Dahomey's ruler rebels against Allada and makes himself a king

Contemporary European accounts describe the ruler of Dahomey as a subordinate governor under the king of Allada, the larger and older state to the south, who made himself sovereign only in 1715 when he threw off Allada's authority. Law identifies that man as Wegbaja, whom Dahomian tradition later called the true founder of the kingdom and credited with inventing taxation, courts, laws against arson and rape, prostration before the throne, and the burial customs of the state. The traditions describe a country without order before he arrived. Law reads that as a charter rather than a record. Prostration and the king's claim on a dead subject's property were already practised in Allada and in Whydah before Dahomey conquered either of them. A chief becoming a king in 1715 is a change of rank inside a working political system, which is a smaller and more ordinary event than the making of law out of anarchy.

The Atlantic trade in Africans was already old before anyone published a description of how it worked. The first such information appeared in 1675, in the manual of commerce written by Savary and known as the Perfect Merchant, and compilers of dictionaries drew on that account for generations afterwards. In 1723 Savary's universal dictionary of commerce set out the justification repeated for the rest of the century. It is difficult, the entry conceded, to justify the trade in Negroes altogether, and then argued that these wretched slaves found their salvation in the loss of their liberty and in the Christian instruction given them. The order of operations is what matters. The practice came first, in the search for hands cheap enough to dig gold and grow sugar, tobacco and cotton, and the theory explaining why the people bought deserved their condition was assembled afterwards, once buyers in Europe began asking.

In May 1712 Governor Arnoul de Vaucresson opened his report to the ministry in Paris with a long run of losses among enslaved people and livestock in Martinique, from illnesses so unusual that the owners could not explain them. Several owners had arrested their slaves, held them in irons on the plantations, extracted confessions and then sent them on to the king's prison. One case in that report concerns an enslaved man named Francois, who claimed particular skill in detecting poisons, spells and the people who used them. His owner, a Mr David, hired him out during the crisis and collected money from the neighbours for it. The court dropped the case against the accused for want of proof, rebuked the owners who had abused them, and made David return the money for tricking the public. Slaveholders were learning who to suspect, and how to look, from the enslaved themselves.

Francisco Buytrago was a knight of the Order of Christ and a cavalry officer stationed in Angola for twenty years across the 1710s and 1720s. He spent that time watching medical practitioners in Angola and the kingdom of Kongo and asking them questions, and from them and from enslaved informants he learned about a small yellow tree with thick bark that he was told was the finest counter poison anywhere in the world. He saw healers use it on a man badly swollen from evil spells, and reported that people also carried the bark to keep harm from reaching them at all. The tree was almost certainly Erythrophleum suaveolens, called nkasa by Kikongo speakers, whose bark made the ordeal drink given to test the innocence of the accused and also served as a fishing poison. Buytrago drew none of that. He understood the bark as a new instrument for casting out demons and wrote a manuscript recommending it for exorcisms.