Part Two: The Haitain Revolution: The Most Successful Revolt in the Americas
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that I have a podcast that you've listened to more than once a week if you're listening to the second part. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this week is Prop. Hi, how are you? Hey, shout out Wyclef Jean. Stupid. I'm sorry. He's Haitian. Wait, he didn't even run for president of Haiti. He did run for president. And then they wouldn't let him? Yeah.

He's a great artist. Yeah, no, I like his music. I feel like I don't know anything about him as a person and maybe there's something terrible. I have no idea. People being like, I don't know who he is. He's Mr. Shakira, Shakira. Shakira, Shakira. Yeah, you know him. You've heard him.

It's funny because in my mind, I'm like, how could you not know who Wyclef John is? I don't know who almost anyone is. I think it's because I was a child of the 90s. I think that's why I know who he is. I was going to say, I was like, nah, it's probably your age. Because the Fugees and Lauryn Hill, that moment is so important. And Wyclef is so important to that moment. One time, he's got two of the biggest songs on earth. He got an ad-lib.

You know, so in like Killing Me Softly, he's like, one time, two times. Well, we are indeed talking about Haiti. Well, first we're talking about the fact that our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie. How are you? Hey. And our audio engineer is Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory.

Rory. That was Rory. Wow. Rory, you sound different. I have a cold. I don't know. I've never met Rory. You're so hilarious. Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And this is part two of what's going to be a four-parter about the Haitian Revolution, which was on my short list of things that no matter what I knew I had to cover at some point or like

well, there's so much. A lot of the stuff that I still haven't covered is stuff that I haven't covered because I'm like, there's so much to it, you know? Yeah. And, um,

We're not even... No one who listens to the show regularly is going to be shocked. We're not even going to get to the Haitian Revolution today. Wow. Margaret. Multiple episodes of Context. Oh, boy. You? No way. But this one's full of stories and poison. I thoroughly... So we were doing a script read of a series Jamie was working on, and she was like, and then I realized I needed to do a second part, and I was like, oh, really? Oh, really? And...

And it's the same with you. Really? Yeah. Both of you. Yeah. The thing that happens, like one of the things that I do when I start doing a, researching a topic is I like go and listen to the other people who've covered it and stuff. To be fair, I have actually a long time ago, I listened to the revolutions podcast by Duncan, I think about the Haitian revolution, but I didn't read, listen to it for this episode. But I, when you go and you just like read the, the pop articles and stuff, you know, like they don't,

do it for me they're missing something there's nothing wrong with them well sometimes they're literally wrong but it's flat yeah and yeah and part of it is that it's like i don't know there's a lot of stuff i don't know about the world and i like so i like yeah i like being able to come in and be like hey look there's an island it's over here you know if you're not from there you're not born knowing what it is you know yeah i'm also like my my problem is always like

where do you start? Where do you start the story? Like, I'm like, context as context, whatever starting point you start at had background. Yeah. So you're like, okay, well, well, let me tell you about the background, but that background has background. So I'm always like, where do you, I don't know where to start. How do I bring you in? Yeah. I think it's Carl Sagan, but I could be wrong. There's like, if you want to, if you want to teach someone to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to create the universe. Yeah.

That is an amazing take. I remember at one point I got really obsessively into DIY for a while. I had this cabin that I built in and lived in. And then I started being like, I want to make all my own stuff. And then I was like, I can't realistically make my own shoes. I mean, I know people who've made shoes, but realistically it's not going to happen. And then I was like, I can build a computer, but I can't make a computer. And it started bugging me that I couldn't make everything. And then I eventually...

Now I don't have to make my own clothes again. Now I can just go and get clothes. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah, there's the bell curve of unplugging. At some point, you're like, well, can I just plug that one in? Yeah. Supplements. Very funny. And then with history, you get the same thing where you're like, okay, well, I can't do all of the context ever. Yeah. But I can do a lot of it, and I enjoy it. So, Insan Damang.

Vodou was practiced by enslaved people and also, importantly, by self-emancipated people. By the maroons.

There are a lot of different arguments about how many, what percentage of people were Maroons at any given point in Haiti's history. And as we pointed out, all of the records were destroyed. So we kind of don't really know. But like the best estimate I've seen was that about 1% of the enslaved population was Maroon at any given point, which would put it at around like 5,000 people or so. But I've also read things that are like 20,000 and more. And I don't know.

There were also free people of color on the island who are generally mixed African and French folks who were called a word that I don't want to say on air. I just literally don't know whether I'm, I don't know. It's fine. Don't do it. But it wasn't like cut and dry. Oh, there's this religion with a distinct name in culture and beliefs being practiced during this time as we talked about. History is really messy.

According to almost every version of what I could find of the Haitian Revolution, there was one major precursor to the Haitian Revolution. I was like, not a lot of uprisings. And then suddenly this big conspiracy plot that was a rebellion against colonial power. And that's what I expected I was going to tell you today. And I'm still going to tell you, but I'm going to tell you two versions of it. Uh-huh.

I compared a ton of sources. I wrote it all up and everything. Two hours before recording time, I referenced one more source, a more recent book from 2023 put out by Harvard Press. I devoured the introduction and the chapter on the guy that I'm going to talk about right before recording. The book is called A Secret Among the Blacks, Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution by John D. Garagas. Okay. So here are two stories about a guy named Francois Macandal.

You ever heard of Francois Macandal? Like I said, like I know just disparate names here and there, but I can't tell you no facts about him. Yeah, I understand. He is entirely mythologized. It's hard to figure out exactly what's real. And there's this guy, his original name, his birthplace, all of that is forgotten because of, you know, slavery. Yeah.

At first, people said he was from the Guinea coast, the southern coast of West Africa, as it was called at the time. Later, people said he was probably from the coast of what's now the Republic of Congo. Then after that, people were like, actually, the fact that there's no vowel at the end of his last name means he was actually probably from the interior of Congo. But he is from one of the places. So what they what that means is he's from one of the places that everyone in Haiti was from. Yeah. Got it. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah.

