A woman of about twenty two is burned alive with the father of her child

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.

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.