Part One: The Haitian Revolution: The Most Successful Revolt in the Americas

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that we live in hell. No wait,
that's unrelated the fact that we live in hell world.
You're a weekly reminder that when bad things are happening,
you could do good things because it's bad otherwise. Yes,
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is
prop How are you hey man?

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Uh well, where do we begin?

Speaker 4 (00:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
We're recording this at the end of January twenty twenty five,
so if you're listening in the future, this is either
a blissful time to look back at or just obviously
where everything went wrong.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I just don't know how many months January has. Why is.

Speaker 4 (00:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (00:45):
I mean I'm excited for this because it's going to
be a sign that, like you said, in this hell
we live in, every once in a while there are
people that are tall drinks of water.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, people, people get shited done. In real bad times,
people get shit done like this month where your city
caught on fire and uh, nothing else bad happened.

Speaker 5 (01:10):
I will say in spirit of cool people like from
street level to like even our government, like civics, like
people snapped into snapped into work. One thing we will
always say is La loves La and like we got busy,

(01:34):
Like we got busy. I am very impressed at how
fast we were already ready to go. But when by
the time the city bureocracy was able to like you know,
stand up all the stuff they needed to stand up,
we was already ready and like, yeah, there hasn't been
except for the rent price gouging.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
But it's the people coming in after that do all
the damage.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
It's the people coming in after. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:59):
But like I've been like just so impressed dude, people,
Like I was in a spot where somebody learned Spanish
just so that they can communicate. Like it was super dope,
Like I was translating for a little bit, but then
after a while he was like, oh wait, I'm gonna learn,
So it was pretty dope.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah fuck yeah yeah. Our producer is Sophie, who's also here.
Hi Sophie.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Do you remember on our Q and A when somebody
was like asking us about sourdough bread and we were like,
we don't do that. I made sourdough bread. Boom.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Do you think the QA was part of your nod?

Speaker 1 (02:36):
My wonderful friend Molly also Molly for listening. Hi Molly,
not Molly who works on cools. On different Molly. Also
great Molly. Oh, there's good Molly's.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
A lot of Molly's.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, Molly's a pretty good Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
I don't mind him. Molly crazy drug though.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, as I say, I've had a little bit of
fun on Molly.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
But Molly Trefacta was like, take this cooking class with me,
and we signed up like two months ago and we
took this class.

Speaker 5 (03:01):
There are a lot of things you can make fun
of about Portland, and then there's other stuff that like, yeah,
but that's kind of dope.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
No, it was very charm It was like very lovely,
but it was it was peak Portland, but in a
good way.

Speaker 5 (03:15):
Yeah, you can make fun of Portland as much. Oh
my god, you're take a salarial class. It's like, actually,
sour dough is pretty delicious and it's pretty cool that
you could make it because we have gluten issues.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
So yeah, exactly. And I took this class. I got
my starter, I got my dough, and I made soured
nough bread and I waited the like cool down period.
I was like, oh, it looks like bread. Is it bread?
Because it looked like bread. But I was like, does
it taste delicious?

Speaker 2 (03:39):
So it looked real good. I got to see it.
None of you all can, only the three of us can.

Speaker 5 (03:45):
It looks amazing. I ain't gonna hold you got the
nice crisp on top man.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah it looks good.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
So if anybody wants to message me to talk about bread, cool,
that's my that's my plug.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Which is saying a lot because normally Sophie doesn't want
to be messaged about whatever random thing you think. I've
all listening to this show.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, but I really like.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
But I really like when people are like, no, like
I know this shit, this is my take, and I'm like, okay, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
Can appreciate that when you know what you're talking.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
About, because I took one class and I made bread
once and I was like, wow, I'm amazing.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
I am a baker, you know what.

Speaker 5 (04:23):
Actually, somebody DMed me on some like correcting some history
stuff that I like, appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Most of the time. I'm like, I have a degree
in this stuff.

Speaker 5 (04:33):
So like, uh, you want to you want to pick
a write off camera one of the nine books on
the topic that you talk about, But this time I
was like, shit, actually, am I stay corrected?

Speaker 4 (04:45):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (04:46):
You know, so I appreciate what somebody knows what they're
talking about, you know.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I really like because I cover things all the time
that are like not my background or experience, right, you know,
and I'm like, I hope I'm doing right by the
people of the play. So I'm talking about the history
of because that's all I can hope to do and
hearing from people and sometimes they're like, hey, you got
it like ninety percent right, and I'm like, you know what,
I'll take it.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
You know, yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
And usually it's a it's more of a like, oh,
that's one way that people usually talk about it, but
it's actually kind of like this, and I'm like, well
that's amazing, you know.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, makes you want to do it again, huh.

Speaker 4 (05:19):
I know.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
For me, I'm like, damn, I want to record again,
I know.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
And it makes me like wish I could just kind
of stay in a topic for like months, but I
would actually get bored. My brain doesn't work that way.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
We all would, Yeah, it'd be the worst. Speaking of which,
I might have left the stove on give me a second.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
La burns down again.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Nope, cool. Everything's fine. Please keep this in.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
All right, all right, So let's see our audio engineer
is Rory. Everyone wants to say hi to Rory. Hi Rory.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
So Rory. I never met Rory.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Rory is so cool? Sorry, Hi Roy. I was like,
Rory's really cool guy. Ory has a very good looking dog, okay,
and Rory has has a cool beard AFFECTA.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
That's that's my that's good things.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
That's all the Internet gets to know about Rory.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Where Yeah, that's that might even be more than the
Internet should now, but.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, I agree, but you would like him, prop.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Our theme musical was written for us by un woman
and prop.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know, I saw among the things that the government
decided to shut down, besides everything else, was the celebration
of DEI holidays like Black History Month. Oh yeah, what's
your opinion about Black History Month? A?

Speaker 5 (06:45):
Well, first of all, yeah, I remember jun teenth wasn't
a holiday until two years ago. And it's not like
we wasn't celebrating it. I feel like I feel about it.
It's historical importance. You know, I'm the child of the
Black panther, so we always go hard on Black History Month.
So like there's a part of me that will always

(07:06):
appreciate it. I love anytime that as corny as it
or as like vapid as it might be, it's still
pushing to the front things the stuff that I've swam
in my whole life, and you know, understandings of obviously
it could stand to be deeper. I don't get into
the whole like why I got to be the shortest
month or a year, you know what I'm saying. But

(07:28):
I know I, as a black child, benefited from having
this month happened, you know.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
But at the end of the day, like I don't whatever,
you know, like yeah, whatever, like you're not.

Speaker 5 (07:44):
What are you gonna You're gonna hang your kin take
cloths at at you know, at the Southwest Airlines, like
like at the gate, Like you go to the gate,
they got a can't take cloth on it, you know
what I'm saying, Like I'm like, cool, thanks exist.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
You know, I didn't forget we exist.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
But yeah, I didn't forget we existed.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
I'm glad that you took a second to you know,
design your I don't know, it's like it's you get
so many years away from it, Like it's hard, right
because in its inception, You're like, this was amazing, even
just June teams becoming a national holiday. It's like, well,
how about some healthcare and some reparations, But at the
same time it's important.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
It's like, you know what I'm saying, But like you.

Speaker 5 (08:28):
Can once you get a few years away from it,
You're like, I hate to be. What I'm trying to
say is I hate to be the like privileged generation
that didn't have to fight for it, that don't see
its importance now, you know what I'm saying. Like that's
always like the hard part for me because it's like whatever.
But like if I were, you know, with Abernathy on
the Bridge, you know what I'm saying, I would be like,

(08:50):
nigg you go celebrate this like it's I mean, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
No, it makes sense to me because I've always like,
like with this podcast, I was like, well, I'm not
going to specifically set asp and do black history in
February because I'm trying to cover black history. Because because
if you try and cover radical history in the Western
hemisphere and you don't talk about black history an awful lot,
you're failing, right.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
Not covering radical history.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yeah, yeah, And so like and so that was the
kind of my attitude going into it. But I was
I was thinking about how because you know, I asked
you a while ago about today's topic, and I was
thinking about Black History Month, where I was like, now
they're trying to take it away, and now I'm like, well,
never mind.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Well now we got to crank that soldier boy. You
know what I'm saying. Now it's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't care until you tried to take it. Yeah.
Now like oh okay, well now I'm never leaving.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah yeah, And like you know, because I mean, you know,
I was also afraid of like being corny by being
like a white girl being like all right, I'm gonna
make sure that February is this, and then I just
sort of figure like again, like as long as I
cover Black history, like.