He might have been named after a village or tribe called Makandal. He might have been named after Makanda, meaning a totem or a fetish. Or people named his fetishes Makanda after him. That actually seems like the most likely. In the pop version of his history, he's royalty. Like in Africa, he was royalty.

And a lot of figures throughout history, once they're important, people will be like, oh, they were secretly royalty. Either they were like secretly royalty in Africa and like a colonized area, or they like the one white person in their lineage was a princess or whatever, you know, but.

Mach and all might have actually been royalty. That seems fairly is certainly possible. It might even be the most likely thing. If nothing else, he was educated. He knew how to read and write. He spoke Arabic. And most accounts said he was very, very skilled as an herbalist. He was also probably Muslim. He knew how to heal and he knew how to poison.

When he was 12, he was captured and trafficked to Saint-Domingue, probably in the 1720s or the 1730s. He was called the old man of the mountain later, 30 years later. But, you know, considering most people only lasted a year. Yeah. He was sold to a man named Le Nomain de Mazy. And if I pronounce your name wrong, you shouldn't have enslaved people. Exactly. He was set to work on an indigo plantation in a fairly remote rural area, one that soon turned into a sugar plantation.

Most accounts from long after his death said that he lost a hand or an arm while processing sugar. And it gets called a... I love the euphemisms of history. A workplace accident.

Like his, his, this story is starting to like come back of like the dual one hand. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like a workplace. Yeah. It's like, is it a workplace? Is it an accident? Like neither of those feel like appropriate words. I don't think this is a workplace. Yeah. He's in the Saw movies and he loses an arm while he's in the Saw movies. Yes.

Sugar plantation work required a bunch of cattle, I guess. I am not an expert on having a sugar plantation. And you need someone to hang out and keep people away from stealing the cattle. And so he's got one arm. And so they're like, all right, or one hand. Or maybe he has both hands. We only have one attestation that he lost a hand. But either way, he gets a job guarding cattle. And...

Look, as far as having being enslaved in the saw factory, this is the job you want. It is a remote job with almost no supervision. There's like his boss's owner or whatever. It's like nowhere around. Yeah. And so for a few years, from 1844 to 1848, he hangs out in this hut either alone or with another enslaved person and watches after the cattle. And meanwhile, he builds a reputation as a healer of animals, of enslaved people, and probably white people were coming to him too. There's a lot of like...

The French people were like so fucked because, I mean, they're clearly in a better position, but they're like so fucked, right? Because all of the skilled healers are like herbalists from Africa. Yeah. They're all in the bush. Yup. Yeah. And so you'd like, you'd be like, oh, my kid's sick. I can't take him to a white doctor. They'll put leeches on them. I don't know if they put leeches on them or not.

But, you know, like the African doctors were doing a lot better work. Yeah. They're like they're using plants like how the rest of human society has for a long time. Yeah. Also, I still always go back to whenever whenever we talk about old medicines. This is when I'm like, yeah, I only want to have been born now.

Yeah, totally. There's no other era I'd want to live in. Yeah. Like, yeah, you got to cut on your arm. Let's just saw that shit off. Yeah. How about here's some whiskey. I'm going to cut your arm off. Yeah. And you got a 50% chance of surviving after we do it. Hey, you might not make it. Yeah.

No, I want to be born after antibiotics, but like, that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, let me just listen. Nah, fam. You telling me, you telling me I got a little sickness. You going to go to the river and pull out a water roach and put it on my cut? Like, nah, I'm good. Yeah. God, even imagine being like the people trying to figure out what works because you're like, well.

I guess we just cut off a bunch of people's arms and see what happens. I don't know, man. It seems like if you just didn't have that arm where that thing is, it wouldn't be a product of the rest of your body. Yeah. And it is better than dying of the infection. True. Yeah, I don't want to live at no other time. No. Anyway. No. And so he's living in this hut. And then at some point he decides to run away. There's two versions of the story.

One version of the story is that he walks away. He's like, no one's watching me. I'm done. And he leaves. The more common version of the story, I don't know if it's true or not, is that he had a falling out with the guy who had enslaved him. Well, rather, not the original. That guy dies and then his wife inherits him and then marries a new guy and whatever. Yeah. The guy who owned him was raping this enslaved woman. But he and that woman were in love.

One night he was caught sleeping with her, and so the slaver ordered him to be lashed 50 times. This was, as you're kind of talking about, this is more or less a death sentence. Yeah. If you are in Saint-Domingue and you are lashed 50 times, you're probably going to die. You're going to die, yeah. And so he's like, well, I don't want to die. So he leaves. Or he just left anyway because no one was watching him. I heard that story. Like, he was just, wasn't nobody there, so he just left. Yeah. That's the story I heard, but who knows? No, no, I mean, I actually think that...

Both stories work. Both stories is completely possible. But the less spectacular one is like always going to be slightly more likely in my head. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And especially because it wasn't like and then he went back and killed whatever. No shade on him no matter what he chose. However, he ended up self-emancipating. Yeah. So he walks into the mountains in 1848 and he lived there for 10 years. And both versions of the story besides exactly why he left. They they agree at this point. Both the like

This isn't where I had to like rewrite everything. Okay. Here's where they start to fork off. He converts from Islam to voodoo, or I guess you don't really have to give up Islam to practice voodoo and who knows. He becomes a leader of the maroons because he is a man with an idea. It's a very simple idea. When it comes down to it, it's a simple idea. It's complicated in its execution. But the idea is this. White people can't enslave you when they're dead.

I'm very sympathetic to this position. Hear me out, guys. Yeah. Okay, I'm spinballing here. Yeah. What if they're dead?

Yeah. It's a very elegant solution. Yeah. And if you don't want to be dead, don't enslave people. I feel like they kind of like, you kind of put us in a precarious position here. I feel like this seems to be that you don't listen to reason, obviously, or we wouldn't be here in the first place. So I feel like... Yeah. One of your own friars who showed up right away was like, this is a bad idea. And you didn't listen to him. That's what your pastor said. Your pastor said y'all sinned. Yeah. Okay.

