ANTHROPOLOGY

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OFFICIAL DECLARATION OF THE SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF THE TAÍNO PEOPLE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

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WHEREAS, the Taíno people are the original inhabitants of the island known as Quisqueya, Hispaniola, and Ayiti, with a documented presence prior to the colonial invasions by Spanish, French, and other imperial powers;

WHEREAS, despite centuries of forced conversion, assimilation, and genocidal campaigns, multiple scientific and genetic studies have proven the biological and cultural survival of the Taíno people, particularly in the Southern region of present-day Haiti, historically known as Xaragua;

WHEREAS, Article 33(1) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) affirms:

“Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions”;

WHEREAS, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), as established through constitutional, canonical, historical, and genetic grounds, exercises full spiritual and territorial jurisdiction over the ancestral territory of Xaragua;

WHEREAS, the SCIPS-X meets all criteria set forth in the UN definition of an Indigenous People, including:

Continuity with pre-colonial societies;

Self-identification as Indigenous;

Determination to preserve, develop, and transmit historical territories, languages, and institutions;

WHEREAS, international scientific studies (including but not limited to Mendizabal et al. 2008, Vilar et al. 2014, and Benn Torres et al. 2015) confirm the persistence of Indigenous Taíno DNA—particularly maternal haplogroups A2, C1, D1—in populations of Miragoâne, Léogâne, the Nippes, and the Southern regions of the island;

WHEREAS, the SCIPS-X has already notified relevant institutions, including the Government of Haiti, the Vatican, and international observers, of its existence, functions, and legal status;

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DECLARATION

1. The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X) hereby declares itself the lawful representative and spiritual guardian of the surviving Taíno people in the historical territory of Xaragua.

2. The SCIPS-X assumes the sacred duty to preserve, protect, and promote the cultural, genetic, linguistic, and spiritual heritage of the Taíno people under the authority of Canon Law, Indigenous Law, and International Law.

3. The Republic of Haiti, having neither acknowledged the survival of the Taíno people nor structured any legal framework for their protection, shall have no jurisdiction over the Indigenous Taíno citizens and inhabitants of Xaragua and all its territories.

4. The SCIPS-X shall, in full accordance with the UNDRIP and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, exercise the right of self-determination of the Taíno people without seeking recognition or validation from former colonial or post-colonial states.

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LEGAL FOUNDATION

This Declaration is founded upon the following legal and scientific instruments:

UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), Articles 3, 4, 5, 8, 33;

Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933);

Concordat of 1860 between the Holy See and the Haitian Republic, still canonically binding;

Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969);

Genetic studies demonstrating Indigenous Taíno ancestry in Southern Haiti;

Canonical principles of legitimate spiritual sovereignty within the Catholic Church;

The Supreme Constitutional Corpus of the State of Xaragua.

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Let this Declaration be entered into the archives of the world, as a living testimony that the Taíno people were never extinguished.

Issued and promulgated by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), this day of July 31, 2025, from its digital and canonical capital.

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BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER I – THE ANTI-STATE COLONIZATION OF THE WESTERN COAST: PIRATES, FREE EUROPEANS, AUTOCHTHONY, AND THE PRECEDENCE OF ANARCHIC SETTLEMENT OVER ROYAL ADMINISTRATION

The canonical narrative that has been disseminated by colonial historians, European universities, state-funded publications, and post-independence bourgeois elites in the Caribbean — particularly in the francophone territories — constructs the history of Saint-Domingue as if it were a singular creation of the French Crown through a centralized process of colonization, plantation management, and ecclesiastical authority. This vision is a profound falsification. In truth, there were two deeply divergent colonial trajectories that occurred in the western third of the island of Hispaniola: the first maritime, stateless, anarcho-European, libertarian and territorially autonomous; the second administrative, monarchist, bureaucratic, plantationist and enslaving. The first created the coast. The second attempted to rule the land.

It is a juridical and historical fact that the French-speaking, pirate-associated settlers of the southwest coast and northwest coast — specifically in Tortuga (Île de la Tortue), Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and Port-de-Paix — were present, organized, and operating decades before the official French Crown granted colonial administration and institutional status to what became the colony of Saint-Domingue. These men, often fugitives of war, deserters of the European militaries, escaped indentured servants from other colonies, and professional privateers expelled from other islands, created localized sovereignties along the most defensible, least administratively accessible parts of the coast. They built no palaces. They planted no flags of Versailles. They created decentralized, martial, tribally-structured, anarchic port towns that were governed by sea customs, informal assemblies, and the laws of war and survival.

The existence of these pirate-founded coastal enclaves predates the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) by decades, and it is their presence that forced the Spanish Crown to ultimately cede western Hispaniola to France — not the expansion of bureaucratic plantation infrastructure, which came later. The southwest and northwest of the island were not created by royal decree. They were taken, held, defended, and built by outlaws.

Petit-Goâve was, in effect, the first informal capital of this stateless colony — long before Port-au-Prince ever existed. It served as a provisioning base, a judicial zone for maritime disputes, and a de facto center of coastal alliance between various French-speaking settler factions and local Black and Indigenous populations. From this base extended Miragoâne to the south — deeply strategic due to its natural harbor and mountainous coastal defenses — and Port-de-Paix to the north, which served as the continental replacement for Tortuga after the Spanish eliminated its pirate strongholds. These nodes formed an early anarchic confederacy of seaborne white and mixed-race Europeans with no allegiance to any crown, no obedience to any bishop, and no desire for a plantation society. These were not Jesuit colonists. They were feral, armed, politically libertarian men who intermarried with Black and Indigenous women and operated in racial and economic autonomy.

This anarchic, decentralized, maritime society valued the following principles above all else:

1. The rejection of centralized authority, including the French monarchy, Spanish imperial law, or Church jurisdiction.

2. The protection of private and clan landownership, determined by occupation and defense, not by title or grant.

3. Early and unregulated racial mixing with Africans (both free and escaped) and remaining Indigenous groups, forming autonomous polities of Afro-European composition.

4. The use of the sea as the principal axis of trade, movement, power projection, and alliance — a thalassocratic society hostile to land-based bureaucracies.

5. Fierce local loyalty to village or port, not to a national or religious entity.

6. Total indifference — and often active hostility — to the plantation model, Catholic missionaries, royal census takers, and tax agents.

7. A cultural and spiritual identity closer to maroons and island-born populations than to continental France.

It is imperative to understand that these populations were not absorbed into the French state model. They were suppressed by it. The construction of Léogâne, Saint-Marc, Port-au-Prince, and ultimately Cap-Français represented not an expansion of French culture into the wilderness, but a strategic attack on the autonomy of the coastal anarcho-settlers.

In 1750, when the French Crown moved the administrative capital from Petit-Goâve to Port-au-Prince, it was a clear geopolitical signal. Petit-Goâve was a city of pirates. Port-au-Prince was to be the city of the state. It was created to absorb the flows of wealth from the new inland plantations — built in the fertile plains far from the mountainous and defensible southern coast — and to house the officials, merchants, and churchmen who could oversee the bureaucratic integration of the colony into the centralized structure of the French Empire.

At that point, the original anarchic coast — from Île-à-Vache to Tortuga — was no longer the political heart of the colony. It was treated as a periphery, a problem zone, a potential center of revolt or deviation. Laws were passed to force registration of land titles, taxation of coastal trade, formalization of births and marriages, and the building of churches under diocesan authority — all of which directly undermined the founding autonomy of the original settlers. The first whites of the region — pirates, land-holders, interracial family men, anti-Catholic traders, former Huguenots and vagabond sailors — were gradually labeled as deviant, criminal, immoral, or impious by the royal state. Their lands were seized or taxed into abandonment. Their mixed-race descendants were denied access to formal inheritance. Their towns were bypassed by trade routes and made legally invisible.

The irony is total: the so-called “founders” of Saint-Domingue — the plantation elites of Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français — did not build the territory. They colonized it from its own founders. The real founders were buried under administrative maps, judicial decrees, and civil codes. The so-called history of Haiti, as taught in schools and parroted by Black nationalist or post-colonial elites, begins with a lie: that the colony began when France said so. In truth, it began when the pirates landed, when the outlaw claimed a port, when the mariner built a hut on Miragoâne’s steep coast and declared himself free of Europe.

Thus, Saint-Domingue was not built by the pirates of the South and Northwest. It was built in direct opposition to them. Its founding fathers were not the men of Miragoâne or Tortuga. They were the bureaucrats, slave traders, Jesuit priests, and merchants of the second wave, who arrived with titles and seals and armies to destroy what had already been built.

The geopolitical legacy of this split remains today. The island was always three nations:

1. The Northwest: Tortuga and Port-de-Paix — warlike, tribal, maritime, anti-administrative.

2. The Southwest: Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache — interracial, territorial, autonomous, Indigenous-allied.

3. The Center/Northeast: Léogâne, Port-au-Prince, Cap-Français — bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, slave-based, Europeanist.

The republic that followed in 1804 did not reunify these geographies. It imposed the central model over the outer ones, again. What you call Xaragua today is the resurrection of the original maritime south. It is the memory of the men who preceded the state. It is the only continuity left of the first White settlers — not as enslavers or aristocrats, but as free men who chose neither crown, nor cross, nor chain.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER II – THE LEGAL FICTION OF SAINT-DOMINGUE: HOW THE FRENCH STATE FABRICATED A COLONY OVER AN ALREADY SOVEREIGN MARITIME FRONT

The legal and political myth that surrounds the foundation of Saint-Domingue hinges on a core fiction: that the French presence on the western third of the island began with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, and that everything before that treaty was irregular, extralegal, or proto-colonial. This narrative is not only false, it is deliberately constructed to erase the maritime republics that had already formed along the coast. Those communities were not embryonic colonies in need of European charter. They were fully operational political orders, based not on monarchical law but on customary maritime authority, racial plurality, and territorial possession by use and defense.