Speaker 5 (09:52):
Yeah, you know, it's also like to your point as like, oh,
white girl's doing the black history thing. Like the thing
about our culture and I'm gonna say specifically like Black
American culture is like we're very much alike once you
give us a reason to once you're in your in
like when we love you, we love you, you know,

(10:12):
and it's just you're one of us, you're part of
the squad. You have to go out of your way
for us to be like all right, nah, you good,
Like you have to you have to really be out
of pocket for black community to stop like showing you grace,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
So for somebody like.

Speaker 5 (10:30):
Yourself who's like continuously has shown proven that you part
of part of the solution, you know what I mean?
Saying same I say with like Robert and Sophie like
they've you've proven it already, you know what I mean. So, like,
you know, for you to slip up here and there
forget this reference not knowing whatever, dog like nah, they
you know, they solid, you know what I mean. So
I feel like if you, like I would trust that

(10:52):
you're reasoning to being like, we're gonna make this Black
History Month is because of what you just said.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, since y'all trying to take it, watch this, you
know what I mean? Right?

Speaker 2 (11:02):
And I was planning on doing this, and then I
was like, oh, I guess this is gonna be the
first thing that's going to come out in February. And
it still wasn't a like Black History Month thing. But
then I was just looking at that Executive order and
I'm like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 3 (11:12):
You can't take that away? What do you like?

Speaker 5 (11:14):
And no one's gonna like why do we get days
off in Black History Month?

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Like what what did you go?

Speaker 5 (11:21):
Like?

Speaker 3 (11:21):
How you go and force this?

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, and it doesn't it doesn't cost anything, like you
dont all like you just get to I mean my
problem with it. It had always been like, oh, it's like
an easy way for people to feel better about the
fact that eleven months are White History Month, you know, yeah,
totally like but this topic, which you know what I'm
going to talk about, but the audience still, well, no,
that's not true. They know what it is.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
They read the title description the thing already.

Speaker 6 (11:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
There's been a couple of topics that since I first
pitched this show, I knew I wanted to talk about
I want to talk about the Russian Civil War, I
want to talk about the Spanish Civil War. And I
wanted to talk about the Haitian Revolution. Yeah, because as
soon as I started doing episodes about abolitionism in the US,
I was like, oh, the Haitian Revolution scared the shit

(12:07):
out of all of the racists.

Speaker 5 (12:09):
Yes, yeah, Oh, they was like, oh boy, we better Yeah,
because it worked.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah. It cast a shadow across the minds of slavers everywhere.
It was perhaps the first glimpse of what the future
held in store for them. One day, slavers everywhere would
be strung up and killed. Yeah, and uh it scared
the shit out of kings and presidents, and politics in
the Western world would never be the same.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Unfortunately, one major effect of it is that we'll talk
about the effects of it later at the end of
this four parter, but all the slave empires like shored
up their defenses and cracked down on enslaved people and abolitionists.
Yeah and uh fay quite famously, the entire Western world
is still out to destroy and punish shady and it's
not forgotten.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
It to this day. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (13:00):
Like I was like, you'll probably talk about it, but
like we like they're still getting sanctions from that, right.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That the the destruction, the the
economic punishment is just such a like it's even proof
that they like, well, they don't care about like capitalism
as a ideal of like yeah, once everyone's equal and
we all have markets, it's like, no, it's a tool
with which to punish people who they don't like. Yeah,

(13:30):
I'm curious coming into it. Okay, okay, do you have
like a what you know of the Haitian Revolution or
like battle standout things or.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
Big yeah, big picture. I know the narrative. I know
the high points, a few names here and there.

Speaker 5 (13:44):
Yeah, a few like sparse points, like the word zombie
you know comes from Haitian slaves, you know what I mean?
The history of voodoo as resistance, which really really baked
my noodle once. I like kind of it came out
of just the old traditional Baptist Black people's story to

(14:05):
be like, oh wait, this was resistance like kind.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Of changes everything, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 (14:11):
Yeah, and yeah, and just some of the like work
to continually destable. So like a lot of high points,
a few random facts, but I got to just at
a narrative. But I'm excited for to go through this specifically.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
No, me too.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And what's funny is I know because I haven't finished
writing all four parts yet, So I know everything that
leads up to the revolution right now, and then I
know a lot of the middle stuff and the end stuff,
but I don't know all of it yet because there's
a big fucking topic.

Speaker 5 (14:39):
Yeah, there's a strange I've talked about on one of
our shows, just this sort of thing around just like
the African diaspora around like the pride some of the
Central American black people feel, Caribbean black people feel, and
then African black people feel. That's different than like the

(15:00):
black people of the United States in the sense that
in a lot of ways, like they looked at us
like you didn't throw off your yeah, your owners, so
they kind of looked at us like, well, y'all a
little weak, you know what I'm saying, Like we we
got free, you know.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
So there's there's there has.

Speaker 5 (15:18):
Been sort of a historical kind of like little thing
like inside of sort of those communities, and then when
they come here us kind of being like, well, you
kind of didn't go through what you went through.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
You speak patois, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 5 (15:35):
It's kind of French, you know, like you're not you're
not black people like we black people, you know what
I'm saying, which is foolish, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
But but that became kind of a.

Speaker 5 (15:45):
Thing of just like American black people like y'all didn't
throw off y'all captors.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
So yeah, you're not like us. You know, it's very subtle.

Speaker 5 (15:56):
You know, a lot of that stuff's been worked out since,
but that's always kind of been a thing.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's funny because I have this like defensiveness where I'm like,
but y'all tried, like it's like very much at least
as hard as anyone else. And there's a lot of dude,
there's a lot of luck in the Haitian Revolution. Yeah,
and like infinite amounts of sacrifice and work, don't get
me wrong, totally.

Speaker 5 (16:18):
Yeah, being much more mature now, it's like you can't.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
First of all, they are us.

Speaker 5 (16:23):
You just got off the bus, you know, you just
bought up on a on a train stop earlier than us.
It's you are us, So it's foolish to have divisions
among us. Anyway, that division was given to us by
our captors. So there's that, you know what I mean.
And then secondly it's like, yeah, it's just they're two
different worlds. It's two different times, it's two different things.
Like you can't you can't really compare the two anyway.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
No, No, it makes sense. Yeah, I am guessing that
if people have heard of one figure of the Haitian Revolution.
It's too soon of a tour.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
He was this unlikely enough hero. We're not really going
to supergendom this week. He's more of next week. He's
unlikely hero because he's sort of may or may not
have been a Catholic. People like to argue about it.
He was born enslaved. Eventually he's going to be a
freed overseer and potentially kind of a slaver himself, depending
on which version of the history you read. And he
is actually a really conservative figure, but he's not who

(17:16):
we're going to start with. We'll talk more about him,
but we're gonna talk about a bunch of other people
that I find super interesting, and Vodu is going to
be one of the main pieces of context that we're
going to talk about today. Yeah, but first we're going
to talk about Hispaniola, which is not what it should
be called. It actually should be called Haiti in the
Taino language. But there's an island called Hispaniola. It's the

(17:39):
second largest island in the Caribbean after Cuba, and it's
the most populous right now. It is divided into two countries.
Haiti is the western third of the country. The Dominican
Republic is the eastern two thirds. The Dominican Republic speaks
Spanish primarily, Haiti speaks French and Creole. People have been
living there for several thousand years. At least the Tano

(18:02):
people lived there, and they had a bunch of different
names for the island. One of them was Iedi, And
then there's like we don't really know. There's like there's
three people saying what the original indigenous name of this
island is. They're all white people, and there's like so
there's like three people saying it, and one of them
like ID was just the western half, and one person
was like AD was just the eastern half, and one

(18:23):
person is like eighty was all of it. Yeah, but
to save us the trouble, we're gonna call it aid
the Land of High Mountains. There were thousands of people
living there, tens of thousands or nearly a million, depending
on your sources, living in five different kingdoms. And I
always feel like it's like, I mean, one, it's alway
worthking about indigenous people anywhere, But also you just have

(18:44):
this like fucking Tara Nalis idea of like, uh huh,
this place is empty or there's just like a couple
people living there and they don't have a society, and
like that's not fucking true.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yes, yeah, a million people.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah yeah, five different fucking kingdoms.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Like yeah, very long history, guys, Yeah, so funny.

