Seven hundred converts in one Congo station and a mass burning of images

Baptist missionaries reached the lower Congo in 1878 and 1879 and were welcomed at Sao Salvador by Pedro V. They built their church beside the ruined cathedral and in the early 1890s took stones from it for the walls, which to Kongolese eyes implied a continuity the Europeans did not intend, since the ruins were still the burial ground of generations of rulers and the central shrine of the kingdom. In August 1885 Henry Richards wrote from the station at Mbanza Manteke that the people were coming up in such numbers that services had moved outdoors and that more than seven hundred had converted, with a mass burning of images. Something similar happened at Sao Salvador a year later. The men who carried the new preaching outward included a blacksmith called Dom Miguel Ndelengeni and a young man at Stanley Pool named Ntoni, which is the Kongolese form of Anthony.

In 1885 the Haitian writer and diplomat Antenor Firmin published On the Equality of the Human Races, written against the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau. Firmin argued that the Haitian people stood as a lighthouse for black people across the Americas and in Africa, because of the revolution that had ended slavery there. Vodou had no place in what he was defending. His purpose was to demonstrate that Haitians were a civilised people, and the argument left the opposition between barbarism and civilisation standing exactly where the anthropology of his century had put it. Hurbon treats the omission as the shape of a much longer problem. The educated minority spoke for Haiti abroad while the religion of the rural majority was kept at the edge of national life, and after a century the marginalising felt normal to the people doing it.

Arnold Toynbee, lecturing in 1884, produced the analysis of the industrial revolution that later writers worked from. Its essence for him was the replacement of medieval regulation by competition, which made the revolution a social event before it was an economic one. Eighty years later Ronald Hartwell defined the essential character of the same thing quite differently, as a sustained rise in the rate of growth of total and per head output at a pace that broke with everything before it. The two definitions travel together in most accounts, since freedom from old constraints was supposed to produce the growth. In the twentieth century the growth half took over, because every new state in the world was being told that the road to wealth ran through an industrial revolution of its own. Haiti heard that advice as often as anyone, and the word revolution in it carries this nineteenth century English cargo.

D. Trouillot published an ethnographic sketch of vodou at Port au Prince in 1885 and noted that the reptile had long since slipped away from its canari, the small clay vessel that stands for the altar. Everyone who looked found the same thing. Moreau de Saint Mery had made the snake the centre of the colonial ceremony, yet Haitian and foreign writers who described ceremonies afterwards either say it is gone or never mention it. Among them are Hannibal Price, whose book on the rehabilitation of the black race appeared at Port au Prince in 1900, the physician Leon Audain, whose study of Haiti's affliction was printed there in 1908, and the traveller Eugene Aubin, whose account of Haitian planters and peasants came out in Paris in 1910. What survives of the older worship is narrower: country people will not kill a water boa. The dance, the trance and the sacrifice carried on without it.