And as for how to get these slavers to go from living slavers to dead bodies, he fell back on what he knew best. Plants. He was a brilliant poisoner. His idea united people across ethnic and linguistic lines. I've read that he had 3,000 maroons working with him. I've read that he had 20,000 maroons working with him.

He built up a network across Saint-Domingue to help people escape into the hills with agents in every major city. Amazing. He worked with free black people, with the pockettiers who went from plantation to plantation to peddle wares to enslave black people. And this part is actually particularly astounding because getting free black people to be part of a slave revolt at this time was particularly hard because there was a kind of a three-way tension happening.

Between the French, the free black people, many of whom were middle class and the enslaved black people. And so good on him if that is and good on the, you know, middle class people for for throwing down. Yeah. Because once you're out, you're like, well, I'm not trying to like like you supposed to stay under the radar. Like, oh, I don't know. Problems like I'm out. We made it just, you know, good luck to you. But yeah. Slip you a little bit of money if you need to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of here, kid. Yeah. Yeah.

These groups led raids on plantations to free people and steal shit. And several times, the story goes, he was captured. And each time he escaped, he recruited people. And then he and his agents started poisoning people. About 6,000 people were poisoned to death during this. If you read a simplistic retelling of events, he poisoned white people. That's the nicer way to tell the story, right? Yeah. If you read the stuff that's more willing to engage in the ethically complicated nature of revolt...

He poisoned white people and he poisoned black people who didn't agree with him about his plans for revolution. Yeah. And he also poisoned livestock and crops because those animals and crops were capital assets of the colonial economy. Yeah. The part that was brought forth to me, like when they, it was always a comparison contrast between like him and Harriet Tubman. That's the way I remember it being taught to me. Oh, interesting. Yeah. In his like,

I got out, but I'm not just going to leave y'all. You know what I'm saying? Like we're going to figure out how to get everybody out. But the difference between, yeah, when he's male, it was female, like, you know, working among cloaks, but just him being like, if you ain't for us, you against us. And his understanding, whether he knew it or not of capitalism of like, you have to like, you have to, not only do you have to, you have to cut off their reason for even having slaves.

You know, and that understanding of that sort of solidarity of like, no, I'm poisoning your cattle. And the idea that like, I've always said that like privilege makes you brittle, but it also makes you aloof in the sense that you're not paying attention to what we putting in these drinks. You're not paying attention to the, you know, how we making you salads. You're not paying attention to this. You know what I'm saying? Like, you don't know what we feeding you, you know? So yeah.

That as a act of resistance was, like I said, that's when you said Francois, I was like, I knew the name and like it was starting to come together. But that was the thing to where it's like you have to you have to cut off the money. And that's what what we understood him as. Whereas Harriet Tubman was like, well, let's get free. Right. He was like, you got to stop the money.

Because they're just going to bring somebody else. Yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah, and also just like... And we're just going to literally kill them until they go away. You know? Like, we're going to just like... You don't have to be here. No, that is a really interesting comparison between two of them. Because I got... You know, I mean, Harry Tubman is like one of the most singular heroes in all of history. Totally. You know? But like...

You look at this and I'm like, well, it's not a bad plan. I mean, I don't blame him. You know what I'm saying? And it's like... And Haiti... Not like Haiti was aware of America. You know what I'm saying? But at the time, or now looking at it now, I'm like, Haiti's a lot smaller than the Confederate South. So it's smaller. So there's like... You could probably pull it off. There's not that many of y'all. You know what I'm saying? There's only about...

I had trouble finding the exact population of white versus black in exactly this year, but by looking at charts and conjecturing, there's about half a million enslaved people and there's about 40,000 white people. It's not that many. Yeah. Yeah. So if he killed 6,000 of them, that is 15% of the white people. It's pretty big. You are well on your way, you know? Yeah. Some say that this poisoning spree lasted six years. Some say that it lasted 18 years. Some say that it was more than 6,000 people. Yeah.

Some people say his goal was to spark a race war and or just literally kill all the white people on the island. It could have worked. He was working on his most ambitious project yet when he was caught. What his most ambitious project was, speaking of fucking with the money, is pivoting to ads. He started podcasting. Sheesh. Yeah. That was good. That was good. You got me. Thank you. Thank you. That's my main job here. Here's a bunch of ads.

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In terms of the ethics of this particular action, look, he is not walking away without blood on his hands. Two-thirds or so of the population of the city was enslaved. But, you know, he also told people that he had magic powers. He told people that he was immortal. He said that if he were to be killed, he would not die, but instead he would return as a mosquito to keep killing slavers. Love it. Yeah. Love it.

He goes to a local dance at a plantation. There's like a party once a year, basically. You get your holiday party. And he's ratted out and captured at the party. Yeah.

I just had this, I just totally separate. I just had this image of just like, yeah, your work, your office into the year, Christmas party slaves though. Yeah. And only half of you are still alive from the start of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking that party. That party would be either morose or wild or both. Dude. Yeah. I mean, can we kind of actually know a little bit about how those parties went? Cause that's where Vodou comes from. Yes. Well,

Like let's do ecstatic stuff while we're like trying not to die. Yeah. So he's captured. He breaks out of his cell. He's recaptured. He is sentenced to death by being burned at the stake. On January 20th, 1858, he is burned at the stake. First, he slips his bonds, even though he's like missing a hand. He has to be retied and then he's burned. In order to make an example out of him, enslaved people were brought to witness his death.

But they said, he did not die. We saw him. He turned into a mosquito and he flew away. He promised he would return and free all of us. And mosquitoes did a lot of the killing. They did a lot of the killing. In the Haitian revolution. Yes. Yes. Mosquito-borne illnesses were essential to military victory of the Haitian people against European powers. And as those soldiers died, people would say, see, Macandal is still doing his work.

Good old sickle cell anemia. Yeah. Yeah. Came to save us all. You know what I'm talking about? No, I don't remember. Because I haven't gone to the part where I remember it was like yellow fever or something killed a lot of them. So malaria, like...

