On February 26, 1794, Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières arrived at the port of Norfolk, Virginia, from Le Havre on the coast of France. His journey had not been an easy one. Shortly after leaving France, the ship carrying Baudry, his wife, their 13-year-old daughter, and a Norman servant girl was caught in a terrible storm. The family endured a harrowing four-month Atlantic crossing, but they had experienced far worse. Just two years earlier, Baudry had discovered his wife and daughter “wandering in the woods” of St. Domingue, after rebels had forced them to abandon their home in the early days of the Haitian Revolution. Baudry, a distinguished French military officer, had himself been wounded fighting the insurgents near Léogane, and the majority of the soldiers under his command had been slaughtered. Fearing for his life, Baudry fled the colony in March 1792.Footnote 1 In Paris, he briefly reunited with his more famous brother-in-law, the lawyer and writer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry.Footnote 2 However, both were soon forced into exile, and he eventually settled in Philadelphia. There, Baudry worked as a clerk, bookseller, and editor. He also used his exile as an opportunity to travel North America, spending time with his wife and in-laws in New Orleans. Eventually, Baudry presented himself as an expert on the natural history of the French colonies, delivering lectures to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and publishing several articles on “scientific” topics.Footnote 3
Among Baudry's most famous works is a two-volume account of his “voyages” to Louisiana. The first volume, published in 1802, was such a success that he completed the much longer Second Voyage just a year later. Like the first volume, Baudry's Second Voyage à la Louisiane focuses neither on a voyage, nor very much on Louisiana, perhaps explaining why so little attention has been paid to it by scholars. Rather, the book is a natural history of St. Domingue, offering an eclectic mix of the biological, botanical, and medicinal knowledge of the island, alongside poetry, anecdotes, and political reflections. Baudry firmly believed that France would once again rule over its rebel colony. As such, the volume's true aim is stated in the first two sentences of the introduction: “We will without doubt reconquer the incomparable island of Saint Domingue. It is in this hope. . . that I decided to offer the Colonists the fruit of some of my observations on the peculiarities of this beautiful country.”Footnote 4
A significant portion of Second Voyage is devoted to African slavery—a description of the “Angola” coast, interactions between masters and slaves in St. Domingue, and most notably a 39-page “Dictionnaire ou Vocabulaire Congo.” Baudry's intent was to educate planters on the operation of efficient, productive business enterprises. He believed that knowledge of Kikongo would aid masters in preventing the high mortality and other “inconveniences” frequently suffered by bossal (“raw,” newly arrived) slaves. Indeed, Baudry viewed the treatment of slaves through much the same redemptionist prism as he saw the colony's “lost” natural history. For Baudry, communication with Africans was a “science”: “As a farmer myself, I have felt the usefulness of this kind of science, and in my leisure moments. . . I have tried to learn enough to understand my bossal slaves and to be understood.” According to Baudry, speaking to the bossal in his own language will “brighten him and inspire his confidence. His hope born, you soften in him the memory of his hut, his sad family, and soon he no longer sees you as a man superior to him, but as a benefactor who has snatched him from death, misery, and the degradation of man.”Footnote 5
A cynical reading of Baudry's account might conclude simply that he was calling for the manipulation of Africans to capitalize on their labor. Such a conclusion would not be wrong. Baudry was no champion for Africans nor, more generally, for people of color in St. Domingue, especially in the wake of the Revolution.Footnote 6 Yet, his writing does reveal a familiar, personal connection that emerged out of Kikongo conversations with his slaves. The “softening” elicited by the African's “memory of his hut” and “his sad family” required far more than a mechanical knowledge of word translation: it required a depth of cultural understanding that evoked real human intimacy. Even as Baudry claimed to be “softening” his slaves, so too was Baudry being “softened.” Regardless of his motives, Baudry was inexorably drawn into the social and intellectual worlds of the enslaved Africans on his plantation, and the vehicle for this social and intellectual transformation was the Kikongo language.
