Borno and Haiti

 

While perusing the excellent Corpus of runaway slave ads for Saint Domingue, we came across what appears to be one of the few other sources to mention "Borno" Africans in Saint Domingue. Instead of spelling the name of their homeland in the same manner as Descourtilz (Beurnon), it was rendered as Bernon. The 1789 advertisement in Affiches américaines also mentions that one of the "Bernon" fled his owners in the company of 3 Hausa named Aly, Dominique and Aza. Scipion, the man of "Bernon" nation, was likely very familiar with Hausa people due to Borno's long history in northern Nigeria. Perhaps they also shared an Islamic background that may have helped them transcend "ethnic" differences and find some commonality with other enslaved African Muslims in Saint Domingue. The text likewise mentions another maroon, Christophe of the "Bernon" nation. He was stamped Pommier and belonged to a different owner. 

One cannot help but wonder if these "Bernon" captives and runaways were part of the same group of prisoners of war who were sold into slavery and ended up in the Rossignol Desdunes plantation. "Bernon" Africans seem to have been somewhat uncommon in Saint Domingue, and clearly the mai of Borno was unlikely to intercede and ask for the return of his subjects from across the Atlantic. As an empire mostly drawn into the trans-Saharan orbit, and primarily exporting other peoples as slaves rather than their own (with a few exceptions, according to Descourtilz), it is interesting to consider the connections of Haiti with the "Central Sudan" and Borno as another dimension of Borno's global presence. Althoughly surely small in number in Saint Domingue, it is possible the "Bernon" Africans joined alongside Hausa, Fulani, Mandingue, and others to recreate, in some form, their Islamic religion. It would be an interesting find if Haitian archival sources ever point to a Muslim community in Haiti after 1804, perhaps in the Artibonite region.