Kimpa Mvita is burned alive in the ruins of the old Kongo capital

Kimpa Mvita, a Kongo woman who said the spirit of Saint Anthony spoke through her, was burned alive on 2 July 1706, in her twenty third year. Oral tradition places the fire at Kulumbimbi, the ruined cathedral of the old capital, and says she died beside her companion Joao Barro de Silva with the name of Jesus in her mouth. Other accounts give her last words as Simbanu Li Vita, which means carry on the struggle. From August 1704 she had preached that the kingdom must be put back together under one king at Sao Salvador, and she taught that Christ had been born in that city. Nobles took her side, among them Hipolyta, the wife of king Pedro IV, and Pedro Constantinho da Silva, a general of the royal army. People in Congo today call her the Joan of Arc of Kongo, and since 2009 the university at Uige in Angola has carried her name.

An employee of the Dutch West India Company named Bosman wrote in 1705 that the captives he handled believed they were being bought and carried across the sea so that they could be fattened and eaten. He put the belief down to innocence. It was a reasonable inference from the evidence available to them. People who had been seized, sold and loaded onto a ship by strangers concluded that the slavers and planters were cannibals or sorcerers commanding spirit powers stronger than those at home, since they had managed to tear them away from home in the first place. Many also held that they could return to the country of the dead, leaving only their body to the white man, which is one reason planters feared suicide among new arrivals. In Saint-Domingue a working life lasted seven to ten years on average, and owners saw no reason to lengthen it while the ships kept coming.

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.

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.