This helped even with Rome trying to conquer Africa was because Africans developed a recessive sickle cell trait. Now, if you get two dominant ones, you get sickle cell anemia. If you have one dominant and one recessive, which most West Africans have, then-

we become, in some ways, we have a defense against malaria, right? So from a lot of the mosquito-borne problems. But that shit was wiping out the colonizers. And it's like, it's because we have sickle cell, like white blood cells, you know? And it's like, so it's been, there's even an island off the coast of...

South Carolina that ended up like all of the white people had to leave because there was too many mosquitoes. But it was killing them, but it wasn't killing us. And it's because we're from West Africa and we have sickle cell traits. So it don't kill us. That's why I was like, good old sickle cell. That's probably a huge reason why they had to wait to invent the machine gun in order to take most of Africa. Yeah. Yeah. Mosquitoes was killing them.

Yeah. Yeah, we weren't getting the yellow fever. Like, we just wasn't given it, and it was... Yeah. And the people who were going to get sick and die had already gotten sick and died. Yeah. Whereas all the soldiers had just shown up and were just, like, completely destroyed. Yeah. And charms and amulets and poisons would be called machanda still, and a practitioner who makes these might get called a machandal.

It's possible that the etymology goes the other way, that he got the name Mockendall not because of where he was from or like whatever, but because of what he did. They might have called him that as sort of a word for like witch or, you know. Yeah. Magical practitioner. But that's okay. So this is that's the story I was prepared to tell you. Uh-huh. I've read it. I've read it a dozen ways and is a wonderful story. And I sort of secretly hope it's true.

What I'm guessing happened based on this book, and maybe this random book from 2023 isn't true, right? I don't know. This story that it presents about what happened with Machindal maps so clearly to what we've talked about over and over on this show about hysteria around magic and witchcraft. It parallels the story of Elizabeth Bathory. We heard about the...

Usually people call her Bathory, and she bathed in the blood of virgins to stay forever young. She was one of the first people we sort of accidentally covered on this show. She almost certainly was just like a healer woman who was like a rich aristocratic lady who lived alone and taught girls how to become healers, but the king owed her money.

So the king went after her and like- Wow. Had like an inquisition against her and locked her up in her own castle and accused her of killing virgins or whatever, you know? I swear, like, listen, I'm glad, Margaret, I'm glad you got out when you could because men are just like, I just be like, sometimes I just be like, oh, this, oh, that woman's smart. Witch! Yeah. Like, no.

Oh, they don't like... They don't like... They really just don't... Sometimes they just like being alone among themselves and they don't have to worry about nobody sexualizing their bodies. Yeah. Whore! Like... Yeah. Bro, like...

What? Like, she can read? Witch! Yeah. Just to say, nothing wrong with witches and nothing wrong with whores. Nope. We support. We stan. But people are saying it in a real not nice way. Yeah. Yes. And listen. Yes. Yeah. You know what's great? Do you know what's great, though? What? A witchy whore. Ugh. Yeah. A witchy whore. Ugh. Woo! Some of my best friends.

Got some of your best friends. That's exactly what I was thinking. Some of my friends, just the witchiest whores you've ever met. Just the witchiest whores. And I love you all. Yeah, man. Oh, this girl knows how to like, knows that this flower, when you mix it with this one, it makes a good tea. Witch! Yeah, better burn her. Burn her! And it also happens to people who are marginalized in other ways. It happens to people who are racialized. The whole history of the way that people talk about voodoo and voodoo

Is this right? It's like what you have a religion where you sacrifice an animal. It's clearly the devil. You're like, yeah, what? Okay. What are you talking about? Sacrificial lamb? Got it. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's good when we drink blood. It's bad when you drink blood.

And I would say ours is not literal, but Catholics literally believe it's literal. They do believe in trans, yeah. Transubstantiation. Transubstantiation. Yeah. Thank you. So the short version, what this book presents the idea of is he never poisoned anyone. Really? He was a kind of wacky cult leader who was framed up and executed during a panic, a witch panic, more or less. Oh.

I wish the listeners could see my facial expression right now. I'm like, what? Yeah. Okay. And so it's like, and I feel hesitant saying it because this is a like, he's an important cultural figure. He's a big deal. Like a lot of people are named Francois because of him. Yeah. Like, I'm going to quote CLR James about him soon. You know, like he's an important fucking figure. Yeah. But,

The whole, like, kill all the white people is the thing I currently believe. I could be proven wrong. I would support this man either way. It was probably white people freaking out. It was probably a, like, a panic. Awesome. Nat Turner type panic. Yeah. Yeah. I never thought of it like that. Dang. And so...

There's this whole thing where oppressors are always convinced that the people that they oppress are just waiting to turn the tables and do the exact opposite. Israeli citizens who are like, oh, we can't free Palestine because then they'll kill us all because we treated them so badly for so long. Or white people in the US who believe that the majority of black people want to kill all the white people instead of end white power. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

I actually think if he had wanted to kill all the white people on the island, I think that's an understandable impulse and might've been strategically sound. Like you get into the blurry, like it's probably never good to kill children. You know, like, I mean, you brought up Nat Turner earlier, right? Like, you know, Nat Turner, as far as I understand it, his raids absolutely killed like, you know, non-combatant white people or whatever. Yeah. Whole family. Yeah. You're just going to grow up and become a slaver. So yeah. Yeah. But like,

If you're in the Saw movie and you have a chance to try and stop the next one, I am not mad at you. Like, in the abstract, no, don't kill innocent people, you know? Yeah. But, like, I'm not mad at Nat Turner, and I'm not mad at the version that I thought this man was. Yeah. I don't know. That's, wow. That is, it makes so much sense, the idea that, like, well, yeah, it was a panic. Yeah.

Yeah. And yeah, he was, and he was, you know, he probably inspired some people, you know, maybe some people got poisoned because again, like we make your food. Yeah. You know? So like, yeah, I don't, I mean, we could, but,

You know? And it's one of the things that I, like, almost, like, literally keeps me up at night because I'm a little bit obsessive about my job, is the fact that, like, you start off with the version of the story, like, take Batory. Oh, she bathed in virgin blood to stay young forever. And you're like, no, she probably didn't. Right? Yeah. She's probably, like, a healer. Right? But what if she did? Now, that would actually not be an ethical thing to do, but, like... Totally.

