A Dominica election puts men of colour in control of the House

Dominica had a government separate from the rest of the Leeward Islands from 1771 and, by 1775, a governor with a nominated Council and an elected House. The Brown Privilege Bill of 1831 gave free men of colour across the region new political and civil rights, and in 1833 three of them won seats in the local House. London responded by placing Dominica under a Leeward Islands governor sitting in Antigua and leaving only a lieutenant governor on the island. In 1835 the freedmen defeated a census bill the Colonial Office wanted, arguing that counting people by colour would only keep the distinction alive. The qualification to vote was a freehold of ten acres, a lease on land worth twenty pounds a year, or a building worth as much. Enough freedmen met it that after the election of 1837 they controlled the chamber. Seven years afterwards the island's president, a white planter who had watched it happen, was still describing the result as a subversion of the election law.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843 and reunified the whole island under his presidency in 1820. Contemporaries and later historians called his rule obscurantist, since it opposed the instruction of the mass of the population, and also military, autocratic and racially exclusive. Black officials were pushed out of administrative work and out of power. Schooling stayed with the light-skinned families of the elite. Under him the mainly mulatto fraction of the old free population consolidated itself as the ruling group and as the local relay of foreign commerce, taking hold of the port trade, specialising in ground rent and urban property, and leaving agriculture to blacks of every class. When the crisis came the sides failed to line up by colour. Against Boyer stood mulatto liberals speaking for landowners and merchants, black domaniers attacking mulatto hegemony as such, northern separatists, old followers of Christophe, and disappointed Boyerists inside the civil service.

Garcia V died in 1830 and a Capuchin went up to Sao Salvador one last time to conduct the funeral. In the disorder that followed he could not crown a successor. He came back to Loanda with a Kongolese lay brother and found his last European colleague dead. The kingdom and the mission were ending together. Garcia's priest son left the Kongo for work in Angola, where there was no bishop between 1826 and 1852 and fewer than twenty priests. Italian diocesan clergy from Milan and a group of Swiss Benedictines both offered to go and revive the church there, and both offers were killed by Capuchin and Portuguese obstruction. In 1834 an anticlerical government in Lisbon ordered every convent closed and the Capuchin property was sold. Bernardo da Burgio sailed for Palermo in May 1835 with the mission archives and one companion, the Kongolese brother Bernardo of Sao Salvador.

Perry shows the analogy between aboriginal and African enslavement acquiring legal force. Both Alexandre Pétion's 1816 constitution and the post-Boyer constitution of 1843 allowed the immigration and naturalisation of individuals of either African or Indian descent. In this vision, she argues, Afro-diasporic Haitians and the descendants of the Taino could be indigenous at the same time, because the label above all designates a relation to Europeans as usurpers, a position that ought normatively to produce anticolonial alliance. She sets this beside Dessalines's address to the people after a failed expedition against French troops in the Spanish half of Hispaniola, in which he presumed that the indigènes espagnols, descendants of the Indians destroyed by the first usurpers of the island, would seize the chance to sacrifice to the spirits of their ancestors. That expectation was disappointed.