In this research note, I will examine a small portion of Baudry's “Vocabulaire Congo” in order to extend scholarly calls for an intellectual history of the enslaved in the Atlantic world.Footnote 7 Haiti has long been hailed as the iconic example of slaves' embrace of the revolutionary ideologies of the Atlantic world, yet we know very little about the ideas or inspirations of the majority of those slaves. Nearly two-thirds were Africans, half of whom had arrived in St. Domingue in the five years leading up to the Revolution. And the majority of those were from Kongo. French idioms of liberty, fraternity, and equality no doubt resonated with these Africans, but French was not their only language, nor, for that matter, the only language of their masters. By concentrating closely on the words and meanings imparted by Baudry's “Vocabulaire Congo,” Kongolese political ideologies begin to come into sharper focus, as tools employed not only by Africans, but also by their colonial masters. In this way, African intellectual histories became woven into the very fabric of the revolutionary Atlantic world.Footnote 8
By the time the Second Voyage was published, Baudry was more than ten years removed from St. Domingue. He had endured flight, forced exile, and an itinerant existence in Paris, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He claimed that when the Haitian Revolution started he had been working on a colonial encyclopedia for 18 years. This encyclopedia was to consist of “24 or 25 quarto volumes, which the brigands robbed me of during their insurrection.” Remarkably, using only a few notes salvaged from the ashes of his plantation, Baudry recreated from memory a French-Kikongo vocabulary consisting of more than 680 words and 120 phrases. Christina Mobley has demonstrated that Baudry's vocabulary reflects linguistic patterns of a fairly small group of western Kikongo speakers who came from north of the Congo River.Footnote 9 These findings accord with what we know about the eighteenth-century French slave trade along the Loango coast in west central Africa. Most of the trade derived from three ports: Cabinda, Malemba, and Loango. By the 1780s, French traders had become increasingly dissatisfied with trade at Loango and moved south to the ports of Soyo and Ambriz. This coastal area was only about 200 miles long. In his Second Voyage, Baudry provides short ethnographic and natural histories of each section of this coast, including nautical descriptions of the major ports, confirming their importance in the slave trade to the French colonies.
What is a Slave?
By its very existence, Baudry's French-Kikongo vocabulary is an exceptional document, one of only a handful of surviving African-language vocabularies in the Americas, and the only known example from Haiti. That Baudry could recall such an extensive vocabulary ten years after leaving St. Domingue highlights just how conversant he was in Kikongo. Indeed, one wonders if Kikongo was much more than a simple “leisure” activity for Baudry; it appears that it might have been a lingua franca. A careful reading of Baudry's translation demonstrates just how deeply embedded in the world of Kikongo ideas some “French” colonizers had become.
At the most basic level, French words and their Kikongo translations illustrate the convoluted and confusing epistemological histories of the Atlantic world. For example, in Baudry's word list, his entry for ‘France’ is translated into Kikongo as m'poutou. We know that the term m'poutou is a corruption of ‘Portugal,’ a reference to the first European colonists to arrive in central Africa in the fifteenth century. For Kongolese speakers, all of Europe became m'poutou, regardless of national distinction.Footnote 10 Hence, Baudry's interpretation of France as m'poutou is technically correct, but the translation of France as Portugal (or Europe) reveals the ways that African homogenization of Europe elided difference in much the same way that the term ‘Africa’ did for Europeans. For Kongolese in St. Domingue, France and Portugal remained interchangeable as the imaginary collective homeland of all white people (mondélé), calling into question African understandings of the existence of ‘France,’ let alone the distinct principles of its revolution and their supposed influence on the Haitian uprising.
Entries like m'poutou tell fascinating histories of entangled Atlantic (mis)translations, and there are similar examples dotted throughout Baudry's dictionnaire. While these words reveal important epistemological differences—or “dialogues of the deaf” as Wyatt MacGaffey once called them—more interesting still are those terms for which Baudry (and other Europeans like him in the diaspora) seemed to understand clearly the implications of their “mis”-translations.Footnote 11 Rather than simply confusing meanings or accommodating fields of African meaning that did not have European equivalents, Baudry in several instances appears to intentionally adopt Kongolese ways of being (ontologies) in his translations of European terms. In doing so, he provides us with a rare perspective on Kongolese histories of slavery, rebellion, and memory in Haiti. These histories not only provide new insights on the lives of Africans in Haiti but also demonstrate forcefully how specific Kongolese ideas shaped French understandings in St. Domingue. Ultimately, men like Baudry naturalized the world of Kongolese ideas just as readily as Kongolese naturalized French ideas. The impacts of these ideological transformations on slavery and revolution challenge us to view Haiti's history in new ways.
