Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2: You're a weekly reminder that we live in hell. No wait,
Speaker 2: that's unrelated the fact that we live in hell world.
Speaker 2: You're a weekly reminder that when bad things are happening,
Speaker 2: you could do good things because it's bad otherwise. Yes,
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is
Speaker 2: prop How are you hey man?
Speaker 3: Uh well, where do we begin?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: We're recording this at the end of January twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: so if you're listening in the future, this is either
Speaker 2: a blissful time to look back at or just obviously
Speaker 2: where everything went wrong.
Speaker 3: I just don't know how many months January has. Why is.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean I'm excited for this because it's going to
Speaker 5: be a sign that, like you said, in this hell
Speaker 5: we live in, every once in a while there are
Speaker 5: people that are tall drinks of water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people, people get shited done. In real bad times,
Speaker 2: people get shit done like this month where your city
Speaker 2: caught on fire and uh, nothing else bad happened.
Speaker 5: I will say in spirit of cool people like from
Speaker 5: street level to like even our government, like civics, like
Speaker 5: people snapped into snapped into work. One thing we will
Speaker 5: always say is La loves La and like we got busy,
Speaker 5: Like we got busy. I am very impressed at how
Speaker 5: fast we were already ready to go. But when by
Speaker 5: the time the city bureocracy was able to like you know,
Speaker 5: stand up all the stuff they needed to stand up,
Speaker 5: we was already ready and like, yeah, there hasn't been
Speaker 5: except for the rent price gouging.
Speaker 2: But it's the people coming in after that do all
Speaker 2: the damage.
Speaker 3: It's the people coming in after. Yeah.
Speaker 5: But like I've been like just so impressed dude, people,
Speaker 5: Like I was in a spot where somebody learned Spanish
Speaker 5: just so that they can communicate. Like it was super dope,
Speaker 5: Like I was translating for a little bit, but then
Speaker 5: after a while he was like, oh wait, I'm gonna learn,
Speaker 5: So it was pretty dope.
Speaker 2: Yeah fuck yeah yeah. Our producer is Sophie, who's also here.
Speaker 2: Hi Sophie.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 1: Do you remember on our Q and A when somebody
Speaker 1: was like asking us about sourdough bread and we were like,
Speaker 1: we don't do that. I made sourdough bread. Boom.
Speaker 2: Do you think the QA was part of your nod?
Speaker 1: My wonderful friend Molly also Molly for listening. Hi Molly,
Speaker 1: not Molly who works on cools. On different Molly. Also
Speaker 1: great Molly. Oh, there's good Molly's.
Speaker 3: A lot of Molly's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Molly's a pretty good Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't mind him. Molly crazy drug though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as I say, I've had a little bit of
Speaker 2: fun on Molly.
Speaker 1: But Molly Trefacta was like, take this cooking class with me,
Speaker 1: and we signed up like two months ago and we
Speaker 1: took this class.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of things you can make fun
Speaker 5: of about Portland, and then there's other stuff that like, yeah,
Speaker 5: but that's kind of dope.
Speaker 1: No, it was very charm It was like very lovely,
Speaker 1: but it was it was peak Portland, but in a
Speaker 1: good way.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can make fun of Portland as much. Oh
Speaker 5: my god, you're take a salarial class. It's like, actually,
Speaker 5: sour dough is pretty delicious and it's pretty cool that
Speaker 5: you could make it because we have gluten issues.
Speaker 1: So yeah, exactly. And I took this class. I got
Speaker 1: my starter, I got my dough, and I made soured
Speaker 1: nough bread and I waited the like cool down period.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, it looks like bread. Is it bread?
Speaker 1: Because it looked like bread. But I was like, does
Speaker 1: it taste delicious?
Speaker 2: So it looked real good. I got to see it.
Speaker 2: None of you all can, only the three of us can.
Speaker 5: It looks amazing. I ain't gonna hold you got the
Speaker 5: nice crisp on top man.
Speaker 3: Yeah it looks good.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if anybody wants to message me to talk about bread, cool,
Speaker 1: that's my that's my plug.
Speaker 2: Which is saying a lot because normally Sophie doesn't want
Speaker 2: to be messaged about whatever random thing you think. I've
Speaker 2: all listening to this show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I really like.
Speaker 1: But I really like when people are like, no, like
Speaker 1: I know this shit, this is my take, and I'm like, okay, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Can appreciate that when you know what you're talking.
Speaker 1: About, because I took one class and I made bread
Speaker 1: once and I was like, wow, I'm amazing.
Speaker 3: I am a baker, you know what.
Speaker 5: Actually, somebody DMed me on some like correcting some history
Speaker 5: stuff that I like, appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Most of the time. I'm like, I have a degree
Speaker 3: in this stuff.
Speaker 5: So like, uh, you want to you want to pick
Speaker 5: a write off camera one of the nine books on
Speaker 5: the topic that you talk about, But this time I
Speaker 5: was like, shit, actually, am I stay corrected?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: You know, so I appreciate what somebody knows what they're
Speaker 3: talking about, you know.
Speaker 2: I really like because I cover things all the time
Speaker 2: that are like not my background or experience, right, you know,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, I hope I'm doing right by the
Speaker 2: people of the play. So I'm talking about the history
Speaker 2: of because that's all I can hope to do and
Speaker 2: hearing from people and sometimes they're like, hey, you got
Speaker 2: it like ninety percent right, and I'm like, you know what,
Speaker 2: I'll take it.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: And usually it's a it's more of a like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's one way that people usually talk about it, but
Speaker 2: it's actually kind of like this, and I'm like, well
Speaker 2: that's amazing, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, makes you want to do it again, huh.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: For me, I'm like, damn, I want to record again,
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: And it makes me like wish I could just kind
Speaker 2: of stay in a topic for like months, but I
Speaker 2: would actually get bored. My brain doesn't work that way.
Speaker 3: We all would, Yeah, it'd be the worst. Speaking of which,
Speaker 3: I might have left the stove on give me a second.
Speaker 2: La burns down again.
Speaker 3: Nope, cool. Everything's fine. Please keep this in.
Speaker 2: All right, all right, So let's see our audio engineer
Speaker 2: is Rory. Everyone wants to say hi to Rory. Hi Rory.
Speaker 3: So Rory. I never met Rory.
Speaker 1: Rory is so cool? Sorry, Hi Roy. I was like,
Speaker 1: Rory's really cool guy. Ory has a very good looking dog, okay,
Speaker 1: and Rory has has a cool beard AFFECTA.
Speaker 2: That's that's my that's good things.
Speaker 1: That's all the Internet gets to know about Rory.
Speaker 2: Where Yeah, that's that might even be more than the
Speaker 2: Internet should now, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, but you would like him, prop.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 2: Our theme musical was written for us by un woman
Speaker 2: and prop.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, I saw among the things that the government
Speaker 2: decided to shut down, besides everything else, was the celebration
Speaker 2: of DEI holidays like Black History Month. Oh yeah, what's
Speaker 2: your opinion about Black History Month? A?
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, yeah, I remember jun teenth wasn't
Speaker 5: a holiday until two years ago. And it's not like
Speaker 5: we wasn't celebrating it. I feel like I feel about it.
Speaker 5: It's historical importance. You know, I'm the child of the
Speaker 5: Black panther, so we always go hard on Black History Month.
Speaker 5: So like there's a part of me that will always
Speaker 5: appreciate it. I love anytime that as corny as it
Speaker 5: or as like vapid as it might be, it's still
Speaker 5: pushing to the front things the stuff that I've swam
Speaker 5: in my whole life, and you know, understandings of obviously
Speaker 5: it could stand to be deeper. I don't get into
Speaker 5: the whole like why I got to be the shortest
Speaker 5: month or a year, you know what I'm saying. But
Speaker 5: I know I, as a black child, benefited from having
Speaker 5: this month happened, you know.
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, like I don't whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, like yeah, whatever, like you're not.
Speaker 5: What are you gonna You're gonna hang your kin take
Speaker 5: cloths at at you know, at the Southwest Airlines, like
Speaker 5: like at the gate, Like you go to the gate,
Speaker 5: they got a can't take cloth on it, you know
Speaker 5: what I'm saying, Like I'm like, cool, thanks exist.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't forget we exist.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I didn't forget we existed.
Speaker 5: I'm glad that you took a second to you know,
Speaker 5: design your I don't know, it's like it's you get
Speaker 5: so many years away from it, Like it's hard, right
Speaker 5: because in its inception, You're like, this was amazing, even
Speaker 5: just June teams becoming a national holiday. It's like, well,
Speaker 5: how about some healthcare and some reparations, But at the
Speaker 5: same time it's important.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know what I'm saying, But like you.
Speaker 5: Can once you get a few years away from it,
Speaker 5: You're like, I hate to be. What I'm trying to
Speaker 5: say is I hate to be the like privileged generation
Speaker 5: that didn't have to fight for it, that don't see
Speaker 5: its importance now, you know what I'm saying. Like that's
Speaker 5: always like the hard part for me because it's like whatever.
Speaker 5: But like if I were, you know, with Abernathy on
Speaker 5: the Bridge, you know what I'm saying, I would be like,
Speaker 5: nigg you go celebrate this like it's I mean, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it makes sense to me because I've always like,
Speaker 2: like with this podcast, I was like, well, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to specifically set asp and do black history in
Speaker 2: February because I'm trying to cover black history. Because because
Speaker 2: if you try and cover radical history in the Western
Speaker 2: hemisphere and you don't talk about black history an awful lot,
Speaker 2: you're failing, right.
