Two thirds of the enslaved in 1785 had landed from Africa recently

In 1785, six years before the rising, people born in Africa made up about two thirds of the enslaved population of Saint Domingue. Colonists called them bossales, from their recent arrival, and set them against the creoles, who had been born on the island and had known nothing else. Gerard Barthelemy made that proportion the foundation of a book published in 1996, arguing that the bossales were the ones least reconciled to slavery, that Vodou belonged to them, and that the division runs through everything in Haitian history since, separating a peasantry that wants no state at all from a town population willing to live under one. Hurbon takes the figure and refuses the extrapolation. Haitian peasants in his account want French, schooling, writing and more money, and Vodou has a highly organised internal hierarchy even with no central authority running it.

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.

Perry notes that the insurgent army in Saint-Domingue was for a short time called the Army of the Inca. Geggus attributes the name to a mistaken belief that the Taino descended from the Inca. Sinclair Thomson offers an alternative that Perry prefers to leave open: the Tupac Amaru rebellion against the Spanish received extensive coverage in the Saint-Domingue press, so the name may register a sense of solidarity with aboriginal peoples that reaches beyond the Taino as local predecessors. She uses the ambiguity to develop her central distinction. The relationship the revolutionaries built with the Taino was not filiation, which would require biological descent, but affiliation, secured by an analogy between two historical situations involving two entirely different sets of actors, Taino against Spanish and African-descended against French.

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.