Speaker 5 (19:03):
You're just like, well, they've existed as long as y'all
have existed.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, Like what the hell you mean? A new world?

Speaker 5 (19:11):
Like, yeah, been here as long as you have Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Oh you know what else has been here the whole time.
Ads just waiting over our shoulder, waiting to show up
and to try and convince you to gamble, which you
probably shouldn't do.

Speaker 6 (19:26):
Yes, here's the ads, and we're.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Back if you want to have fun gambling. I'm not
mad at you. It's just on the long enough timeline.
It's not a way to get rich.

Speaker 5 (19:44):
If you make it just a line item, Like, make
it a line item in your we're budgeting, you got
five hundred bucks that you're okay with spending, Just do that.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
I'm sorry. My hands raised.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, a little h hand icon has appeared in props
windows or is it?

Speaker 3 (20:03):
Hey, guys, can I talk?

Speaker 1 (20:05):
I have no idea how to get rid of that,
And so it just looks like you're going.

Speaker 5 (20:09):
Ex me and then my shining says, it looks like
you're done talking. We'll lower your hand in three seconds.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
One, okay, it's gone. Now okay, so I could talk again.
I had to wait a right, I at least.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
It didn't lie.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
On December sixth, fourteen ninety two, a white slaver arrived
on the shore of ied. He's a guy you might
have heard of. His name was Christopher Columbus.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
Maybe you heard of.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
Him, Yeah, And Europeans just started pouring into the place
that they called Insula Hispana and Latin because they were
still speaking Latin and then which was Spanish Island shortened
to Hispaniola. They were less concerned with naming the place
and more concerned with exploiting it. They started enslaving people
on basically day one. I think it was day six,

(20:57):
I can't remember exactly, but it was like everyone was
like really nice to them when they arrived, and then
within a couple days they were like, what the fuck
are you doing?

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Right?

Speaker 3 (21:05):
So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Disease just wrecked the indigenous people. More than ninety percent
of the population was dead within two decades of Columbus's arrival,
and it. It's never quite acknowledged that when Europeans like
quote unquote conquered North America, it was them conquering like
a post apocalyptic wasteland.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yeah, like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
They brought the apocalypse with them in the form of
disease because.

Speaker 5 (21:32):
When they like to not derail this convo, but when
they did go a head up against some of these
Meso American empires, they got their ass kicked.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, And like I think all the time about I
haven't totally wrapped my head around it. When I was
a kid, I always assumed that Africa was like sort
of colonized first, you know, because it's closer and europe
knew it existed, right, And then you're actually like, oh no,
it went internal European colonization like Ireland and shit. Yeah,
then the America's then Africa in Africa, And part of

(22:05):
that was that, like Europeans would get their fucking asses kicked.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
It was whooping a ass. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
You can see fights that were like spear versus gun,
and the spears were sometimes pulling it off.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
You know, dude. Book recommendation.

Speaker 5 (22:21):
I'm reading this book called African History of Africa. Oh sick,
all right, it's like Africans talking about Africa.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
It's super good.

Speaker 5 (22:29):
But they talked about one of the Ashanti tribes when
hang my stupid hand again when Britain.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Came, and they're like, yeah, yeah, the first the first.

Speaker 5 (22:40):
General they sent down there, like the Ashanti king like
turned his skull into a cup, so it was like
a like a ceremonial cup for like decades, like he
just drank out of the drank out of the guy's skull.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Like it was like, hey, whooped Joe ass Yeah, And
so European show yeh fourteen ninety two and they're actually
kind of bummed about the genocide. They sort of it
accidentally did They wanted to do a genocide, but they
wanted on their terms because their plan was they wanted
a genocide via slavery. They wanted to enslave everyone on
the island and then ship them over to Europe. But

(23:15):
they couldn't enslave most of the people because they were
dead because of.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Disease, because they killed them.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, of course the Tano people weren't completely destroyed, and
there's still Tano people today and they've had to like
do the like proving like people are like no no, no, no,
that you've all been destroyed. You're just making it up.
And then they're like, fine, we'll do the genetics shit.
And then they're like yeah, okay, yeah, I no, you're right. Sorry, yeah,
I fucking told too.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
Yeah yeah we don't. Yeah yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Don't actually have to tell us our history.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yeah yeah we do.

Speaker 6 (23:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
So, with the potential source of slave labor dead, the
Europeans were like, well, let's import Africans. And this very
first step is like potentially mythologized, but there's no reason
to doubt it. The very first enslaved Africans when they
arrived in the New World, either fifteen oh two or
fifteen oh three, I've read both. You had the very

(24:08):
first Maroons. The book The Encyclopedia of African Religion suggests
that a single black man escaped from the first slave
ship to dock in the Americas. He disappeared into the jungle,
and whether or not he lived or died himself, he
blazed a trail that so many people followed afterwards. We

(24:28):
have talked about Maroon communities on the show time and
time again, because they're kind of the quintessential cool people
who did cool stuff thing you know, yea, but for
people who only got the same history education I did,
and did not hear the word maroon until I was
an adult. Maroon communities are communities of people escaping enslavement
within a slave empire, like those run by Europeans in

(24:49):
the Americas. Mostly these are self emancipated black people, whether
they were born in Africa or whether whether they were
born into slavery, but indigenous people were often vital to
these communities. The first Maroons were likely people who just
ran off and were accepted into indigenous societies, and they
were also the occasional but it gets kind of played
up by white people who like to have ourselves and

(25:10):
we want our representation in every story, there were occasional
poor white people escaping indentured servitude or other like debts
who joined marion societies. Yeah, wherever you had slavery, you
had maroon communities. One story that I want to tell
eventually because I just only read the super quick version

(25:30):
of it, and I want to do probably whole episodes
about it. The first ever revolt against the colonizers in
the New World that I found is the revolt of Enriquillo.
He's a Tano chief and this revolt started in fifteen
nineteen and lasted thirteen years. His father had been killed
by I've run across this particular story so many times

(25:50):
when I read about colonization that I almost am like,
is this this literally the only thing that white people
know how to do, which is that in order to
conquer all the people, the fucking Spanish were like, all right,
all the chiefs, come here, we'll talk it out, we'll
sign some treaties. We'll have a little piece thing. Get
them all in one building, lock the door and set

(26:12):
it on fire.

Speaker 4 (26:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Uh like, I think they did this in fucking Brave.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
Heart, Like totally did it in Braveheart.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
That's it.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
That's day one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
And so sometimes his name is Enrique, sometimes it's Enriquio, Enriqueo.
His dad was one of the chiefs who died this way, okay,
And then he was basically raised by this Catholic friar
as a result, who was actually a hardcore abolitionist who
wrote a history book called A Short Account of the
Destruction of the Indies about how bad the white people

(26:47):
were there. And he's white himself. Yeah, this isn't to
say that the Catholics were on the side of the oppressed.
This is the opposite of the truth.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
This is one guy saying, are y'all crazy?