As one might expect, the word ‘esclave’ is found prominently in Baudry's vocabulary, but the Kikongo word that Baudry chooses to represent it is one that complicates our understandings of chattel slavery. For Baudry, esclave translated as vika in Kikongo. The ambiguity of this term begins to come into view when we also recognize that Baudry also translated captif as m'vika.Footnote 12 As we know, all slaves were captives, but not all captives were slaves. So which meaning should take precedence? The most effective way of understanding the field of meaning embedded in vika is through historical linguistics.
The term vika comes from the common Bantu root *-pika, which has long been misunderstood as a Western Bantu innovation that translated simply as ‘slave’. Brazilian historian Marcos Abreu Leitão de Almeida demonstrates that, in fact, the root *-pika (also, -bika, -vika) was a proto-sangha-kwa word that interior peoples transmitted to their proto-forest-Bantu descendants. Among these groups, the original vocabulary was retained only among Njila, Kongo-Nzebi, and some Western Savanna language speakers near Angola.Footnote 13 In short, the field of meaning encompassed by pika, bika, and vika migrated from the interior forests to the coast. Thus, the original meanings of *-pika are to be found in the interior, with innovations moving from east to west. Moreover, the innovation of the /v/ sound in place of /p/ and /b/ is found only among Kongo-Nzebi speakers, precisely along the Loango coast and its immediate interior.
Even though *-vika is commonly translated as ‘slave,’ we know that the latter term is itself an innovation, an addition to the linguistic field that represented the introduction of European forms of chattel slavery into the coastal region.Footnote 14 Baudry's other translation for vika, ‘captive,’ comes closer to capturing the broader meaning of the term in Kikongo. Louis-Marie-Joseph de Grandpré, who worked as a slave trader and lived on the Loango coast in the 1780s, precisely the time that Baudry was speaking with his Kongolese slaves in St. Domingue, wrote that the Kikongo term bica meant “to await someone, to abandon.”Footnote 15 Meanwhile, Grandpré claimed that the term for slave was not *-pika (-bika, -vika), but montou.Footnote 16
Vika, Extended
Baudry's ‘captive’ and Grandpré’s ‘awaiting someone’ may appear to be contradictory, but both encompass a sense of social alienation and detachment. The archetypical form of alienation—and the epitome of vika status—was separation from one's matriclan (kanda). To be kanda-less was to be a “despicable outcast, without money, without influence, without defense, exposed to all insults because nobody will stand up for him.”Footnote 17 The abjection of the kinless outsider could be ameliorated by building new protective social networks, but this process took time, and achieving full belonging was rare. Thought of differently, to be a vika was to be perpetually dependent, like a serf or vassal.Footnote 18
According to Grandpré, vassals (“fils de terre”) were distinguished from “ordinary slaves” (montou), who were “purchased.”Footnote 19 Both vassals and slaves were at the service of Kongolese princes, but the “sons of the land” held higher status than the commodified montou. Grandpré clarified this distinction, explaining that among the servant class:
Many are slaves and subject to the whims of their master, who sells them at his will. There are many others who do not fear a similar fate, although the law would subject them as slaves; but whether their wealth gives them a consideration which protects them, or a long descent in the place of their residence, they are so naturalized that their master is afraid to sell them, or does not want to be deprived. . . . Although they say they are slaves, the master knows his rights, but never exercises them.Footnote 20
As Wyatt MacGaffey has pointed out, “In Kongo, as in neighboring areas of Central Africa, everybody was “owned” by somebody; the difference between “free” and “slave” was that ownership of the free was more widely distributed.“Footnote 21 This subtle but important difference can be seen in Kikongo distinctions between vika (owned person) and various categories of “bought” persons.Footnote 22 By the late nineteenth century, these included muntu wa nsumba (bought person), muntu a nzimbu (person exchanged for cowry shells), and muntu a mbongo (person for whom one has paid much).Footnote 23 Presumably, Baudry's Kikongo-speaking interlocutors in St. Domingue had montou and perhaps other terms at their disposal when they chose vika as their preferred term for slave. Baudry almost certainly chose vika in accordance with the demands and self-definitions of Kongolese “slaves” in St. Domingue, demands that converged around ideas of dependency, reciprocity, the “right” to run away from cruel masters, and even master exchange.