Speaker 3: Not covering radical history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so like and so that was the
Speaker 2: kind of my attitude going into it. But I was
Speaker 2: I was thinking about how because you know, I asked
Speaker 2: you a while ago about today's topic, and I was
Speaker 2: thinking about Black History Month, where I was like, now
Speaker 2: they're trying to take it away, and now I'm like, well,
Speaker 2: never mind.
Speaker 3: Well now we got to crank that soldier boy. You
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying. Now it's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I didn't care until you tried to take it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now like oh okay, well now I'm never leaving.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And like you know, because I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: I was also afraid of like being corny by being
Speaker 2: like a white girl being like all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: make sure that February is this, and then I just
Speaker 2: sort of figure like again, like as long as I
Speaker 2: cover Black history, like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, it's also like to your point as like, oh,
Speaker 5: white girl's doing the black history thing. Like the thing
Speaker 5: about our culture and I'm gonna say specifically like Black
Speaker 5: American culture is like we're very much alike once you
Speaker 5: give us a reason to once you're in your in
Speaker 5: like when we love you, we love you, you know,
Speaker 5: and it's just you're one of us, you're part of
Speaker 5: the squad. You have to go out of your way
Speaker 5: for us to be like all right, nah, you good,
Speaker 5: Like you have to you have to really be out
Speaker 5: of pocket for black community to stop like showing you grace,
Speaker 5: you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: So for somebody like.
Speaker 5: Yourself who's like continuously has shown proven that you part
Speaker 5: of part of the solution, you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Saying same I say with like Robert and Sophie like
Speaker 5: they've you've proven it already, you know what I mean. So, like,
Speaker 5: you know, for you to slip up here and there
Speaker 5: forget this reference not knowing whatever, dog like nah, they
Speaker 5: you know, they solid, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 5: I feel like if you, like I would trust that
Speaker 5: you're reasoning to being like, we're gonna make this Black
Speaker 5: History Month is because of what you just said.
Speaker 3: Well, since y'all trying to take it, watch this, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean? Right?
Speaker 2: And I was planning on doing this, and then I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, I guess this is gonna be the
Speaker 2: first thing that's going to come out in February. And
Speaker 2: it still wasn't a like Black History Month thing. But
Speaker 2: then I was just looking at that Executive order and
Speaker 2: I'm like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 3: You can't take that away? What do you like?
Speaker 5: And no one's gonna like why do we get days
Speaker 5: off in Black History Month?
Speaker 3: Like what what did you go?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 3: How you go and force this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it doesn't it doesn't cost anything, like you
Speaker 2: dont all like you just get to I mean my
Speaker 2: problem with it. It had always been like, oh, it's like
Speaker 2: an easy way for people to feel better about the
Speaker 2: fact that eleven months are White History Month, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: totally like but this topic, which you know what I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about, but the audience still, well, no,
Speaker 2: that's not true. They know what it is.
Speaker 3: They read the title description the thing already.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There's been a couple of topics that since I first
Speaker 2: pitched this show, I knew I wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: I want to talk about the Russian Civil War, I
Speaker 2: want to talk about the Spanish Civil War. And I
Speaker 2: wanted to talk about the Haitian Revolution. Yeah, because as
Speaker 2: soon as I started doing episodes about abolitionism in the US,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, the Haitian Revolution scared the shit
Speaker 2: out of all of the racists.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, Oh, they was like, oh boy, we better Yeah,
Speaker 5: because it worked.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It cast a shadow across the minds of slavers everywhere.
Speaker 2: It was perhaps the first glimpse of what the future
Speaker 2: held in store for them. One day, slavers everywhere would
Speaker 2: be strung up and killed. Yeah, and uh it scared
Speaker 2: the shit out of kings and presidents, and politics in
Speaker 2: the Western world would never be the same.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, one major effect of it is that we'll talk
Speaker 2: about the effects of it later at the end of
Speaker 2: this four parter, but all the slave empires like shored
Speaker 2: up their defenses and cracked down on enslaved people and abolitionists.
Speaker 2: Yeah and uh fay quite famously, the entire Western world
Speaker 2: is still out to destroy and punish shady and it's
Speaker 2: not forgotten.
Speaker 3: It to this day. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Like I was like, you'll probably talk about it, but
Speaker 5: like we like they're still getting sanctions from that, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That the the destruction, the the
Speaker 2: economic punishment is just such a like it's even proof
Speaker 2: that they like, well, they don't care about like capitalism
Speaker 2: as a ideal of like yeah, once everyone's equal and
Speaker 2: we all have markets, it's like, no, it's a tool
Speaker 2: with which to punish people who they don't like. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm curious coming into it. Okay, okay, do you have
Speaker 2: like a what you know of the Haitian Revolution or
Speaker 2: like battle standout things or.
Speaker 3: Big yeah, big picture. I know the narrative. I know
Speaker 3: the high points, a few names here and there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a few like sparse points, like the word zombie
Speaker 5: you know comes from Haitian slaves, you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: The history of voodoo as resistance, which really really baked
Speaker 5: my noodle once. I like kind of it came out
Speaker 5: of just the old traditional Baptist Black people's story to
Speaker 5: be like, oh wait, this was resistance like kind.
Speaker 3: Of changes everything, you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and yeah, and just some of the like work
Speaker 5: to continually destable. So like a lot of high points,
Speaker 5: a few random facts, but I got to just at
Speaker 5: a narrative. But I'm excited for to go through this specifically.
Speaker 3: No, me too.
Speaker 2: And what's funny is I know because I haven't finished
Speaker 2: writing all four parts yet, So I know everything that
Speaker 2: leads up to the revolution right now, and then I
Speaker 2: know a lot of the middle stuff and the end stuff,
Speaker 2: but I don't know all of it yet because there's
Speaker 2: a big fucking topic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a strange I've talked about on one of
Speaker 5: our shows, just this sort of thing around just like
Speaker 5: the African diaspora around like the pride some of the
Speaker 5: Central American black people feel, Caribbean black people feel, and
Speaker 5: then African black people feel. That's different than like the
Speaker 5: black people of the United States in the sense that
Speaker 5: in a lot of ways, like they looked at us
Speaker 5: like you didn't throw off your yeah, your owners, so
Speaker 5: they kind of looked at us like, well, y'all a
Speaker 5: little weak, you know what I'm saying, Like we we
Speaker 5: got free, you know.
Speaker 3: So there's there's there has.
Speaker 5: Been sort of a historical kind of like little thing
Speaker 5: like inside of sort of those communities, and then when
Speaker 5: they come here us kind of being like, well, you
Speaker 5: kind of didn't go through what you went through.
Speaker 3: You speak patois, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: It's kind of French, you know, like you're not you're
Speaker 5: not black people like we black people, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying, which is foolish, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: But but that became kind of a.
Speaker 5: Thing of just like American black people like y'all didn't
Speaker 5: throw off y'all captors.
Speaker 3: So yeah, you're not like us. You know, it's very subtle.
Speaker 5: You know, a lot of that stuff's been worked out since,
Speaker 5: but that's always kind of been a thing.
Speaker 2: It's funny because I have this like defensiveness where I'm like,
Speaker 2: but y'all tried, like it's like very much at least
Speaker 2: as hard as anyone else. And there's a lot of dude,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of luck in the Haitian Revolution. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and like infinite amounts of sacrifice and work, don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, totally.
Speaker 5: Yeah, being much more mature now, it's like you can't.
Speaker 3: First of all, they are us.
Speaker 5: You just got off the bus, you know, you just
Speaker 5: bought up on a on a train stop earlier than us.
Speaker 5: It's you are us, So it's foolish to have divisions
Speaker 5: among us. Anyway, that division was given to us by
Speaker 5: our captors. So there's that, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: And then secondly it's like, yeah, it's just they're two
Speaker 5: different worlds. It's two different times, it's two different things.
Speaker 5: Like you can't you can't really compare the two anyway.
Speaker 2: No, No, it makes sense. Yeah, I am guessing that
Speaker 2: if people have heard of one figure of the Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 2: It's too soon of a tour.
Speaker 3: M hm.
Speaker 2: He was this unlikely enough hero. We're not really going
Speaker 2: to supergendom this week. He's more of next week. He's
Speaker 2: unlikely hero because he's sort of may or may not
Speaker 2: have been a Catholic. People like to argue about it.
Speaker 2: He was born enslaved. Eventually he's going to be a
Speaker 2: freed overseer and potentially kind of a slaver himself, depending
Speaker 2: on which version of the history you read. And he
Speaker 2: is actually a really conservative figure, but he's not who
Speaker 2: we're going to start with. We'll talk more about him,
Speaker 2: but we're gonna talk about a bunch of other people
Speaker 2: that I find super interesting, and Vodu is going to
Speaker 2: be one of the main pieces of context that we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about today. Yeah, but first we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about Hispaniola, which is not what it should
Speaker 2: be called. It actually should be called Haiti in the
Speaker 2: Taino language. But there's an island called Hispaniola. It's the
Speaker 2: second largest island in the Caribbean after Cuba, and it's
Speaker 2: the most populous right now. It is divided into two countries.
