kongo

Between 1704 and 1706 a movement of Kongolese Catholics formed around a young woman who said she was possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony. It was a healing movement and a political one at the same time, and its targets were plain: the civil war then tearing the kingdom apart, the sale of people into the Atlantic, and the conduct of the reigning king. Its claim was that kindoki, the power leaders held, had been misused, and that redirecting it would heal the country. Kikongo speakers had long discussed Christian priests in their own vocabulary, calling them nganga a ukisi, a religious specialist of the kind they already knew. The Antonian movement belongs to a wider pattern in West Central Africa in this period, in which mass movements of public healing became open criticism of the people in charge. The war it protested fed captives to Portuguese buyers at Luanda and to Vili merchants north of the Congo.

Between 1679 and 1704 enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue organised four separate armed conspiracies. Their object was the destruction of the master class in its entirety. The dates matter more than the plots achieved on their own. The colony was barely established, its enslaved population was still small, and resistance of this order was already being planned and had to be hunted down. The usual telling of Haitian history begins the story of revolt in August 1791, as though a hundred and thirty years of obedience came first. The record says something else. Conspiracy, poisoning, flight to the mountains and open revolt run continuously through the colonial period, and marronage was permanent. What changed in 1791 was scale, timing and the collapse of French authority in Europe, which gave a rising the room to grow into a war. The intention was present in the first decades, and the colonists knew it.

This is my favorite thing on the whole timeline and it exists only because the data was read whole. Saint-Domingue took 2,336 recorded voyages landing 695,398 people, ranking fifth among all destinations in the Atlantic trade. But the composition of who arrived changed completely across the century. In 1700 the Bight of Benin supplied 59.9 percent of arrivals and West Central Africa supplied zero. By 1760 West Central Africa is at 57.1 percent and Benin has fallen to 16.2. By 1790, the year before the rising, it is 42.1 against 9.6. So the generation that took the colony by force in 1791 was demographically a different population from the one that built it. Anybody making an argument about continuity of African military tradition into 1791 has to survive this table first, and most of those arguments have never been shown it.

The Constitution of the Archbishopric of Bahia, issued in 1707, addressed the overlap between sorcery and medical practice entirely in European terms. The church held that nobody could manipulate nature, or appear to, except through a demon and a pact with the Devil. Lay healing worried it for a related reason. Seeking a cure by unsanctioned means opened the door to superstitions that endangered the soul. So the law forbade anyone to perform cures without a licence and the archbishop's approval, and stressed that no layperson might expel demons from a human body. Nothing in it mentioned Africans, and the rule on jurisdiction sent sorcery cases to the Inquisition only when they amounted to open heresy. Meanwhile free and enslaved practitioners of African descent went on treating afflictions attributed to poisons and charms, using divination and spirit possession, and Europeans as well as Africans went on paying them for it.