Enslaved New Orleanians take the open ground behind the city

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.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

Cases heard by the Conseil Superieur of Martinique in 1755 and again in 1767 describe the same procedure. Enslaved people were lined up and touched with a branch of the medecinier, the tree also called the Barbados nut or purging nut, in one instance by a small child, and the guilty were expected to collapse in fits of convulsions and shouting. Slaveholders reporting these events told the court that everyone on the plantations held that contact with the branch would torment a poisoner. Pierre Clement de Laussat recorded the same use of medecinier branches in a diary entry in 1807. Eating the seeds causes vomiting and stomach pain, which Orfila noted in 1814, while touching the leaves and branches does nothing at all. The ritual worked through participation. It needed the whole community present, and the verdict it produced was one they had reached together.

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.