The kabinda dance, and what was never told to the blans

Inside the revolt there was a second layer that did not travel. Enslaved people used the kabinda dance and chants invoking Ginen, the ancestral Africa, to carry knowledge that was deliberately withheld from whites and from milat observers alike. The sources that survive were written by people on the outside of that wall, which means every colonial account of Vodou practice in this period is a transcript of what the practitioners chose to let a stranger see. I find this the single most underrated methodological fact in Haitian history. We have thousands of pages of planter observation and almost none of it is testimony. It is surveillance, and surveillance of a community that knew it was being watched and performed accordingly. Any timeline built only from written colonial sources is reading the cover story and calling it the record.

The colonial assembly moved from Leogane to Cap-Francais and resolved that Paris had no right to legislate on the internal race question, arguing that colonial production was the real currency in the debate and that a bankrupt revolutionary France could not afford to lose it. A judge at Cap-Francais told the chamber that mixed-race colonists were degenerates and that black people were a species of ape, and that money spent on slaves had not been spent to create citizens. The argument worked. The National Assembly in Paris rescinded the May decree. Within days a mass rising broke out in the Northern Department under Boukman and Jean Francois, with roughly twenty thousand insurgents, two thousand whites killed and heavier losses among the enslaved. The rescission is the hinge: metropolitan retreat on a narrow reform removed the last legal channel and left force as the only remaining instrument.

On 10 May 1795 Jose Caridad Gonzalez, an African from the Loango coast, joined Jose Leonardo Chirino in leading a rising of enslaved and free Black people in the Coro district of Venezuela. It was not the first of its kind there. A rebellion around Caracas in 1749 was led by a man remembered as Miguel Loango. Central Africans shipped through Loango made up a large part of the enslaved population of Maracaibo, Caracas, the state of Falcon and the Barlovento district of Miranda. The coastal town of Curiepe, founded in the seventeenth century by two men called Manuel and Antonio Congo, was the first settlement of free Black people in the country. The demands raised in 1795 were taken up two years later by Manuel Gual and Jose Maria Espana, whose conspiracy Venezuela treats as a founding act. The port that filled Saint-Domingue filled Venezuela as well, and risings followed in both places.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.