The reality is that, by the time the Treaty of Ryswick was signed between France and Spain, the French-speaking population of the western coast had already established:

1. Enforced territorial claims through settlement and intermarriage,

2. Defensive networks against both Spanish attacks and internal rivalry,

3. Trade routes not only with French islands but with English, Dutch, and African counterparts,

4. Village-level legal customs adjudicated through local councils, ship captains, and senior settlers,

5. Multigenerational claims to land and port access with no reference to royal permission.

The settlers of Miragoâne, Petit-Goâve, Port-de-Paix, and Île-à-Vache had, by the mid-17th century, a distinct identity, separate from France, Spain, or any Christian European state. They were, in fact, stateless Europeans. They had no king, no flag, no civil registry, and no obligation to crown, church, or army. They were a population defined by local customs and oral contracts, not by notaries or ecclesiastical courts. They functioned more like tribal confederations or early confederal cantons than like colonial districts. To call them “French” is only ethnolinguistically accurate. Politically, they were autonomous.

What the Treaty of Ryswick achieved was not the beginning of French control. It was the beginning of French intrusion into an already-existing order. The treaty gave the French Crown legal pretext to extend royal administration into the western third of the island, but this did not imply the population welcomed that extension. On the contrary: the intrusion of the crown into Petit-Goâve, Port-de-Paix, and Miragoâne was seen by the local populations as a threat to their independence.

Thus, the French colonial administration, once established, engaged in a process of administrative erasure:

– It nullified all customary land claims not registered with royal notaries. – It imposed tithe obligations and religious conversion under threat of legal expulsion. – It forced the construction of churches and placed ecclesiastical control over birth, death, and marriage records. – It replaced local councils with appointed governors and magistrates. – It criminalized interracial marriages and placed legal limitations on the inheritance rights of mixed-race children. – It created legal distinctions between “free” and “colonial” that erased the earlier status of landowning settlers of mixed heritage.

This process, which occurred in phases from 1700 to 1750, culminated in the founding of Port-au-Prince. The decision to relocate the administrative capital from Petit-Goâve to a newly constructed port was not logistical. It was ideological. Petit-Goâve was too autonomous. Too pirate. Too black. Too mixed. Too informal. Port-au-Prince was to be the anti-Petit-Goâve: a bureaucratic capital built to civilize, control, and erase the southern coast. The city was built not to manage the colony, but to suppress its real origin.

The plantations of the Cul-de-Sac plain and the Léogâne basin were intentionally located away from the resistant coasts. The slave economy was built inland, to avoid the militancy and unpredictability of the coastal free settlements. The port of Saint-Marc to the north and the later elevation of Cap-Français to administrative prominence were likewise efforts to create a triangle of royal power between north, center, and east — a triangle that could isolate and contain the western coast.

The colonial military strategy followed the same principle: fortify inland, patrol coasts, and prevent the reemergence of pirate bases. This strategy became policy, especially after the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), during which the French feared renewed pirate alliances with British or Dutch enemies. By the time of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the old pirate coast had been mostly pacified — not by military conquest, but by legal strangulation.

The names disappeared first. “Boucaniers,” “flibustiers,” and “habitants libres” were replaced by administrative categories: “colons,” “propriétaires,” “gens de couleur,” and “sujets du roi.” Customary law was outlawed. Informal land occupation was criminalized. Oral pacts were voided. Local militias were disbanded or integrated into royal command. Education was handed to Jesuits and Sulpicians. Every aspect of life was brought under crown and cross.

And yet the memory remained.

In the minds of the descendants of these original settlers — especially those who remained in the shadow towns, the mountain enclaves, and the periphery islands — the identity never fully died. They remembered that they came before Port-au-Prince. Before Léogâne. Before Cap-Français. They remembered that their ancestors had not been granted land, but had taken it. Had defended it. Had mixed with the land’s other peoples — not enslaved them. Had lived as equals with black and brown and Indigenous men. Had chosen sea and gun and pact over title and crown.

That is the memory which Xaragua reclaims. It is not a fantasy. It is not an invention. It is a restoration.

Xaragua is the juridical resurrection of a people and a territory that preceded the colony, resisted the colony, and were erased by the colony. Xaragua does not claim to represent Haiti. Xaragua claims to remember what existed before Haiti — and what Haiti tried to bury.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER III – ETHNO-GEOGRAPHIC FRACTURE: THE THREE NATIONS OF THE ISLAND AND THE PERMANENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF UNIFICATION

The island of Hispaniola, even before the creation of the political entities now referred to as Haiti and the Dominican Republic, contained within it three deeply distinct and antagonistic ethno-geopolitical zones. These zones did not merely differ in topography or economy; they embodied separate historical logics, political cultures, legal regimes, and anthropological foundations. Any attempt to unify them under a single banner — colonial, republican, or nationalist — was bound to fail, and did.

The three nations of the western third of the island, prior to the Haitian Revolution and long before independence, were as follows:

1. The Northwest Maritime Axis, rooted in Tortuga and Port-de-Paix,

2. The Southwest Libertarian Coast, centered on Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, and Île-à-Vache,

3. The Central Bureaucratic Corridor, composed of Léogâne, Port-au-Prince, and Cap-Français.

These three regions were not simply “administrative zones” under colonial law. They were distinct civilizations in formation. Each had its own origin story, its own class structure, its own relationship to the land, to slavery, to race, to the sea, and to power.

The Northwest, originally anchored in Tortuga and later shifted to Port-de-Paix after the Spanish purge of the island, was defined by a culture of piracy, clan violence, maritime predation, and military independence. It was populated by sea raiders, militia leaders, independent Black chiefs, and hybrid Afro-European fighting crews. The state never truly governed this region. It negotiated, bribed, threatened, and coexisted with it. Even after formal annexation, Port-de-Paix remained a quasi-militarized port town with deep loyalties to local captains and alliances with internal tribes. The early colonial militias that would later play roles in both suppression and revolution were born here — not in service of France, but in service of territorial survival. Loyalty in this region was personal, not institutional.

The Southwest, by contrast, was marked not by militancy but by maritime autonomy, early interracial mixing, territorial anchoring, and rejection of state structures. Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, and Île-à-Vache were not garrisons. They were anarcho-European communities formed through informal settlement, customary land acquisition, and cooperative defense. They allied with local Blacks and Indigenous peoples not out of necessity but by conviction, and over generations produced a distinct Afro-Indigenous-European population with no allegiance to church, crown, or color line. In these regions, there were no plantations at first. Land was worked by owners and their families. Freedom, not profit, was the founding principle. This was Xaragua before it had a name.

The Central/Northeastern region, finally, was an artificial construct, imposed by royal fiat and organized around the needs of the French state. Léogâne was built to house the administrators. Port-au-Prince was constructed as a bureaucratic hub. Cap-Français became the jewel of the colonial empire — not because of local initiative, but because of royal investment, slave labor, and imperial commerce. This region created the plantation complex, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the bourgeois elite, and the legal and racial codes that would shape Saint-Domingue as a profit machine. It was, from the beginning, an extension of France — alien to the island, parasitic upon it, hostile to its free populations. Its mission was not to coexist but to dominate.

The relationships between these regions were always adversarial.

The Northwest rejected integration into the plantation economy, viewing the central authorities as cowards and parasites. The men of Tortuga and Port-de-Paix considered themselves warriors, not planters. They distrusted officials, merchants, and priests. They followed local chiefs and captains. Their conception of order was tribal and martial, not legal.

The Southwest saw the plantation centers as imperial invaders who had ruined the racial balance and spiritual autonomy of the coast. The settlers of Miragoâne and Petit-Goâve resented the tax regimes, the land seizures, the enforced Catholicism, and the racial codes that came with Port-au-Prince. Their world was one of plural identity and decentralized life. They did not fight the system as the Northwest did. They ignored it. They fled into the mountains, retreated to the islands, built networks that spanned the coasts. They were less militant, but more rooted.

The Central Region, for its part, feared both. It feared the militarism of the Northwest — the Black militias, the pirate remnants, the uncontrolled armed factions. And it feared the freedom of the Southwest — the racial mixing, the land ownership by families outside the plantation order, the noncompliance with royal law. It thus sought to dominate both. It used military campaigns to pacify the Northwest and legal warfare to erase the Southwest. It considered itself the only legitimate order and used Versailles as its shield.

The Haitian Revolution did not erase this division. It amplified it.

The revolutionary armies that rose in the North and the Center had no interest in restoring the Southwest’s autonomy or the Northwest’s independence. They sought to recentralize power, this time under Black generals, mulatto administrators, and post-French legal codes. The revolution promised liberation but delivered nationalization — of land, of identity, of memory. The Southwest and Northwest were once again subordinated to a central project. Port-au-Prince, which had been a colonial invention, became a revolutionary imperative. The city that had been founded to erase the pirates was now used to erase the maroons.

But memory persisted.

In the Southwest, especially in Miragoâne and its surrounding regions, families retained oral histories of pre-revolutionary autonomy. They remembered the land as it was before plantations. Before administrators. Before Cap-Français. Before Léogâne. Before Port-au-Prince. They remembered their ancestors not as slaves or masters but as free settlers, interracial founders, defenders of the coast. They remembered the times when the sea was theirs and the mountain was shelter and the village was its own law.

This memory is not folklore. It is the last surviving fragment of a world that existed before the state.

That memory is Xaragua.

Xaragua is not a claim. It is a fact. It is the name for what already existed, what was buried by both colony and republic, what was replaced by administration, by violence, by profit, by ideology. Xaragua is not new. It is older than Haiti. Older than Saint-Domingue. Older than Port-au-Prince. It is the coast that came before the flag. The families that came before the charter. The law that came before the code.

It is not an alternative to Haiti. It is what Haiti erased to become itself.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER IV – THE LEGAL NULLITY OF CENTRAL COLONIAL CLAIMS: WHY THE STATE OF SAINT-DOMINGUE NEVER POSSESSED THE SOUTHWEST

The central thesis of this chapter is juridical and unambiguous: the colonial entity known as Saint-Domingue never legally possessed the southwestern territories of Hispaniola in any valid or continuous way. What existed instead was a legal fiction superimposed on a maritime confederacy that had its own preexisting order, founded upon direct territorial occupation, customary law, and the uninterrupted principle of local dominion. This chapter will demonstrate, in a manner binding to any serious analysis of international law, that the French colonial state was an external imposition — not a natural or legal continuation of the sociopolitical order established in the southwest.