Speaker 2: Haiti is the western third of the country. The Dominican
Speaker 2: Republic is the eastern two thirds. The Dominican Republic speaks
Speaker 2: Spanish primarily, Haiti speaks French and Creole. People have been
Speaker 2: living there for several thousand years. At least the Tano
Speaker 2: people lived there, and they had a bunch of different
Speaker 2: names for the island. One of them was Iedi, And
Speaker 2: then there's like we don't really know. There's like there's
Speaker 2: three people saying what the original indigenous name of this
Speaker 2: island is. They're all white people, and there's like so
Speaker 2: there's like three people saying it, and one of them
Speaker 2: like ID was just the western half, and one person
Speaker 2: was like AD was just the eastern half, and one
Speaker 2: person is like eighty was all of it. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: to save us the trouble, we're gonna call it aid
Speaker 2: the Land of High Mountains. There were thousands of people
Speaker 2: living there, tens of thousands or nearly a million, depending
Speaker 2: on your sources, living in five different kingdoms. And I
Speaker 2: always feel like it's like, I mean, one, it's alway
Speaker 2: worthking about indigenous people anywhere, But also you just have
Speaker 2: this like fucking Tara Nalis idea of like, uh huh,
Speaker 2: this place is empty or there's just like a couple
Speaker 2: people living there and they don't have a society, and
Speaker 2: like that's not fucking true.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, a million people.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, five different fucking kingdoms.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, very long history, guys, Yeah, so funny.
Speaker 5: You're just like, well, they've existed as long as y'all
Speaker 5: have existed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like what the hell you mean? A new world?
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, been here as long as you have Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh you know what else has been here the whole time.
Speaker 2: Ads just waiting over our shoulder, waiting to show up
Speaker 2: and to try and convince you to gamble, which you
Speaker 2: probably shouldn't do.
Speaker 6: Yes, here's the ads, and we're.
Speaker 2: Back if you want to have fun gambling. I'm not
Speaker 2: mad at you. It's just on the long enough timeline.
Speaker 2: It's not a way to get rich.
Speaker 5: If you make it just a line item, Like, make
Speaker 5: it a line item in your we're budgeting, you got
Speaker 5: five hundred bucks that you're okay with spending, Just do that.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. My hands raised.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little h hand icon has appeared in props
Speaker 2: windows or is it?
Speaker 3: Hey, guys, can I talk?
Speaker 1: I have no idea how to get rid of that,
Speaker 1: And so it just looks like you're going.
Speaker 5: Ex me and then my shining says, it looks like
Speaker 5: you're done talking. We'll lower your hand in three seconds.
Speaker 2: One, okay, it's gone. Now okay, so I could talk again.
Speaker 2: I had to wait a right, I at least.
Speaker 3: It didn't lie.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: On December sixth, fourteen ninety two, a white slaver arrived
Speaker 2: on the shore of ied. He's a guy you might
Speaker 2: have heard of. His name was Christopher Columbus.
Speaker 3: Maybe you heard of.
Speaker 2: Him, Yeah, And Europeans just started pouring into the place
Speaker 2: that they called Insula Hispana and Latin because they were
Speaker 2: still speaking Latin and then which was Spanish Island shortened
Speaker 2: to Hispaniola. They were less concerned with naming the place
Speaker 2: and more concerned with exploiting it. They started enslaving people
Speaker 2: on basically day one. I think it was day six,
Speaker 2: I can't remember exactly, but it was like everyone was
Speaker 2: like really nice to them when they arrived, and then
Speaker 2: within a couple days they were like, what the fuck
Speaker 2: are you doing?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Disease just wrecked the indigenous people. More than ninety percent
Speaker 2: of the population was dead within two decades of Columbus's arrival,
Speaker 2: and it. It's never quite acknowledged that when Europeans like
Speaker 2: quote unquote conquered North America, it was them conquering like
Speaker 2: a post apocalyptic wasteland.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, yeah.
Speaker 2: They brought the apocalypse with them in the form of
Speaker 2: disease because.
Speaker 5: When they like to not derail this convo, but when
Speaker 5: they did go a head up against some of these
Speaker 5: Meso American empires, they got their ass kicked.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like I think all the time about I
Speaker 2: haven't totally wrapped my head around it. When I was
Speaker 2: a kid, I always assumed that Africa was like sort
Speaker 2: of colonized first, you know, because it's closer and europe
Speaker 2: knew it existed, right, And then you're actually like, oh no,
Speaker 2: it went internal European colonization like Ireland and shit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: then the America's then Africa in Africa, And part of
Speaker 2: that was that, like Europeans would get their fucking asses kicked.
Speaker 3: It was whooping a ass. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can see fights that were like spear versus gun,
Speaker 2: and the spears were sometimes pulling it off.
Speaker 3: You know, dude. Book recommendation.
Speaker 5: I'm reading this book called African History of Africa. Oh sick,
Speaker 5: all right, it's like Africans talking about Africa.
Speaker 3: It's super good.
Speaker 5: But they talked about one of the Ashanti tribes when
Speaker 5: hang my stupid hand again when Britain.
Speaker 3: Came, and they're like, yeah, yeah, the first the first.
Speaker 5: General they sent down there, like the Ashanti king like
Speaker 5: turned his skull into a cup, so it was like
Speaker 5: a like a ceremonial cup for like decades, like he
Speaker 5: just drank out of the drank out of the guy's skull.
Speaker 2: Like it was like, hey, whooped Joe ass Yeah, And
Speaker 2: so European show yeh fourteen ninety two and they're actually
Speaker 2: kind of bummed about the genocide. They sort of it
Speaker 2: accidentally did They wanted to do a genocide, but they
Speaker 2: wanted on their terms because their plan was they wanted
Speaker 2: a genocide via slavery. They wanted to enslave everyone on
Speaker 2: the island and then ship them over to Europe. But
Speaker 2: they couldn't enslave most of the people because they were
Speaker 2: dead because of.
Speaker 3: Disease, because they killed them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course the Tano people weren't completely destroyed, and
Speaker 2: there's still Tano people today and they've had to like
Speaker 2: do the like proving like people are like no no, no, no,
Speaker 2: that you've all been destroyed. You're just making it up.
Speaker 2: And then they're like, fine, we'll do the genetics shit.
Speaker 2: And then they're like yeah, okay, yeah, I no, you're right. Sorry, yeah,
Speaker 2: I fucking told too.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah we don't. Yeah yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Don't actually have to tell us our history.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah we do.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, with the potential source of slave labor dead, the
Speaker 2: Europeans were like, well, let's import Africans. And this very
Speaker 2: first step is like potentially mythologized, but there's no reason
Speaker 2: to doubt it. The very first enslaved Africans when they
Speaker 2: arrived in the New World, either fifteen oh two or
Speaker 2: fifteen oh three, I've read both. You had the very
Speaker 2: first Maroons. The book The Encyclopedia of African Religion suggests
Speaker 2: that a single black man escaped from the first slave
Speaker 2: ship to dock in the Americas. He disappeared into the jungle,
Speaker 2: and whether or not he lived or died himself, he
Speaker 2: blazed a trail that so many people followed afterwards. We
Speaker 2: have talked about Maroon communities on the show time and
Speaker 2: time again, because they're kind of the quintessential cool people
Speaker 2: who did cool stuff thing you know, yea, but for
Speaker 2: people who only got the same history education I did,
Speaker 2: and did not hear the word maroon until I was
Speaker 2: an adult. Maroon communities are communities of people escaping enslavement
Speaker 2: within a slave empire, like those run by Europeans in
Speaker 2: the Americas. Mostly these are self emancipated black people, whether
Speaker 2: they were born in Africa or whether whether they were
Speaker 2: born into slavery, but indigenous people were often vital to
Speaker 2: these communities. The first Maroons were likely people who just
Speaker 2: ran off and were accepted into indigenous societies, and they
Speaker 2: were also the occasional but it gets kind of played
Speaker 2: up by white people who like to have ourselves and
Speaker 2: we want our representation in every story, there were occasional
Speaker 2: poor white people escaping indentured servitude or other like debts
Speaker 2: who joined marion societies. Yeah, wherever you had slavery, you
Speaker 2: had maroon communities. One story that I want to tell
Speaker 2: eventually because I just only read the super quick version
Speaker 2: of it, and I want to do probably whole episodes
Speaker 2: about it. The first ever revolt against the colonizers in
Speaker 2: the New World that I found is the revolt of Enriquillo.
Speaker 2: He's a Tano chief and this revolt started in fifteen
Speaker 2: nineteen and lasted thirteen years. His father had been killed
Speaker 2: by I've run across this particular story so many times
Speaker 2: when I read about colonization that I almost am like,
Speaker 2: is this this literally the only thing that white people
Speaker 2: know how to do, which is that in order to
Speaker 2: conquer all the people, the fucking Spanish were like, all right,
Speaker 2: all the chiefs, come here, we'll talk it out, we'll
Speaker 2: sign some treaties. We'll have a little piece thing. Get
Speaker 2: them all in one building, lock the door and set
Speaker 2: it on fire.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh like, I think they did this in fucking Brave.
Speaker 3: Heart, Like totally did it in Braveheart.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 3: That's day one. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so sometimes his name is Enrique, sometimes it's Enriquio, Enriqueo.
Speaker 2: His dad was one of the chiefs who died this way, okay,
Speaker 2: And then he was basically raised by this Catholic friar
Speaker 2: as a result, who was actually a hardcore abolitionist who
Speaker 2: wrote a history book called A Short Account of the
Speaker 2: Destruction of the Indies about how bad the white people
Speaker 2: were there. And he's white himself. Yeah, this isn't to
Speaker 2: say that the Catholics were on the side of the oppressed.