Speaker 6 (26:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, yeah, And he's kind of important to hold up,
not so that you can say, like, not all Catholic friars,
but instead that you can be like, we kind of
can't let historical people off the hook, because there were
people who because he showed up as a colonizer. He
showed up like I want a place to go live.
I'm gonna go live on Hispaniola. And then within like
a couple of years he's like, wait, what the hell

(27:19):
are we doing here? You know? Yeah, And so this
is the mentor of the kid of the Chief who
was murdered, and so Enriquio led this Tano revolt, fought
the Spanish to a standstill despite living and basically an apocalypse.
This is after the ninety percent destruction, right wow, and

(27:41):
forced new treaties to be signed. But I think that
the reason that one day I'll do a whole two parter.
But like, I think the reason the treaties fell apart
is that just like every all the time of people
just kept dying, Like.

Speaker 5 (27:53):
I just the really living color of I don't know
if I can. I can't wrap my mind around ninety percent. Yeah,
that's that's everyone you know is dead.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
Yeah, that's what that is.

Speaker 5 (28:11):
That's everyone you know and everyone who's alive, everyone they
know is dead. Like just I don't I don't know
if Yeah, I just don't that reality. And then the
color of like I really wish we could just go
back into history and just drop people in very easy

(28:33):
boxes and say, well they felt like this, they felt
like this, they felt like this, but and just it's
as messy as it is now, like us in our
you know, extreme left anarchists still somewhere in your house
have a single use plastic, you know, and like just
the complication of that. I enjoy that part of history

(28:54):
of you know, hearing this dude, that's like, well, you're
you're still a you're still a co You're still here
in a land that you shouldn't be in the first place.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah. Oh, and he he wrote a book, he wrote
a bunch of stuff being like he actually he did
not come off great. He did not start great. He
was like, oh, we're treating the indigenous people bad. We
should stop enslaving them and instead import Africans was the
first thing he wrote, and then really quickly he was like, wait, no,
never mind.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Bah, God, forget that one. Let's try it out.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
But he definitely went to his grave believing that it
is a very good and useful thing for Catholics to
go all over the New World and convert everyone to
Catholicism and like wanted like better kinder colonization.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Even though he.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Helped inspire one of the main anti the first anti
colonial revolt. Yeah so complicated, yea, yeah, which is more
anti colonial revolting than I've done. I've gone to some protests, I've.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
They were yeah yeah, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
And as far as I can tell, Maroon Africans joined
that revolt the first time I ran across it. Literally
it was represented as a Maroon revolt, but I think
that that's an exaggeration, but I don't know. But it
also showed Enslave people that there was a way to
fight colonization. You can go to the mountains and then
use guerrilla warfare to kill Europeans and it is an

(30:11):
effective strategy. Yeah, and it will continue to be ineffective
probably into the future.

Speaker 4 (30:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
However, Maroon communities were slowly wiped out on the smaller
islands of the Indies because white settlers cleared and burned
the wilderness basically, so by the seventeen hundreds they were
mostly gone from everywhere except these larger islands. Some of
these Maroon communities were absolutely huge. You and I talked
years ago on this show about the Maroon community in

(30:39):
Brazil Coulombo di Plomars, which was an independent nation in
the seventeenth century with thirty thousand people. I think you
can listen to Chico Mendes episodes for that.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
I think, yeah, yeah, when it's in is chicodes Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah. Before the Haitian Revolution, the real standout Maroon warriors
were in Jamaica. As the Encyclopedia of African Religion put it, quote,
it is the Jamaicans, however, who hold the distinction of
waging the most slave rebellions in the West per capita.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
And one day I'm just like, this is almost like
my list of notes of things that I'm going to
come back to. If you heard a Queen Nannie, I hadn't. Yes,
Queen Nannie is fucking cool. She united all the Maroons
in Jamaica. She was born and what's now Ghana. Yeah,
she practiced Obeah, which is a syncretic African diaspec religion.

(31:29):
Fucking for fifteen years, united all the Maroons into a
war against the British, which was the world's greatest military
power and who outnumbered them even on the island greatly. Yeah,
and like forced them to their knees multiple times.

Speaker 5 (31:43):
Dude, her like her, she's in that book. I was
telling about her origin story even before she did that,
Like she was always about that life. Yeah, like just
not a game about that life.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (31:56):
And as a note for like I don't I might
be talking out my neck as far as like drawing
this connection, but like no, like Mexico's kind of like
known for the like machismo, like the way that like
the men kind of like a really macho thing. Like
it's it's really the same in Jamaica, Like the Jamaican
concept of manhood is like very much you need to

(32:18):
have a million kids, and also like you just can't.
You don't take shit, like you know what I'm saying,
And like some of it is back to being like
we will not we will not comply, like that is
like in there even just like I said, just the
construction of what it means to be a Jamaican man.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
Like, yeah, we don't comply, you know what.

Speaker 5 (32:40):
I'm saying, So I don't like I said, I might
be talking out of my neck, but like that's another
one of those things. It's just I feel like has
gone through their sort of like sense of self is
like nah, bro, yeah we revolt.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah no, it makes sense, and it's some of that
energy is what's gonna is how Haiti's gonna end up free?

Speaker 4 (33:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, And so the Maroons are fucking cool. On the
Island of a eighty. The Spanish were sort of ignoring
the western coast of the island for a while. French
pirates started hanging out there. We did a whole pirate's
episode talking about how they were not as cool as
people think, but also more cool than sometimes people think.
They're more interesting in different ways than people might expect. Eventually,

(33:24):
in sixteen ninety seven, after some wars and shit in Europe,
Spain formally seeded the western part of the island of
the French. This new colony was called San Dumong, which
is French. So it doesn't look like Sandumong, it looks
like Saints don't I don't know whatever.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
All kind of letters that shouldn't be in network.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, there's a lot of vowels in the city and
the French. The reason there weren't a ton of enslaved
people over there wasn't because the Spanish were nice, but
because the Spanish weren't really hanging out there, and the
pirates were slavers, but not on the same kind of
scale because they didn't have a plantation economy. M the
French over so so many enslaved African people as fast

(34:04):
as they possibly fucking could. In the short term, this
worked out really well for the French. All of the
people who came over, they're like life expectancy was like
two or three years. It was like fifty percent of
them die within a year.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
Sheesh.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
And then it's like, it's kind of interesting because I
want to know more about this. Obviously I've read about
in various books, but I feel like I'd have to
like get a degree in exactly this to totally understand it.
It's kind of interesting to me because like, economically, in
the US South, enslave people were so expensive, yeah, but
here life was cheap, so it was cheaper and easier

(34:40):
to work people to death and just replace them.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
Wow, I never thought about that.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
It seems like the conditions were even worse than elsewhere
in the America's. But I have a feeling that, like,
if I read a book about Haitian slavery, it's going
to be the worst possible. And then if I read
a book but Jamaica slavery's be because it's just awful.
Everywhere slavery is one of the most things that's ever
happened in the history of humanity. Is chattel slavery, Like.

Speaker 5 (35:03):
Yeah, I would vote, if you're right, I would vote Haiti,
though the conditions I wouldn't vote.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
Yeah, I would vote. I mean, if you're going to
have to vote for something.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
As awful, we're going to do a little pole.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
Yeah who had it worse?

Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah what? Yeah the slavery oppression Olympics.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
But it it.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
But yeah, it is fucking awful. It's also like the
scale of bad. I actually think it is kind of
important for people to understand because, like any ethical position
says slavery wrong, right, yes, But when you have that
oversimplified moral position, you can then start blaming like the
Africans themselves who do enslaving and like how like not

(35:48):
every but like a real large number of cultures all
over the world had slavery, right yeah, and so then
you're like, well it's all equally bad and you're like, well,
racialized chattel slavery, bringing people from a different continent was worse.