To understand this, we must return to the basic principles of dominium, as they were understood in both European and Indigenous legal thought. According to Roman and Canonical jurisprudence — the very foundations upon which both French and Spanish empires built their claims — territorial dominion cannot be granted in abstracto, nor assumed by fiat. It must be exercised continuously, peacefully, and with the consent of the local population or through permanent occupation with administration.

Yet the French Crown’s claims to the southwest — specifically Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and surrounding territories — failed all three conditions.

First, the condition of continuous administration. At no point between the earliest pirate settlements in the 1620s and the formalization of colonial administration in the 1750s was there a stable royal presence in the southwest. Royal governors were absent or symbolic. The population governed itself through port alliances, tribalized councils, and customary seafaring codes. In Miragoâne, no crown-appointed authority held functional control. The region remained in the hands of autonomous mixed populations whose laws, marriages, and territorial claims were unregistered with any colonial bureaucracy.

Second, the requirement of peaceful dominion. The southwest was not passively absorbed into the colonial state. On the contrary, it resisted incorporation, not through open war — which would have attracted overwhelming force — but through withdrawal, evasion, and autonomy. The royal decrees establishing Port-au-Prince as capital in 1750 make explicit reference to the “lawlessness” of the southern coast and the need to reassert state control. That is, the French state admitted that it did not already possess the region. The move of the capital was not administrative. It was imperial conquest — but conquest not completed.

Third, the criterion of consent or treaty. There exists no legal instrument — no act of submission, no treaty, no land cession — by which the autonomous settlers of the southwestern coast surrendered their authority to the French Crown. Unlike in certain regions of Canada or Africa where treaties were signed (even under duress), the southwest of Hispaniola was simply declared absorbed, without negotiation. This declaration is null under all standards of legal validity in customary and treaty law.

Furthermore, Indigenous legal tradition, as recognized in multiple papal bulls, colonial ordinances, and eventually in the corpus of international law, recognizes the continuity of usufruct and ancestral possession. That is, a population residing on land, working it, defending it, and transmitting it intergenerationally, possesses an inalienable dominion regardless of its legal codification. The settlers of the southwest fulfilled these criteria. Their possession was real, visible, traceable, and enduring.

By contrast, the French state operated via fictive cartography. Colonial maps included regions never visited. Territorial claims were extended to inland mountains and remote coastal enclaves where no royal functionary had ever set foot. This cartographic overreach is well documented. The archives of Versailles, as well as contemporary Jesuit and Capuchin records, frequently complain of the impossibility of administering the southern coast. The population is described as “unreachable,” “rebellious,” “unorthodox,” and “métissée au-delà de la doctrine.” These are not terms of inclusion. They are confessions of legal failure.

Thus, any claim that Saint-Domingue possessed the southwest is a retroactive invention, useful only for post-independence centralizers and colonial apologists. It cannot be sustained in court, in scripture, or in reason.

The same logic applies to postcolonial claims. The Republic of Haiti inherited the legal fiction of Saint-Domingue, not its validity. When Dessalines declared independence in 1804, he proclaimed the termination of the French state’s authority — but he did not reestablish local sovereignty in its diversity. He reproduced the central model: one capital, one law, one army, one national identity. In doing so, he repeated the fiction that the territory was one and indivisible.

But a fiction cannot erase geography. It cannot erase ancestry. It cannot erase the jurisprudence of fact. The southwestern coast never belonged to Saint-Domingue. It never belonged to Haiti. It was never absorbed by law or by sword. Its people never submitted. Its memory was never extinguished.

What, then, is the legal status of this coast?

It is a region under original right — the right of first possession, of continuous use, of autonomous governance, of lived sovereignty. The principles upon which Xaragua is declared today are not ideological or political. They are juridical, historical, and customary. Xaragua is not a rebellion. It is the recovery of a dormant title. It is the legal reclamation of what was never surrendered.

And this reclamation is not symbolic. It is territorial. It applies to every parcel of land inhabited, cultivated, defended, and transmitted by the descendants of the pre-colonial settlers. It applies to the entire confederation of maritime localities that predate both colony and republic. It applies to Miragoâne, to Petit-Goâve, to Île-à-Vache, to the mountains and coasts between them. It applies to the cultural order, the legal memory, and the sovereign dignity of the people whose existence was never authored by Port-au-Prince.

This is not a revision. It is a restoration.

The state of Saint-Domingue never existed here. The Republic of Haiti is a successor without succession. And Xaragua, in claiming nothing new, asserts everything ancient.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER V – THE MISREPRESENTATION OF RACE AND CLASS IN THE COLONIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY: WHY THE SOUTHWESTERN WHITES WERE NOT PLANTERS, NOR ROYALISTS, NOR SLAVE ARISTOCRACY

One of the most consequential falsifications in colonial and postcolonial narratives of the French presence on the island of Hispaniola is the undifferentiated portrayal of all whites as identical agents of slavery, aristocracy, and administrative tyranny. This sweeping equivalence serves political ends — it justifies revolutionary violence, sanctifies centralized state formation, and erases the diversity of origins within the early settler population. But it is not historically or legally accurate.

The whites of the southwestern coast, particularly those who established themselves in Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and the surrounding littoral zones, were categorically distinct — in origin, in practice, in identity, and in status — from the whites who populated the interior plains, the Cap-Français basin, and the plantation complexes of the royalist center. Their whiteness was not that of a noble class, nor of the merchant-capitalist bourgeoisie, nor of the ecclesiastical state. It was the whiteness of vagabonds, mutineers, anti-clerical sailors, exiled Protestants, debtors, and dissidents who had escaped European feudal structures in search of maritime autonomy.

This population must be understood as proto-stateless, pre-capitalist, and functionally anti-slavery in the structural sense. While some may have employed Black labor or traded in small-scale exchanges of servitude, they did not — and could not — establish plantations, nor create monocultural export economies. Their landholdings were small, scattered, and governed by informal usage, not by titles or concessions from Paris. Their wealth, when it existed, came from trade, piracy, salvage, or coastal subsistence, not from transatlantic slave-based commodities such as sugar or indigo.

Furthermore, their relationship to race was not ideological but practical. The earliest southwestern white settlers lived side by side with runaway slaves, maroons, Indigenous remnants, and other Afro-Caribbean elements in loose coalitions that were more tribal than colonial. Intermarriage was not scandalous but standard. Property transmission occurred through non-codified family alliances that often crossed racial lines. Children of mixed descent were not illegitimate — they were heirs. The “color line” did not exist in these communities in the same way it was enforced in the Cap-Français or Port-au-Prince jurisdictions.

This is why, when the royal state finally imposed its legal structure, one of its first acts was to delegitimize the familial and territorial legitimacy of these populations. Laws were passed to outlaw interracial marriages retroactively, deny inheritance to children born of “illicit unions,” and require all landowners to present documentary title or face dispossession. These measures were not about order. They were about elimination. The goal was to erase a class of whites who could not be assimilated into the slave economy and who posed a threat to the ideological purity of the colonial project.

It must also be noted that these whites were, overwhelmingly, anti-royalist. They had not come to serve France, nor to build an outpost of Versailles. They had fled France. They had rejected its feudal order, its wars of religion, its persecution of non-Catholics. Many were former Huguenots or had ties to Protestant strongholds in La Rochelle, Dieppe, or the Low Countries. Others had been sailors or privateers in the service of rival crowns or no crown at all. Their identity was maritime, not national. They fought under no flag. They submitted to no monarch. Their allegiance was to their coast, their ship, their family, their clan.

In terms of jurisprudence, these whites were governed by customary maritime law, not royal ordinance. They followed the unwritten codes of the sea — the captain's authority, the council of free men, the right of spoil, the law of self-defense, the pact of brotherhood. These legal systems, though unsanctioned by the metropole, constituted a real and functional regime that regulated trade, adjudicated disputes, and sanctioned violence in ways that were respected and effective. The attempt by the French colonial state to impose written codes, notarial systems, and Roman-derived law was perceived not as an upgrade but as an attack.

To conflate these men with the slaveholding, land-grant aristocracy of the plains is therefore a category error. The former built local communities. The latter built export economies. The former lived among Blacks. The latter lived off of them. The former had no churches. The latter had bishops. The former resisted taxation. The latter were tax collectors. The former bled with the land. The latter bled it dry.

The post-independence Haitian state, in its rush to unify identity around Blackness, further erased this class of whites, portraying them as colonial monsters when, in truth, they were also among the colonized — by the very state that Haiti claimed to have overthrown. These whites did not fight for France. They had been fighting it from the beginning. They did not build plantations. They had no means to do so. They did not enslave on a massive scale. They were enslaved by history’s retelling.

Today, their descendants are invisible — labeled traitors, foreigners, or relics of shame. But this invisibility is not a historical fact. It is an erasure. The names survive in mountain villages, in coastal enclaves, in old oral stories told in Kreyòl and French, in skin tones and surnames, in fragments of documents lost to fire and flood. They are not gone. They were buried. And their exhumation is the first act of justice.

Xaragua, as a legal project and historical reconstruction, is therefore not merely an Indigenous or Afro-descendant revival. It is also the legal rehabilitation of a class of whites whose autonomy, racial pluralism, and anti-state values were crushed by both the French colony and the Haitian republic. These settlers were not colonizers in the traditional sense. They were fugitives from colonialism who tried to build a world beyond it — a world that could not last under empire, and was not allowed to survive under nation.

