Two hundred people gather at night in Marmelade and buy protection

In 1786 the colonial courts of French Saint Domingue indicted a man named Jerome Poteau and several others for holding night assemblies in the northern coffee parish of Marmelade. The meetings were frequent and drew as many as two hundred enslaved people, who called them mayombe or bila. Going to one was said to protect a person against punishment by a slaveowner. Poteau sold small chalky stones carried in cloth bags, red and black acacia seeds used for identifying thieves and poisoners, and sticks bored out and packed with powder, which were believed to win a fight against any man whose stick was empty. Sticks studded with nails fetched very large sums. He put the stones in rum with gunpowder to anger them, and added pepper for clients with fever. Witnesses described an altar with two candles and crossed machetes. The local whites had tolerated the assemblies for a long time and moved only when they grew noisy. Poteau was sentenced to the galleys.

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.

The Dominicans who drafted a slave code in 1784 attached to it an account of what the colony actually produced. Apart from tobacco grown around Santiago in the north, they judged sugar to be the only export worth naming, and they counted 760 black and brown workers on nineteen sugar mills. That was the whole plantation sector of Spanish Santo Domingo. Across the mountains, the French colony of Saint Domingue was working several hundred thousand people on cane and coffee and was the richest European possession in the Americas. The Spanish side lived instead on cattle. Ranching estates called hatos sold meat and hides, much of it across the border, where French planters needed meat to feed their labour force and leather to make the whips used on it. Most of the manufactured goods reaching Dominican households came in through smuggling, which was cheaper and better than anything the official Spanish channels supplied.

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.