The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  As they are today, during the colonial era secret societies were a dominant social force throughout much of West Africa, particularly among the coastal rain forest peoples who were taken in bondage to Saint Domingue. The parallels between these groups and what later evolved in the Maroon communities in the colony are striking. Membership was by initiation, a lengthy process that exposed the candidate to physical hardships, tests of endurance and pain, following which he learned the secret passwords, symbols, and handshakes of the society. As in Saint Domingue, it was knowledge of these esoteric signs that defined the group; in virtually every other regard the societies were not secret, and in fact their function demanded that their existence be completely known. For these societies were no mere peripheral feature of West African culture; they lay at the very core and remained, both before and after the colonial era, the principal and militant champion of the traditional way of life. The Poro society of Sierra Leone, for example, left its mark on virtually every facet of Mende life, taking responsibility for tribal education, the regulation of sexual conduct, the supervision of political and economic affairs, as well as the operation of social services including recreation and medical care. A key to the strength of the West African secret societies—and what was particularly applicable to the needs of the Maroons—was the fact that their interests and activities were defined in terms of the community, rather than a lineage or clan. Thus they provided for the Maroon bands an invaluable model for the consolidation of the diverse cultural backgrounds of the individual slaves.

  As the single most important arbiter of culture, the West African secret societies had as a vital function the administration of justice, and as in the case of the leopard society among the Efik of Old Calabar, their tribunals delivered a verdict based on the outcome of the poison ordeal. Judgment by ordeal could cover any and all personal or social crimes, and was inevitably invoked in suspected cases of sorcery. Not surprisingly, the secret societies developed a particularly refined knowledge of toxic preparations, learning not only to identify and experiment with different species of plant and animal, but also to control dosage, means of administration, and even the psychological set of the potential recipient.

  But the use of toxic preparations was not restricted to the secret societies, nor even among them to the ordeal tribunals. Perhaps as much as any single material trait, the manipulation of poisons remains a consistent theme through African cultures. In certain regions, for example, criminals were executed by pricking their skin with lances or needles dipped in the juice of toxic plants. In parts of West Africa when a king died, his heir had to submit at least twice to poison ordeals to prove his supernatural strength; should he fail and die, the lineage was broken and the throne was declared vacant. Individual sorcerers often used potions of course, but in one of the most extraordinary developments, poisons were used systematically by established rulers in vain atempts to purge entire populations of evil. The leaders of the Cazamance and Balantes peoples in West Africa, for example, used a preparation based in part on the bark of a tree known as tali (Erythrophleum guineense— Leguminosae). Other ingredients included the powder ground from the dried hearts of previous victims and a number of admixtures reminiscent of those used in contemporary Haiti—ground glass, lizards, toads, crushed snakes, and human remains. Placed in a vat and allowed to ferment for a year, this toxic preparation was then ceremoniously paraded on a day of great festivities and given to every citizen. Each year as many as two thousand people died. With the advent of the slave trade, however, West African rulers discovered an even better means of purging their societies. According to Moreau de Saint-Mery, the most respected of the early colonial authorities, certain kings made use of their treaties with the European merchants to get rid of their poisoners by condemning them to deportation to Saint Domingue.

  When Macandal finally fled the plantation he buried his vengeance deep within his breast. He didn’t fear recapture; no planter would risk the price of valuable hounds to run down a one-armed slave, let alone a Mandingue whose very tribal name was synonymous with rebellion. Macandal’s concern was one of timing—when and how to best seek retribution. It would be easy enough to kill. Muskets and powder were available for a price from the freedmen in the cities, and even armed with clubs and a few machetes a dozen Maroons could handily overrun a plantation, burning the stables, the drying sheds, and the cursed mills, and still have time to pay their respects to the master’s wife before the militia arrived. But pillaging plantations and sacking mansions now held little attraction for Macandal, and for what he intended to do there weren’t enough guns in all the colony. Once when asked to interpret one of his dreams, he had called for a clay vessel and placed into it three kerchiefs. He pulled out one that was yellow and explained to the crowd that it was the color of the ones who were born on the land. The next one was white, and it was they who now ruled. And here, he said, finally, are the ones that shall remain masters of the island, and the color of the kerchief was black.