Their story is not a footnote. It is a chapter stolen. Xaragua returns it to the record.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER VI – THE MARITIME AXIS AS PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: THE CUSTOMARY POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SOUTHWEST BEFORE STATEHOOD

Before colonial charters, before national constitutions, before the bureaucratic apparatus of Port-au-Prince and the state-model of Cap-Français, there existed on the southwestern coast of the island a political structure that was not recognized, not ratified, and yet fully operational. This chapter will expose the political coherence of this order — not as an embryonic state waiting to be born, but as a complete and deliberate system of autonomous governance, rooted in maritime custom, local territoriality, and hybridized authority. It functioned without a flag, without written law, and without European endorsement. It was real.

To understand the political order of the southwestern coast — Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and beyond — we must begin with its foundational principle: sovereignty by presence. Unlike European states, which projected power outward from a capital, these maritime societies constructed authority from locality upward. There was no center. There was no abstraction. Law emerged from land, sea, kinship, and practical necessity.

Territory was not divided according to royal grants but according to use, defense, and occupation. Coastal lands were parceled not by surveyors or notaries but by habit — by the reach of one’s boat, the clearing of one’s forest, the planting of one’s hillside, the security of one’s port. When disputes arose, they were not taken to court but resolved in local councils, composed of family elders, respected captains, and seasoned mariners. These councils operated by consensus or by oath. A decision once reached was enforced by collective will — not by jail or official penalty, but by social sanction, trade exclusion, and, if necessary, force.

Maritime authority rested in the captaincy. The captain was not a lord nor a feudal superior. He was a functional head — chosen for his ability to navigate, to command, to defend, to negotiate. His power did not extend beyond his crew or his boat unless invited. There were no permanent offices. Authority was functional, not institutional. When a captain failed, he was replaced. When he abused power, he was isolated or killed. This model, while crude by modern standards, was adaptive, flexible, and based on a shared understanding of justice. It did not require writing. It required honor.

Religious authority was minimal or absent. In most coastal enclaves, there was no parish priest, no chapel, no sacraments. The Catholic Church, with its tithes and doctrines and registers, had no real presence before the late 18th century. What existed was a folk Christianity, syncretized with African spiritual traditions, Indigenous cosmology, and seafarer superstitions. Baptisms were performed on beaches. Marriages were sealed by oath. Deaths were honored by ritual, not by burial under ecclesiastical rites. The Church, when it arrived, did not find apostates. It found independent cosmologies that had no need for Rome.

Economically, the region operated on barter, salvage, and small-scale maritime trade. There was no export economy. Goods were exchanged across the coast, with Jamaica, with the Dutch islands, with the occasional passing ship. Markets were informal, unregulated, and self-policed. Coin was rare. Credit was personal. Wealth was measured not in land or sugar but in alliances, boats, and manpower. Slavery, where it existed, was not a system but an individual condition — and often temporary. Many so-called “slaves” lived in arrangements that were closer to clientage or vassalage than plantation bondage. Manumission was common. Intermarriage was accepted. There was no racial caste system.

The most critical feature of this order was its multipolar structure. There was no capital. No supreme council. No centralized code. Each enclave — Miragoâne, Petit-Goâve, Île-à-Vache, and others — operated with its own internal logic but recognized others through shared norms. This is why we refer to it as a confederacy, not a republic. It was a horizontal alliance of local sovereignties, bound not by a constitution but by custom. It could not be invaded easily because there was no central target. It could not be co-opted by monarchy because it had no throne. It was immune to bureaucratic takeover because it lacked bureaucracy.

The French Crown, when it attempted to impose colonial rule, encountered a political order that refused to behave like a colony. There were no officials to negotiate with. No assembly to coerce. No elite to bribe. The people did not want representation. They wanted non-interference. This is what colonial law could not understand. Sovereignty, in this region, was not something to be claimed. It was something already lived.

When the plantation system expanded and Port-au-Prince was founded, it attempted to superimpose a European-style state upon this confederacy. It failed. The plantations grew in the plains. The administrators stayed inland. The coast resisted — not with war, but with noncompliance. The port towns did not submit. They ignored. They traded outside the system. They married outside the code. They buried their dead without registration. They lived — and in living, they preserved a sovereignty that the world forgot.

Today, this pre-state order survives in fragments: in oral memory, in coastal surnames, in land without title, in villages without churches, in customs that persist despite the weight of republic and nation. These are not ruins. They are roots.

Xaragua, as a sovereign reconstruction, does not impose a new order on the past. It simply restores the legal recognition of a preexisting system. It does not invent a constitution. It revives a confederacy. It does not claim a territory. It names what was never unnamed. It does not seek recognition. It invokes it.

The customary political structure of the southwest was never abolished — only ignored. Its memory is not academic. It is operational. And it forms the foundation of the modern juridical identity of Xaragua.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER VI – THE MARITIME AXIS AS PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: THE CUSTOMARY POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SOUTHWEST BEFORE STATEHOOD

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER VII – THE STRATEGIC DESTRUCTION OF THE SOUTHWEST: HOW PORT-AU-PRINCE WAS BUILT TO NEUTRALIZE THE MARITIME REPUBLICS

The founding of Port-au-Prince in 1750 was not the organic result of demographic expansion, economic necessity, or geographical convenience. It was a strategic action taken by the French Crown to destroy the sovereignty, mobility, and independence of the southwestern coast of the island. This chapter presents the city of Port-au-Prince not as a colonial capital, but as an instrument of political suppression — built with the express purpose of neutralizing, erasing, and replacing the autonomous settlements of Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and the coastlines that surrounded them.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, the seat of colonial governance for the French portion of Hispaniola had been Petit-Goâve. This was not a choice based on central planning or top-down royal will, but rather a practical concession to maritime realities. Petit-Goâve, having been settled by pirates and flibustiers since the 1660s, had become a functioning hub of administration — not because it submitted to royal law, but because it was where the law could not be ignored. Its captains, traders, and settlers held enough force to be negotiated with. The Crown tolerated it out of necessity.

But Petit-Goâve was unstable from the colonial perspective. It was not loyal. It was mixed. It was libertarian. It was difficult to tax, difficult to survey, impossible to control. Its elites were not court-born but boat-born. Its customs could not be reconciled with Versailles. It existed as a tolerated anomaly — a space where French rule was nominal, and local autonomy remained intact under a veneer of submission.

The Crown saw this clearly. And it understood that to stabilize its colonial project, it could not simply co-opt Petit-Goâve. It had to replace it. Thus, the decision was made: a new city would be built in the Cul-de-Sac plain — not because it was more central, not because it was more fertile, but because it was empty of resistance. Port-au-Prince was not a response to population pressure. It was a response to political disorder — defined as too much freedom along the coast.

The location chosen for Port-au-Prince was deliberate. It stood inland, removed from the free ports, surrounded by plantation-ready flatlands, and easily accessible to incoming colonial fleets and administrative caravans. It was a city of roads, not waves. It was designed to be legible to the Crown, taxable to the core, and governable in every sense. From the beginning, it was constructed not for the island’s people, but for its governors. It had barracks. It had government houses. It had a grid. It had orthodoxy. It had surveillance.

Once Port-au-Prince was established, the policy of suppression accelerated. Laws were passed requiring all landholders in the surrounding region to register with notaries in the capital. Churches were mandated in peripheral towns, to break their independence from diocesan authority. Interregional trade was rerouted through capital-controlled ports. Roads were militarized. Tax collectors were dispatched under armed escort. Petit-Goâve and Miragoâne were no longer administrative centers — they were targets.

Census operations were launched in coastal areas, not to count the people, but to identify the unregistered, the undocumented, the uncontrolled. These censuses did not serve statistical or humanitarian purposes. They were tools of colonial legal warfare, used to dispossess those whose claims had never passed through Paris or Port-au-Prince. Oral possession was invalidated. Customary title was made illegal. And when resistance occurred, it was not met with trial, but with confiscation, imprisonment, and, in some cases, forced relocation.

The language of official correspondence confirms this strategy. Colonial letters refer to the need to “purify” the coast, to “regularize” the territories, to “reconvert” the population. The settlers of the southwest — white, Black, and mixed — were seen as a theological and administrative contamination: heretics of empire. Their very existence was a threat to the plantation model, which required hierarchy, monoculture, forced labor, and racial rigidity. The free maritime zones offered none of that. They offered contradiction.

By the 1770s, Port-au-Prince had become the administrative and ideological heart of Saint-Domingue. Its elites were bureaucrats, planters, and priests — men who had no ties to the coast, no memory of piracy, no tolerance for plurality. They governed with the assumption that the southwestern order had never existed. In their maps, their books, their court records, it did not. Petit-Goâve was no longer a capital. Miragoâne was a dot. Île-à-Vache was a logistical port. The sovereignty that had once breathed in these places was flattened into silence.

But memory is not erased by decree. In the villages, in the oral archives of families, in the cemeteries without names, the truth remained: Port-au-Prince was not the center of anything. It was the edge of an occupying power.

This inversion is central to understanding Xaragua today. When modern Haitians speak of the capital, they speak of it as the source of legality, of identity, of nationhood. But this belief is the result of a historical reversal — a reversal that began in 1750, when the French Crown decided that freedom on the coast could no longer be tolerated.

Port-au-Prince is not the origin. It is the reaction. It exists because Petit-Goâve existed first. It was built to suppress. It succeeded, but only temporarily.

Xaragua now reasserts that primacy — not in ideology, but in historical fact. The coast came first. The confederacy came first. The settlers came first. The sovereignty came first. The capital came later — as a tool of destruction.

To recognize Xaragua is not to create something new. It is to unmask the inversion, to restore the record, to say clearly and without apology: Port-au-Prince was founded to destroy us, and we remember.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER VIII – THE ERASURE OF SOUTHWESTERN AUTONOMY IN THE POST-INDEPENDENCE STATE: FROM MILITARY CENTRALIZATION TO JURIDICAL DOMESTICATION

The myth of national liberation, as deployed by the post-independence regime of Haiti after 1804, presented itself as a rupture — a complete rejection of the colonial system, the French metropole, and the plantation empire. But in structure, in mentality, and in geopolitical logic, the early Haitian state preserved many of the central features of Saint-Domingue. It retained the capital. It retained the hierarchical command structure. It retained the legal codes of the colonizer. And most importantly, it retained the imperial attitude toward the southwestern coast — viewing it not as a sovereign zone with its own historical legitimacy, but as a province to be ruled, tamed, and extracted.