Drawing upon a range of ethnographic and oral traditions in West Central Africa, Almeida demonstrates that across the region captives could legally change masters through highly choreographed rituals. Indeed, he argues that *-pika (-bika, -vika) did not imply chattel slavery at all: rather, the essence of these terms was “master exchange.” For example, in Benguela, a mistreated slave could flee his master, enter the property of his desired new master, and kill one of his cattle. After cooking and eating the cow, he would announce his crime for all to hear, offering himself as the “eternal slave” of his new master as restitution. More simply, the slave might run to his new master, rub a piece of his clothing, and declare, “Ame pika yove” (I am your slave).Footnote 24
Almost the same process of master exchange applied further north in the Kikongo-speaking regions that produced most of St. Domingue's slaves on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. According to Grandpré, princes along the Loango coast frequently tried to lure the vassals of other masters to their own lands by offering new privileges and freedoms.Footnote 25 Similarly, describing the coast of Loango in the 1770s, the French Catholic priest Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart wrote that “the slaves are not so mistreated in these states: the King and the Princes spare those who belong to them, in the fear that having nothing which attaches them to their homeland, they will pass to the service of foreign Princes who always readily seize the opportunity to augment their possessions, ensuring the fugitive slaves that they want to give them a better fate than they have left behind.”Footnote 26 The practice of changing masters endured in Loango. In 1909, British anthropologist John Weeks described in greater detail the mechanics of the master-switching ritual. Weeks' account is worth quoting at length:
In connection with slaves there is a custom that somewhat ameliorates their condition by ensuring for them decent treatment and proper consideration. A slave badly treated by his master may run off to another, who will, he thinks, use him more kindly. On arrival before the selected chief he kneels before him and pays homage, saying “I have come to you because my master does many bad things to me. Will you accept me?” If the chief listens to him and decides to accept him, he kills a goat, and they eat a portion of it together. This is a token that the chief has agreed to accept him. Guns are fired and people shout “Nkombo! Nkombo!” (Goat! Goat!), and all the town is jubilant because of the event.
On the next market day the chief takes the one he has accepted and shows him at the market, making it known that he has eaten his goat and is no longer a slave. The old master must accept the ordinary market value of his slave, and he is not allowed to take him again, or buy him for any amount of money. His former slave takes a new name from the ceremony of eating the goat, and is henceforth called “Nkombo” (Goat). Nor is he the slave of the man who gave him the goat— rather he is practically a free man. These “goats” are very highly appreciated by chiefs, as they generally become very faithful followers of those with whom they have eaten the goat. Some chiefs buy costly charms for the purposes of attracting these “goats” to them.Footnote 27
Clearly, Europeans recognized that “slaves” demanded some modicum of fair treatment in Kikongo-speaking regions of West Central Africa, lest they offer themselves as “goats” to other masters. But how might the concept of “goat slaves” have been transmitted to colonial St. Domingue? Along with Baudry's entries of vika and m'vika for ‘slave’ and ‘captive’ respectively, he also included the Kikongo word bika for the French quitter (to leave or part) and lâcher (to drop, to let go of, to release, to set free).Footnote 28 These definitions recall Grandpré’s bica, with its sense of “to wait for someone, to abandon” (attendre, laisser). In St. Domingue at least, the Kikongo words vika, m'vika, and bika operated side-by-side, opening onto a field of meaning that might explain the prevalence of petit marronage and French colonists' seeming tolerance of slave gatherings at markets, provision grounds, and weekend festivals.Footnote 29 If slaves in St. Domingue understood slavery through the optic of dependency and reciprocity, the demands they put upon masters for “freedoms” within the institution of slavery must be understood as claims staked by dependents.
