A missionary in Kongo tries to stop the trade filling Saint-Domingue

The Portuguese missionary Rafael de Castello de Vide served in Kongo through the 1780s, witnessed and denounced the export of captives, and sought to persuade the king of Kongo to ban the sale of enslaved people outside the country. Thornton uses his eyewitness reports to connect two things usually kept apart. A long round of Kongo civil war began in 1779, first setting partisans of King Pedro V against those of José I, then breaking out again on the death of José's brother and successor Afonso V. French and English shippers were buying along what they called the coast of Angola, with the region around Loango as the main base, and Vili merchants brought captives from inland to Cabinda, Malemba and Loango. Thornton estimates some sixty-two thousand Kongolese exported in the decade after 1780, more than half the combined French and English Angola trade.

David Geggus worked through seventy five surviving plantation inventories from Saint Domingue, covering roughly fifteen thousand enslaved people and recording ethnicity, age and sex. Among the African born on sugar estates, the group the records call Congos was the largest in all three regions of the colony. They were 43.5 per cent in the North between 1777 and 1791, 36.3 per cent in the South between 1771 and 1791, and 32.4 per cent in the West between 1773 and 1791. The North was where the rising of 1791 began. The label needs care. John Thornton warns that Congo was used loosely and served the French and the colonial upper class as a term of contempt for the African born. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes that the same people were recorded as Congos in French and Spanish colonies and as Angolans in British ones.

In 1785, acting on a denunciation, police raided a house near Cachoeira in Bahia where six people had gathered, all of whom said they were Jeje, a Brazilian term for people born in the Gbe speaking region of the Bight of Benin. Their leader, Sebastiao de Guerra, had been accused of sorcery once before and was publicly known for curing charms, dancing calundus and leading worship in the Jeje language. What the police carried away differed from what earlier raids had produced. Alongside small calabashes holding ingredients for spells there were buried objects and an arrangement of leaves, and leaves were central to the worship of the vodun, to initiation and to medicinal baths in the Bight of Benin. The gathering looked less like a healing consultation and more like a shrine with offerings and a congregation. Historians read the case as an early moment in the formation of Candomble as an institution.

Soulouque was born enslaved at Petit-Goâve on 15 August 1782. In 1847 the milat elite in the Senate picked him as president precisely because they read him as a compliant black officer they could work around. He then purged them, consolidated real power, crowned himself Emperor Faustin I, and ran the country for a decade behind a paramilitary force called the zinglins. Look at that sequence and then look at 1957, when a different elite backed a mild country doctor for the same reason and got the Tonton Macoutes. This is what I mean when I say the timeline should sit entries next to each other rather than only under each other. Soulouque and Duvalier are one hundred and ten years apart and they are the same play run twice, and you only see it when the two entries are on the same screen.