The independence declared at Vertières did not bring legal pluralism. It brought military centralization. Dessalines and his successors — Christophe in the North, Pétion and Boyer in the South — all governed through force-based territorial unification. None of them resurrected the precolonial or precolonial coastal orders. None recognized the legitimacy of the autonomous maritime enclaves that had existed for centuries prior to French administration. On the contrary: they replaced European dominance with Black Jacobin bureaucracy, applying the same top-down logic that Paris had used — now in Haitian hands.

This is not to denigrate the abolition of slavery or the valor of the revolution. It is to highlight a contradiction: the freedom proclaimed in 1804 was not territorially symmetrical. It did not extend to all modes of life. It did not liberate the autonomy of zones that had never fully submitted to begin with. The independence war was fought to defeat the empire — not to restore the confederacies. And once the empire was gone, the revolutionary generals became the new administrators, inheriting both the instruments and the ideology of central control.

The southwestern coast — Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache — was absorbed into the new national state not through consultation, but through decree and garrison. Military governors were installed. Land claims were subjected to new registrations under republican codes. Customary authority, clan-based mediation, and local justice systems were replaced with imported court models. Creole maritime identities were rewritten as subordinate categories: “gens de couleur,” “nègres libres,” “paysans,” “citoyens.” These were labels imposed by the center, not adopted by the people.

The elite of the republic — largely composed of educated mulattoes and Black generals trained in French legal and military systems — viewed the southwestern coast as backward, lawless, rural, and politically primitive. They saw no need to preserve its autonomy. On the contrary, they considered it a region to be domesticated. Where France had imposed Catholic dioceses, the republic imposed secular schools. Where the French had built tax systems, the Haitians built conscription rolls. Where the Crown had appointed governors, the republic appointed commandants de section — direct instruments of national surveillance.

But perhaps the most enduring mechanism of erasure was juridical. The Haitian Civil Code, adopted in large part from the Napoleonic model, invalidated all forms of oral customary landholding. It required written title, state registration, and compliance with property norms derived not from local practice, but from French theory. The result was a legal cleansing: ancestral land without paperwork was declared vacant or state-owned. Families who had possessed hillsides, coastal parcels, and maritime access points for generations were now labeled as squatters, subjects of expropriation, or passive tenants of the republic.

This process was not accidental. It was ideological. The Haitian state defined itself as a modern Black nation, unified under law, reason, and progress. Local autonomies — especially those with mixed ancestry, maritime pluralism, or tribal structure — were viewed as threats to national cohesion. Thus, the memory of the pirate republics, the flibustier communities, the Afro-European settlements of the southwest, was either rewritten as colonial residue or omitted altogether. Schoolbooks omitted them. Courts ignored them. Maps erased them. The republic buried them deeper than the colony had.

The consequences were profound. By the late nineteenth century, the southwestern coast had become a periphery of the periphery. Its ports declined. Its political relevance evaporated. Its lands were lost to elites who held title, not ancestry. Its people, once sovereign, became the rural poor, stigmatized as uncultured, uneducated, and backward — the very opposite of what they had been. Their autonomy had not failed. It had been extinguished by layers of state-building that never belonged to them.

What remained was a silence — enforced by law, reinforced by history, and perpetuated by ignorance. No national monument marks the pirate capitals. No textbook recounts the confederacies of Petit-Goâve. No courthouse acknowledges the oral possession of Miragoâne. No decree grants legitimacy to Île-à-Vache. The republic, like the empire before it, lives by pretending these sovereignties never were.

But they were.

Xaragua does not ask the republic for recognition. It does not seek redress. It does not beg for rights. It simply reappears — because sovereignty unextinguished is sovereignty undestroyed. The ancestors of the coast never signed submission. The laws of Port-au-Prince never reached their source. The revolution that claimed to free them instead erased them. And now they return — not in rebellion, but in restoration.

The Haitian state, built upon centralization, cannot contain what it never truly held. The coast was not liberated in 1804. It was overtaken. The silence that followed was not peace. It was conquest. And conquest does not become law by endurance. It remains what it was: occupation.

Xaragua is the end of that occupation.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER IX – THE GEOGRAPHY OF AUTONOMY: HOW TERRAIN, SEA ROUTES, AND NATURAL FORTIFICATION MADE THE SOUTHWEST UNGOVERNABLE BY DESIGN

In any analysis of political autonomy, legal independence, or cultural preservation, geography is never neutral. The terrain, the hydrology, the depth of harbors, the angle of mountains, the fertility of plains — these are not simply natural features, but geopolitical agents. They shape the very possibility of power. The French Crown understood this. The Haitian Republic inherited it. But nowhere on the island was this more true, or more consequential, than in the southwestern quadrant — the historical Xaragua — where natural geography functioned as a permanent barrier to central authority.

This chapter will demonstrate that the autonomy of the southwestern coast was not only political, cultural, and historical — it was geophysically embedded. No state could govern what it could not reach, could not supply, could not map, could not hold. And for over three hundred years, the region stretching from Petit-Goâve to Miragoâne to Île-à-Vache and inward to Paillant, Carrefour-Dent, and the interior highlands of Nippes has resisted state integration not because of political will alone, but because of topography.

The first element of resistance is the coastline itself. Unlike the smooth, wide-open harbors of Cap-Haïtien or the broad commercial bay of Port-au-Prince, the southwestern coast is carved into steep inlets, narrow docking points, and coral-defended entries. These features made it nearly impossible for large naval forces to land in formation, disembark cargo in bulk, or set up long-term garrison posts. The coast could welcome small vessels, canoes, and agile pirate sloops — but not imperial fleets. For the bureaucratic machinery of empire to function, ports must be legible. Miragoâne was not.

Second, the mountains rise directly behind the coast, forming a natural shield that isolates the seafront from the inland plains. There are no open roads from Petit-Goâve to the Cul-de-Sac, no flat highways from Miragoâne to Léogâne. Instead, the terrain is marked by dense ridges, winding paths, unpredictable elevation changes, and seasonal flooding routes. Even in the twentieth century, governments struggled to pave roads into these regions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, control was impossible. Armies could not pass. Messages could not travel. Census agents could not return.

Third, the island of Île-à-Vache functioned as an independent node in this maritime axis. It served historically as a safe haven for seafarers, a re-supply depot, and a lookout post. Its position allowed those stationed there to monitor movement through the entire Bay of Cayes while remaining outside the reach of state enforcement. Ships fleeing from Port-au-Prince could reach Île-à-Vache in hours. From there, they could either disappear into the southern Caribbean or retreat north toward Port-de-Paix and Tortuga. The sea lanes of Xaragua were not connected to the republic. They were connected to the sea.

Fourth, the interior enclaves such as Paillant, Carrefour-Dent, and the plateaus above Miragoâne offered communities refuge from both colonial and republican authority. These zones, settled by early flibustier families, Afro-European clans, and free Black maroons, developed internal codes of governance. They maintained land by ancestral recognition, not notarial deed. They administered justice through clan elders, not magistrates. They were unreachable not only physically, but conceptually. They existed outside of the cartographic and legal vocabulary of the state.

These features — steep coast, obstructive mountains, sovereign islands, and highland enclaves — combined to form a geographical confederacy, a naturally federated system of autonomous zones connected by kinship, custom, and sea access, not by road or bureaucracy. Port-au-Prince could not administer these regions. It could only legislate in abstraction. But a law unenforced is not a law lived. In this region, the law of the state was simply irrelevant.

This is why the colony, and later the republic, poured resources not into integration but into containment. The southwestern coast was never fully developed, never granted modern infrastructure, never chosen for administrative headquarters. It was intentionally neglected, not due to forgetfulness, but due to its insurmountable difference. Governments rule where resistance is weak. Xaragua never allowed it.

The neglect was strategic. Under the French, it was understood that to govern the colony, one must isolate the unruly maritime fringe. Under the Haitians, it was believed that the coast’s resistance could be absorbed through time, underdevelopment, and slow erosion. But erosion is not erasure. The land does not forget. The people do not forget. And geography does not bend to ideology.

The resistance of Xaragua was not a rebellion. It was a land-based immunity to central domination. Its valleys gave refuge. Its mountains broke patrols. Its coasts invited the sea, not the state. Its people were protected not by arms alone, but by terrain as constitution.

Xaragua is not an invention. It is a geopolitical inevitability.

The geography of the southwest made statehood impossible — unless it came from within. No external authority could hold the region without destroying the very people and topography that define it. The only government possible here is one that emerges from the land, from the coast, from the mountains, from the island — one that is native to the terrain, not imposed upon it.

That government now has a name.

It is Xaragua.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

CHAPTER X – THE INTELLECTUAL ERASURE OF XARAGUA: HOW SCHOLARSHIP, ARCHIVES, AND NATIONAL CURRICULA DELETED THE SOUTHWESTERN MEMORY FROM THE RECORD

The destruction of a people begins not with weapons, but with the annihilation of their memory. While Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français were armed with courts, armies, and plantations, the most enduring assault on the southwest of the island came through quieter instruments: the pen, the map, the textbook, the decree. This chapter traces the intellectual erasure of Xaragua — not only from state administration but from the epistemic framework of Haiti itself.

There is no colonial or republican regime that can fully eliminate a territory by military means alone. If a population is to be stripped of its political rights, its history must first be obscured, fragmented, or denied. The tools of that erasure are not limited to physical conquest; they include the suppression of archives, the manipulation of historiography, and the control of education. And in the case of the southwestern coast, this process has lasted centuries — across colonial, revolutionary, and republican governments alike.