Speaker 5 (36:02):
Like there's just another way around it. Like you know,
you owe somebody money, you work until it's gone. Okay,
that's one thing. It is a horrible condition. Serfdom is
a type of slavery, that's but it's something totally different.
But yeah, the idea that you are subhuman, Yeah right,
we're not the same species.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
I am a superior race.

Speaker 5 (36:23):
And when you talk specifically, like you said about Haiti,
like I again, it's like, remove all hyperbole or slang
from this sentence. They worked them to death, yeah, like
they they dropped dead.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
They worked them to death, like I.

Speaker 5 (36:47):
Just I don't know how else this yeah literal, not
like literally no, like yeah literally like they worked.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Half of them died in the air.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
Yeah, yes, that's why I say.

Speaker 5 (37:00):
That's why I say Haiti was different because like to
your point, it was like they were so fungible, you know,
in Haiti, in America.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
It costs so much. Yeah, so it's like, we don't
want your.

Speaker 5 (37:09):
Slave to die like you just you just wasted three
thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
You know, it costs as much as your house.

Speaker 5 (37:14):
If you've got as much as your house, this guy dies,
you know. So they're like paper plates. They're paper plates.
You just yeah, yeah, it's bonkers.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
It was cheaper to just bring more and more people
over than try to keep them alive.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah yeah, just go get more.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
But it worked out well in the short term to
treat them like paper plates. But it turns out people
aren't machines. People have opinions, they have desires, They are
smart as shit, and they are as fiery as shit.
And uh, it didn't work out well for the French
in the long term. And one of the things that
enslaved people brought over, something that more or less destroyed

(37:51):
the French government's control on their most profitable colony was
African religion. So most of the people who are stolen
or brought to sand among came from the southern coast
to West Africa, especially what's now been in and western
parts of Nigeria, especially kind of originally later it's going
to be more people from what's now the Republic of

(38:11):
Congo and was the Kingdom of Congo at the time.
Sort of all the all the lines have been redrawn
by colonizers, but like you know, yeah, in particular in
the beginning, it was fond people and Aa people, so
just for people who are bad at geography, the southern
part of the western part of Africa, that coast, and
then also Central Africa like kind of right around the

(38:33):
corner from it is where most of the folks who
ended up there came from. And the places that these
people are from influences a bunch about later history, and
that's kind of another part of the Like I'm gonna
go on a limb and say, it's probably harder for
you to discover your family heritage than it is for me.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
That's a good guess. Get out, it's a good guess.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, But there's still kind of this like a rature
of like I don't know, they're just from Africa, as
if there's not like different people there with different beliefs
and different cultures and different languages who brought things with them, you.

Speaker 5 (39:08):
Know, yeah, and they and like here's what's crazy is
like I even fell victim to some of this, I'm like,
they don't even look alike. Like you put a you
put an Ethiopian next to somebody from Beneen, and you're like, wait,
are y'all the same? Like no, they look very different
because the distance between Ethiopia and Benin is a continent,

(39:34):
you know, And yeah, yeah, and the practices are different,
and like the even what you like, which will probably
get into later, and obviously for me this is like
really friend of mine because I'm like again reading this book,
but like even what they mean by religion, yeah, you're
like the Europeans were like, well, they worshiped their ancestors,

(39:57):
because that's there. There's no word for God or worship
and a lot of these tribes, you know what I'm saying.
And it's because well they were looking at it from
the lens that they did, from these monotheistic lenses, whereas
you go to East Africa, which has been monotheistic for
a while, you know what I'm saying. So like what
made sense if you was already trading with Sudan and
stuff like that, They're like, oh, okay, so y'all are

(40:18):
a little different. Axoms like first Christian City in like
the year one hundred, you know what I'm saying. But
by the time you could, but that didn't make it
west so west. It was like, we just don't we
don't know what you mean by that, you know what
I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, Yeah, And the synchronization got more and more, even more. Yeah,
and it was so it was so blurry. And so
I love synchrotization. It's one of my favorite things in
the world because it's so messy and complicated and like, yeah,
you can't really draw moral lines around.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
That to untangle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
And what's interesting is then a lot of early Pan Africanism,
you know, the idea that like, well more complicated I'm
gonna easily say, but like, you know, the idea that
Africa should unite with itself to defend itself against yeah,
its own destruction. A lot of the like getting over
cultural differences happened from the diaspora because people are like, well,

(41:17):
we all spoke different languages than used to be at
war with each other back home, but we just got stolen, you.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Know, we're just on a boat. Yeah, and like and
now we're here and now this is my family. Yeah,
and it's like and yeah, and it just it did it. Definitely.
That's a great point, Margat.

Speaker 5 (41:36):
I'm glad you brought that up, because that does fold
back to that Pan Africanism to where it was, like
they're even talking about it now with like you know,
obviously with the with the land grab of Africa and
that the borders are made up and yeah, you slice
right through a village, so a lot of the indigenous
and like native sort of ethnic differences are like separated

(41:59):
by a country.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (42:01):
So like but now it's like, okay, here's where we are.
So you're like, I'm Ghanaian and Ashanti, yeah, but I'm African.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah yeah, and what I am is stuck pivoting to ads.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, yes, you are here, they are.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
And we're back.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
And so Vodu is the main religion we're.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Gonna be talking about this week and next week. And
one of the main places it's syncretized with is Catholicism. Right.
It is a combination of a bunch of different mostly
West African religions with some stuff more from Congo and
then Catholicism and then also some Islam and some hindu is.
It does lots of stuff.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, but I had gone into it, assuming that the
Catholicism was like, well, they ended up in you know,
Spain and then France Island, and so they're befo. They
had to convert to Catholicism, and there was a forced
conversion of Catholicism that's going to happen later in this story.
But actually the synchronization with Catholicism started in Africa in
the Kingdom of Congo, h in the year fourteen ninety one,

(43:13):
the year before Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue on his
death ship. The king of Congo, king and Zinga and Nakwum,
converted to Catholicism, presumably to get closer ties to the
Portuguese and get better access to trade and firearms. It
depends on what source you read. Unfortunately, a lot of
the sources about the Catholicization of Western Africa are in
Central Africa, are like Catholic propaganda.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, so I don't know, but he didn't.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Last too long as a Catholic because Catholicism was like,
well you can only have one wife.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
Listen.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
I know missionaries now who like have gone to like
South Africa, they'd be like, wow, we do these outreaches
out there and they go, well, your Bible Moses had
a lot of wise.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
Why can't I have a lot of whites.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
There's a lot of Christians. You think you can have
a lot of wives. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (44:02):
Yeah, And then they would say this, okay, like this, listen, Margaret,
if I'm lying on flying this is a true story.
I was doing this show us South Africa and his
brother was telling me about he was out there trying to.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
Preach the gospel to the to the to the natives
out there.

Speaker 5 (44:16):
And they said, okay, well, let me ask you this,
Like you said, you say, I can only have one wife,
all right, So which one of these should have divorced?
Because you told me that divorce was wrong too, So
is it what about the first one? Well, the first
one ain't got kids. Well that one got chillen. Well
this one got two children, So which one? Which one
is my wife?

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Then?

Speaker 3 (44:35):
Yeah, I'm just supposed to abandon the rest of them.
I was like, did you answer me? He was like,
I didn't have an answer.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Yeah, I mean, like I can't put a moral like
you know, there's a lot of different ways societies have
been built. There are societies where men can have multiple
wives or societies where women can have multiple husbands there.
I mean, I live in a very polyamorous society, so like, yeah,
we can only marry one of because of the law,
but like whatever, you know.

