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Research Note: New Perspectives on Kongo in Revolutionary Haiti

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2016

James Sweet
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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. In Paris, he briefly reunited with his more famous brother-in-law, the lawyer and writer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry. 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.

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Articles
Information
The Americas , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 83 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2016 

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References

1. For more on Baudry's life as a soldier and political figure in St. Domingue, see Depréaux, Albert, “Le Commandant Baudry des Lozières et la Phalange de Crête Dragons (Saint-Domingue, 1789-1792),” Revue de L'Histoire des Colonies Françaises 17 (1924): 1–42 Google Scholar.

2. Moreau de Saint-Méry's detailed study of colonial St. Domingue is the most authoritative and most frequently cited source on the history of Haiti prior to the Revolution. Saint-Méry, Moreau de, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Chez l'auteur, 1797)Google Scholar.

3. See for example Baudry, “A Memoir on Animal Cotton, or the Insect Fly,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 5 (1802): 150–159 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief treatment of Baudry's life as a natural historian, see Iannini, Christopher, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 1–3 Google Scholar, 7–8, 268–269.

4. Loziéres, Louis-Narcisse Baudry des, Second voyage à Louisiane: faisant suite au premier de l'auteur de 1794 à 1798 (Paris: Charles, 1802)Google Scholar, vol. 2, 1.

5. Ibid., 72–73.

6. See for example Baudry's, Les égarements du nigrophilisme (Paris, 1802)Google Scholar, in which he argues for the restoration of slavery in the French colonies and the innate inferiority of Africans and people of color.

7. See for example Dubois, Laurent, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31 (2006): 1–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sweet, James, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

8. The argument laid out here builds on Sweet, Domingos Álvares. See also Sweet, , “Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Epistemology, Ontology,” Journal of African History 55 (2014): 147–159 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Mobley argues that Yombe, Vili, and Woyo were the languages that most contributed to Baudry's vocabulary. Christina Mobley, “The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti” (PhD diss.: Duke University, 2015). In chapter 5, 186–229, Mobley ingeniously combines contemporaneous eighteenth-century linguistic evidence from the Loango coast and St. Domingue to demonstrate the proliferation of Western Kikongo in revolutionary Haiti. The derivation of Baudry's vocabulary from Western Kikongo is also confirmed by John Thornton, personal email, March 17, 2013, and Koen Bostoen, personal email, December 23, 2015. For more on the West-Kongo subclade, see Koen Bostoen, Simon Branford, Grollemund, Rebecca, and Schryver, Gilles-Maurice de, “Introducing a State-of-the-Art Phylogenetic Classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster,” Africa Linguistica 21 (2015): 87–162 Google Scholar.

10. Massoumou, Omer and Queffélec, Ambroise Jean-Marc, Le français en République du Congo (Paris: Archives contemporaines, 2007), 312 Google Scholar.

11. MacGaffey, Wyatt, “Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Schwartz, Stuart, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 249–267 Google Scholar.

12. In Kikongo, vika and m'vika are the same word. The “m” is simply the singular noun prefix for the root -vika.” The fact that “esclave” and “captif” stand as separate entries in Baudry's dictionnaire—and both are “vika”—reveals the ambiguity of the term.

13. Marcos Abreu Leitão de Almeida, “Ladinos e boçais: o regime de línguas do contrabando de africanos (1831–c. 1850) (MA thesis: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2012). See especially 129–152.

14. See for example the explanation of Portuguese traveler Henrique Augusto Dias Carvalho, who traveled across West Central Africa in the late 1880s. noted, He, “In these countries the slave, in the exact sense conveyed by the word in European languages, does not exist.” Prisoners of war who served invading armies were called mubeka or mubika, meaning “he who carries.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society 11 (1889): 570 Google Scholar.

15. Grandpré, L. de, Voyage a la Côte Occidentale d'Afrique fait dans les années 1786 et 1787 (Paris: Dentu, 1801)Google Scholar, vol. 1, 161. For Grandpré, bica meant “attendre, laisser.”