It's not boring is an interesting thing. And then like all kinds of shit, like in that story, one of the reasons she ended up the way she did theoretically, but again, she probably didn't turn out the way she, people say she did. She watched her dad who was like the counter, whatever the fuck execute someone by cutting open a cow and then sewing the person alive into the stomach of the cow. What? And that is not contested. The way that Europeans killed people is,

It seemed like every time they executed them, they had to come up with the most Wile E. Coyote way of doing it. Yeah. Like, they just got bored. Yeah. They just think of something else. And so then I read about, like, there's this whole thing where Italian women were poisoning their husbands because before...

Republicans want to get rid of no-fault divorce. The thing that women had before no-fault divorce was we make your food and we're going to poison you. And that's real, as best as I can tell. And it seems real that there was this quote-unquote magical underground in a lot of Western European cities, like in the early modern era, late medieval era or whatever, where you go and you can talk to someone who will provide abortion for you, who will read your fortune, who will do this... It's called...

Service magic is the way an anthropologist I read talks about it. Yeah. Which is going to come back into this story in a little bit. And maybe those people killed kids. I don't know. They were accused of it. Yeah. They probably didn't. But yeah, we've lived in this world long enough to see crazy shit. Yeah. Happen in the news. So like, like the satanic panic of the eighties, those kids weren't out there sort of sacrificing kids to worship the devil. Yeah.

But someone probably did at some point, right? Somebody was being funny and just enjoying themselves. And yeah, you're right. That is true. Dude. Yeah. It's just- And so, yeah, this poison plot almost certainly just describing hysteria. But as you pointed out, probably a bunch of these people got poisoned. Probably somebody did, yeah. Maybe not by Macandal, but like-

They certainly deserve to be. It's easier. Yeah, it's easier. It's neater to wrap this thing that you don't understand. Just wrap it up with a nice little bow with a person. This dude. Yeah. This is where it came from. Totally. It's just easier to wrap your brain around that. Totally. Yeah. No, that's such a good way to put it because like,

Okay, and so the idea that he was going to kill all the white people or whatever is probably propaganda. And the argument that is made about this, we know that there is propaganda that says this. The year he was killed, 1758, there were already anti-black pamphlets circulating around France about how he had been leading an army set on killing all the white people. By 1787, there was a new version going around that he was just a crazy man. He was a gifted healer who had been driven mad by the evils of slavery.

And after the Haitian Revolution, this was the version of the story that spread. C.L.R. James, one of the more important black theorists and historians, he wrote a book called The Black Jacobins about the Haitian Revolution in 1938. And in it, he wrote, quote, an uninstructed mass feeling its way to revolution usually begins by terrorism and Machendal aimed at delivering his people by means of poison. Yeah. And so it's like, it is a justifiable thing to believe. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's no... Like, dude, even listening to your past episodes, just about various things that different anarchist revolutions and stuff like that that happened in Europe. Like, I think out of just...

trauma pain and protest i like refuse to learn about a lot of europe you know what i mean like yeah yeah that's fair there's so much more yeah earth is much larger than this guys you know so yeah but that being said you miss out on a lot of like pretty dope shit that was going on up there yeah you know um you sometimes get to this place to where you're like damn like i can't

We can't we we can't know what happened, you know. So then I start thinking about now and I'm like, well, how many how many things can I not really explain to y'all? Like, how am I going to explain like Sophie appreciate this? How am I going to explain Kendrick and Drake to y'all to a hundred years from now? How am I going to say like I like it? I'm listening, you know, with the the bastards thing on Oprah like.

I can't understate how big Oprah is, you know, and or was like to be like Mr. Beast. Like, is that like how do I how do I make you understand? You know what I'm saying? Like, that's what I say with Drake with a lot of a lot of younglings. I was like, listen, I can't understate how big of a star Ja Rule was. Like when I tell you Ja Rule was Drake.

Like it. And he's a joke now because of 50 cent. And I don't know how, like, I know that doesn't make sense to you, but you just like, I can't draw this straight line for you. So I think about now how frustrated I would be to be like, when Kendrick said he's not like us, like,

all of what that means who is us what do we mean by that like this was a this is a like i'm this i'm i'm trying to make a parallel here but like this is a moment it's a moment in pop culture subculture and hip-hop culture this is a like i'm not being corny this is a water that was a watershed moment yeah like that i think changed the music industry and changed hip-hop forever like i i i truly believe that moment what kendrick did right now but

How do we do a cool people episode on Kendrick? Like, I don't know how to explain what this and how this moment came because this happened. Well, then I have to talk about Mustard sending him five beats a day for three months. You know what I mean? And that's why we're going, Mustard! You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't...

I don't know how to, I don't know what's myth. Just send that video of him playing They Not Like Us like 17 times at the forum. It's so amazing. So cool. And then just like seeing everybody's faces in the crowd. It's like, that's it. Run it back. Yeah. But how do you put that into words is the question. How do I put it into words? Yeah. And then, so then what do you do? You film a biopic and you say, oh yeah, you know, Kendrick was- And you simplify it.

You simplify it, but it's like, it's frustrating because like, it was so much more beautiful than that. Yeah. You know? So whatever happened with Francois, like, like I'm really my mind blown by being, because what you're saying is so possible that it's like, ah, probably wouldn't even, probably wouldn't even that serious. Like, you know? Yeah, no. And, and, and so much is built up around this concept that you almost get into this, like,

At a certain point, it almost becomes true. You know, it almost like... Yeah. It's so messy. And I don't know. Yeah, the unknowableness of so much of this. Yeah, it's the thing that keeps me up at night is that I'm like, I will read all of these different sources and all of them are flawed. But that's like... Oh, Lord.