For Kongolese, these “freedoms” apparently included broad patronage networks, master switching, and even marronage metaphors related to cattle. For example, some St. Domingue runaways, after being away from their master's property for a short period, sought to negotiate their return to the plantation through “an older woman in the planter's family or a neighbor, with slaves promising to return if they were spared punishment.”Footnote 30 Other runaway slaves like the “Congos” Julien and Cupidon, each fled back to the plantations of their previous masters in the hopes that these more benevolent patrons would reclaim them.Footnote 31 Finally, three Congo runaways, each in different parts of the colony, allegedly walked around with bridles in their hands claiming that they were “searching for their master's cattle.”Footnote 32 These three Congos, who appeared in separate runaway ads over a period of four months in 1782, are the only runaways found among the more than 10,000 runaway advertisements in St. Domingue between 1766 and 1791 who feigned searching for cattle. Perhaps this is only a coincidence. Or, perhaps rather than searching for cattle, these Congos carried the bridles as symbols of their dependent status as runaway vika looking to attach themselves to new masters. Whatever the case, they exemplified the full field of meanings associated with vika and bika—they were “slaves” who had “left or parted,” or “abandoned,” and were now “waiting for someone” who might serve as a new protector/patron.
Crucially, this small sample of “goat slaves” emerged in St. Domingue in the 1770s and early 1780s. During the 1780s and the years immediately leading up the revolution, more than 230,000 Africans disembarked in the colony, nearly half of them from west central Africa.Footnote 33 This represented the height of the slave trade to St. Domingue. As labor demands increased and the number of Africans rapidly increased, abuses on plantations mounted. Africans were overworked, underfed, and punished in graphic fashion. The French crown tried to curb planter terror with a series of royal ordinances in 1784 and 1785, but to little avail.Footnote 34 Not surprisingly, slaves abandoned the plantations in droves. Of the 10,000 runaway slave ads published in St. Domingue's most prominent colonial newspaper between 1766 and 1791, half appeared between 1783 and 1790.Footnote 35 But the expansion of the plantation economy, especially into St. Domingue's mountainous regions, meant that runaways had few places to hide, and no benevolent patrons left to take up their cause. However, the revolution would present runaway slaves with new opportunities.
Evidence suggests that St. Domingue's slaves fled to the earliest rebel camps, presenting themselves to their leaders much as Kongolese presented themselves to African chiefs—as “goats,” swearing allegiance to a new master. Kongolese slaves fled to a variety of military bands led by “kings.”Footnote 36 Viewed through this lens, it is no coincidence that in the earliest stages of the Haitian Revolution in places like Grand-Rivière and Les Platons, even after overwhelming military victories, insurgents did not demand the outright abolition of slavery. Rather, they tried to negotiate the freedom of their leaders, the introduction of a three-day work week, and the abolition of the whip.Footnote 37 Being a vika was not intolerable, so long as there were patrons to protect slaves' reciprocal interests.Footnote 38 In exchange for these concessions, leaders like Jean François, Biassou, and Gilles Bénech promised the slaves peaceful return to their plantations; however, St. Domingue's Colonial Assembly refused to negotiate with the rebels. In this way, St. Domingue slave masters simultaneously crushed the customary rights of the maroon (from the Spanish cimarrón, “wild, untamed”; often associated with cattle) and the vika, asserting that the “goats” and “cows” could no longer be allowed to roam freely. Rather, they had to be confined to their own corrals, laboring non-stop to satisfy their masters' voracious appetites for wealth.
Baudry's use of the term vika to translate esclave suggests how Kongolese ways of being impressed themselves on French planters in St. Domingue. Though the term vika was multi-valent and admittedly ambiguous, slave masters apparently acted in accordance with the broad meanings of the term, recognizing the reciprocal demands of their slaves, at least until shortly before the Revolution. Evidence suggests that the curtailing of these concessions helped spark and ultimately sustain the uprising. If, as David Geggus has argued, “marronage was primarily an alternative to rebellion, a safety valve that helps explain the remarkable absence of slave revolts in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue,” then the strict curtailing of those freedoms in the immediate years leading up to the revolution marked a violation of the masters' reciprocal obligations to their slaves.Footnote 39 The failure of this social contract was a license to rebellion.