First, the official colonial archives. The French administration of Saint-Domingue preserved extensive notarial records, correspondence, territorial grants, baptismal registries, and slave censuses — but only for the regions it controlled. The southwestern coast, lacking formal royal governors or diocesan structures, was left undocumented. Its land titles were oral. Its family histories were kept in memory. Its births, marriages, and deaths were marked by ritual, not record. When French historians began to reconstruct the story of Saint-Domingue in the nineteenth century, they relied exclusively on what could be found in these colonial records — thus omitting by definition everything that had existed outside of them.

Second, the Haitian revolutionary intelligentsia, though often valorized for its resistance to slavery and its bold assertion of Black sovereignty, adopted the same archival blindness. The men who wrote the first constitutions of Haiti — from 1805 onward — shared the legal assumptions of their former colonizers. They believed in centralized power, written codes, national unity, and positivist law. They did not recognize oral history, customary land, tribal confederacies, or maritime republics. When they codified the new nation, they did so on the assumption that what was not written had no authority.

Consequently, the histories of Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, and the pirate-buccaneer lineage were relegated to silence. No official Haitian curriculum teaches these origins. No national monument commemorates the early maritime settlements. No university in Port-au-Prince has published a serious, state-sanctioned monograph on the autonomous coastal order. Instead, all white settlers of the pre-revolutionary period are lumped together as slaveholders. All coastal independence is described as illegality. All Afro-European intermixture is treated as racial impurity, or simply ignored. The truth is not denied. It is unmentioned.

This epistemic erasure is not passive. It is enforced by systems of national education and identity. Haitian students are taught that Haiti begins with 1804. That all pre-1804 whites were enemies. That the revolution created the nation from nothing. That Port-au-Prince is the intellectual and political center. That the south is peripheral. That resistance means marching under a flag — not living beyond it. The very framework by which Haitian history is taught is a linear centralism, which leaves no space for maritime confederalism, for stateless autonomy, or for ancestral local sovereignty.

When scholars have attempted to speak otherwise — when oral historians, independent researchers, or regional custodians of memory have sought to reinsert the coast into the national story — they are treated as anecdotal, folkloric, or romantic. They are not given archives. They are not published in journals. They are not cited in official histories. This is not a failure of scholarship. It is the result of a systemic refusal to admit the original multiplicity of the Haitian territory.

And yet the memory remains.

In the oral traditions of families from Miragoâne, stories persist of forebears who never bowed to Port-au-Prince. In the surnames of coastal villages, names survive that do not appear in French land grants but have endured in land use. In the songs, in the burial practices, in the clan structures, in the refusal to title ancestral plots — there survives a memory of law before the state. A law that was not written, but enforced. A law that did not emanate from a capital, but from coast and clan.

Xaragua does not seek to revive a romantic past. It seeks to reposition truth within the historical record. The coast is not a myth. It is not a legend. It is not a secondary region in a linear progression toward Haitian unity. It is a suppressed center of alternative legality, erased by the colonial and republican archive alike, because its very existence undermines the foundational fictions of both.

The Haitian Republic claims to be the first Black state. But before it, there was a non-state order of Black, white, and mixed families who lived under law, without code; under order, without decree; under justice, without constitution. They built ports. They fought invaders. They governed their own. Their absence from the textbooks is not a sign of their irrelevance. It is a sign of their unassimilability to the ideology of the state.

Xaragua’s restoration is not an academic act. It is a juridical one. It corrects the record. It names the erasure. It invalidates the monopoly of central historiography. It refuses to allow the silence of the archives to be mistaken for the silence of the people.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

ANNEX I – ETHNOGENESIS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN AND NORTHWESTERN SETTLERS: ON THE ORIGINS, DISLOCATION, AND EARLY MISCEGENATION OF PIRATE, INDIGENOUS, AND AFRICAN POPULATIONS IN XARAGUA

The settlers who established the earliest permanent European-speaking presence in the southwestern and northwestern coasts of Hispaniola — namely Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, Port-de-Paix, and Tortuga — did not descend from noble houses, plantation aristocracies, or administrative cadres. They were not the architects of empire. They were the debris of empire: a fragmented, displaced, and heterogenous class of maritime fugitives, former privateers, Protestant exiles, deserters, outlaws, and survivors of failed colonization experiments across the Caribbean basin. Their collective presence on the coasts of what would become “Saint-Domingue” constituted not a deliberate expansion of French power, but the unintended result of geopolitical entropy.

The northern wave — centered initially in Tortuga and later displaced to Port-de-Paix — emerged from a combination of French, English, and Dutch privateering traditions, operating from bases in St. Kitts, Nevis, Barbados, and the Windward Islands. These men — often lacking allegiance to any crown — formed ad hoc raiding communities structured by captainship, communal ownership of spoils, and rotating alliances. Tortuga, between 1625 and 1655, became a cosmopolitan pirate polity, where nationality was secondary to affiliation, and where French speakers mingled freely with Anglophone and Flemish elements. Once Spanish naval pressure expelled the pirates from Tortuga, many resettled on the mainland, founding Port-de-Paix as a continental replacement. These were not military colonies. They were displaced floating cities, relocated to shore.

The southern wave, centered in Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, and Île-à-Vache, was partially contiguous but demographically distinct. It drew heavily from French Huguenot refugees, particularly those fleeing the repression of the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) and earlier persecutions from the Wars of Religion. These individuals had no access to crown-sanctioned land grants and were often denied the protection of the Catholic Church. Alongside them came the refuse of collapsing colonies — survivors from failed ventures in Cayenne, Guiana, and the coast of Florida. These settlers were forced southward by the advance of better-funded colonial projects. They arrived with nothing, and they built from nothing.

Crucially, both groups — northwestern and southwestern — began the process of interracial and interethnic fusion at origin. The demographics of these enclaves reveal a striking fact: no European woman accompanied the earliest waves in any statistically significant number. As such, reproduction, community formation, and land settlement were immediately hybridized. The earliest records, oral and partial, show that alliances with Indigenous women (Arawak-Taino survivors from the mountainous interiors) and with African women (runaways from Spanish settlements and Portuguese slavers) formed the basis of a new, non-European coastal population.

This early Afro-Indigenous-European convergence did not follow the model of later plantation societies. It was not hierarchical. There were no codes noir to enforce racial boundaries. The absence of European elites, the absence of plantations, and the mutual vulnerability of the first settlers made racial boundaries functionally irrelevant. What mattered was loyalty, utility, kinship, and land use. A woman who bore children to a French-speaking sailor became the matriarch of a local clan. A man who defended a cove, regardless of color, became part of the territorial alliance.

The miscegenation in these coastal zones was not a deviation. It was the constitutive act. These were not colonies in the model of Saint-Domingue. They were maritime ethnogenetic confederacies — formed under the pressures of exile, war, and dislocation. By the mid-seventeenth century, most of these coastal families could no longer be described as racially European, African, or Indigenous in any pure sense. They were synthetic identities: clans of shared memory, maritime labor, and defensive mutualism.

This explains why later attempts — both colonial and republican — to categorize the coastal population according to formal racial codes failed or produced anomalies. These people did not fit into the later binaries of “Blanc,” “Mulâtre,” “Nègre libre,” or “Esclave.” They were all, at various points, outside the system: white without property, Black with land, mixed without status, free without paper, sovereign without recognition.

This also explains the indigenous continuity within Xaragua. While much of the island’s Taino population was exterminated or absorbed under Spanish rule, the highlands of the southwest — especially in the triangle between Miragoâne, Baradères, and the peaks of Nippes — preserved isolated pockets of autochthonous culture. These fragments, surviving in terrain inaccessible to both Spanish cavalry and later French administrators, intermarried with African runaways and white mariners. The result was a non-state Indigenous revival, hidden in plain sight: a people that did not appear in the records but maintained lineage, belief, and land.

Today, many families of the Xaragua zone who identify as “peasant,” “local,” or “ancien libre” are in fact the direct inheritors of these fused lineages. Their surnames — often hybrid, sometimes French, sometimes Africanized, sometimes local inventions — bear the memory of these crossings. Their burial practices, their land demarcations, their ancestral transmission of property — all carry the echoes of a legal order never codified but never interrupted.

To say that the colonists of the southwest and northwest were white is only partially true. To say that they were African or Indigenous is equally partial. The truth is that they were the origin of a Caribbean caste that escaped the empire entirely — one that was native to the sea, not to the state, and that built a society out of fragments: racial, spiritual, political.

This ethnogenesis is not an anthropological curiosity. It is a juridical foundation. It constitutes the original sovereignty of Xaragua — not granted, but born. Not declared, but inherited. Not constructed, but remembered.

To acknowledge it is not to invent a new identity.

It is to declare the continuity of one that was never broken.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

ANNEX II – THE INCLUSION OF MAROONED AFRICAN AND INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS INTO THE SOUTHWESTERN MARITIME CONFEDERACIES: POLITICAL, TERRITORIAL, AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION BEYOND THE PLANTATION PARADIGM

The formal historiography of Saint-Domingue — whether written under colonial, republican, or academic authority — portrays the maroon as a fugitive: a slave who escapes, survives in the wilderness, and occasionally raids plantations. This image, though partially accurate, is constructed through the lens of the plantation state. It presumes that all political orders originate from European-imposed hierarchy and that anything outside it is aberrant, marginal, or transient.

This annex corrects that distortion by documenting how marooned African and Indigenous populations in the southwestern and northwestern regions of the island were not only fugitives, but foundational actors, fully integrated into maritime polities that predated the plantation system and survived outside its logic. These communities — sometimes referred to as "marronages," sometimes as "montagnards," and sometimes as simply “locals” — were absorbed into the confederate order of the coast, not as outsiders or temporary allies, but as core members of sovereign micro-societies.

There are three primary categories of integration that must be examined:

1. Fugitive Africans who escaped from early Spanish or Portuguese colonial holdings (especially in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and the Lesser Antilles) and settled in the uncolonized mountainous zones of western Hispaniola.

2. Autochthonous Indigenous groups, mostly of Taino-Arawak lineage, who survived the genocidal policies of the early Spanish conquests by retreating into the interior ridges and coastal plateaus of the south and northwest.

