The article critiques the scholarly emphasis on the centrality of West-Central Africans in the Haitian Revolution. It argues that two highly influential articles published 30 years ago by John Thornton greatly exaggerated the presence of such “Congos” in the colony, and overstated that of Africans in general. Amplified in subsequent works by Thornton and others, this exaggeration has become the prevailing orthodoxy and the issue has gone entirely unnoticed down to today. To make its point, the article draws on a data set of more than 31,000 enslaved workers of known origin and it attempts to calculate population change on the eve of the revolution. It lays out the way the ethnic composition of the black population varied by crop type and region, and produces for the first time estimates for the whole of Saint Domingue. It additionally makes two excursions into African studies. The first is to investigate the ethnic/geographic origins of the “Congos.” The second relates to the nature of slavery in West-Central Africa and certain items of Kikongo vocabulary. This forms part of a critique of an ambitious article by James Sweet concerning the influence of Kongolese in Saint-Domingue that constitutes the article's final section.

Over the past 30 years, scholarship has shifted from viewing the Haitian Revolution as largely an extension of the French Revolution to understanding it as a revolt from the perspective of Africa and Africans. Four related factors contribute to explanations of this change in perspective. First, historians trained in pre-colonial Africa began to study slavery in the Americas. The second factor is the emergence of Atlantic History as a field of study, the third is the Bicentennial commemorations of the start (1991) and the end (2004) of the Haitian Revolution, and the fourth is Michel-Rolph Trouillot's much celebrated, widely circulated, and extremely influential essay “Unthinkable History” (from Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; 1995), in which he critiqued the entire historiography of the Haitian Revolution and called for new perspectives. Taken collectively, the confluence of these four factors, all emerging prominently in the 1990s, contributed to the historiographical shift in Haitian scholarship that David Geggus labels “Kongomania.”

The two main points of Geggus's contribution to this issue of The Americas is to challenge this recent understanding of the Haitian Revolution as essentially an African revolt in the Caribbean led by Kongos, and to give scholars reason to focus more attention on the active role of Creoles. Collectively, the responses by John Thornton, James H. Sweet, and Christina Mobley to Geggus's article emphasize that the point of their scholarship was to offer a Kongo perspective on the Haitian Revolution from their training and expertise in African history, not produce a new orthodoxy.