Two hundred and seventeen armed men are shipped out of the colony

In 1791 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue armed enslaved men to strengthen their hand against the white colonists who refused them equal rights. The armed men were known as the Swiss, a name borrowed from the mercenary guards of the French king. Once the free coloured leaders obtained the concessions they wanted, the soldiers who had fought for them became an embarrassment. Two hundred and seventeen of them were put aboard ship late that year and carried to the Mosquito Coast of Central America. They were held below deck in irons, and the crews tried to sell them on arrival. Officials at Belize and in Jamaica, worried about what such men might say to the enslaved people around them, refused to let them land. The ships turned back to Saint-Domingue, where the men appear to have been killed without trial. Political exile, sale and massacre ran together in a single voyage, eleven years before the same combination returned on a much larger scale.

A week before the burnings began, a group of rebel commanders held a ceremony at Morne Rouge, at the place called Bwa Kayiman, where the oungan and rebel leader Boukman prayed for support. The article stresses that Trouillot situates this within a wider pattern rather than treating it as unique: many guerrilla leaders held ceremonies before fighting, Biassou told the enslaved not to flee death because the spirits would return them to Africa, and three quarters of the leaders named, including Boukman, Biassou, Yasint, Lamour Derance and Romaine-la-Prophetesse, were oungan before they were commanders. Calinda dances were the only gatherings the enslaved were permitted, so a dance was simultaneously a cultural event, a religious event and a political meeting. Vodou supplied conviction and organisation at once, working as an adhesive across people separated by language and origin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects both conventional readings of Bwa Kayiman, that it was merely a political congress and that it was merely a mystical ceremony.

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.

The rising of August 1791 on the northern plain of Saint Domingue is usually told as a break with everything European, the church of the masters included. Hurbon sets a number against that. Of the twenty four Catholic missionaries serving the northern part of the colony, at least sixteen gave support to the revolt of the enslaved. He raises the point while arguing that the defence of Vodou cannot rest on a claim that every Haitian ought to serve the spirits. Vodou in his account is a religion of tolerance, closer in temper to the cults of ancient Greece than to a faith that goes out to convert. It was assembled from African religions in contact with Christianity, and its gods are matched to Catholic saints. A church whose priests joined the insurrection belongs to that history, and so does the same church's long campaign afterwards to break the temples.