  For six years the network spread, with the whites completely oblivious of the danger about to befall them. Macandal was everywhere, moving with the impunity of a god garnering favors and awakening the zeal of the people. He chose his agents with care and placed them in every corner of the colony, and they in turn kept him informed of potential converts—perhaps a coachman whose woman had been recently raped by the master, or a kitchen boy whipped raw for stealing bread. On parchment and bark he drew figures in charcoal, tallying in symbols that only he understood the names of the plantations and the leaders of each and every work gang that toiled beneath the relentless sun—every man and woman who would come to his cause. He wanted everyone; they could look on him as they chose so long as their eyes held terror; be it fear of God or man it mattered not to him, just terror so that the secret would remain safe. But above all he needed those who worked on the inside—the coachmen, cooks, and domestic servants, the ones whose presence in the very bosom of the whites would not sound the alarm. In that way, Macandal would be assured that with each anguished dying breath the slavers would stare into the faces of those closest to them and see only the reflection of their own evil smiles.

  By night Macandal wandered, but by day he ran a school, the students spread out before him in the thick grass, their fingers releasing the musty odor of fungi, the ooze of molds, and the pungent scent of crushed venom glands. The men held Macandal in awe, and at his behest combed the island, bringing back herbs with sap that stung, evil-looking sea creatures, snakes, and toads. Together they reached deep into their collective memory, struggling with senses numb from disuse to remember the lessons taught in their youth, the formulae and preparations and ingredients that might be mirrored among the plants and animals of the new land. If Macandal was their teacher, he in turn was the apprentice of others, the old women and men who lived alone among the dripping stalactites in caves and slept on beds of bat droppings. It was they who retained the ancient wisdom, some learned in Africa and some acquired on the island from the descendants of those who had lived among the remnants of the Arawakans, the tortured sons of the caciques that had ruled the land before the arrival of the whites. In the caves, these elders studied Macandal’s discoveries, fingering the fruits that bled red and blackened in the air, the shriveled lizards, and venomous insects. What they finally approved, after years of study, Macandal placed in the belly of the mortar, broken at the edges and worn with use. Then before their eyes he ground the silent death that would one day walk across the fields, and reach into every kitchen in the land.

  In time, like ink on a blotter, the poison seeped into the lives of the whites. First the cattle died, one by one, until the stiff carcasses littered the northern plain. The planters in dismay hired the best scientific minds, herbalists who left their physic gardens in the Cap to tramp across the pastures in search of some vile weed fouling the fields. For days and weeks they combed the grass. Just as they thought that they had found the guilty plant, and the work gangs had begun to
sweep clean the pastures, the first of the dogs died, and word came that poison had entered the houses.

  To their horror, the whites found themselves in a trap of their own making, dependent on the very people who were the agents of their doom. The poison appeared everywhere: baked into bread, in medicine vials, in kegs of ale lifted directly from the ships and drunk because the water from the wells could no longer be trusted. Entire banquets succumbed, sometimes from the soup, perhaps the tea, the wine, or even fruit picked fresh from the trees. The terror of the whites gave way to rage, and innocent slaves were flayed alive. The slightest suspicion of collaboration with the poisoners meant a horrible death. But the enemy could not be seen; only its mark was felt, universally on the whites and equally on any black who showed signs of betraying the agents of Macandal. The colonial administration declared a state of siege and emptied the garrisons to parade up and down the streets of the Cap, their guns shouldered and useless against the invisible enemy. The courts condemned whoever they imagined to be guilty, and work gangs were decimated in attempts to secure the names of the leaders of the conspiracy. The chemists and herbalists reconvened to attempt once more to identify the source of the plague, whether animal or plant, or perhaps some compound taken from the apothecary or some potion brought by the wretches from Africa. A royal proclamation prohibited any slave from concocting any remedy, or attempting to cure any sickness with the exception of snakebite. But nothing that the government did could stop the contagion. Hundreds of slaves died, and as many whites. Before Macandal was through, six thousand at least would be dead.

