Makandal took his name from the Kongo word for an amulet

Francois Makandal was executed in 1758 after years spent distributing poisons and magic packets across the plantations of the northern plain of Saint Domingue. Historians have generally called him an African of Sudanic and Muslim background, on the strength of an investigating judge who thought one word in his invocations sounded like Allah. Geggus reads the material the other way. The packets Makandal made and bound with cord belong to the West Central African tradition of the nkisi, an object charged with power by being tied or nailed, and his name looks like a rendering of makunda or makwanda, Kongo words for an amulet. Protective packets in the late colony and in independent Haiti were called macandals, so the sequence runs from the objects to the man. The name of his accomplice, Mayombe, points to the same region, the forested highlands behind the Loango coast that supplied a very large share of the captives landed in the colony.

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.

Geggus offers what he calls a minimum tally of about a hundred and eighty incidents of slave rebellion and conspiracy across the Americas, and argues that the 1790s stand out as the period of peak intensity, with 1795 possibly unique for the number of separate incidents in different societies. His appendix lists Curaçao twice in January and August of that year alongside Coro, Pointe Coupée in Louisiana, Nassau, Puerto Principe, Aguadilla, Demerara, Aruba, Buenos Aires, Trinidad, Bayamo and Samaná. He notes that the rough parity between Brazil with twenty-seven incidents and the United States with twenty-five is probably an artefact of the American supply of local newspapers rather than of slave behaviour. Only the 1811 rising in the Louisiana territory mobilised more than a hundred slaves in North America, while the West Indies and Guianas produced at least eight or nine risings of a thousand or more. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects Eugene Genovese's schema in which the French Revolution produced a new revolutionary type of slave uprising superseding earlier restorationist ones, on the ground that Genovese never supplied a plausible example of the new type.

Makandal was an African born man who lost an arm working on a sugar plantation of the northern plain and kept a lifelong grudge against his former masters. He claimed powers drawn from a mixture of Islam, Christianity and African religion, and after running away in 1751 he organised a wide conspiracy to poison French colonists and their livestock, which Girard says killed thousands. He was said to be able to turn into a mosquito and fly off when cornered. In 1758 the French caught him and tied him to a stake at Cap Francais, and as the flames rose he broke loose of the pole, at which the enslaved people in the crowd cried out that he had escaped. The authorities cleared the square and put him back in the fire. As late as 1791 many still believed he was alive and would return to call a day of reckoning.