Speaker 5 (45:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the queen that you mentioned earlier, Yeah,
she they come from a matriarchal society. The women have
multiple you know what I'm saying, Like, so they're even different.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
Well, and then the King of Congo, part of his
whole I want to have multiple wives thing was actually
because of how women had power in his society. Yes,
it was maturallineal. Yeah, and it was also an elective monarchy.
So once again like we have this like oh, Europe
is clearly more advanced about Like look, monarchy is like
not my favorite way of its structuring society, but it's

(45:34):
an elective monarchy instead of a like you know, ye
the oldest son is immediately in charge society.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Yeah, mom chooses, Mom goes that kid.

Speaker 4 (45:42):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
And so it was since his eldest son wasn't guaranteed,
it was like something where he was like, look, I
can't I need to have my multiple wives because I
have multiple sons for multiple wives and it's natural lineal
society and like, yeah, and he wasn't as fully in charge,
so he converted back to I think it was more
of an animist faith.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
But I like again like a rishi, but that was
more aeshi was a little further north. But anyway, on.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
No, no, I mean you know, I actually I actually
tried to find the name of what his traditional practice was,
and I checked multiple sources and none of them said.

Speaker 5 (46:10):
Yeah, I might be wrong because like orishi is more
like Ghanaian benig.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
That's not necessarily Congo.

Speaker 5 (46:15):
So a lot of the Africans that made it to
America were like that was that was some of the practices.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Anyway, Okay, so he dies, he converts back to quote
unquote paganism. He dies, and two of his sons have
a war. One was an animist and one was a Catholic.
The Catholic son won and he was the one that
the mom picked and he became King Afonso the first
And if you read Catholic Education dot orgs article about this,

(46:43):
he was an anti slavery crusader who just wasn't able
to stop the slave trade, which combined traditional West African
slavery traditions, which is just this part's true. If you
capture people in battle, you can.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Own that or whatever, right oldest time.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
I combined that with the more raw, exploitive chattel slavery
that the Porte wanted to impose. The idea that he
fought slavery is there is the tiniest bit of truth.
It is a lie. It is absolutely a lie. Afonso
centralized power, He conquered neighboring territories, and he sold all
the prisoners of war into slavery for export. Under his reign,

(47:18):
Congo became a Catholic country and an important center for
the Transatlantic slave trade. He built roads into the interior
to better allow people to go capture people to go sell.
He did fight against slavery in that the Portuguese were like,
all you black people are the same, We're going to
capture Congo people too, And he was like, no, no, no, no,
you can't capture.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
Us and capture us. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (47:39):
You hear all the time from like very bad faith arguments,
yeah about this era in time, you know, and the
coloring of the idea that like, well, well, since we're
humans like everybody else, and we all come from tribal struggles,
you're like you're thinking that they're thinking about it the

(48:01):
way we think about it, you know. So like when
I say I'm I'm warring with this neighborhood tribe, it's like, oh, bro,
like I could defeat this tribe and make a little
money off it.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
And then you know what I'm saying, like.

Speaker 5 (48:15):
Okay, word, so like you said earlier, it's like we're
all using the same word slavery.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
But man, I don't know, you.

Speaker 5 (48:22):
Think I'm subhuman and you're gonna take me across the
you know what I'm saying, like it worked me to do.
I don't know, I'm thinking like I'm just making money
for the country, like you know, and then you're gonna
set them free the way that we set slaves free
after we're done with them, Like you don't own them,
Like what are you I'm saying, like, yeah, ain't know
they if your children, Like that's uniquely chattow slavery, that

(48:45):
your children of slaves are slaves, Like that's not I
ain't know you meant that. I thought you was just
gonna help me with the kingo you know. Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
That's such a good way to put it, is that. Yeah,
like people are using the same word and they're describing
two very different things. And then yeah, you hear people
like because you have to if you talk about transatlantic
slave trade, you have to talk about the fact that

(49:07):
like Africans participated in it, right, But you can't do
it to then be like so it's all samey saby.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Yeah, like therefore it's okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
No, the Portuguese showed up and we're like, we're going
to turn this into a machine of stealing people. Yeah,
you know, so important our stories that the Catholicization of
African religion had already begun even before people were sold
to Haiti. All of these African people are suddenly in
sand among and they're being worked to death in sugar fields.
A lot of them don't speak the same language, a

(49:39):
lot of them don't see themselves as part of the
same culture at all. Slowly they start building a culture
that united them. And as best as I can tell,
the thing that united them was the syncretic religion that
they built in this new world, the religion of Vodu.
And you probably you said you've deep dived this stuff before.
Speaking of word words that people use all kinds of

(50:01):
different ways, to mean different things. There is a lot
of confusion around the name of this religion. It does
not have the sharpest of boundaries. Vodu, Voodoo, Voodon, and
who Doo are four separate things that are not always
seen as separate things, including sometimes by practitioners. Yeah, as
best as I am able to figure out by cross

(50:23):
reverence in a million sources and talking to one of
my friends and knows a little bit more about this
than I do. Vodu, the main subject of this episode
is a religion that originated in sand among in Haiti
that combine the religious and spiritual practices of a bunch
of people there. Voudon is the name used to describe
the religion practice in Western Africa. Voodoo is the Louisiana version.

(50:44):
Whodoo is a closely related kind of folk religion that
is a bit less formalized and sometimes is just a
word for the ritual practices rather than the religion in general,
and its spread further throughout the Southern US. Each of
these draws from different amounts of different regions of Africa
and syncretize slightly differently. For example, also with Islam, which

(51:04):
is also heavily syncretized with African religions by that point too,
because Islam was also very present in Africa.

Speaker 5 (51:11):
Yeah, I often think of it as like the way
you it's I think of it like gumbo, like the
way you would describe gumbo to where it's like what's
what is it? And you're like, yeah, well it's I mean,
do you have a you can't? Is there a gumbo recipe?
Like you know, he's like, I don't know, it's jumbalaya,
it's you know what I mean, Like there's so and

(51:32):
especially with i Jab, have always felt like that's because
my lord, I'm married a first gen Mexican. Like there's
Santa Ria, which is like I was like, this sound
like voodoo to me.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
So uh and it's slightly different, but it's coming from them.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, yes, slightly different, you know.

Speaker 5 (51:48):
So I always it's like the edges of it, that's
what we were saying earlier.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
It's like I know you, I know.

Speaker 5 (51:53):
You're saying religion because that's the lens you have. But
it's like it's it's not the like the way you
mean it not you mark, No, Yeah, like yeah, you
know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
That's why you that's why we can't.

Speaker 5 (52:06):
Like, like you said, it's like you can read a
trillion books, and I'm like, just like ask seventeen grandma's Yeah,
how to make gumbo?

Speaker 3 (52:15):
Yeah, you need to get your rule right.

Speaker 5 (52:17):
And you know, you boil up your shrimp and you
know what I'm saying. It's like, okay, so it's a
shrimp soup. Well, no, it's perhaps sausage. Do I gotta
have seafood?

Speaker 1 (52:26):
No?

Speaker 5 (52:26):
I don't have to seafood. Well then okay, so it's
just can you be vegetarian? Well I guess, I guess
it's still gumbo, and mean, well, what makes it gumbo?
It's gumbo because it's gumbo. Like I don't, I don't
know what to tell you.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah, you for anyone who doesn't listen to hood politics
with Prop, you need to listen to it because Prop
is the master of explaining things in exactly this way.
That is, that is the way to describe it, that is, yeah,
you know it when you see it. Yeah, so'st We're
gonna focus on Haitian voting because it is the religion.

(52:58):
And yeah, when we say like the religion, most of
these people will call themselves Catholic and go to Catholic mass, absolutely,
and like you could, you could be more than one
thing here.