  It was a child that finally betrayed him, a young girl arrested along with three men as poisoners and condemned to be burned alive. One by one she was made to suffer the agonies of the others, watching the flames grow from the base of the pyre until they flared out of the acrid smoke to ignite the creosote-soaked rags. The smell of the flesh turned her stomach, and as she tried to look away they twisted her face to the sight and held it until she saw the belly of the men bloat, bubbling at the surface, dripping fluid until the skin, stretched to the limit, split, disgorging the steaming entrails of the gut. When her turn came, the executioner tormented her with the pinewood torch, tracing patterns in the air, brushing its burning end close to her skin. Her horror grew with her rage and fear, and just as the order was given, she broke, releasing the names of fifty others, which were dutifully recorded before the executioner, ignoring her cry of protest, went ahead and dropped the burning ember onto the base of the pyre.

  The web of betrayal grew until it enveloped Macandal himself. But when his turn came, and he was paraded stripped to the waist before the people assembled in the capital, the citizens in their silk waistcoats beneath festive parasols, the slaves standing ebony black and solemn, the soldiers cautious, moving at the pace of death with the rhythm tapped out on drums covered in dark cloth, a strange thing happened. Macandal looked neither frightened nor even defiant as they lashed him to the post and brought forth the torch; he seemed indifferent, almost bored as he waited for the event, so carefully orchestrated by the governor, to be over. And when they saw him like that, a murmur ran through the ranks of the slaves, and their normally inscrutable expressions became radiant, expectant, disquieting to those whites sensitive enough to notice. Then, as the first flames reached the base of his legs, Macandal lifted his face, screaming at the sun. His body began to shake violently, his torso thrusting away from the post, his free stump pounding the air until with a single spasm that drew the breath out of the crowd he broke free and flung himself beyond the flames. Pandemonium broke over the mob. Amid calls of “Macandal is free!” the whites fled the plaza, and the guards rushed to the pyre, claiming later that they had recaptured the slave and bound him to a plank and cast him back onto the flames. But none of the blacks saw it done, and though the governor even produced the ashes to quell the fears of the whites, it was to little effect. The entire northern province, lulled into complacency by his capture, rang out with the alarm, and once again the planters felt like prisoners barricaded within their own houses. For the blacks there was little doubt as to what had occurred. If captured, Macandal had always told them, he would turn himself into a fly, and no one questioned his ability to do so, especially when after his reputed death, the toll of poison continued as before.

  Macandal’s was not the first, nor certainly the last, Maroon revolt to shake the foundations of the colony. As early as 1681, before the colony had passed from the Spanish to the French and at a time when there were as many indentured whites as Africans, with a total population of only about six thousand, Maroonage was already an acknowledged threat. Two years before, in one of the earliest documented revolts, a slave named Padrejean had killed his master, recruited a band of twenty Africans, and embarked on his goal of strangling every white in the land. The revolt failed, but it was the type of incident that drew the attention of the king and led to the royal edict of 1685, a law that among other injunctions specified that a captured Maroon have his ears cut off and a shoulder branded with a fleur-de-lys; should the offense be repeated the hamstrings would be cut and a second brand applied to the other shoulder. The publication of this decree was an indication of a growing concern among the free whites, a fear that would become hysteria as the population of slaves soared. By the early years of the eighteenth century seditious plots, mysterious killings, and rumors of impending catastrophe became a staple of colonial life. Poisons were already so common that in 1738, two years before Macandal even fled the plantation, they were specifically prohibited by royal decree. Their political potential as a weapon of the slaves and a nefarious threat to the planters was made explicit upon the arrest of the Maroon leader Medor. “If the blacks commit poisonings,” he told his captors, “the end purpose is to gain freedom.”

  By the last years of French rule, it was patently clear to all that the greed of the entire system had set the colony on a path of self-destruction. Only the potential for massive profits could possibly have numbed the whites to the imminent disaster. As absentee planters scrambled to increase their holdings, the borders of the plantations touched, and then to meet the rising demand for coffee, in particular, rose higher and higher into the mountains, displacing bands of Maroons and ironically forcing more and more of them to depend on pillage. The voracious consumption of labor, meanwhile, doubled the population of slaves in a mere fifteen years. How long could the whites possibly have expected to control close to a half-million blacks, the vast majority of them born in Africa and steeped in a military tradition of their own that had spread kingdoms across half a continent?