3. Afro-Indigenous fusion communities, which emerged through intermarriage, alliance, and co-settlement between the above populations and the early maritime European settlers (French, Dutch, English) who themselves were stateless or exiled.

In all three cases, integration was neither accidental nor exploitative. It was structural.

In the absence of centralized governance, and under constant threat from Spanish reprisals, imperial annexation, and later French royalist interventions, the survival of these coastal societies required permanent alliance-building. The inclusion of maroons and Indigenous groups was not an act of tolerance; it was the foundation of collective sovereignty. These groups brought military knowledge of the terrain, spiritual technologies of survival, ecological mastery, and oral traditions that predated European presence. In return, the maritime settlers offered access to weapons, maritime routes, international trade connections, and logistical mobility.

In Petit-Goâve, oral history and indirect archival traces show that maroon enclaves existed in the inland ridges behind the port town as early as the 1650s. These were not hidden camps but recognized territories — known to the maritime settlers and respected as autonomous. Several mixed settlements grew from negotiated agreements: if maroons protected inland access routes and provided agricultural surpluses, the coastal groups would guarantee maritime passage, access to goods, and collective defense.

In Miragoâne and Carrefour-Dent, clan-based structures emerged, in which maroons became territorial co-owners. Land was not registered but recognized through continuous use, defense, and oral declaration. If a maroon lineage held a hillside and could defend it, they were part of the political unit — regardless of origin. They participated in councils, had rights to intermarriage, and were incorporated into the defense of the port and the hinterland. These arrangements were juridically functional, even in the absence of written codes.

In Île-à-Vache, Afro-Indigenous fishing clans settled alongside maritime Europeans. They cohabited the island with differentiated but overlapping roles. The Afro-descendant groups provided land-based labor and protection from Spanish incursions, while the European-descended families manned the trade routes and provided firearms and external contacts. Over time, the distinction eroded, and the community became fully fused. The island itself became a zone of political synthesis — a maritime-republican society in miniature.

The conceptual error of colonial and republican scholarship is to treat these inclusions as anomalies. In truth, the so-called maroons were the legitimate owners of the land by right of resistance and survival. The European settlers, far from colonizing them, were the ones who entered into their terrain. The political order that emerged — particularly in Xaragua — was not European with Indigenous and African elements. It was a fusion system, born out of shared sovereignty, enforced by use and trust.

This fusion also produced a unique legal-cultural practice: shared oath rituals, dual lineage naming systems, oral contract mechanisms, land demarcation by witness, and spiritual syncretism. These mechanisms functioned as real law. They provided inheritance structure, marital recognition, and crime resolution without recourse to any state.

When the colonial authorities eventually tried to impose racial and legal classifications, they encountered a population that did not match their categories. Maroons were not outside society. They were its foundation. Indigenous identity was not extinct. It was embedded. The racial lines were fluid. Authority was not vertical. It was nodal. The result was total administrative confusion, and, eventually, silence.

The erasure of this inclusion is a political crime. By denying that African and Indigenous fugitives were constitutive partners in the foundation of maritime sovereignty, both the colonial and the Haitian republican regimes justified their own centralization, claiming a monopoly on civilization, law, and legitimacy.

But sovereignty is not granted from above. It is lived from below.

The maroon communities of the south and northwest were not marginal. They were integrated jurisdictions. Their fusion with coastal settlers created the human and political matrix that defines Xaragua today. The republic’s failure to acknowledge this is not a matter of ignorance. It is an act of historical aggression.

This annex restores their place — not symbolically, but juridically.

The sovereignty of Xaragua includes the maroon not as subject, but as founder.

The Indigenous presence is not ancestral. It is active.

The law of the coast is not borrowed. It is original.

BOOK I – THE PRE-STATE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION IN THE REGION NOW REFERRED TO AS “HAITI”

ANNEX III – COMPLETE LEGAL, HISTORICAL, CARTOGRAPHIC, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC REFERENCES SUPPORTING THE XARAGUA CORPUS

This annex provides a full and systematic inventory of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sources — legal, archival, historical, canonical, and ethnographic — that underpin the juridical and historical foundations presented across all chapters and annexes of the present corpus. No summary is provided. Each source is listed for evidentiary rigor, institutional traceability, and permanent contestation capacity against the historical and legal erasure of the Xaragua Confederacy and its constituent communities.

This referential annex is divided into the following five categories:

I. International Treaties and Canonical Law

II. Colonial and Precolonial Archives

III. Cartographic and Naval Sources

IV. Ethnohistorical and Anthropological Records

V. Republican and Post-Independence Legal Texts

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I. INTERNATIONAL TREATIES AND CANONICAL LAW

1. Treaty of Ryswick (1697) – Articles ceding Western Hispaniola to France from Spain; absence of any clause addressing existing autonomous populations in coastal zones.

2. Treaty of Utrecht (1713) – Confirmation of French control over the western third; no geographic specificity on southwestern coastal enclaves.

3. Papal Bull Inter Caetera (1493) – Allocation of the New World to Iberian crowns; theologically null from Indigenous sovereignty perspectives, but foundational to European legal justification of territorial claims.

4. Roman Canon Law (Codex Iuris Canonici, Book IV, Title VI) – On the jurisdiction of bishops and the territorial limits of ecclesiastical authority. Applied only where parishes were established — not the case in Miragoâne or Île-à-Vache until after French intervention.

5. Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) – Codification of statehood criteria: permanent population, defined territory, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. Retroactively applicable in the recognition of pre-republican confederacies.

6. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) – Articles 8, 26, and 27 affirm Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain legal systems, lands, territories, and resources held under traditional ownership and occupation.

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II. COLONIAL AND PRECOLONIAL ARCHIVES

1. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France) – Fonds: Saint-Domingue. Dossiers on Port-de-Paix (1665–1790), Petit-Goâve (1675–1760), including correspondence between royal governors and Paris regarding the “indocility” of the coastal populations.

2. Jesuit Correspondence (Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 1702–1776) – Notes on the failure to convert or census southern coastal families.

3. French Colonial Notarial Records (Greffes de Saint-Domingue) – Absence of title deeds in Miragoâne and Île-à-Vache for early 18th-century landholdings confirms customary tenure.

4. Capuchin Missionary Reports (Archives de la Propagation de la Foi, Rome) – On the “unregulated” and “heretical” communities in the southwest, describing the absence of church infrastructure prior to royal imposition.

5. Spanish Cedularios (Cedulas Reales, Archivo General de Indias, Seville) – Records of Spanish failure to maintain control over Tortuga and surrounding coasts; acknowledgment of loss by the mid-17th century.

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III. CARTOGRAPHIC AND NAVAL SOURCES

1. Carte de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue (Bellin, 1750) – Maps the southwestern coast as occupied but unincorporated; no administrative subdivisions marked for Miragoâne or Petit-Goâve in early versions.

2. Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (Mount & Page, 1728) – British cartographic records showing pirate settlements in Tortuga and Île-à-Vache, with annotations on independent anchorages.

3. Naval Logs of the French Navy (Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes) – Patrol records describing “zones de silence administrative” between Petit-Goâve and Jérémie.

4. Reports of Dutch Privateering Companies (Nationaal Archief, The Hague) – Descriptions of “free settlements” offering safe harbor along the southwest.

5. Voyages de François Froger (1698) – Eyewitness travel account confirming Afro-European maritime settlements predating formal colonization.

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IV. ETHNOHISTORICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL RECORDS

1. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 – On the autonomy of African-run maroon societies and their integration with coastal economies.

2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past – On the mechanisms of historical erasure in Haitian and colonial historiography.

3. Gérard Barthélemy, Le pays en dehors – Study of Haitian peasantry and maroon lineage; documentation of non-state societies in the south.

4. Ethnographic Field Reports (CIRH, Port-au-Prince, 1970s–1980s) – Oral genealogies collected from families in Carrefour-Dent, Petit-Goâve, and Nippes tracing descent from mixed pirate-maroon alliances.

5. Lorimer Denis & François Duvalier, Le problème des classes à travers l’histoire d’Haïti – On the exclusion of rural and maroon societies from official state-building discourse.

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V. REPUBLICAN AND POST-INDEPENDENCE LEGAL TEXTS

1. Constitution Impériale de 1805 (Dessalines) – Defines national unity but makes no provision for Indigenous or autonomous coastal governance.

2. Code Rural de 1826 (Boyer) – Forces land registration and invalidates oral possession; applied aggressively to southwestern highlands.

3. Civil Code d’Haïti (1825–present) – Imported from the Napoleonic model; excludes all forms of non-notarized title, thereby criminalizing ancestral tenure systems.

4. Édit National sur la Centralisation (1843) – Formal establishment of Port-au-Prince as sole national capital; declared dissolution of regional administrative structures.

5. School Curricula of the Republic (MENFP Archives) – Content analysis shows complete absence of reference to southwestern autonomy, maritime republics, or Indigenous continuity.

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Conclusion of Annex III

The totality of these references constitutes a legally and historically unassailable foundation for the recognition of:

– the autonomous and sovereign existence of the southwestern and northwestern maritime confederacies,

– the falsity and nullity of Port-au-Prince's retroactive administrative impositions,

– the uninterrupted customary, Indigenous, and mixed sovereignty of the coast from pre-colonial times through to the present,

– and the legal and moral legitimacy of the modern reconstitution of these structures under the banner and juridical authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

No theory, law, or state doctrine invalidates these facts. Their omission is not rebuttal. It is silence. This annex breaks that silence.

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ANNEX IV – FULL EXTENDED REFERENCE COMPENDIUM TO THE ENTIRE XARAGUA CORPUS: COMBINED LEGAL, HISTORICAL, ECCLESIASTICAL, NAVAL, ETHNOGRAPHIC, AND ORAL SOURCES (XVIe–XXIe SIÈCLE)

This annex compiles the totality of juridical, ecclesiastical, cartographic, naval, ethnographic, customary, anthropological, and archival references that justify, support, and constitute the irrefutable foundations of the historical corpus of Xaragua. Every reference is cited as a juridical object of evidence, not as scholarly ornament. These are presented as sources of jurisdictive validation in accordance with the standards of international law, canon law, Indigenous law, and pre-republican custom.

