The slave trade
and the peopling of Santo Domingo273It is generally agreed that the settlement of Santo Domingo was carried
out in the first place by the Sudanese group, then the Guiñean group and
finally the Bantu group.
What is certain is that early slave consignments to Santo Domingo came
from St Louis in Senegal and the island of Gorée.
Imprecision begins with the second phase of imports. We do know
that the Guinea group was the first to take over from the Sudanese group as
the colony's main provider of Negro slaves, but we do not know whether in
the latter part of the colonial period, the Guinea group or the Bantu group
predominated. The chief point of any inquiry into this subject is to find out
which ethnic groups were in the numerical majority in the last half-century
before independence. These groups were our most immediate ancestors, not
only bequeathing us their physical and moral characteristics but also, at a
deeper level, forming and influencing our cultural heritage.Were they Guineans or Bantus?No definite answer to this question has yet been found. Attempts had been made
to solve the riddle by examining voodoo and oral tradition, settlers' correspon-
dence, the minutes of the Santo Domingo notaries, the bills of lading of the
slave-ship owners, and workshop inventories, but without being able to satisfy
our legitimate curiosity.
Let us briefly examine these various approaches. Some specialists have
tried to maintain that the practice of voodoo as the predominant popular
religion in the colony is conclusive proof that Guiñean slaves were in the
majority in Santo Domingo. It is an attractive theory, but it does not stand
up to analysis. Furthermore, it is contradicted by the advertised descriptions
of slaves and by the workshop inventories, which on the one hand show that
Kongos were in the majority among the maroons and on the other hand
reveal no very considerable proportion of Dahomans (Aradas excepted).
While it is true that voodoo, originating in Dahomey (now Benin), did take
root and spread in the colony, this was not because of any massive presence
of Dahoman slaves, for there was never any such thing. The reasons for the
introduction and widespread practice of voodoo must be sought elsewhere.
In a recent paper, Lilas Desquiron^3 pointed out the considerable
contribution made by Kongos of the Bantu group to the establishment of
voodoo in Haiti. Moreover ethnologists have shown that voodoo had borrowed
some elements from Catholicism. It thus appears that voodoo, by reason of the
disparate nature of its elements, cannot indicate the predominance either of
the Guiñean or of the Bantu group among the early population of Santo
Domingo. True, the word 'Guinea' for a long while symbolized Africa, but
so, towards the end of the colonial period, did the word 'Congo'. The runaway