A report to the French naval minister names Kongo captives the most numerous

A report titled Considerations sur l'etat present de la colonie francaise de Saint Domingue was presented to the French naval minister in 1778. It describes where the colony's enslaved people came from and why French buyers wanted them from particular places. Alongside people from Guinea and the Gold Coast, it names those from the Kongo region as the most numerous in the colony, and it characterises them as clever and easy to drive, quick to learn any trade shown to them, intelligent in the cultivation of land, and prone to running away. A separate description of the colony published in 1797, covering conditions up to 18 October 1789, likewise calls those from the Congo coast and Angola the most prized and the most numerous. Buyers were choosing deliberately by region. That is what makes the trade records usable as evidence about where people actually came from.

Dahomey paid an annual tribute to the Yoruba empire of Oyo for most of a century. Archibald Dalzel, drawing on Lionel Abson who ran the English fort at Whydah for over thirty years, described what happened when the envoys came to collect and Kpengla's second minister, the Meu, died. The envoys demanded a hundred of the dead man's women. Kpengla handed over some to be rid of them, and three months later the king of Oyo threatened invasion unless he received the rest. Rather than give up more Dahomean women, Kpengla sent troops into neighbouring Agouna to seize the number required. They were beaten back with heavy losses. Hearing this at midday, the king put on his cartridge box, shouldered his firelock and marched on Agouna at the head of eight hundred armed women. The enemy fled. Dalzel dated this to 1781, and documents show the Meu died in early 1779.

An enslaved woman named Quamina died in 1775 on a Suriname plantation after weeks of pain in her belly. Everyone on the estate went together to the overseer, H. C. Dorfeld, accused Quacoe of poisoning her and asked that he be put in irons. Quacoe was the head carpenter and, judging from the letter Dorfeld sent the court, a healer too; the others believed he could have cured Quamina and had refused. At the funeral in the slave quarters the crowd ran behind the coffin and flung it against Quacoe's door. They searched his house for evidence and found none. They washed the body and gave him the water to drink, on the understanding that a guilty man would die of it, and he drank it willingly. Later four men beat him, joined by several young women with sticks, and he reached the main house covered in blood. The court punished the four and let Quacoe go.

Girard reconstructs Louverture's life before 1791 from the awkward parts. He was a coachman on the Breda plantation, spared field labour, given some education by his master though he remained partly illiterate and wrote in a mixture of French and Creole. In 1776, years before any general emancipation, his master freed him voluntarily. He then rented a few acres together with the thirteen enslaved people who came with the land and set up as a planter. Girard observes that he spent the rest of his life reminding other black people that he had been born in slavery and not that he had also been a free man living off slave labour. He adds a detail that fits the pattern, that when the revolt broke out in 1791 Louverture's first act was to take his former master to safety, and only then did he join the rebellion, as a veterinarian.