The concept of exploring mysteries you can't understand is like central to the Catholic faith. And like the idea that you can never know God, right? You just can kind of peace out around it. That's like how I feel like trying to read this history shit is that I'm like, well, I have all of these impressions and somewhere in the impression is the blurry truth, you know? Yeah. And it's supposed to be like bouncing off the mysticism of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, evangelicalism tried to

turn it into a rubric and here's your points. But that's supposed to be beautiful. It's supposed to be inspiring that this is above us. It's this transcendent thing that all of us are attracted to and we can't wrap our minds around it or wrap our hands around it. And that's what makes it divine. And that's supposed to inspire you. Rather than getting your arms around it, building a fence and saying, I understand who God is and you don't. So

So, yeah. So, like, I however, when we talk about it, I'm frustrated. Yeah. But with history, I'm like, no. But like what happened? No, I know. I know. I know. Exactly. No. Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, what John D. Garagas claims happened, quote, he was a diviner in the Congo tradition who formed spiritual communities for healing and self-defense. In doing so, he established one of the multiple cultures of resistance that emerged in the decades before the Haitian Revolution.

Other enslaved people took vengeance against their enslavers or appealed to colonial courts to protect them from torture and abuse. Still others planned and participated in labor stoppages and strikes against plantation policies and leadership. Enslaved people were thinking strategically about their lives as they imagined and worked for a future in which French colonists would no longer dominate Saint-Domingue. And so he's saying like, look, he did something interesting. He created these like

communities for self-defense and healing and other people who weren't just led by him he didn't have like an army everywhere you know yeah got all this shit done and what what he claims actually happened what these communities for healing and self-defense are was that they all got together and did sports ad gambling stuff uh here did it to me again thank you thank you

I honestly think if we ever do a Cool Zone Awards, like, Margaret, this girl, you... Who's the judge for the Cool Zone Awards? Because to me, I'm like, you get a trophy. You get a trophy. You get a trophy. You get a trophy. Everybody gets a trophy. Yeah, you can't be the judge. No one else has ever, like, actually tricked me. I'm like, wait, what happened, sex?

It takes a deep cynicism. Yeah, because with Robert, he changes his voice. Yeah, the pitch is different. You're like fully stay in tone. Yeah, it's pretty good. Thanks. Whereas Robert's like, and you know who? Yeah, you're like, oh, commercial coming. You're like, yeah, Robert, we fucking know. That was much fun. Five billion ads online.

And here's some of them, unless you have cooler zone media, in which case here's none of them.

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And something goes missing, and you're like, damn you, roommate, you probably stole my thing. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's called having a sibling. Yeah. Listen, living with another human. Yeah. Yeah. Now, imagine you're a guy who owns people. Oh, no. And you get sick because you ate some bad meat. Mm-hmm. Who are you going to blame? Probably the people that cooked the meat. Yeah. So...

People were getting sick and dying because they were bad at being humans. And they had bad food.

They were like – they had stored stockpiled food that spoiled and they ate it anyway because they're dumb Europeans. You poisoned us. Yeah. No, sir. The air did. Yeah. That's called salmonella. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. Or like they get mosquito bit and they're dying and they're like, I bet it was – and to be fair, if you are like a monster who is destroying hundreds of thousands of people's lives –

It's reasonable to think that they're the ones who hurt you. And that, again, makes so much sense. And if you and if you the black people, you like could be. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I did. Yeah. Maybe I did. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't do nothing. They just let you left the milk out all night and then drank it. You know, like, yeah, you ain't smell that beef before you cooked it. You see, we wasn't eating it. Yeah. You don't feed us nothing. And we knew not to eat that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and so that is the – it seems like historians are leaning towards the – some people just ate some bad food for a while because some stores went bad. And the moral of the story is the great African-American proverb, wash your chicken. Yeah, well – I know scientifically you're not supposed to, but – Wash your chicken, wash your rice. Wash your chicken, wash your rice. Anyway, what were you saying? No, no, okay, so –

So it seems likely, just trace the story of Machindal by this other, this new presentation of it, is that up until the point he's in Maroon, we're more or less all on the same page. He walks into the mountains and then he kind of just starts a cult. He has a fairly absentee owner. So he can kind of just walk around pretending to be a free black man. I think his owner is usually out to sea because his wife, the new husband is off out to sea or whatever. Yeah.

He has a little spot in the mountains and he has followers living there of a religious tradition that derives from Congo practices that are not voodoo. In particular, he makes and distributes charms that get called macandals. And almost everyone coming from these traditions, as I read it at least, was carrying some kind of charm or fetish at this point. Like a lot of different practices had you do this. But these ones were meant to be different. These ones were considered alive.

They had to be fed and such. The Macindals were made of bone fragments from a baptized child taken from a graveyard mixed with other stuff like grated plantain root and soot from a cooking pot, communion bread wrapped up with a little lead cross. The missionaries were giving everyone lead crosses, so they had a lot of them. And he would give you a Macindal and he'd say, now you're not allowed to eat beans or fresh meat except for poultry.

And you can't drink wine. And if you do, your Mock and Doll will stop working unless you atone. Some of this seems like food safety stuff, right? Yeah. Some of it might have been, you know, a lot of different religions have been like, oh, we got to come up with some way to get people to stop drinking so that people start acting right or whatever. Some of the stuff around the religious practices, I'm more skeptical about just because they raise my like red flags of like,

Well, I'm about to tell you that they worship the literal devil in a second. And that's the part that like raises the like, do they? Yeah. I don't know. In that same way that like people are always like, oh, these kids worship the devil. And I'm like, I bet some of them did. I have friends who do. Like, I don't know. Yeah. You know, there's some politics in what he's doing because in the Congolese tradition he's from, healing people meant healing the land. Illness was caused by bad social relations.

And so it's like, this is a sick place because of all this stuff is happening. He seemed fairly legitimate about like, he also seemed to be actually a good healer and people would come to him from all over and stuff. And when I say that it was a cult, I'm claiming it as distinct from Vodou, which was not a cult. And it seems that a ceremony started with cursing both white people and anyone who wasn't yet initiated who was black. So like everyone who's not with us is bad or whatever. And that's the, where I'm like, if that's true, it's kind of culty. Yeah.

