Ottobah Cugoano puts sovereignty in people rather than the state

Ottobah Cugoano was captured and enslaved, worked on Caribbean plantations, and came to London in the middle of the eighteenth century with the man who owned him. There he wrote a critique of slavery that starts from a different place than the abolitionist argument around him. In the late eighteenth century he described the imperial organisation of the slave trade and the triangular Atlantic economy it belonged to. His conception of sovereignty considers people first and institutions afterwards. No human being has the right to enslave another, and therefore the task is to build institutions that cannot do it, rather than to reform the state so that it complies on paper while surviving intact. He named the Atlantic nations whose internal quarrels set the rules of that trade, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, and observed that Africans and the peoples of the Americas were not consulted about any of it.

Plantation records from Saint Domingue in the 1780s give the origins of the African population province by province. In the North, where the great rising began in 1791, people from West Central Africa, whom the colonists lumped together as Congos, accounted for almost sixty per cent of the Africans. Aja-Fon speakers from the Bight of Benin, the group whose religion supplied Haitian Vodou with its principal deities, its main ceremonies and most of its African vocabulary, made up twelve per cent. On the plains of the West Province the Aja-Fon and the Yoruba each formed sixteen per cent, Central Bantu thirty two per cent, and in the mountains behind them half. The South resembled the North. The pattern was old. Records reaching back to the 1720s show Congos among the largest groups in the colony from the start, and at no point did Aja-Fon speakers pass twenty per cent of the Africans there.

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.

Dubois separates the planning meeting from the religious ceremony, and gives the meeting the organisational weight. On Sunday 14 August 1791, just over a week before the insurrection began, two hundred enslaved people gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in the parish of Morne-Rouge. They were delegates from estates across the central northern plain, including Limbe, Petite-Anse where the Gallifet plantations lay, Port Margot, Limonade, Plaine du Nord and Quartier Morin. Gatherings of this kind had happened before and were common enough that several planters had given permission for what they were told was a dinner. This one was different: final plans for a mass uprising were made. Most delegates were privileged people, many of them drivers. Dubois reads the choice of delegates as the reason the plan held across dozens of estates without leaking.