The Congolese Atlantic: New Perspectives on Central Africans in the Haitian Revolution

African and Haitian historians have long since established the fact that the majority of Haitian Revolutionaries were born in central Africa, and many had only spent a short amount of time in the colony. My paper asks how central African background influenced the Haitian Revolution. In order to answer this question, I treat colonial Saint Domingue and west central Africa as one political sphere, asking how warfare and resistance to enslavement in west central Africa impacted resistance to slavery in the Haitian Revolution.

Using sources from around the Atlantic world, my paper will explore with as much specificity as possible from where in Africa slaves in Saint Domingue originated, and why this is important for understanding the Haitian Revolution. This paper challenges previous work that has suggested the majority of captives came either from Gabon or from the Kingdom of Kongo. Instead, my research suggests that in the late eighteenth century, especially the 1780s, slaves bought by the French on the Loango Coast came largely from east of the Kwango River, south of the Zaire River. In addition, the French bought large numbers of slaves south of Benguela: these captives would likewise have originated from east of the Kwango River. In my paper I will interrogate the implications of such origins for the Haitian Revolution, suggesting that the experience of resisting the rise of “predatory states” such as the Bayaka and the Luba and Lunda in the late eighteenth century were significant events. Sources for this paper include French and colonial documents, written documentation from central Africa, French cartography, as well as oral narratives and Vodou songs.