Speaker 2: This is the opposite of the truth.
Speaker 3: This is one guy saying, are y'all crazy?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And he's kind of important to hold up,
Speaker 2: not so that you can say, like, not all Catholic friars,
Speaker 2: but instead that you can be like, we kind of
Speaker 2: can't let historical people off the hook, because there were
Speaker 2: people who because he showed up as a colonizer. He
Speaker 2: showed up like I want a place to go live.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go live on Hispaniola. And then within like
Speaker 2: a couple of years he's like, wait, what the hell
Speaker 2: are we doing here? You know? Yeah, And so this
Speaker 2: is the mentor of the kid of the Chief who
Speaker 2: was murdered, and so Enriquio led this Tano revolt, fought
Speaker 2: the Spanish to a standstill despite living and basically an apocalypse.
Speaker 2: This is after the ninety percent destruction, right wow, and
Speaker 2: forced new treaties to be signed. But I think that
Speaker 2: the reason that one day I'll do a whole two parter.
Speaker 2: But like, I think the reason the treaties fell apart
Speaker 2: is that just like every all the time of people
Speaker 2: just kept dying, Like.
Speaker 5: I just the really living color of I don't know
Speaker 5: if I can. I can't wrap my mind around ninety percent. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's that's everyone you know is dead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what that is.
Speaker 5: That's everyone you know and everyone who's alive, everyone they
Speaker 5: know is dead. Like just I don't I don't know
Speaker 5: if Yeah, I just don't that reality. And then the
Speaker 5: color of like I really wish we could just go
Speaker 5: back into history and just drop people in very easy
Speaker 5: boxes and say, well they felt like this, they felt
Speaker 5: like this, they felt like this, but and just it's
Speaker 5: as messy as it is now, like us in our
Speaker 5: you know, extreme left anarchists still somewhere in your house
Speaker 5: have a single use plastic, you know, and like just
Speaker 5: the complication of that. I enjoy that part of history
Speaker 5: of you know, hearing this dude, that's like, well, you're
Speaker 5: you're still a you're still a co You're still here
Speaker 5: in a land that you shouldn't be in the first place.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, and he he wrote a book, he wrote
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff being like he actually he did
Speaker 2: not come off great. He did not start great. He
Speaker 2: was like, oh, we're treating the indigenous people bad. We
Speaker 2: should stop enslaving them and instead import Africans was the
Speaker 2: first thing he wrote, and then really quickly he was like, wait, no,
Speaker 2: never mind.
Speaker 3: Bah, God, forget that one. Let's try it out.
Speaker 2: But he definitely went to his grave believing that it
Speaker 2: is a very good and useful thing for Catholics to
Speaker 2: go all over the New World and convert everyone to
Speaker 2: Catholicism and like wanted like better kinder colonization.
Speaker 3: Even though he.
Speaker 2: Helped inspire one of the main anti the first anti
Speaker 2: colonial revolt. Yeah so complicated, yea, yeah, which is more
Speaker 2: anti colonial revolting than I've done. I've gone to some protests, I've.
Speaker 3: They were yeah yeah, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And as far as I can tell, Maroon Africans joined
Speaker 2: that revolt the first time I ran across it. Literally
Speaker 2: it was represented as a Maroon revolt, but I think
Speaker 2: that that's an exaggeration, but I don't know. But it
Speaker 2: also showed Enslave people that there was a way to
Speaker 2: fight colonization. You can go to the mountains and then
Speaker 2: use guerrilla warfare to kill Europeans and it is an
Speaker 2: effective strategy. Yeah, and it will continue to be ineffective
Speaker 2: probably into the future.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: However, Maroon communities were slowly wiped out on the smaller
Speaker 2: islands of the Indies because white settlers cleared and burned
Speaker 2: the wilderness basically, so by the seventeen hundreds they were
Speaker 2: mostly gone from everywhere except these larger islands. Some of
Speaker 2: these Maroon communities were absolutely huge. You and I talked
Speaker 2: years ago on this show about the Maroon community in
Speaker 2: Brazil Coulombo di Plomars, which was an independent nation in
Speaker 2: the seventeenth century with thirty thousand people. I think you
Speaker 2: can listen to Chico Mendes episodes for that.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, yeah, when it's in is chicodes Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Before the Haitian Revolution, the real standout Maroon warriors
Speaker 2: were in Jamaica. As the Encyclopedia of African Religion put it, quote,
Speaker 2: it is the Jamaicans, however, who hold the distinction of
Speaker 2: waging the most slave rebellions in the West per capita.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And one day I'm just like, this is almost like
Speaker 2: my list of notes of things that I'm going to
Speaker 2: come back to. If you heard a Queen Nannie, I hadn't. Yes,
Speaker 2: Queen Nannie is fucking cool. She united all the Maroons
Speaker 2: in Jamaica. She was born and what's now Ghana. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she practiced Obeah, which is a syncretic African diaspec religion.
Speaker 2: Fucking for fifteen years, united all the Maroons into a
Speaker 2: war against the British, which was the world's greatest military
Speaker 2: power and who outnumbered them even on the island greatly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and like forced them to their knees multiple times.
Speaker 5: Dude, her like her, she's in that book. I was
Speaker 5: telling about her origin story even before she did that,
Speaker 5: Like she was always about that life. Yeah, like just
Speaker 5: not a game about that life.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And as a note for like I don't I might
Speaker 5: be talking out my neck as far as like drawing
Speaker 5: this connection, but like no, like Mexico's kind of like
Speaker 5: known for the like machismo, like the way that like
Speaker 5: the men kind of like a really macho thing. Like
Speaker 5: it's it's really the same in Jamaica, Like the Jamaican
Speaker 5: concept of manhood is like very much you need to
Speaker 5: have a million kids, and also like you just can't.
Speaker 5: You don't take shit, like you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 5: And like some of it is back to being like
Speaker 5: we will not we will not comply, like that is
Speaker 5: like in there even just like I said, just the
Speaker 5: construction of what it means to be a Jamaican man.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, we don't comply, you know what.
Speaker 5: I'm saying, So I don't like I said, I might
Speaker 5: be talking out of my neck, but like that's another
Speaker 5: one of those things. It's just I feel like has
Speaker 5: gone through their sort of like sense of self is
Speaker 5: like nah, bro, yeah we revolt.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, it makes sense, and it's some of that
Speaker 2: energy is what's gonna is how Haiti's gonna end up free?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the Maroons are fucking cool. On the
Speaker 2: Island of a eighty. The Spanish were sort of ignoring
Speaker 2: the western coast of the island for a while. French
Speaker 2: pirates started hanging out there. We did a whole pirate's
Speaker 2: episode talking about how they were not as cool as
Speaker 2: people think, but also more cool than sometimes people think.
Speaker 2: They're more interesting in different ways than people might expect. Eventually,
Speaker 2: in sixteen ninety seven, after some wars and shit in Europe,
Speaker 2: Spain formally seeded the western part of the island of
Speaker 2: the French. This new colony was called San Dumong, which
Speaker 2: is French. So it doesn't look like Sandumong, it looks
Speaker 2: like Saints don't I don't know whatever.
Speaker 3: All kind of letters that shouldn't be in network.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of vowels in the city and
Speaker 2: the French. The reason there weren't a ton of enslaved
Speaker 2: people over there wasn't because the Spanish were nice, but
Speaker 2: because the Spanish weren't really hanging out there, and the
Speaker 2: pirates were slavers, but not on the same kind of
Speaker 2: scale because they didn't have a plantation economy. M the
Speaker 2: French over so so many enslaved African people as fast
Speaker 2: as they possibly fucking could. In the short term, this
Speaker 2: worked out really well for the French. All of the
Speaker 2: people who came over, they're like life expectancy was like
Speaker 2: two or three years. It was like fifty percent of
Speaker 2: them die within a year.
Speaker 3: Sheesh.
Speaker 2: And then it's like, it's kind of interesting because I
Speaker 2: want to know more about this. Obviously I've read about
Speaker 2: in various books, but I feel like I'd have to
Speaker 2: like get a degree in exactly this to totally understand it.
Speaker 2: It's kind of interesting to me because like, economically, in
Speaker 2: the US South, enslave people were so expensive, yeah, but
Speaker 2: here life was cheap, so it was cheaper and easier
Speaker 2: to work people to death and just replace them.
Speaker 3: Wow, I never thought about that.
Speaker 2: It seems like the conditions were even worse than elsewhere
Speaker 2: in the America's. But I have a feeling that, like,
Speaker 2: if I read a book about Haitian slavery, it's going
Speaker 2: to be the worst possible. And then if I read
Speaker 2: a book but Jamaica slavery's be because it's just awful.
Speaker 2: Everywhere slavery is one of the most things that's ever
Speaker 2: happened in the history of humanity. Is chattel slavery, Like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would vote, if you're right, I would vote Haiti,
Speaker 5: though the conditions I wouldn't vote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would vote. I mean, if you're going to
Speaker 3: have to vote for something.
Speaker 2: As awful, we're going to do a little pole.
Speaker 3: Yeah who had it worse?
Speaker 2: Yeah what? Yeah the slavery oppression Olympics.