They theoretically had a hut called the Devil's Hut that had the largest Mock and Doll of them all in it. They also worshiped God. It wasn't a like, you know, literally it was kind of like, ah, you Christians are forcing us to do this shit and you got God and the devil or whatever. They're both fine. Put them on the shelf. It's fine. Yeah. This had the largest Mock and Doll of them all, the size of a child, and they would worship it and then say, there's nothing in the world greater than God, Satan, and after those two, Francois Mock and Doll. Wow. And...

I am afraid of this just being a plane into stereotypes, but it seems to be being presented as a, as a historical way of looking at anything that happened. Um, and it overall is, it's not coming from a position of like, Oh, and those wacky, you know, devil worshipers or whatever. Um,

He helped a lot of people. He formed a little counter society outside of slave society. Also, again, you're like, even if you're like, oh, it's a little weird. Like the other thing is slave society. Yeah. I don't know, man. I'm going to go. I think I'd take my chances with the weird culty voodoo then to continue to be a slave. Yeah. Yeah. And he's basically a service magician. He is, you know, proficient.

present in basically every society throughout history as you have the person who performs divination and healing and stuff. The main thing, the book I read didn't call him a cult leader. That's my interpretation of what I read. Yeah. They call them a diviner. And that seems very likely. And a service magician is contrasted from witchcraft, witchcraft in this context, not Haitian context, but the context of like talking about pre-modern magic, whatever. Yeah.

Witchcraft is like magic that does stuff I don't want it to. So witchcraft is the like poison your crops and kill your cattle and make you unfertile and like, you know, and service magicians, including Mach and Dahl, regularly work to counter witchcraft. So among his like charms and stuff is he'd be like, oh, I can tell you who is poisoning you. You know, I can, I can divine who, who has cursed you. Right. Okay.

And it was actually this particular task, the figuring out who poisoned someone, that got him killed. Because...

People were dying a bunch of bad food at the time or possibly being poisoned. I don't know, but probably mostly the supplies had gone bad. And there's this mass hysteria and colonial authorities are convinced that it is evil African magic killing everyone. And so before they got to him, they rounded up a bunch of other like suspected poisoners in a very witchcraft trial way where they're like, you grab one person, you torture them. And they're like, oh, my friends made me do it. And they name them and then they go get them and you torture them. And yeah, you know.

And so they were already afraid of the big evil poison plot to kill all the white people. And the coffee plantations had been creeping up the mountains and it was more people from Congo. And so that was like kind of the communities he was working within. And they had their big December dance, their work party. And they invited him because they needed him to help Divine who had been poisoning them. But then a little boy went and told the white people that there was a poisoner at the dance. Damn it. I know. I know.

Two colonists grabbed him and they didn't have any shackles, so they hog tied him and then tied him to a 50-pound weight. What? And then, yeah, because... Speaking of the way that Europeans would, like, murder people, like, the whole, like, all of the terrible devices that blacksmiths came up with to do to enslave people, like... But, like, why, though? Yeah. Why? Yeah. Yeah. I remember the first time I watched a movie about a maroon community and...

It had one of the people in one of those like neck cages with spikes pointing to your neck. So your head has to stay upright. And I remember like seeing that in the movie and I was like, dear internet. And the internet was like, yeah, no, no. Yeah. People used to do that to people. Yeah. Yeah. For real. Yeah. That was the thing. Imagine living in that society and be like, this is all right. You know? And that you're on the right side of history. Yeah. Like how do you fucking sleep at night? How are you thinking at it?

Did he just come to you in a drink? Like, how do you think of that? Yeah. You're clearly enjoying the art form of your work. And I don't traditionally believe in hell as a concept, but I might now. I don't know, fam. If that came out of it. Yeah. So he has a 50-pound weight tied to him. They hold him captive. After his guards fall asleep, he crawls out the window, even though he's still tied up.

And he is like running through the fields, probably dragging his 50 pound weight. They catch him with dogs. They arrest him. He's held in jail. In court, he denied making poisons. He did name some of his followers. I assume he's being tortured. And these are all, they're all arrested. And I think most of them are killed too. There's almost no records of the trial. We, instead of it being like the actual records of the trial, it's the like side notes, like the recollect, like the people talking about it or whatever. There's no evidence brought against him for poisoning. Okay.

Even though that's what he's killed for. Oh. He was convicted and among his many things was seducing slaves and corrupting people. He was also... The reason they burned him at the stake is that what he did was sacrilegious because he used crosses in his charms. Even though he's from a place that's been using crosses in their charms for 250 years because the Congo has had Christians there for a really long time. For a long time, yeah. Yeah. And...

He was accused of trying to start a race war. The only theoretical thing that possibly in any way backs this up, though, again, like literally if all the white people have decided that all the black, whatever, anyway, I don't need to justify this. Yeah. The only thing that he might have done that said something like that is that there's a one follower said that he performed a magic trick once where he took a, he turned a cloth from olive to white to black, like kind of just like,

handkerchief magic, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which is really charming. Watch this. And when he did it, he used it to represent who rules the island. Olive was the indigenous people, white for the French, and black for the people who would rule. Wow. And this was like, see, he's going to have a race war. Like, again, whatever. Yeah. By the end of the day, the judge is handed down a sentence and he was burned at the stake the same day. Damn.

While he was on fire, he pulled his shackles out from the post and ran for it. He was recaptured and tied up again. And then, I don't have any reason to say that he didn't turn into a mosquito and killed all the invading armies. Could be. You know. And that is the end of part two of our four-parter on the Haitian Revolution. Francois. Getting us to 30 years before the Haitian Revolution. Yeah, we still haven't got to the revolution. No. Haiti's still got slaves right now if you're keeping up. There's still...

