A forbidden dance called the water mother alarms the colonists

An essay published anonymously in about 1750, L'Essai sur l'Esclavage et Observations sur l'Etat Present des Colonies, describes a dance the French colonists of Saint-Domingue had banned outright. In Surinam it was called Watur mama and in the French islands the water mother. The writer admits that almost nothing about it was known to outsiders, only that those who danced it kept it secret and that it worked strongly on their minds. He believed they used it when planning something violent, that the leader of a plot would fall into a state where he lost consciousness, and that on coming round he would say his god had spoken and ordered the enterprise. The Code Noir had already made assemblies of enslaved people illegal for any purpose other than Catholic worship, and masters could be punished for allowing them. Night gatherings went on anyway, and older men used them to keep African stories, argument and ritual alive. This is among the earliest colonial accounts of the practice that later took shape as Vodou.

Colonial officials in Martinique kept running into the same difficulty. Poison cases produced almost no evidence the law would accept, and courts were often left with the testimony of other enslaved people and nothing else. On 5 November 1749 they answered with an ordinance requiring any slaveholder who suspected that a person or an animal had been poisoned to call a surgeon and have the body opened. The language was urgent. The crime could no longer be ignored, it was real and even common among the slaves, and its spread had to be stopped and if possible pulled up by the root. The ordinance was printed and posted on church doors throughout the colony, and a version of 1758 repeated it and required surgeons to perform the service free so that owners would actually use them. Publishing the law was also a way of spreading the idea the law described.

In October 1749 several residents of a Salvador neighbourhood complained to the Inquisition about deaths they blamed on Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, a well known free couple of African descent who could both inflict and lift illnesses caused by charms. Witnesses called Ignacia the greater of the two, a master of the calundu dance and a queen, and stressed her African origin. A neighbour who had worked beside Gomes as a stonecutter for decades described him attending the calundus of other people before he ran his own, travelling every Sunday and holy day to Rio Vermelho and Itapagipe, and going as far as Pernambuco to visit the houses of other practitioners. He saved money, bought Ignacia's freedom, then bought a farm where they could work. Reputation was built by learning from rivals, and the network of clients and teachers that made a practitioner successful was the same thing that made him easy to accuse.

Oyo was a Yoruba kingdom in the interior to the north east, and it had invaded Dahomey repeatedly. Tegbesu spent his first years fighting it and made peace in 1748 on the condition of an annual tribute. The military reason was obvious enough, since the invasions were ruinous. There was a commercial one too. Oyo had been the main supplier of captives to the coast, and peace opened the possibility that its caravans would come down through Whydah again. During 1746 to 1748 Tegbesu had criers announce at Whydah that the paths were open and free. The second and third announcements named the places by name, Epe, Weme, Ajara and Popo, and invited their traders in. Dahomey had spent twenty years accused by European buyers of strangling the routes from the interior. It now set out to become the middleman on those same routes.