Speaker 3: But it it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it is fucking awful. It's also like the
Speaker 2: scale of bad. I actually think it is kind of
Speaker 2: important for people to understand because, like any ethical position
Speaker 2: says slavery wrong, right, yes, But when you have that
Speaker 2: oversimplified moral position, you can then start blaming like the
Speaker 2: Africans themselves who do enslaving and like how like not
Speaker 2: every but like a real large number of cultures all
Speaker 2: over the world had slavery, right yeah, and so then
Speaker 2: you're like, well it's all equally bad and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: racialized chattel slavery, bringing people from a different continent was worse.
Speaker 5: Like there's just another way around it. Like you know,
Speaker 5: you owe somebody money, you work until it's gone. Okay,
Speaker 5: that's one thing. It is a horrible condition. Serfdom is
Speaker 5: a type of slavery, that's but it's something totally different.
Speaker 5: But yeah, the idea that you are subhuman, Yeah right,
Speaker 5: we're not the same species.
Speaker 3: I am a superior race.
Speaker 5: And when you talk specifically, like you said about Haiti,
Speaker 5: like I again, it's like, remove all hyperbole or slang
Speaker 5: from this sentence. They worked them to death, yeah, like
Speaker 5: they they dropped dead.
Speaker 3: They worked them to death, like I.
Speaker 5: Just I don't know how else this yeah literal, not
Speaker 5: like literally no, like yeah literally like they worked.
Speaker 2: Half of them died in the air.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, that's why I say.
Speaker 5: That's why I say Haiti was different because like to
Speaker 5: your point, it was like they were so fungible, you know,
Speaker 5: in Haiti, in America.
Speaker 3: It costs so much. Yeah, so it's like, we don't
Speaker 3: want your.
Speaker 5: Slave to die like you just you just wasted three
Speaker 5: thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: You know, it costs as much as your house.
Speaker 5: If you've got as much as your house, this guy dies,
Speaker 5: you know. So they're like paper plates. They're paper plates.
Speaker 5: You just yeah, yeah, it's bonkers.
Speaker 2: It was cheaper to just bring more and more people
Speaker 2: over than try to keep them alive.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, just go get more.
Speaker 2: But it worked out well in the short term to
Speaker 2: treat them like paper plates. But it turns out people
Speaker 2: aren't machines. People have opinions, they have desires, They are
Speaker 2: smart as shit, and they are as fiery as shit.
Speaker 2: And uh, it didn't work out well for the French
Speaker 2: in the long term. And one of the things that
Speaker 2: enslaved people brought over, something that more or less destroyed
Speaker 2: the French government's control on their most profitable colony was
Speaker 2: African religion. So most of the people who are stolen
Speaker 2: or brought to sand among came from the southern coast
Speaker 2: to West Africa, especially what's now been in and western
Speaker 2: parts of Nigeria, especially kind of originally later it's going
Speaker 2: to be more people from what's now the Republic of
Speaker 2: Congo and was the Kingdom of Congo at the time.
Speaker 2: Sort of all the all the lines have been redrawn
Speaker 2: by colonizers, but like you know, yeah, in particular in
Speaker 2: the beginning, it was fond people and Aa people, so
Speaker 2: just for people who are bad at geography, the southern
Speaker 2: part of the western part of Africa, that coast, and
Speaker 2: then also Central Africa like kind of right around the
Speaker 2: corner from it is where most of the folks who
Speaker 2: ended up there came from. And the places that these
Speaker 2: people are from influences a bunch about later history, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of another part of the Like I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go on a limb and say, it's probably harder for
Speaker 2: you to discover your family heritage than it is for me.
Speaker 3: That's a good guess. Get out, it's a good guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But there's still kind of this like a rature
Speaker 2: of like I don't know, they're just from Africa, as
Speaker 2: if there's not like different people there with different beliefs
Speaker 2: and different cultures and different languages who brought things with them, you.
Speaker 5: Know, yeah, and they and like here's what's crazy is
Speaker 5: like I even fell victim to some of this, I'm like,
Speaker 5: they don't even look alike. Like you put a you
Speaker 5: put an Ethiopian next to somebody from Beneen, and you're like, wait,
Speaker 5: are y'all the same? Like no, they look very different
Speaker 5: because the distance between Ethiopia and Benin is a continent,
Speaker 5: you know, And yeah, yeah, and the practices are different,
Speaker 5: and like the even what you like, which will probably
Speaker 5: get into later, and obviously for me this is like
Speaker 5: really friend of mine because I'm like again reading this book,
Speaker 5: but like even what they mean by religion, yeah, you're
Speaker 5: like the Europeans were like, well, they worshiped their ancestors,
Speaker 5: because that's there. There's no word for God or worship
Speaker 5: and a lot of these tribes, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: And it's because well they were looking at it from
Speaker 5: the lens that they did, from these monotheistic lenses, whereas
Speaker 5: you go to East Africa, which has been monotheistic for
Speaker 5: a while, you know what I'm saying. So like what
Speaker 5: made sense if you was already trading with Sudan and
Speaker 5: stuff like that, They're like, oh, okay, so y'all are
Speaker 5: a little different. Axoms like first Christian City in like
Speaker 5: the year one hundred, you know what I'm saying. But
Speaker 5: by the time you could, but that didn't make it
Speaker 5: west so west. It was like, we just don't we
Speaker 5: don't know what you mean by that, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, And the synchronization got more and more, even more. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it was so it was so blurry. And so
Speaker 2: I love synchrotization. It's one of my favorite things in
Speaker 2: the world because it's so messy and complicated and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can't really draw moral lines around.
Speaker 3: That to untangle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting is then a lot of early Pan Africanism,
Speaker 2: you know, the idea that like, well more complicated I'm
Speaker 2: gonna easily say, but like, you know, the idea that
Speaker 2: Africa should unite with itself to defend itself against yeah,
Speaker 2: its own destruction. A lot of the like getting over
Speaker 2: cultural differences happened from the diaspora because people are like, well,
Speaker 2: we all spoke different languages than used to be at
Speaker 2: war with each other back home, but we just got stolen, you.
Speaker 3: Know, we're just on a boat. Yeah, and like and
Speaker 3: now we're here and now this is my family. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's like and yeah, and it just it did it. Definitely.
Speaker 3: That's a great point, Margat.
Speaker 5: I'm glad you brought that up, because that does fold
Speaker 5: back to that Pan Africanism to where it was, like
Speaker 5: they're even talking about it now with like you know,
Speaker 5: obviously with the with the land grab of Africa and
Speaker 5: that the borders are made up and yeah, you slice
Speaker 5: right through a village, so a lot of the indigenous
Speaker 5: and like native sort of ethnic differences are like separated
Speaker 5: by a country.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So like but now it's like, okay, here's where we are.
Speaker 5: So you're like, I'm Ghanaian and Ashanti, yeah, but I'm African.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and what I am is stuck pivoting to ads.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, you are here, they are.
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 3: And so Vodu is the main religion we're.
Speaker 2: Gonna be talking about this week and next week. And
Speaker 2: one of the main places it's syncretized with is Catholicism. Right.
Speaker 2: It is a combination of a bunch of different mostly
Speaker 2: West African religions with some stuff more from Congo and
Speaker 2: then Catholicism and then also some Islam and some hindu is.
Speaker 2: It does lots of stuff.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I had gone into it, assuming that the
Speaker 2: Catholicism was like, well, they ended up in you know,
Speaker 2: Spain and then France Island, and so they're befo. They
Speaker 2: had to convert to Catholicism, and there was a forced
Speaker 2: conversion of Catholicism that's going to happen later in this story.
Speaker 2: But actually the synchronization with Catholicism started in Africa in
Speaker 2: the Kingdom of Congo, h in the year fourteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: the year before Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue on his
Speaker 2: death ship. The king of Congo, king and Zinga and Nakwum,
Speaker 2: converted to Catholicism, presumably to get closer ties to the
Speaker 2: Portuguese and get better access to trade and firearms. It
Speaker 2: depends on what source you read. Unfortunately, a lot of
Speaker 2: the sources about the Catholicization of Western Africa are in
Speaker 2: Central Africa, are like Catholic propaganda.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I don't know, but he didn't.
Speaker 2: Last too long as a Catholic because Catholicism was like,
Speaker 2: well you can only have one wife.
Speaker 3: Listen.
Speaker 5: I know missionaries now who like have gone to like
Speaker 5: South Africa, they'd be like, wow, we do these outreaches
Speaker 5: out there and they go, well, your Bible Moses had
Speaker 5: a lot of wise.
Speaker 3: Why can't I have a lot of whites.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of Christians. You think you can have
Speaker 2: a lot of wives. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And then they would say this, okay, like this, listen, Margaret,
Speaker 5: if I'm lying on flying this is a true story.
Speaker 5: I was doing this show us South Africa and his
Speaker 5: brother was telling me about he was out there trying to.
Speaker 3: Preach the gospel to the to the to the natives
Speaker 3: out there.
Speaker 5: And they said, okay, well, let me ask you this,
Speaker 5: Like you said, you say, I can only have one wife,
Speaker 5: all right, So which one of these should have divorced?
Speaker 5: Because you told me that divorce was wrong too, So
Speaker 5: is it what about the first one? Well, the first
Speaker 5: one ain't got kids. Well that one got chillen. Well
Speaker 5: this one got two children, So which one? Which one
Speaker 5: is my wife?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just supposed to abandon the rest of them.
