Medor tells the court at Cap Francais about powders for taming owners

In 1757 an enslaved man named Medor went before the court at Cap Francais in Saint Domingue and confessed without being compelled. He said that he and many others used magical powders to persuade owners to grant them their freedom. His statement opened the enormous investigation that became the Makandal affair. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus have since tracked the timing and geography of the deaths blamed on poison that year and argue that mycotoxins in spoiled flour, during a wartime blockade, are the likelier cause. On that reading Medor and the others who confessed to using poison and spells to tame their owners may genuinely have believed their taming had killed by accident. The same pattern turns up far away. In Suriname, Clarinda and Nero insisted that the mixture Nero made from bush herbs was meant to calm Clarinda's mistress, and Clarinda was alarmed when the woman fell ill and died.

From the late 1750s the enslaved people of New Orleans gathered every Sunday on an open piece of ground behind the city to trade and to enjoy themselves. They were Bambara, Mandingo, Wolof, Fulbe, Fon and Yoruba, and they were joined by free people of colour and by Native Americans. The site had been used for the corn feasts of the Houma before the French came. It was known as the Place des Negres and later as Congo Square. What went on there was drumming and dancing performed in public by hundreds of people of African descent, the bamboula, the calinda, the coujaille and the pile chactas, all of them related to Vodou rites, and it was the market where the charms called gris gris were sold. The word comes from Mende, spoken by Mandingo and Bambara people. No other place in the United States let African religion be performed so openly for so long.

Dessalines was born into slavery at Duclos in the north on 20 September 1758 and took the name of the free black man who later owned him. He rose through the war as a field commander rather than a diplomat, and that difference decided everything about 1804. Toussaint negotiated with France for autonomy inside the French system. Dessalines concluded that no arrangement with France was survivable and declared independence outright on the first of January 1804. He then ordered the killing of the remaining French population, wrote white land ownership out of the constitution, and crowned himself Emperor. He was assassinated in 1806 by people who had fought beside him. Haiti spent the next century deciding whether he was the founder or the warning, and the honest answer is that the country has never fully settled it.

Mocombe presents Makandal as an oungan from Guinea who turned religious authority into a weapon of war. Working at night, he and his followers burned estates, killed owners and, over roughly six years, poisoned as many as six thousand whites. The French captured him in 1758 and executed him publicly in the square of Cap-Francais, present day Cap-Haitien. The article treats the choice of a public square as deliberate: the colony needed spectators, because Makandal's power rested on the belief among the enslaved that he could not be killed. Mocombe places this in a wider argument that marronage was the most persistent form of refusal, and that maroons in the mountains were not simply fleeing but rebuilding African forms of production, worship and authority from which raids on the plains could be launched.