274 Jean Fouchard
chief Macaya recognized the king of Congo as 'born master of all blacks',
and even before the ceremony at Bois-Caiman a Congolese song was adopted
as an anthem for the rebels and for voodoo assemblies.
Be that as it may, while the voodoo songs with their many verses refer
to the gods or has of Africa, in terms either of the rada or of the petro ritual,
they always refer to them together, for instance:
Mrin sôti Ian Guinin, mrin sôti Guéléfé [Ifé] ... palez hounsis congos Ian Guinin ...
of té-léguey... Legba Petro, Legba Ibo, Legba Dahoumin, Legba Allada, Legba
Badagri...
The litany known as the 'Prayer of Djor' shows even more clearly the number
of'peoples' which combined to form the Haitian community:
Rélé toutes toutou l'Afrique Guinin, toutes nanchons [nations] rada [Aradas], ibo,
caplaou, en-mine [Amine, Mine], mondongue, mandingue, sinigal [Senegal], canga,
congo, nago, danhomé, wangol, mahi, foulah, mayoumbé, fon, bambara, haoussa,
congo-franc...
The voodoo songs thus reflect a recognition of the original loas of all the
'nations' contributing to the peopling of Santo Domingo and of the many
different contributions to the growth of voodoo itself, rather than any ethnic
distribution.
Does an examination of the settlers' correspondence, of the accounts of
contemporary historians, of workshop inventories or of bills of lading give any
better results? No—colonial documentation provides no exact answer to our
questions as to whether the Guineans or the Bantus were in the majority at
the end of the colonial period.
But it is certain that if workshop inventories, for example, are analysed
systematically as more and more archives are discovered, we shall obtain an
increasingly accurate picture. In the end we shall know what was the most
usual 'distribution' for the period we are concerned with, in the workshops
and in the sugar, indigo and coffee mills and plantations. Were the Aradas in
the majority in the sugar industry, and the Kongos in the coffee industry?
What was the real proportion oîbossales (newly imported slaves) and 'creóles'
(born in the colony) used in agricultural labour, domestic service and factory
work at the end of the colonial period, even before the slackening off and
eventual abolition of the official slave trade?
The inquiry is only just beginning. It will be a long and difficult one:
workshop inventories do not abound. Every so often a fresh bundle of them
is found in some dusty old cupboard.
M. Debien has analysed several hundreds of workshop inventories and
brought together an invaluable source of documentation. At the same time, in