If the term vika provides us with alternate, Kongolese insights into how French masters might have understood slavery in colonial St. Domingue, other terms leave no room for doubting the extent to which some slave masters became etched in Kongolese ontologies. Throughout Baudry's Second Voyage, he uses the term ‘brigand’ to describe the Haitian rebels. Recall, for example, that the “brigands” burned Baudry's plantation, destroying his 24-volume colonial encyclopedia. In French, the etymology of the term brigand dates back to around 1400 and refers to irregular “foot soldiers.” Today, the term is best defined as “robber” or “bandit,” pointing to the blurry distinction between paid mercenary soldiers and armed criminal gangs. Yet, Baudry's Kikongo translation of brigand—the same term he used to describe Haiti's revolutionary Africans—was n'doki. Technically, n'doki means other-worldly “power” that can be used for good or evil, but the ability to harness this power was always considered dangerous. Thus, its associations have nearly always translated as “witch” or “witchcraft.”
The fact that Baudry chose the socially loaded term n'doki to define ‘brigand’ was no error. On the contrary, Baudry almost certainly understood the Haitian rebels as “witches” and the revolution itself as an act of witchcraft. How else to explain such an “unthinkable” catastrophe, one that Baudry himself had clearly not yet reconciled, even ten years later?Footnote 40 What makes this reference truly important, however, is the field of knowledge from which it emanates. Baudry likely had at his disposal any number of other terms to describe brigands.Footnote 41 His choice of n'doki utterly failed to convey the French meaning of brigand, but it captured perfectly the French perspective on the inexplicable social ruptures, death, and destruction wrought by the Haitian Revolution. For the French, all of the “nonwhite rebels of St. Domingue” were brigands.Footnote 42 As a mirror to the witchcraft implied by chattel “slave” and “slavery,” Baudry translated “brigand” and “brigandage” in a way that only someone embedded in the social and cultural worlds of Kongo peoples in St. Domingue could possibly understand. In this way, Haiti became the ground for an intellectual contest over the meaning of “witchcraft,” one that implicated French and Kongolese alike.
Swamp Grass and Slaves
Even as the French were caught up in the epistemological webs of Kongolese “witchcraft” during the Haitian Revolution, memories of Kongolese slavery, witchcraft, and violence have lived on in Haiti's post-revolutionary history, often in plain sight. Most historians, and even casual observers, of Haiti's twentieth-century history have heard of the tontons macoutes, the feared henchmen who unleashed murder and mayhem under Papa Doc Duvalier beginning in the 1960s. In Haitian oral tradition, Uncle Knapsack was “a terrifying bogeyman who put disobedient children in his bag and carried them off to slavery.”Footnote 43 Unfortunately, tracing the lineage of this story to any time earlier than the period of the Duvalier regime is a challenge. In the late nineteenth century, the American lawyer John Bigelow seemingly captured a hint of this myth when he described the Haitian knapsack, or macoute. Bigelow wrote, “The macoute is a sort of knapsack or saddle-bag made of flag or swamp grass, and which the Haytian peasant throws across the back of his donkey; and in it he carries everything, from a baby to a piece of pork, from a bunch of sugar cane to a sack of flour.”Footnote 44 Bigelow's reference to the baby in the knapsack may be a simple coincidence, though his gendering of the “Haytian peasant” as male and his lumping of the baby with consumable commodities does raise suspicions.