16. For montou as ‘esclave,’ see ibid., 156. The use of montou for slave persisted into the nineteenth century on the Loango coast. See for example Turiault, M., “Le Congo, langage, moeurs, religion, gouvernement des peuplades de cette region de l'Afrique équatoriale,” Bulletin de la Société Académique de Brest 9 (1883-84): 27 Google Scholar, 28.

17. Bittremieux, Leo, Mayombsch idioticon (Ghent: Erasmus, 1922), 112 Google Scholar. Thanks to Marcos Abreu Leitão de Almeida for pointing me toward Bittremieux's expansive definition of dikanda.

18. Jan Vansina writes that pika meant “dependent” but was “glossed as slave.” The noun pika is an innovation from the root -pik, meaning “to arrive,” as in a “new settler” or “stranger.” Vansina, , Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 278 Google Scholar.

19. Grandpré, Voyage a la Côte, vol. 1, 186. The term montou (also muntu) is most often translated simply as ‘person,’ but it appears to have emerged as a shorthand for a broad field of “bought persons.”

20. Grandpré, Voyage a la Côte, vol. 1, 104–105.

21. MacGaffey, Wyatt, “Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves: Texts from 1915,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 41 (2008): 55 Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 60. Similarly, Vansina argues that -pika was “certainly not the only term for slave or slavelike status in the area, but it came to refer to the traded slave.” Vansina, , “Deep Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 352 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also map 3, for the distribution of ‘pika’ across coastal West Central Africa.

23. Karl Laman, The Kongo (Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia VIII, 1957) vol. 2, 56. See also Martins, Manuel Alfredo de Morais, Contacto de culturas no Congo Portugués (Lisbon: Junta da Investigação do Ultramar, 1958), 54 Google Scholar. Revealingly, Martins notes that the opposite of “bought” people were those persons “belonging to the kanda,” or “muntu a kanda,” also known as mfumu.

24. Almeida, “Ladinos e boçais,” 145, as quoted from Ladislau Magyar, Viagens no interior da África Austral nos anos 1849 a 1857, manuscript, chapt. 7.

25. Grandpré, Voyage a la Côte, vol. 1, 115. For a more detailed description of this practice, see Mobley, “The Kongolese Atlantic,” 152–156.

26. Proyart, M. l'Abbé, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d'Afrique (Paris: C.P. Berton and N. Crapart, 1776), 121 Google Scholar.

27. Weeks, John H., Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: J.B. Lippincott, 1914), 72–73 Google Scholar. During roughly the same period, Karl Laman recorded similar descriptions of slaves escaping to other masters. See MacGaffey, “Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves,” 69–71.

28. For the French quitter as ‘bika’, see Baudry, Second voyage à Louisiane, vol. 2, 140. For lâcher as bika, see 130.

29. Moreau de Saint-Méry, for example, wrote that the Cap Français market drew up to 15,000 slaves every week. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, vol. 1, 441.

30. Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 52–53 Google Scholar.

31. Affiches américaines, January 30, 1773 (Cupidon); March 28, 1780 (Julien). Le marronage à Saint-Domingue (Haiti): histoire, mémoire, technologie: www.marronnage.info/fr/index.html, accessed February 19, 2015.

32. Affiches américaines, April, 13, 1782 (“Une nègre, nation Congo . . . age de 15 à 16,” Port-au-Prince); August 19, 1782 (“Un jeune Nègre, nommé, Mathieu, Congo,” Saint-Marc); August 21, 1782 (“Un negre Congo, nommé Jean-Baptiste, dit Pharaon,” Fonds-Blancs). Le marronage à Saint-Domingue (Haiti): histoire, mémoire, technologie: www.marronnage.info/fr/index.html, accessed November 9, 2016.

