A German snake charmer poster travels the world and turns into Danbala

A portrait of the serpent spirit Danbala Wedo painted on the wall of a temple in Jacmel goes back, according to the art historian Henry John Drewal, to a nineteenth century chromolithograph advertising a snake charmer in Germany. Versions of the picture have turned up in West Africa, in India and across the Americas. In the Jacmel version the charmer has been renamed Reine Traveaux, the Queen of Work, the snake is Danbala, and an inset figure stands for his wife Ayida Wedo. This is how the visual language of the religion has always been assembled. Catholic prints of the saints were read the same way from the beginning of the colonial period: Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland was recognised as Danbala, Saint James the Greater on his white horse as the warrior Ogou, Saint Isidore kneeling in a field as Azaka of the harvest. Commercial images travel, and people put them to their own uses.

Asiatic cholera reached Jamaica through Port Royal in September 1850. The first reports blamed a steamer from the isthmus of Panama, where the disease had been killing miners on their way to the California gold fields. It crossed the harbour into Kingston within days and moved fast through the crowded streets of the city. By November travellers had carried it into the other parishes. Kingston counted between four and six thousand deaths in the first year alone. A medical officer sent out from England reported that mortality in Jamaica ran at thirty three times the European rate, and that no part of the world had recorded a higher ratio of deaths to population. The epidemic faded late in 1850 and returned briefly in 1854. It was reckoned to have killed forty to fifty thousand people, a tenth to an eighth of the island. Haiti escaped it, because Soulouque kept watch on the ports.

Pierrot follows the story into the middle of the century, when the Reverend John Relly Beard published his life of Toussaint in 1853 and a second book in 1863. Beard emphasised his subject's racial purity, wanting it marked that he was wholly without white blood, while also asserting that the negro race was inferior to the highest style of man and that the race at large had as yet no history. He praised Toussaint for proclaiming the doctrine of free trade, and disparaged Dessalines, the man who actually liberated Haiti, as a monster cruel by nature. The mechanism Pierrot draws out is the introduction's admission that no detailed life was accessible to English readers because the only existing memoir had long been out of print. Rainsford's account was out of print in 1853 and still is.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.