Speaker 3: I was like, did you answer me? He was like,
Speaker 3: I didn't have an answer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like I can't put a moral like
Speaker 2: you know, there's a lot of different ways societies have
Speaker 2: been built. There are societies where men can have multiple
Speaker 2: wives or societies where women can have multiple husbands there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I live in a very polyamorous society, so like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we can only marry one of because of the law,
Speaker 2: but like whatever, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the queen that you mentioned earlier, Yeah,
Speaker 5: she they come from a matriarchal society. The women have
Speaker 5: multiple you know what I'm saying, Like, so they're even different.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and then the King of Congo, part of his
Speaker 2: whole I want to have multiple wives thing was actually
Speaker 2: because of how women had power in his society. Yes,
Speaker 2: it was maturallineal. Yeah, and it was also an elective monarchy.
Speaker 2: So once again like we have this like oh, Europe
Speaker 2: is clearly more advanced about Like look, monarchy is like
Speaker 2: not my favorite way of its structuring society, but it's
Speaker 2: an elective monarchy instead of a like you know, ye
Speaker 2: the oldest son is immediately in charge society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mom chooses, Mom goes that kid.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And so it was since his eldest son wasn't guaranteed,
Speaker 2: it was like something where he was like, look, I
Speaker 2: can't I need to have my multiple wives because I
Speaker 2: have multiple sons for multiple wives and it's natural lineal
Speaker 2: society and like, yeah, and he wasn't as fully in charge,
Speaker 2: so he converted back to I think it was more
Speaker 2: of an animist faith.
Speaker 3: But I like again like a rishi, but that was
Speaker 3: more aeshi was a little further north. But anyway, on.
Speaker 2: No, no, I mean you know, I actually I actually
Speaker 2: tried to find the name of what his traditional practice was,
Speaker 2: and I checked multiple sources and none of them said.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I might be wrong because like orishi is more
Speaker 5: like Ghanaian benig.
Speaker 3: That's not necessarily Congo.
Speaker 5: So a lot of the Africans that made it to
Speaker 5: America were like that was that was some of the practices.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Okay, so he dies, he converts back to quote
Speaker 2: unquote paganism. He dies, and two of his sons have
Speaker 2: a war. One was an animist and one was a Catholic.
Speaker 2: The Catholic son won and he was the one that
Speaker 2: the mom picked and he became King Afonso the first
Speaker 2: And if you read Catholic Education dot orgs article about this,
Speaker 2: he was an anti slavery crusader who just wasn't able
Speaker 2: to stop the slave trade, which combined traditional West African
Speaker 2: slavery traditions, which is just this part's true. If you
Speaker 2: capture people in battle, you can.
Speaker 3: Own that or whatever, right oldest time.
Speaker 2: I combined that with the more raw, exploitive chattel slavery
Speaker 2: that the Porte wanted to impose. The idea that he
Speaker 2: fought slavery is there is the tiniest bit of truth.
Speaker 2: It is a lie. It is absolutely a lie. Afonso
Speaker 2: centralized power, He conquered neighboring territories, and he sold all
Speaker 2: the prisoners of war into slavery for export. Under his reign,
Speaker 2: Congo became a Catholic country and an important center for
Speaker 2: the Transatlantic slave trade. He built roads into the interior
Speaker 2: to better allow people to go capture people to go sell.
Speaker 2: He did fight against slavery in that the Portuguese were like,
Speaker 2: all you black people are the same, We're going to
Speaker 2: capture Congo people too, And he was like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you can't capture.
Speaker 3: Us and capture us. Yeah.
Speaker 5: You hear all the time from like very bad faith arguments,
Speaker 5: yeah about this era in time, you know, and the
Speaker 5: coloring of the idea that like, well, well, since we're
Speaker 5: humans like everybody else, and we all come from tribal struggles,
Speaker 5: you're like you're thinking that they're thinking about it the
Speaker 5: way we think about it, you know. So like when
Speaker 5: I say I'm I'm warring with this neighborhood tribe, it's like, oh, bro,
Speaker 5: like I could defeat this tribe and make a little
Speaker 5: money off it.
Speaker 3: And then you know what I'm saying, like.
Speaker 5: Okay, word, so like you said earlier, it's like we're
Speaker 5: all using the same word slavery.
Speaker 3: But man, I don't know, you.
Speaker 5: Think I'm subhuman and you're gonna take me across the
Speaker 5: you know what I'm saying, like it worked me to do.
Speaker 5: I don't know, I'm thinking like I'm just making money
Speaker 5: for the country, like you know, and then you're gonna
Speaker 5: set them free the way that we set slaves free
Speaker 5: after we're done with them, Like you don't own them,
Speaker 5: Like what are you I'm saying, like, yeah, ain't know
Speaker 5: they if your children, Like that's uniquely chattow slavery, that
Speaker 5: your children of slaves are slaves, Like that's not I
Speaker 5: ain't know you meant that. I thought you was just
Speaker 5: gonna help me with the kingo you know. Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 5: That's such a good way to put it, is that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: like people are using the same word and they're describing
Speaker 5: two very different things. And then yeah, you hear people
Speaker 5: like because you have to if you talk about transatlantic
Speaker 5: slave trade, you have to talk about the fact that
Speaker 5: like Africans participated in it, right, But you can't do
Speaker 5: it to then be like so it's all samey saby.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like therefore it's okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: No, the Portuguese showed up and we're like, we're going
Speaker 2: to turn this into a machine of stealing people. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, so important our stories that the Catholicization of
Speaker 2: African religion had already begun even before people were sold
Speaker 2: to Haiti. All of these African people are suddenly in
Speaker 2: sand among and they're being worked to death in sugar fields.
Speaker 2: A lot of them don't speak the same language, a
Speaker 2: lot of them don't see themselves as part of the
Speaker 2: same culture at all. Slowly they start building a culture
Speaker 2: that united them. And as best as I can tell,
Speaker 2: the thing that united them was the syncretic religion that
Speaker 2: they built in this new world, the religion of Vodu.
Speaker 2: And you probably you said you've deep dived this stuff before.
Speaker 2: Speaking of word words that people use all kinds of
Speaker 2: different ways, to mean different things. There is a lot
Speaker 2: of confusion around the name of this religion. It does
Speaker 2: not have the sharpest of boundaries. Vodu, Voodoo, Voodon, and
Speaker 2: who Doo are four separate things that are not always
Speaker 2: seen as separate things, including sometimes by practitioners. Yeah, as
Speaker 2: best as I am able to figure out by cross
Speaker 2: reverence in a million sources and talking to one of
Speaker 2: my friends and knows a little bit more about this
Speaker 2: than I do. Vodu, the main subject of this episode
Speaker 2: is a religion that originated in sand among in Haiti
Speaker 2: that combine the religious and spiritual practices of a bunch
Speaker 2: of people there. Voudon is the name used to describe
Speaker 2: the religion practice in Western Africa. Voodoo is the Louisiana version.
Speaker 2: Whodoo is a closely related kind of folk religion that
Speaker 2: is a bit less formalized and sometimes is just a
Speaker 2: word for the ritual practices rather than the religion in general,
Speaker 2: and its spread further throughout the Southern US. Each of
Speaker 2: these draws from different amounts of different regions of Africa
Speaker 2: and syncretize slightly differently. For example, also with Islam, which
Speaker 2: is also heavily syncretized with African religions by that point too,
Speaker 2: because Islam was also very present in Africa.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I often think of it as like the way
Speaker 5: you it's I think of it like gumbo, like the
Speaker 5: way you would describe gumbo to where it's like what's
Speaker 5: what is it? And you're like, yeah, well it's I mean,
Speaker 5: do you have a you can't? Is there a gumbo recipe?
Speaker 5: Like you know, he's like, I don't know, it's jumbalaya,
Speaker 5: it's you know what I mean, Like there's so and
Speaker 5: especially with i Jab, have always felt like that's because
Speaker 5: my lord, I'm married a first gen Mexican. Like there's
Speaker 5: Santa Ria, which is like I was like, this sound
Speaker 5: like voodoo to me.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: So uh and it's slightly different, but it's coming from them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, slightly different, you know.
Speaker 5: So I always it's like the edges of it, that's
Speaker 5: what we were saying earlier.
Speaker 3: It's like I know you, I know.
Speaker 5: You're saying religion because that's the lens you have. But
Speaker 5: it's like it's it's not the like the way you
Speaker 5: mean it not you mark, No, Yeah, like yeah, you
Speaker 5: know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: That's why you that's why we can't.
Speaker 5: Like, like you said, it's like you can read a
Speaker 5: trillion books, and I'm like, just like ask seventeen grandma's Yeah,
Speaker 5: how to make gumbo?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need to get your rule right.
Speaker 5: And you know, you boil up your shrimp and you
Speaker 5: know what I'm saying. It's like, okay, so it's a
Speaker 5: shrimp soup. Well, no, it's perhaps sausage. Do I gotta
Speaker 5: have seafood?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 5: I don't have to seafood. Well then okay, so it's
Speaker 5: just can you be vegetarian? Well I guess, I guess
Speaker 5: it's still gumbo, and mean, well, what makes it gumbo?
Speaker 5: It's gumbo because it's gumbo. Like I don't, I don't
Speaker 5: know what to tell you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you for anyone who doesn't listen to hood politics
Speaker 2: with Prop, you need to listen to it because Prop
Speaker 2: is the master of explaining things in exactly this way.
Speaker 2: That is, that is the way to describe it, that is, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know it when you see it. Yeah, so'st We're
Speaker 2: gonna focus on Haitian voting because it is the religion.
