038840engo 2

The slave trade

and the peopling of Santo Domingo

277

These three groups have fashioned our people and, via the strangest of
melting-pots, have stamped it for ever. They came to sow and quicken our land,
and they worked in blood, sweat and tears to produce stitch by stitch, with
French thread and Bantu spindle, a new ethnic fabric, without ever cutting the
umbilical cord that links us forever to Africa.

Notes

1. Considérations sur l'État Présent de la Colonie Française de Saint-Domingue, II, p. 62-3.


2. Revue d'Histoire des Colonies, No. 135, 3rd quarter, 1951, p. 310.


3. Evolution Historique d'une Religion Africaine : Le Voodoo (paper presented by Mrs Lilas
   Desquiron de Heusch at the Free University of Brussels for the academic year
   1967-68).


4. See Moreau de Saint-Méry, I, 52 et seq., and Rosseline Siguret, 'Esclaves ... au
   Quartier de JacmeP, Revue Française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer, No. 2, 1968, p. 224.