Kongo political traditions contributed revolutionary ideas as much as France did.

Evidence

Kingship meant something quite different in Africa—for instance, in the Kongo, whence many slaves had come in the decades before the revolution—than it did in Europe. In Kongolese political culture, there was a long-standing conflict over the nature of kingship, between traditions that emphasized a more authoritarian form of rule and others that limited the power of kings and provided for more democratic forms of rule. Such traditions drove conflicts in which many of those enslaved in Saint-Domingue 108 av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d would have participated. Indeed, the Kongo might even “be seen as a fount of revolutionary ideas as much as France was.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 371

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Repositions the entire geography of ‘revolution’ by proposing that enslaved Kongolese carried democratic traditions that fed the Haitian insurrection as much as French Enlightenment ideas did.