African metaphysical belief in death and rebirth empowered slave insurrections

Evidence

It was the mind, metaphysics, ideology, consciousness that was Mackandel’s tool in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti. He persuaded the Blacks and their masters to sense the hatred of the slaves in palpable terms. Ordinary precautions were irrelevant, what the slaves could be physically obstructed from accomplishing was unimportant. Their hatred was a material force, capable of snuffing the lives from masters who had gone so far as to import their foods from France and had unloaded the precious cargo with their own hands. It was the same with Hyacinth. His army could rush the cannon of the French forces “without fear or care for the volleys,” shoving their arms into the cannons’ mouths. They knew, they believed that “if they were killed they would wake again in Africa.” On that final day of March 1792, 2,000 of them “died,” to a mere 100 of their opponents, but they were doubly blessed: they won the battle and even their dead were free. Boukman possessed the same truth. And so did Romaine. Nanny, who had preceded her Haitian sister by sixty years, was warmed in her mountainous retreat in Jamaica by that very same consciousness. They lived on their terms, they died on their terms, they obtained their freedom on their terms. Thus it was with obeahmen and obeahwomen, and papaloi. These were the terms that these African peasants and farmers had brought with them to their captivity. They were also the only terms in which their freedom could be acquired. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 836

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the core of the reader’s question — the metaphysical engine of the tradition’s height in Haiti.
• ADDENDUM: The battlefield fearlessness drawn from the belief the dead wake again in Africa resonates with the ritual-death frame of ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses.’