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Istwa Nou

We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.

We keep marching.

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The 1600s

1 entry · 1 year recorded Maafa

1660

1 entry
1660s to 1807 · Africanspan

Loango's Vili brokers sold more people to Saint-Domingue than anywhere else

African middlemen set the terms, and the largest buyer at the far end was the colony that became Haiti.

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Loango stood on the coast of West Central Africa, north of the mouth of the Congo. Its trade was run by Vili brokers, professional merchants who stood between European captains offshore and the suppliers who brought captives out of the interior. The Dutch carried the most from Loango through the seventeenth century. After 1750 the French passed them. Captives from the port went to British, Dutch and French colonies, and the single largest destination was Saint-Domingue. When Britain withdrew from the trade in 1807 the slaving business there collapsed almost completely. I keep Loango on this timeline because of the Vili. The men who set prices and controlled access at this port were African, and they were good at it. Any account of the trade that reduces Africans to cargo cannot explain how a place like Loango worked for a hundred and fifty years. The Kongo names, the Kongo religion and the Kongo majority on the Saint-Domingue estates came through brokers of this kind.

Vili tradersDutch merchantsFrench merchants LoangoWest Central AfricaCongo RiverSaint-Domingue
Where this comes from Eltis, D., & Richardson, D. (2010). Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade. Yale University Press. p. 142.HT-ATST-000171

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

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