Still slaves in Haiti right now. I've tried a couple times to keep up with what's going on in Haiti, and it is... I don't want to be like, it's messy, and so therefore I don't understand it. But I just literally haven't really come to understand it yet. Oh, right now it's... It's bad. It's the Warriors movie. It's gangs. Yeah. And even the guy that's the prime minister, his name is Barbecue, no less. Yeah. That's right. I remember when Barbecue took power. It's gangbanging. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's pretty...

The first crash out was a few years back when the prime minister left. They just ran him out. And he was somewhere in Colombia. And I think that that was like, nah, they put a hit on him. But yeah, I say this with all a complete straight face. I'm like, yeah, nah, it is not safe in Port-au-Prince right now. Yeah. No, yeah. No, it doesn't surprise me. And then just...

I mean, watching what, I don't know, hundreds of years of just like every other country in the world just trying to fuck you. I just, the only, like...

Imagine you're a kid and you're playing Jenga and just like every 10 minutes, somebody, your brother's friend just comes and kicks the shit out of the whole thing. Yeah. And you're just like, well, damn. And then you try to do it again and somebody else just kicks the shit out of the whole thing. Yeah. And then they're all looking at you like, how come you don't know how to do Jenga? Yeah, you're so bad at this. It keeps falling over. You suck at Jenga. And I'm like, well, if you didn't kick it. Yeah. Might be able to figure some shit out. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you just took half the bricks. Yeah. Yeah. The more you learn about how wealth is just systemically stripped from marginalized communities, including in the United States, which means that they're producing wealth. Like, they wouldn't put a chain store into a ghetto if it didn't give them money. If there wasn't wealth being produced in that community and they want it for themselves instead. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Because I'm like, why is Africa just farmed and raped and drained and tapped dry by Europe and the rest of the Western nations? Because it's got shit. Yeah, because it's rich as fuck. It's rich as fuck. That's why. Yeah. Damn, man. Well...

On that pleasant note, hey, at least they're about to have the most successful slave revolt in history. I was like, when does the cool part start? Yeah. Okay. That's what I signed up for. No, I know. And what I thought he was just this poisoner guy. That's why I was like, and then I'm going to leave on a high note because he's going to do this amazing thing. And then I'm like, but he still did this amazing thing. You know, it's like leading a like both free and unfree people into like healing and like community in the mountains. Yeah.

Like, for years, you know, he was, for a decade, he was up there as a maroon. And again, in the Saw factory. I've never seen the Saw movies. It's going to be really obvious to everyone who has as I keep using this metaphor. Keep making discompares. Yeah, yeah. It's just my, like, it's literally, like, the most horror I can horror imagine because the reason I don't watch it is because it's too horror, you know? Yeah, I feel you. But, no, I think, yeah, I think the...

Yeah, like the messiness that we talked about earlier, you know, is something to me. But I think there is something to be said about like just myth making. And like sometimes that like myth making becomes, like you said, that becomes the truth. Yeah. You know, and that's like, and which is, you know, us as people who enjoy history ends up, that actually ends up being more true than truth.

what happened. Yeah. Because the myth making- Is impact. Yes, is the impact and how that affected the rest of the world that you were in. It created a reality that existed because of this myth. So I think, so to that point, yeah, the myth is also something that should be understood in its historical context. Yeah. And even the fact that like how deeply Haiti, the Haitian revolution scared people

all of the like white colonial forces like and then they all punished him for it but it's like that's how intense the impact was even though it like yeah kind of it's still better than not having had that revolution right but like sure it kind of didn't work out great for them you know the white lash but like but someone's got to do something you know and also like it really did spur on

so much of US abolitionism even though it like absolutely yeah and there was people like going from the US over to Haiti and there was like people planning to invade the US there was like I can't remember his name there was an abolitionist as a black man who self-emancipated and then like went to Haiti to raise an army and was going to invade but then I think he was like we was going to come back yeah I think then the Civil War kicked off while he was getting ready for that and so he was like alright let's go do that instead you know yeah but yeah

It's so impactful. Anyway, whatever. We'll keep talking about how it's impactful as we talk about what actually happened. I can't wait, man. Yeah. But anyway, Hood Politics will prop.

I'm going to go straight to the ads. Hell yeah. To the plugs. The good ads. To the politics with Prop. Yeah. You can go to PropHipHop.com to get, I got some shows coming up, like Dope One in LA with Saw Rock. If you know indie hip hop, Rhyme Sayers, she's one of the dopest MCs on earth. Sunset Rooftop, Flyers on the website. Terraform, the book, it's out. Please, please support some poetry and

And yeah, and the podcast is still kicking and screaming, and it's visual now also. Oh, yeah. And if anyone who doesn't listen to it, it is just genuinely one of the best ways of understanding what's happening in modern politics that I've ever heard. Really appreciate that. People should listen to it. And if you want to pay more attention to what I do... Oh!

I have a book coming out. I say that all the time because I write a lot of books. You write a lot of books. But first I'm going to cough, but then Rory's going to cut out me coughing. So I'm just going to say I'm going to cough, but then there's not going to be a cough and y'all are going to be very confused. But I have a book called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. It's the third book in the Danielle Cain series and we'll be kickstarting it in March. And part of that is that there will be audio book versions of the first two books too. And if you want to hear the first book, I read it to Robert Evans on...

This very podcast, if you go back far enough, if you go back to Cool Zone Media Book Club. Let's go. And that's about it. Yeah. I think that you're like, this is no gas. Like, I'm not blowing smoke. I like...

You're one of the smartest humans I know. Fuck, thanks. And it has a lot to do with the breadth of where your intelligence lies. Like I said, it's in an area that I just skipped. I was like, I'm skipping that chapter. But it ended up being such connective tissue for a lot of the stuff I did end up spending most of my time understanding. So one reason why I enjoy the show, but another reason...

Hearing you say, like, no, no, Prop's got a good show. Like, it's like, hang on. Actually, I really take that as a compliment. Like, for real. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate, I don't know. I really like Cool Zone Media. And I am proud to be part of it. The love fest. Yeah. We are the Wu-Tang of podcasts. Yeah.

All right. We will talk to you all next week with more about the Haitian Revolution. Let's go. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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