Speaker 2: And yeah, when we say like the religion, most of
Speaker 2: these people will call themselves Catholic and go to Catholic mass, absolutely,
Speaker 2: and like you could, you could be more than one
Speaker 2: thing here.
Speaker 5: You know, I say, if I say my actual relation
Speaker 5: to this person, it'll be very obvious just the case
Speaker 5: this person listens to or people that know these people
Speaker 5: listen to this. But I was very close to a
Speaker 5: Haitian family for a while whose elders were deeply stooped
Speaker 5: and you know, and very to the points of where
Speaker 5: like this person's parents were. Our dad was like, you
Speaker 5: are not allowed to be around them.
Speaker 2: Like like oh shit, okay, yeah, I'm saying.
Speaker 3: But if you talk to them, they were like.
Speaker 2: Or Catholic, we're Christians.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Like we're Christians, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No. And as I read about it now,
Speaker 2: there's like arguments going on in Haiti between evangelicals and
Speaker 2: practitioners voodoo or voodoo and Catholics literally about the origins
Speaker 2: of Haiti as a nation. Because it's going to come
Speaker 2: down to spoiler for probably part three, it's gonna come
Speaker 2: down to it's gonna get kicked off by a Vodou
Speaker 2: ceremony in the woods. And so the evangelical position is
Speaker 2: that was a deal with the devil, right yeah, and
Speaker 2: then the like well yeah, yeah, we're like, what are
Speaker 2: you talking about? We just we did a thing, like
Speaker 2: we do the thing and it's fine, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: But to talk about w voodoo is all these enslaved
Speaker 2: people are showing up. Soon enough, the King of France
Speaker 2: demands they all convert to Catholicism. And the most Catholic
Speaker 2: thing you can do of all is to say, sure,
Speaker 2: I guess I'm Catholic whatever, without actually changing what you
Speaker 2: believe in already, and then call it Catholicism. My argument
Speaker 2: for this, my grandfather was like born and raised an atheist,
Speaker 2: but in order to marry my grandmother, he had to
Speaker 2: get baptized Catholic. So he just crossed his fingers and
Speaker 2: got baptized Catholic.
Speaker 3: Doesn't count because he crossed his fingers, But it's cool.
Speaker 2: And I would argue that makes him the most Catholic
Speaker 2: person in the family.
Speaker 3: That's hilarious.
Speaker 5: I had another friend who really got involved in like
Speaker 5: just in his own sort of journey and reclaiming his
Speaker 5: africanness and stuff like that, like really got involved in
Speaker 5: a lot of like West African animists, like traditions. His
Speaker 5: argument was like, I don't understand how this is any
Speaker 5: different than he's like, have you you read Leviticus? Like
Speaker 5: like you you know, you chopping up birds and splitting
Speaker 5: them in half, and the priest walked through them, y'all.
Speaker 5: Whole y'all religion is based on penal substitutionary atonement that
Speaker 5: God became a human and died and the blood of
Speaker 5: your savior, Like, I don't have that any weirder than
Speaker 5: what we do it, like, you know, So that's why
Speaker 5: he was, like, I mean, probably why they ain't see
Speaker 5: no problems. He didn't understand why y'all didn't understand why
Speaker 5: what we was doing, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I literally bring up Leviticus in the script
Speaker 2: because of that exact thing.
Speaker 5: And then people go, no, no, no, the Leviticus was that
Speaker 5: was the old it was there was an ancient practice,
Speaker 5: and it was the symbol of what's coming. It was like,
Speaker 5: oh so it was, it was the symbol. It's what
Speaker 5: it symbolizes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, can anyone else do that?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 3: No, only us, Only only we can do to symbol Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: ye know.
Speaker 2: The belief structures of Vodu and Catholicism are fairly compatible
Speaker 2: and Vodu. There's a single monotheistic creator, God Bandier, and
Speaker 2: he is too distant to be interacted with directly, and
Speaker 2: he doesn't interfere with human affairs, so you have to
Speaker 2: go through the spirits, the laah. These are referred to
Speaker 2: in all kinds of different ways, saints, spirits, the invisible ones,
Speaker 2: the mysteries, angels, geniuses. Yep, and there's a ton of
Speaker 2: these laa. They're all doing their own thing. They all
Speaker 2: have their own personalities and colors and days of the
Speaker 2: week and favorite gifts and shit. And again, raised Catholic,
Speaker 2: my family cares so much more about Guardian angels and
Speaker 2: cares more about saints than it does about God. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, the la wah can be nature spirits,
Speaker 2: some are ants. We're gonna talk about a woman who
Speaker 2: became a la who's one of the people kicked off
Speaker 2: the Haitian Revolution. They're divided up into different non shan
Speaker 2: or nations. These are different pantheons. Basically, there's seventeen of
Speaker 2: them or twenty one of them. More like, it just
Speaker 2: depends on who you talk to, who you ask.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no central there's no like pope of voting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's kind of part of the deal that no
Speaker 2: one can like name all of them. These map a
Speaker 2: little bit to different African nations sort of as a
Speaker 2: way for everyone to bring the spirits they care about
Speaker 2: into the religion while still like maintaining like Pan Africanism
Speaker 2: isn't the destruction of the national identity, the ethnic identity,
Speaker 2: the same way that internationalism is not the destruction of ethnicity.
Speaker 2: It is the all of us coming together of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not a creama mushroom soup here. It's like,
Speaker 5: you know, you're not just like it's a gumbo dowsting
Speaker 5: it with mayonnaise. Yeah, it's yeah, it's gumbo.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so they all can bring their own Lua to
Speaker 2: this thing. There's two main nations or three depending on
Speaker 2: who you ask, the gooday or the ancestor spirits the
Speaker 2: spirits of the dead, but they're not what we're going
Speaker 2: to be talking about today. The two main nations are
Speaker 2: the Rata and the Petro. The Rata are the nation
Speaker 2: of Lua that come more from West Africa, specifically from
Speaker 2: the Vudan tradition, and these are like more serene they're
Speaker 2: more like water. Right. Then there's the Petro. The Petro
Speaker 2: are the mean ones. They are the ones who know
Speaker 2: how to get shit done and do not ask nicely.
Speaker 2: They are the fiery Lua. And I find this really fascinating.
Speaker 2: They come more from Haiti itself and also from Congo,
Speaker 2: and as I was saying earlier, the folks from Congo
Speaker 2: who were stolen and taken, there are the later arrivals.
Speaker 2: And so it's more like this makes sense to me
Speaker 2: that the Luah of Africa or over all, the ones
Speaker 2: who are like, oh, we're like chill, are doing our thing,
Speaker 2: Everything's all right, yeah, you know, and then the people
Speaker 2: who are like, oh, I'm on Death Island where I've
Speaker 2: been brought to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nah, fam, I need to mean angels.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, Like you're basically in the move I've never
Speaker 2: seen the movie Saw. I can't handle it, but you're
Speaker 2: basically in the movie Saw. If you are an enslave person.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, yeah, it's all bad.
Speaker 2: Like you're gonna have some mean fucking guardian spirits. Yes,
Speaker 2: you will be shocked to know that it was by
Speaker 2: calling in the Petro Lawa, the fiery ones, that they
Speaker 2: set Haiti free and humans serve the Lawah, that's the
Speaker 2: word that usually gets used. But this isn't like a
Speaker 2: servant and a master. This isn't an enslavement relationship. It
Speaker 2: is a reciprocal arrangement. People offer gifts and sacrifices to
Speaker 2: the laaw and expect to be taken care of in return,
Speaker 2: and they will not leave you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There are two practices in vodou that in particular are
Speaker 2: branded as like devil warship by the evangelical assholes. And
Speaker 2: it's like the whole reason that like it gets used
Speaker 2: as there's a lot of blackxpoy taste that goes on
Speaker 2: when you talk about voodoo.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, yeah, you know, yes.
Speaker 2: But like two of the things that people talk about
Speaker 2: is they talk about the sacrifice of animals and the
Speaker 2: possession of people. I promise you would bring up. I
Speaker 2: promise you i'd make the same point you've already made,
Speaker 2: so I'm gonna make it. Yeah, animals are sometimes sacrificed
Speaker 2: in vodoo. That is to say, animals are prayed over, anointed,
Speaker 2: and then humanely slaughtered before being cooked and served of
Speaker 2: the entire community.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh, this is not particularly different from kosher or her
Speaker 2: law practices, and it is still better than like factory farming,
Speaker 2: and like the way that most people eat meat, and.
Speaker 5: Like it is farm to table. Yeah, with the spirit
Speaker 5: of thankfulness. Yep, you know, yeah, I would even push
Speaker 5: the evangelicals. Now I'm about to get evangelical on you.
Speaker 2: No, no, fair enough, fair enough, I might be throwing
Speaker 2: I might be using that too loosely.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, no, no, no, I'm good.
Speaker 5: I'm just saying I'm agreeing with you in the sense that,
Speaker 5: like I wonder which of your listeners, any of the
Speaker 5: exvangelicals who are still a part of this, like okay,
Speaker 5: go back to your go back to your uh your
Speaker 5: your summer camp Lessons of Romans of the Book of
Speaker 5: Romans and Paul talking about meat sacrifice to idols and
Speaker 5: that where are you or are you not supposed to
Speaker 5: eat this meat? And what Paul said the writer of
Speaker 5: Romans was like, shoot, I eat it, like it's fine.