33. Between 1781 and 1790, 236,848 Africans arrived at St. Domingue; of these, 112,667 were from Kongo/Angola. These figures are roughly the same as those for the previous 20 years combined. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. www.slavevoyages.org, accessed February 19, 2015.

34. Fick, Carolyn, The Making of Haiti: The St. Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 33–37 Google Scholar.

35. Affiches américaines. Altogether, the database includes 10,773 runaway advertisements. Of these, 5,381 appeared between 1783 and 1790.

36. For a careful and provocative reading of the meanings of Kongolese kingship and military service in St. Domingue, see Thornton, John, “I Am the Subject of the King of Congo”: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 181–214 Google Scholar. Crucially, Thornton notes that St. Domingue's “kings” did not have to be African-born to command allegiance.

37. Fick, The Making of Haiti, 114–117, 137–156.

38. On the notion of seeking protection from intermediary patrons, or “tough guys,” in Kongo, see MacGaffey, “Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves,” 70.

39. Geggus, David, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 74 Google Scholar. Debate over the role of runaway slaves in sparking the Haitian Revolution has been robust. Gabriel Debien and David Geggus, among others, have argued that the role of runaways was minimal, while Carolyn Fick sees much greater continuity between marronage and the abandonment of the plantations and the growth of the guerrilla armies of the revolution. Viewed through the Kongo optic presented here, it is clear that maroons played a crucial role in the revolution, albeit one that remained relatively conservative until all options for compromise and reciprocity had been exhausted.

40. Michel-Rolph, Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70–107 Google Scholar.

41. For example, Bentley uses the term ‘kimpumbulu’ to describe “one who is wild, wicked, turbulent, unreliable, passionate, dissolute, rash, reckless, lawless, dissipated, loose, bad, or licentious; a vicious person, a scamp, a rascal.” Bentley, W. Holman, Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language (London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1887), 298 Google Scholar.

42. Ferrer, Ada, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ferrer convincingly demonstrates that the French reduced Haiti's rebels to “brigands” throughout the revolution. In addition to the quotation above, see 86, 87, 91, 193.

43. Cray, Ed, “Haitian Bogeyman,” Western Folklore 24 (1965): 121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Bigelow, John, The Wit and Wisdom of the Haytians (New York: Scribner and Armstrong, 1877), 70 Google Scholar.

45. As a derivative, the root *-kútù means “bag.” Bantu lexical reconstructions 3 / Reconstructions lexicales bantous 3, Yvonne Bastin, André Coupez, Evariste Mumba, and Thilo C. Schadeberg, eds. (Tervuren, 2002), www.africamuseum.be/collections/browsecollections/humansciences/blr, accessed November 9, 2016.

46 Grandpré, Voyage a la Côte, vol. 1, 71.

47. M. l'Abbé Proyart, Histoire de Loango, 108.

48. In French understandings, the macoute was the standard currency of the Loango coast, with slaves being the baseline commodity for measuring its value. According to Bazinghen, a slave was worth 3,500 macoutes in 1764. Bazinghen, François André Abot de, Traité des monnoies et de la jurisdiction de la Cour des monnoies en forme de dictionnaire (Paris: Guillyn, 1764)Google Scholar, vols. 2, 3.

49. Baudry, Second voyage à Louisiane, vol. 2, 83.

50. Here I draw liberally from the ideas of Shaw, Rosalind, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 Google Scholar). See especially chapter 2, “Spirit Memoryscape.”

51. There are important exceptions. See for example John Thornton, Terry Rey, and most recently, Christina Mobley.

52. Kongos made up at least half the slave population on coffee plantations in the northern and western Provinces. In the sugar-producing regions of the north, they comprised 40 percent of the slaves. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 42.

53. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 42.

54. Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment,” 13.

55. As far as I am aware, the only scholar currently employing such broad, cross-cutting methodologies for Haitian history is Christina Mobley. See Mobley, “The Kongolese Atlantic.”

56. Dubois, “Enslaved Enlightenment,” 14.