Regardless, Bigelow's reference to the macoute being made from swamp grass draws us definitively toward its Kongolese etymology and meaning. The proto-Bantu root *-kút means “to bind, wrap up.”Footnote 45 Reflecting on his journey to the Congo coast in the 1780s, Grandpré noted that macoute was a “word of the country that means fabric of straw.”Footnote 46 Ten years earlier, the French priest Proyart described how the Kongolese made these “macoutes”:
The weavers make their cloths of a grass about two feet high, which grows untilled in the desert plains, and needs no preparation to be put to work. . . . This cloth is woven like ours; but they make it on their knees, without shuttle or loom having the patience to pass the wool through the threads with their fingers, in the same way that our basket-makers weave their hurdles. . . . Their little pieces, which we call macoutes, serve as the current money of the country.Footnote 47
If the cloth work known as macoute operated as currency, its most obvious purchasing power was in slaves.Footnote 48 No greater an authority than Baudry points to the chilling exchange of macoutes for slaves at the port of Ambriz. In the introduction to his Kikongo vocabulary, he explains that fishermen in Ambriz no longer sold their fish directly to local villagers: “These fishermen do not bother to sell their fish. They send their representatives to carry their fish to land. We [the French] give them in return a currency made of straw known as makoute. They collect these makoutes. When they have a sufficient quantity, they exchange them for captives, which they sell to the slavers. These captives provide them with goods, and when they have enough to survive they leave fishing altogether.”Footnote 49
In this way local fishermen literally turned fish into macoutes into slaves. Thus, the little pieces of straw cloth used to weave baskets and bags now “tied and bound” human beings to perpetual bondage in the Americas. For contemporary Haitians, the macoute may be a simple sack, but memories of kidnapping, violence, and slavery are etched onto it in inescapable ways. Uncle Knapsack is no myth; the tontons macoutes were indeed slave traders. Haitians may not have access to this history as everyday knowledge, but it is a part of their collective memoryscape. Such memories came flooding back into the explanatory realm of terror and power when Haitians faced one of the twentieth century's most menacing dictators.Footnote 50
Using Baudry's dictionnaire, I have considered just four Kikongo words—mpoutou, mvika, ndoki, and macoute. Admittedly, this analysis is more suggestive than it is exhaustive, and I confess that I am no expert on Haitian history. However, I hope that others can see the potential in the kinds of methodological interventions and close conceptual readings that I am suggesting here. Kongolese ideas and ways of being shaped slavery, revolution, and memory in ways that have scarcely been noticed by historians of Haiti.Footnote 51 These ideas penetrated into the very fabric of eighteenth-century St. Domingue society, reaching even French planters like Baudry, Moreau de Saint-Méry, and others.
Kikongo Ontology in Haiti's History
Given the predominance of west central Africans in St. Domingue on the eve of the Revolution, the presence of Kongolese ideas should come as no surprise.Footnote 52 Yet scholars continue to be deeply skeptical of inquiries such as this one. Most recognize that African ideas mattered, but those ideas are somehow set aside as inscrutable. David Geggus warns against the “twin perils of exoticizing or occidentalizing. . . the attitudes and beliefs” of Africans in the Haitian Revolution.Footnote 53 Meanwhile, Laurent DuBois asks, “Would we recognize an ‘African’ political ideology if we saw one?”Footnote 54 French men like Baudry clearly knew Kongolese ideas when they saw them. And they sometimes tried to co-opt those ideas into their collective service, much as Africans did with ideas like “liberty” and “freedom.”
To shrug our shoulders and concede to the futility of excavating African ideas in the Haitian Revolution is to reify those European intellectual strands that are familiar and accessible. Such a move forecloses any African intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution and leaves us with the same old “Enlightenment” and “Age of Revolution” approaches that are far more ahistorical (and essentialist) than those that try to center on the majority-African rebels. Bringing the Africanist's methodological toolbox to bear on Haitian sources challenges the way we understand “slavery” and “revolution” in Haitian history and memory. A capacious methodological approach that utilizes historical linguistics and early ethnography, alongside archival sources, suggests a more complicated history of the Revolution and its aftermaths.Footnote 55
Africans surely embraced European ideas, but the opposite was also true. Ultimately, I endorse DuBois's argument that “to begin truly to grasp the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Caribbean we must understand the layering transformations and translations, rooted in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, that produced it.”Footnote 56 We already understand the European roots pretty well. If we desire to understand the fields of knowledge and ways of being of the largest group of African slaves in St. Domingue during the revolution, we must find new ways of accessing their ideas. The sources for Kongolese translations and transformations exist. We just have to ask them the right questions.