Speaker 5: Like he's like, they're not. He's basically what he says
Speaker 5: is like, well they're not. Really, God's right, Like you
Speaker 5: know what I'm saying, Like, and he's like it's just
Speaker 5: it's fine. Yeah, Like it's like kind of is auDA.
Speaker 5: He's like, look, if it's if it's a problem for you, yeah, fine,
Speaker 5: but I'll be eating it.
Speaker 2: Joseph, No, it's kind of like aw For for like
Speaker 2: a thousand years, the Catholic Church didn't bother like burning
Speaker 2: witches because witchcraft wasn't real. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that person says they're a witch, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: That's not real thing we believe in science or you know.
Speaker 2: And it was only later that they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: we gotta burn everyone.
Speaker 6: Uh but yeah.
Speaker 2: In Leviticus from the Old Testament, it says basically the
Speaker 2: same thing. You sacrifice an animal and then it is
Speaker 2: eaten by everyone in the community. Yeah, people eat animals.
Speaker 2: I don't, Almost everyone I know does. It's fine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: As for possession, that's a mistranslation. The more direct translation
Speaker 2: of what happens is ritual mounting. You are like a
Speaker 2: horse who is mounted and ridden by a lawa you
Speaker 2: channel the spirit. So many faiths have versions of this.
Speaker 2: It also doesn't seem particularly ethically different from like speaking
Speaker 2: in tongues or whatever. Yeah, ecstatic states are part of religion.
Speaker 2: They're part of why people like religion.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to be, but that's an evil spirit.
Speaker 5: You supposed to only had a holy spirit, only supposed
Speaker 5: to be possession with the Holy One.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, only the one that I like, you know,
Speaker 2: there's no there's no devil in Vodu like.
Speaker 5: Which is like if if you're gonna move the camera
Speaker 5: out and look at this as as aliens, I would
Speaker 5: be like, oh, well I want that one. That one
Speaker 5: ain't got a debt, Like why would I want Why
Speaker 5: would I want to be one brought it a debt?
Speaker 3: I want a devil. I want to go with them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, people just do different things
Speaker 2: and like I'll just be doing stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah all right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the fact that Haiti had the most successful slaver
Speaker 2: vault in the America's was not something people would have
Speaker 2: seen coming. It was, in some ways a quieter place
Speaker 2: than other places. Jamaica had a ton of Maroon wars.
Speaker 2: For example, when the French king passed La Code Noir
Speaker 2: the Black Code in sixteen eighty five, it demanded that
Speaker 2: the enslaved people get converted to Catholicism. It also to
Speaker 2: be clear, this is one of the most evil documents
Speaker 2: in the world. It's just a very clear like laying
Speaker 2: out like here's how we're going to do slavery, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it.
Speaker 2: It was way too nice for the actual slavers. The
Speaker 2: slavers themselves wouldn't go along with it. It said that
Speaker 2: while these people were property, they're also still kind of people.
Speaker 3: They're still image bears. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 3: still but anyway, go on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they could not be forced to work on Sundays
Speaker 2: or religious holidays. They had to be clothed and fed
Speaker 2: and cared for. You can't like extra abuse them. And
Speaker 2: there's even a specific way that they can seek redress
Speaker 2: of grievances through the court system. To be clear, it
Speaker 2: also prohibited slaves from owning property or having any legal
Speaker 2: existence besides those like specific redresses. There's a vile document.
Speaker 2: It is far too nice for the French slavers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the king is far away and the slavers in the
Speaker 2: colony had no interest in obeying the Black codes, so
Speaker 2: they didn't. They forced them to become Catholics. But over
Speaker 2: one hundred years, only five court cases were successfully I
Speaker 2: think filed against slavers by slaves, Like, I don't even
Speaker 2: think they won. I could have been reading the source wrong.
Speaker 2: I think only five were filed.
Speaker 5: If you listen, Oh okay, if like, let me put
Speaker 5: myself into a slave shoes to be like really, homie,
Speaker 5: you like you think the court's gonna help you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly the word yeah.
Speaker 5: Whoa, I'm gonna tell the police all right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This had a strange knock on effect. The fact that
Speaker 2: the courts were like supposed to do this thing but
Speaker 2: didn't want to in erased Sandemong's history. We don't have
Speaker 2: a ton of documents because a lot of the like
Speaker 2: early modern documents, we have our court documents, right, Like
Speaker 2: a lot of the like testimonies of people in court
Speaker 2: are like some of the only records we have, Like
Speaker 2: like why we know anything about Joan of Arc right, yeah,
Speaker 2: is because of the extensive trials. Word okay, Sandomong doesn't
Speaker 2: have that. The colonial courts basically didn't keep records since
Speaker 2: it any like, anytime a black person was captured, like
Speaker 2: recaptured and then taken to court, he might say things like, well,
Speaker 2: that white guy beat the shit out of me all
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the white.
Speaker 2: Guy wasn't supposed to beat the shit out of him,
Speaker 2: so why write it?
Speaker 3: Down, you can't have a record.
Speaker 2: The courts kept very poor records, often purging quote old
Speaker 2: criminal trials of blacks and other useless items.
Speaker 3: There is nothing new, yeah, I know.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 2: And then in seventeen thirty four all the court records
Speaker 2: were destroyed by a fire anyway, and then like fifty
Speaker 2: years later a bunch more were lost during a paperwork shuffle,
Speaker 2: like two courts merged and then ah, whoops, we lost
Speaker 2: them all.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure there was a surveillance camera well appreciated
Speaker 5: this footage of this cop beating this person it dead. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know what happened to it, Like I don't
Speaker 5: know the camera blinked out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's nothing nothing new.
Speaker 2: I remember watching this video recently about like it's a
Speaker 2: lawyer talking about like, are the cops allowed to destroy
Speaker 2: your personal like ring camera when they come to your house?
Speaker 2: And the answer is no, right, Like, of course not.
Speaker 2: There's like basically no condition in which they're allowed to
Speaker 2: cover up or destroy your camera, even if they're like
Speaker 2: serving a legal warn or whatever. But it's like one
Speaker 2: of the things you're like watching that and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're not allowed to. Well, they also have guns. In
Speaker 2: the court, Like, what am I gonna do with that?
Speaker 3: What are you gonna do about it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, dude, no, they're you're you're right, they're not allowed
Speaker 5: to destroy our cameras.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I guess they won't.
Speaker 3: I guess I guess that'll stop them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, in send among Soon enough, rebellion is gonna start.
Speaker 2: And maybe it started, or at least people think it started,
Speaker 2: or they used to think it started with a bold
Speaker 2: new plot, a plot to poison every single white person
Speaker 2: on the island. And they even got pretty far along
Speaker 2: with that plot. But as for how it went down,
Speaker 2: you're gonna have to wait for our first named hero
Speaker 2: of the series on Wednesday in part two.
Speaker 3: You don't get to know who the poisoner in chief is.
Speaker 2: I know, unless you turn to Google and you can look.
Speaker 3: At all this up yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the secret of all podcasting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like, I mean, it's all we just
Speaker 3: looked it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all my sources are in the show notes.
Speaker 1: He really took the allure out of the cliffhanger.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean no, there's no way to know. Well,
Speaker 2: actually there is something that I'll tell you this also
Speaker 2: before for as a Cliffhanger. I wrote the entire script
Speaker 2: thinking the story went a certain way, and then two
Speaker 2: hours before we had to hit record, I found another
Speaker 2: more recent source that disagreed with like the ten other
Speaker 2: accounts that I had read.
Speaker 5: Of it that keep happening to you man, happening to me, oh, Margaret,
Speaker 5: my favorite of my favorite was the Buena Chao yeh
Speaker 5: you know and you that happened to you on now.
Speaker 3: He was like, actually I was done and then I wasn't.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: She doesn't have luck when it comes. She's like, all right,
Speaker 1: I've done my job. I did not do it.
Speaker 6: I did not I do not know.
Speaker 2: Because I always want to know more than the like
Speaker 2: there's always the pop version of the history that's a
Speaker 2: little too clean, you know.
Speaker 5: And now you know your antennas are like your antennas
Speaker 5: are super sharp.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So she'd be like, wait a minute, yeah, do this
Speaker 5: feel this? This this resolves too easily.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But as for how it all went down, well,
Speaker 2: two of you are only have to wait about five minutes,
Speaker 2: but everyone else is gonna have to wait till Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Yuh ha ha ha, Propa, you got anything you.
Speaker 6: Want to plug?
Speaker 5: Yeah, man, we're cooking over at the Politics with prop
Speaker 5: You know, I'm on the same glorious network and we've
Speaker 5: added the video element because you know, you have to
Speaker 5: upgraded my camera, as you guys can see. Yeah, so
Speaker 5: there's that if you're in the LA area. Got some
Speaker 5: gigs come in the Sunset Rooftop me and artist named
Speaker 5: saw Rock. She's one of the dopest rappers on Earth.
Speaker 5: So yeah, Sunset Rooftop twenty second of February. And yeah,
Speaker 5: and just following along with us on the show Man
Speaker 5: like I'm having a great time over here.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah. My sister didn't ask for a lot of
Speaker 2: things for Christmas, but she asked for a terraform book
Speaker 2: by Problem, So people should check it out.
Speaker 3: Please please check out the book.
Speaker 6: That's so sweet.
Speaker 3: That is precious. I would have signed it.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, well I'll probably hit you up for that too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, cool, all.
Speaker 2: Right, see everyone onnestime.
Speaker 4: All right.
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