  Like Macandal, the slaves plotted their final revolt with care. As their network spread and desertions swelled the ranks of the Maroons, the night air reverberated with the sounds of mutiny. In 1786 an informant reported clandestine meetings of two hundred or more slaves being held on the plantations. A contemporary document states “a great deal has been said of slave superstitions and of their secret organizations, and the scheming and crimes for which they provided pretext—poisonings, infanticide—… whites were not admitted to these secret meetings, and legal documentation was usually held secret or destroyed.”

  From these nocturnal assemblies and within the passion of the vodoun rituals, the idea of liberty spread. Maroon bands grew in number as well as size, and the names of their leaders—Hyacinthe, Macaya, Romaine La Prophétesse—spread through the ranks of the slaves. The flash point came in the summer of 1791, and the spark was cast at a vodoun ceremony attended by delegates from every plantation on the northern plain.

  The historic gathering was invoked by the Maroon leader Boukman Dutty, and held on a secluded knoll at Bois Caiman near Morne-Rouge. There on August 14, 1791, beneath the spindly branches of a frail acacia, with the wind twisting the ground and the jagged lightning crashing on all sides, an old woman stood transfixed by the night, quivering in the spasms of possession. The voices of Ogoun the Warrior, the god of fire and the metallurgical elements, cal
led for the cutlass, and with a single blow severed the head and spilt the foamy blood of the black pig of Africa. The leaders were named—Boukman himself, Jean François, Biassou, and Celestin—and one by one the hundreds of slaves swore allegiance. Boukman stood up, and in a voice that matched the fury of the wind cried out, “God who made the sun that shines on us from above, who makes the sea to rage and the thunder roll, this same great God from his hiding place in the clouds, hear me, all of you, is looking down upon us. He sees what the whites are doing. The God of the whites asks for crime; ours desire only blessings. But this God who is so good directs you to vengeance! He will direct our arms, he will help us. Cast aside the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears and pay heed to the voice of liberty speaking to our hearts.” Thus was sealed the pact of the final revolt, in the shadow of the loa and with the blood of the sacrifice.

  Two days later the first plantation burned, and then on the night of August 21 the slaves at five plantations around Macandal’s old territory rose up and moved on the center of Limbé. By morning Acul was in flames, Limbé destroyed, and throughout the next day the uprising rode the sound of the conch trumpets as one by one each settlement in the north fell—Plaine du Nord, Dondon, Marmelade, Plaisance. In a single night of indescribable horror, a thousand whites were strangled and two thousand sugar and coffee mills destroyed. For days dark columns of smoke rose beyond a wall of flames that isolated the entire northern half of the colony. Fire rained from clouds of burning straw torn from fields and swept up by the fireballs. Ash coated the sea, and the image of an entire land aflame reddened clouds as far away as the Bahamas.

  After the first weeks of the uprising, as the frenzy of destruction gave way to skirmishes and then out-and-out battles with the colonial militia, the ranks of the slaves coalesced around certain leaders, who in turn drew their inspiration from the gods. In the western province Romaine La Prophétesse marched to the music of drums and conch shells, behind an entourage of houngan chanting that the weapons of the whites, their cannon and muskets, were bamboo, their gunpowder but dust; his personal guard carried only long cowtails blessed by the spirits and thus capable of deflecting the bullets of the whites. Sorcerers and magicians composed the staff of Biassou, and much of his own tent was devoted to amulets and sacred objects and devotions. In his camps great fires flared by night as naked women invoked the spirits, singing words known only in “the deserts of Africa.” Biassou walked in triumph, exalting his people, telling them that if they were fortunate enough to fall in battle, they would rise again from the hearth of Africa to seed their ancient tribes. A contemporary report from Cap Francis suggests that the black women of the capital went out at night, singing words unintelligible to the whites. For some time they “had adopted an almost uniform dress, around their bellies wearing kerchiefs in which the color red dominated…. The Voodoo King had just declared war (they said) and accompanied by his Queen dressed in red scarf and agitating the little bells decorating the box containing the snake, they marched to the assault of the colony’s cities.”