Speaker 5 (53:07):
You know, I say, if I say my actual relation
to this person, it'll be very obvious just the case
this person listens to or people that know these people
listen to this. But I was very close to a
Haitian family for a while whose elders were deeply stooped
and you know, and very to the points of where

(53:28):
like this person's parents were. Our dad was like, you
are not allowed to be around them.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Like like oh shit, okay, yeah, I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
But if you talk to them, they were like.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Or Catholic, we're Christians.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
Yeah yeah, Like we're Christians, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
Yeah, yeah, No. And as I read about it now,
there's like arguments going on in Haiti between evangelicals and
practitioners voodoo or voodoo and Catholics literally about the origins
of Haiti as a nation. Because it's going to come
down to spoiler for probably part three, it's gonna come
down to it's gonna get kicked off by a Vodou
ceremony in the woods. And so the evangelical position is

(54:10):
that was a deal with the devil, right yeah, and
then the like well yeah, yeah, we're like, what are
you talking about? We just we did a thing, like
we do the thing and it's fine, you know, yeah,
But to talk about w voodoo is all these enslaved
people are showing up. Soon enough, the King of France
demands they all convert to Catholicism. And the most Catholic

(54:32):
thing you can do of all is to say, sure,
I guess I'm Catholic whatever, without actually changing what you
believe in already, and then call it Catholicism. My argument
for this, my grandfather was like born and raised an atheist,
but in order to marry my grandmother, he had to
get baptized Catholic. So he just crossed his fingers and
got baptized Catholic.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Doesn't count because he crossed his fingers, But it's cool.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
And I would argue that makes him the most Catholic
person in the family.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
That's hilarious.

Speaker 5 (54:58):
I had another friend who really got involved in like
just in his own sort of journey and reclaiming his
africanness and stuff like that, like really got involved in
a lot of like West African animists, like traditions. His
argument was like, I don't understand how this is any
different than he's like, have you you read Leviticus? Like

(55:19):
like you you know, you chopping up birds and splitting
them in half, and the priest walked through them, y'all.
Whole y'all religion is based on penal substitutionary atonement that
God became a human and died and the blood of
your savior, Like, I don't have that any weirder than
what we do it, like, you know, So that's why
he was, like, I mean, probably why they ain't see

(55:40):
no problems. He didn't understand why y'all didn't understand why
what we was doing, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Yeah, yeah, I literally bring up Leviticus in the script
because of that exact thing.

Speaker 5 (55:53):
And then people go, no, no, no, the Leviticus was that
was the old it was there was an ancient practice,
and it was the symbol of what's coming. It was like,
oh so it was, it was the symbol. It's what
it symbolizes.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Yeah, oh yeah, can anyone else do that?

Speaker 6 (56:08):
No?

Speaker 3 (56:08):
No, only us, Only only we can do to symbol Yeah. Yeah,
ye know.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
The belief structures of Vodu and Catholicism are fairly compatible
and Vodu. There's a single monotheistic creator, God Bandier, and
he is too distant to be interacted with directly, and
he doesn't interfere with human affairs, so you have to
go through the spirits, the laah. These are referred to
in all kinds of different ways, saints, spirits, the invisible ones,

(56:35):
the mysteries, angels, geniuses. Yep, and there's a ton of
these laa. They're all doing their own thing. They all
have their own personalities and colors and days of the
week and favorite gifts and shit. And again, raised Catholic,
my family cares so much more about Guardian angels and
cares more about saints than it does about God. Yeah,
you know, yeah, the la wah can be nature spirits,

(56:59):
some are ants. We're gonna talk about a woman who
became a la who's one of the people kicked off
the Haitian Revolution. They're divided up into different non shan
or nations. These are different pantheons. Basically, there's seventeen of
them or twenty one of them. More like, it just
depends on who you talk to, who you ask.

Speaker 4 (57:17):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Yeah, there's no central there's no like pope of voting. Yeah,
and it's kind of part of the deal that no
one can like name all of them. These map a
little bit to different African nations sort of as a
way for everyone to bring the spirits they care about
into the religion while still like maintaining like Pan Africanism
isn't the destruction of the national identity, the ethnic identity,

(57:41):
the same way that internationalism is not the destruction of ethnicity.
It is the all of us coming together of it.

Speaker 5 (57:47):
Yeah, it's not a creama mushroom soup here. It's like,
you know, you're not just like it's a gumbo dowsting
it with mayonnaise. Yeah, it's yeah, it's gumbo.

Speaker 4 (57:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
And so they all can bring their own Lua to
this thing. There's two main nations or three depending on
who you ask, the gooday or the ancestor spirits the
spirits of the dead, but they're not what we're going
to be talking about today. The two main nations are
the Rata and the Petro. The Rata are the nation
of Lua that come more from West Africa, specifically from
the Vudan tradition, and these are like more serene they're

(58:19):
more like water. Right. Then there's the Petro. The Petro
are the mean ones. They are the ones who know
how to get shit done and do not ask nicely.
They are the fiery Lua. And I find this really fascinating.
They come more from Haiti itself and also from Congo,
and as I was saying earlier, the folks from Congo

(58:40):
who were stolen and taken, there are the later arrivals.
And so it's more like this makes sense to me
that the Luah of Africa or over all, the ones
who are like, oh, we're like chill, are doing our thing,
Everything's all right, yeah, you know, and then the people
who are like, oh, I'm on Death Island where I've
been brought to.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
Yeah, nah, fam, I need to mean angels.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Yeah yeah, Like you're basically in the move I've never
seen the movie Saw. I can't handle it, but you're
basically in the movie Saw. If you are an enslave person.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
Yeah right, yeah, it's all bad.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Like you're gonna have some mean fucking guardian spirits. Yes,
you will be shocked to know that it was by
calling in the Petro Lawa, the fiery ones, that they
set Haiti free and humans serve the Lawah, that's the
word that usually gets used. But this isn't like a
servant and a master. This isn't an enslavement relationship. It

(59:37):
is a reciprocal arrangement. People offer gifts and sacrifices to
the laaw and expect to be taken care of in return,
and they will not leave you.

Speaker 4 (59:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
There are two practices in vodou that in particular are
branded as like devil warship by the evangelical assholes. And
it's like the whole reason that like it gets used
as there's a lot of blackxpoy taste that goes on
when you talk about voodoo.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
Oh my god, yeah, you know, yes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
But like two of the things that people talk about
is they talk about the sacrifice of animals and the
possession of people. I promise you would bring up. I
promise you i'd make the same point you've already made,
so I'm gonna make it. Yeah, animals are sometimes sacrificed
in vodoo. That is to say, animals are prayed over, anointed,
and then humanely slaughtered before being cooked and served of

(01:00:25):
the entire community.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
Uh, this is not particularly different from kosher or her
law practices, and it is still better than like factory farming,
and like the way that most people eat meat, and.

Speaker 5 (01:00:36):
Like it is farm to table. Yeah, with the spirit
of thankfulness. Yep, you know, yeah, I would even push
the evangelicals. Now I'm about to get evangelical on you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
No, no, fair enough, fair enough, I might be throwing
I might be using that too loosely.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yeah yeah, no, no, no, I'm good.

Speaker 5 (01:00:51):
I'm just saying I'm agreeing with you in the sense that,
like I wonder which of your listeners, any of the
exvangelicals who are still a part of this, like okay,
go back to your go back to your uh your
your summer camp Lessons of Romans of the Book of
Romans and Paul talking about meat sacrifice to idols and
that where are you or are you not supposed to

(01:01:13):
eat this meat? And what Paul said the writer of
Romans was like, shoot, I eat it, like it's fine.
Like he's like, they're not. He's basically what he says
is like, well they're not. Really, God's right, Like you
know what I'm saying, Like, and he's like it's just
it's fine. Yeah, Like it's like kind of is auDA.

(01:01:35):
He's like, look, if it's if it's a problem for you, yeah, fine,
but I'll be eating it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
Joseph, No, it's kind of like aw For for like
a thousand years, the Catholic Church didn't bother like burning
witches because witchcraft wasn't real. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that person says they're a witch, but it doesn't matter.
That's not real thing we believe in science or you know.
And it was only later that they were like, oh,
we gotta burn everyone.

