agricultural expertise, climate and transportation. How it dealt with the ongoing possibility of revolt was quite deliberate.
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Every movement needs two basic conditions: circumstances and leaders. These leaders electrify the atmosphere of circumstances and fork the lightning of change. The Bolshevik theorist George V. Plekhanov called this the role of the individual in history; a voudou priest would call it the agreement to heed the conditions and plans of Ifa. Spike Lee called it doing the right thing. In Russia, Lenin became the personification of the Circumstances. In China, it was Mao; in Poland, Lech Walensa; in Iran, the Ayatollah; in Germany, Hitler; in Egypt, Moses, and so on. Who claimed the will of the slaves in the American South? Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey? Too late, as Genovese says, too little, too far out-gunned.
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As any ruling order knows, the first thing you do in stifling trouble is to stifle those who would lead the trouble. Those who would lead the trouble among African slaves were the same cultural figures who had led the societies from which the slaves had come. The priests. The war against revolt was the war against voudou, and the war against voudou meant the extermination of the African priesthood. That the priests continued in another form may only have spelled the difference between victors and martyrs.
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Like any religion, i.e. the agreed cultural repository of the souls of a people, voudou was the most dangerous communicative ideology imported with the slaves. In Dahomey, Benin and other kingdoms, voudou was not only a religion, it was a centuries-old organizing principle of society. Royalty drew its authority from the orisha (or whatever the spirits were known as) and from the ancestors, and it was no mortal's place to challenge that. Priests as well as kings (who were also priests) were invested with politico-organizational authority; a theocracy as "natural" as democracy would later be argued to be by bourgeoisie Europeans. In the diaspora, priests often became the only
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