The Enduring Legend of François Macandal's Spiritual Power, 1780s

Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a colonial lawyer, wrote on the legacy of François Macandal, a fugitive slave executed in 1758. For several decades leading up to the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, the legend of Macandal spread. This source shows the enduring legacy of those who claimed to have spiritual power. It also points to a belief that the supernatural can provide physical protection.

The Negro Macandal, born in Africa, belonged to the Lenormand de Mézy plantation in Limbé. His hand had to be cut off after it got caught in the mill, and he was made a stockman. 

During his desertion, he became famous for poisonings that spread terror among the negroes & to him they all submitted. He held an open air school in this abominable art, he had agents in all points of the colony, and death stole at the smallest sign of his hand.

Finally, in his ambitious plan, we understood his ambitious project to make all men who weren’t black disappear from the face of saint-Domingue, & his growing success had increased fear and further assured them. The vigilance of magistrates, of government, nothing had led to a means to capture the villain, and threatening words of punishment suddenly only terrified them further.

One day when a great number of negroes from Dufresne plantation in Limbé had organized a big calenda, Macandal who was long accustomed to impunity, came to join the dance.    

A young negro, perhaps because of the impression that the presence of this monster had produced on him, came to warn the surveyor, Mr. Duplessis, and Mr. Trévan who were in this house, and who served so much of the sugar brandy that all the negroes wanted, & Macandal, despite his caution, found himself deprived of his reason.  

They arrested him in a negro café, where they we led him into one of the rooms at the back end of the main house. They bound his hands behind his back, & having no shackles, they used horse shoes on him. The two whites wrote to Cap to inform them of this capture with two house negroes guarding Macandal, having loaded pistols on a table where there was a light.

The guards fell asleep. Macandal, perhaps aided by the two negroes, untied his hands, put out the light, opened the window at the gabled-end of the house, threw himself into the savannah & escaped confinement by jumping like a magpie.

The land breeze that had picked up, made the window latch knock against the window, this noise awoke them; big rumor, they’re looking for Macandal tracking him with dogs earlier & recaptured him.  

Macandal who, if he had made use of the two pistols instead of fleeing, was sure of escaping, was condemned to be burned alive by a decree of the Cape Town Council of January 20, 1758. As he had boasted several times that if the whites took him he would escape them in different ways, he declared that he would take the form of a fly to escape the flames.

As chance would have it, the post where the chain was placed was rotten, the violent efforts he made in torment from the fire, tore the nail out and he tumbled from the stake. The negroes cried: Macandal is saved; the terror was extreme; all the doors were closed. The Swiss detachment guarding the execution evacuated the place; the jailer Masse wanted to kill him with a sword, when, by order of the Attorney General, he was tied on a plank & thrown into the fire. Although Macandal's body was incinerated, many negroes believe, even now, that he did not perish from the torment.

The memory of this being for whom the epithets are lacking, still awaken ideas so sinister, that the negroes call the poison & poisoners Macandals, & this name has become one of the most cruel insults that they can use to address themselves and between them.