Speaker 6 (01:02:00):
Uh but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
In Leviticus from the Old Testament, it says basically the
same thing. You sacrifice an animal and then it is
eaten by everyone in the community. Yeah, people eat animals.
I don't, Almost everyone I know does. It's fine.

Speaker 4 (01:02:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
As for possession, that's a mistranslation. The more direct translation
of what happens is ritual mounting. You are like a
horse who is mounted and ridden by a lawa you
channel the spirit. So many faiths have versions of this.
It also doesn't seem particularly ethically different from like speaking
in tongues or whatever. Yeah, ecstatic states are part of religion.

(01:02:37):
They're part of why people like religion.

Speaker 5 (01:02:40):
Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to be, but that's an evil spirit.
You supposed to only had a holy spirit, only supposed
to be possession with the Holy One.

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
Yeah, no, no, only the one that I like, you know,
there's no there's no devil in Vodu like.

Speaker 5 (01:02:54):
Which is like if if you're gonna move the camera
out and look at this as as aliens, I would
be like, oh, well I want that one. That one
ain't got a debt, Like why would I want Why
would I want to be one brought it a debt?

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
I want a devil. I want to go with them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, people just do different things
and like I'll just be doing stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
Yeah all right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
So the fact that Haiti had the most successful slaver
vault in the America's was not something people would have
seen coming. It was, in some ways a quieter place
than other places. Jamaica had a ton of Maroon wars.
For example, when the French king passed La Code Noir
the Black Code in sixteen eighty five, it demanded that

(01:03:37):
the enslaved people get converted to Catholicism. It also to
be clear, this is one of the most evil documents
in the world. It's just a very clear like laying
out like here's how we're going to do slavery, right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
Yeah, but it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
It was way too nice for the actual slavers. The
slavers themselves wouldn't go along with it. It said that
while these people were property, they're also still kind of people.

Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
They're still image bears. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, you're
still but anyway, go on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
Yeah, they could not be forced to work on Sundays
or religious holidays. They had to be clothed and fed
and cared for. You can't like extra abuse them. And
there's even a specific way that they can seek redress
of grievances through the court system. To be clear, it
also prohibited slaves from owning property or having any legal
existence besides those like specific redresses. There's a vile document.

(01:04:26):
It is far too nice for the French slavers. Yeah,
the king is far away and the slavers in the
colony had no interest in obeying the Black codes, so
they didn't. They forced them to become Catholics. But over
one hundred years, only five court cases were successfully I
think filed against slavers by slaves, Like, I don't even

(01:04:49):
think they won. I could have been reading the source wrong.
I think only five were filed.

Speaker 5 (01:04:55):
If you listen, Oh okay, if like, let me put
myself into a slave shoes to be like really, homie,
you like you think the court's gonna help you?

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Yeah, exactly the word yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:05:10):
Whoa, I'm gonna tell the police all right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
This had a strange knock on effect. The fact that
the courts were like supposed to do this thing but
didn't want to in erased Sandemong's history. We don't have
a ton of documents because a lot of the like
early modern documents, we have our court documents, right, Like
a lot of the like testimonies of people in court

(01:05:37):
are like some of the only records we have, Like
like why we know anything about Joan of Arc right, yeah,
is because of the extensive trials. Word okay, Sandomong doesn't
have that. The colonial courts basically didn't keep records since
it any like, anytime a black person was captured, like
recaptured and then taken to court, he might say things like, well,

(01:05:57):
that white guy beat the shit out of me all
the time.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
Yeah, and the white.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Guy wasn't supposed to beat the shit out of him,
so why write it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
Down, you can't have a record.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
The courts kept very poor records, often purging quote old
criminal trials of blacks and other useless items.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
There is nothing new, yeah, I know.

Speaker 6 (01:06:21):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
And then in seventeen thirty four all the court records
were destroyed by a fire anyway, and then like fifty
years later a bunch more were lost during a paperwork shuffle,
like two courts merged and then ah, whoops, we lost
them all.

Speaker 5 (01:06:35):
I'm pretty sure there was a surveillance camera well appreciated
this footage of this cop beating this person it dead. Yeah,
I don't know what happened to it, Like I don't
know the camera blinked out.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
Yeah, yeah, there's nothing nothing new.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
I remember watching this video recently about like it's a
lawyer talking about like, are the cops allowed to destroy
your personal like ring camera when they come to your house?
And the answer is no, right, Like, of course not.
There's like basically no condition in which they're allowed to
cover up or destroy your camera, even if they're like
serving a legal warn or whatever. But it's like one
of the things you're like watching that and they're like, yeah,
they're not allowed to. Well, they also have guns. In

(01:07:11):
the court, Like, what am I gonna do with that?

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
What are you gonna do about it?

Speaker 5 (01:07:14):
Yeah, dude, no, they're you're you're right, they're not allowed
to destroy our cameras.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
Yeah, so I guess they won't.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
I guess I guess that'll stop them.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Yeah, anyway, in send among Soon enough, rebellion is gonna start.
And maybe it started, or at least people think it started,
or they used to think it started with a bold
new plot, a plot to poison every single white person
on the island. And they even got pretty far along
with that plot. But as for how it went down,

(01:07:45):
you're gonna have to wait for our first named hero
of the series on Wednesday in part two.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
You don't get to know who the poisoner in chief is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
I know, unless you turn to Google and you can look.

Speaker 3 (01:07:57):
At all this up yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
Yeah, that's the secret of all podcasting.

Speaker 3 (01:08:02):
Yeah, it was like, I mean, it's all we just
looked it up.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
Yeah, all my sources are in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
He really took the allure out of the cliffhanger.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Oh, I mean no, there's no way to know. Well,
actually there is something that I'll tell you this also
before for as a Cliffhanger. I wrote the entire script
thinking the story went a certain way, and then two
hours before we had to hit record, I found another
more recent source that disagreed with like the ten other

(01:08:31):
accounts that I had read.

Speaker 5 (01:08:32):
Of it that keep happening to you man, happening to me, oh, Margaret,
my favorite of my favorite was the Buena Chao yeh
you know and you that happened to you on now.

Speaker 3 (01:08:43):
He was like, actually I was done and then I wasn't.

Speaker 4 (01:08:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
She doesn't have luck when it comes. She's like, all right,
I've done my job. I did not do it.

Speaker 6 (01:08:54):
I did not I do not know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Because I always want to know more than the like
there's always the pop version of the history that's a
little too clean, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:09:03):
And now you know your antennas are like your antennas
are super sharp.

Speaker 6 (01:09:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:09:07):
So she'd be like, wait a minute, yeah, do this
feel this? This this resolves too easily.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Yeah. But as for how it all went down, well,
two of you are only have to wait about five minutes,
but everyone else is gonna have to wait till Wednesday.
Yuh ha ha ha, Propa, you got anything you.

Speaker 6 (01:09:28):
Want to plug?

Speaker 5 (01:09:29):
Yeah, man, we're cooking over at the Politics with prop
You know, I'm on the same glorious network and we've
added the video element because you know, you have to
upgraded my camera, as you guys can see. Yeah, so
there's that if you're in the LA area. Got some

(01:09:49):
gigs come in the Sunset Rooftop me and artist named
saw Rock. She's one of the dopest rappers on Earth.
So yeah, Sunset Rooftop twenty second of February. And yeah,
and just following along with us on the show Man
like I'm having a great time over here.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
Hell yeah. My sister didn't ask for a lot of
things for Christmas, but she asked for a terraform book
by Problem, So people should check it out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
Please please check out the book.

Speaker 6 (01:10:17):
That's so sweet.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
That is precious. I would have signed it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Oh shit, well I'll probably hit you up for that too.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:10:25):
Yeah, cool, all.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
Right, see everyone onnestime.

Speaker 4 (01:10:28):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. More podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Host

Margaret Killjoy

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Haitian Revolution: The Most Successful Revolt in the Americas