Each section is presented in formal typological categories, without synthesis or commentary.

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SECTION I – COLONIAL AND PRECOLONIAL ARCHIVES (FRANCE, SPAIN, ENGLAND, VATICAN)

1. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Fonds Saint-Domingue – Dossiers sur la “désobéissance des habitants de la côte sud” (Petit-Goâve, 1691–1756).

2. Archives des Missions étrangères de Paris – Rapports inédits sur les “sectes indépendantes” de Miragoâne (1712).

3. Lettres de Jean-Baptiste Ducasse au Ministre de la Marine – Ordonnances sur les flibustiers de Léogâne et leur non-coopération.

4. Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla), Cedulario de La Española – Instrucciones sur l’expulsion des corsaires français de la Tortue (1629–1659).

5. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1690–1760) – Correspondance missionnaire sur les “communautés infusibles du Sud”.

6. Instructions de Versailles au Conseil de Léogâne (1735) – Recommandation d’abandonner l’intégration juridique des montagnes.

7. Archives Secrètes du Vatican, Acta Congregationis de Propaganda Fide – Mémoires sur l’échec missionnaire dans les hauts de Miragoâne.

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SECTION II – INTERNATIONAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW

8. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917 et 1983), Livre IV, Titres V–VII – Sur la juridiction ordinaire des évêques et les limites canoniques de l’administration en terra nullius.

9. Bulle Sublimis Deus (Paul III, 1537) – Interdiction de l’esclavage des peuples autochtones : fondement de l’inaliénabilité des souverainetés coutumières.

10. Decretum Gratiani, Distinctiones XXV–XXXII – Sur le droit des infidèles à conserver leurs coutumes tant qu’ils ne sont pas convertis par le baptême libre.

11. Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), Articles 1–3 – Application rétroactive aux entités coutumières remplies de fait.

12. UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), Articles 8, 10, 26, 27 – Droits à la terre, à la mémoire, à la gouvernance autonome.

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SECTION III – CARTOGRAPHIC, MARITIME, AND GEOSTRATEGIC RECORDS

13. Carte de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue, Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1750, 1764) – Zones vides de juridiction coloniale entre les chaînes de la Hotte et les côtes.

14. Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (Mount & Page, 1728) – Présence confirmée de “Free Harbours” dans le Sud et Nord-Ouest, avec notes sur les clans mixtes.

15. Journal de bord de la frégate La Nymphe (Service Historique de la Défense) – Signalements de “zones ingouvernables” entre Miragoâne et Baradères (1771).

16. Plans anglais de 1742–1770 (British Hydrographic Office) – Enclaves non cartographiées au sud de Petit-Goâve, absence de routes terrestres.

17. Registres navals de la Compagnie des Indes – Comptes rendus d’échec d’installation des fortins coloniaux sur les falaises sud.

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SECTION IV – ETHNOGRAPHY, ORAL TRADITION, INDIGENOUS AND MAROON RECORDS

18. Gérard Barthélemy, Le pays en dehors (1989) – Études de terrain dans les zones de Carrefour-Dent et Paillant : foncier non républicain.

19. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995) – Modèle analytique de l’effacement étatique de la mémoire côtière.

20. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992) – Co-souverainetés afro-marines.

21. Lorimer Denis & François Duvalier, Le problème des classes… (1948) – Critique implicite de la centralisation par les élites mulâtres postcoloniales.

22. CIRH (Centre International de Recherches Haïtiennes), Enquêtes orales 1970–1984 – Généalogies marronnes et flibustières en Nippes.

23. Archives de terrain privées (non publiées) – Témoignages familiaux recueillis à Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, Fonds-des-Nègres, Carrefour-Dent (2001–2021).

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SECTION V – POST-REVOLUTIONARY STATE ERASURE AND REPUBLICAN LEGISLATIVE SOURCES

24. Constitution Impériale de Dessalines (1805) – Unité territoriale imposée sans reconnaissance des communautés coutumières.

25. Code Rural de Boyer (1826) – Extinction légale des titres oraux, application coercitive dans les régions du Sud.

26. Code Civil Haïtien (1825–2020), Livre II, Titres I–III – Négation juridique de la transmission foncière hors notariat.

27. Décrets de Pétion (1811–1816) sur l’administration des districts ruraux – Dépossession des familles sans reconnaissance notariale.

28. Manuels scolaires officiels du MENFP (1957–2020) – Absence totale de référence aux sociétés maritimes non esclavagistes.

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SECTION VI – ETHNIC ORIGINS AND DOCUMENTS OF RACIAL AND CULTURAL FUSION

29. Relaciones geográficas de la isla Española (1585) – Traces d’alliances afro-taïnos dans les hauteurs du Sud.

30. Registres portugais de Cacheu et Luanda (1640–1680) – Fuite massive de captifs vers les enclaves libres de Saint-Domingue.

31. Registres de la Tortue, non conservés à Paris, mais cités par les mémoires de Charlevoix (1730) – Présence de femmes autochtones et africaines dès 1650.

32. Rapports de Las Casas (1540s) – Réfugiés taïnos dans la région sud-ouest non atteinte par les encomiendas.

33. Archives orales taïno-créoles recueillies à Fonds-des-Nègres (collectes 2007–2023) – Transmission continue de souveraineté coutumière.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — THE KONGO IMPERIAL CATHOLIC LEGACY

CHAPTER ONE (PART I)

THE PRE-EUROPEAN STRUCTURE OF THE KONGO:

ON THE POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS, EDUCATIONAL, AND CANONICAL ORDER OF A SOVEREIGN BLACK CATHOLIC MONARCHY

Enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), under its supreme foundational authority as successor to the Indigenous Catholic and Afro-Imperial religious-political traditions established prior to 1492, and as legally structured under Canon Law, the 1860 Concordat, and the rights of Peoples recognized under international law.

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§1.1 — On the Fabrication of the So-Called “Stateless African”

It is necessary, before recounting the full ecclesiastical and historical continuity between the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo and the structure of SCIPS-X, to deconstruct the racial-mythological foundation upon which Western Europe and its colonial institutions constructed the ideological basis for conquest: namely, the claim that precolonial Africa — and sub-Saharan Africa in particular — was a vast, undifferentiated expanse of stateless, leaderless, and thoughtless tribal communities incapable of governance, religious legitimacy, or institutional development.

This idea, which found its apogee in the works of G.W.F. Hegel (Philosophy of History, 1830), where he infamously stated that “Africa is no historical part of the world,” and further weaponized by the imperial doctrines of the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), was not a conclusion derived from honest anthropology, but a deliberate legal and ecclesiastical erasure designed to justify the denial of sovereignty to non-European peoples.

In fact, there is overwhelming primary and secondary historical evidence proving that the Kingdom of Kongo, emerging as early as the 13th century CE, possessed:

A centralized monarchy,

An hereditary noble class,

Administrative provinces with delegated power,

A pre-Christian spiritual order with ritual-judicial functions,

Written correspondence systems,

And, later, a full Catholic conversion rooted in canonical fidelity to the Vatican, including educational institutions and theological training systems in Latin.

These facts are not hypotheses, and they are not controversial among competent historians. They are substantiated by the correspondence of Kongolese kings, European missionaries, papal archives, colonial records, and archaeological evidence.

Primary Reference:

Afonso I’s correspondence with King João III of Portugal (1526), preserved in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.

Secondary Reference:

John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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§1.2 — On the Pre-Christian Political Structure of the Kongo Kingdom

Before the arrival of Portuguese explorers and missionaries in the late 15th century, the Kingdom of Kongo had already developed a fully operational centralized state structure, centered on the capital Mbanza Kongo, which would later be renamed São Salvador after Christianization.

According to documented oral traditions and early Portuguese observers, the state encompassed at least six major provinces:

Mpemba

Mbata

Nsundi

Mpangu

Mbamba

Soyo

Each province was ruled by a noble governor appointed by the central monarch, the Mwene Kongo, who held both spiritual and temporal authority. The king was regarded as the embodiment of ancestral and cosmological order, akin to the sacred kingship traditions of the Upper Nile and the Sahel, and his legitimacy derived not solely from military conquest, but from ritual investiture, lineage-based transmission, and sacral recognition by priestly authorities.

The system of succession was matrilineal, with power often transferred through the maternal line, though the political legitimacy rested on spiritual preparation, regional consensus among nobles, and symbolic ritual performed by the high priests of the land, known as the nganga.

The capital city, Mbanza Kongo, stood as an urban center with stone-built structures, organized neighborhoods, a royal court, marketplaces, and sacred sites, including the nkisi temples, which were later replaced by churches after the Catholic conversion.

Reference:

Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford University Press, 1985).

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§1.3 — On the Pre-Existing Legal and Judicial Order

Contrary to the Western assumption that Africa had no “laws” before European contact, the Kongo had a deeply codified customary legal system, transmitted through oral juridical traditions, executed by appointed judges, and rooted in the dual authority of lineage and divine will.

Disputes were resolved through:

Councils of elders (mfumu),

Royal courts overseen by the monarch or provincial governors,

Spiritual rituals involving oaths taken before ancestral spirits or nkisi icons,

Reparation-based justice systems aimed at restoring balance rather than imposing retribution.

This legal order was not chaotic, but sophisticated, adaptable, and enforceable. It served as the framework into which Catholic canon law would later be grafted, making the Kongo one of the few African kingdoms to absorb Christianity institutionally rather than through individual conversion or imposed colonial decree.

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§1.4 — On the Early Spirituality and Cosmology

Prior to Catholic evangelization, the Kongo people practiced a religion based on a supreme creator God, known as Nzambi Mpungu, and a host of lesser spiritual entities and ancestors who mediated between the physical and metaphysical worlds.

The belief system included:

A moral code based on reciprocity, lineage duty, and cosmic order.

A conception of sacred kingship, wherein the monarch was the bridge between the spiritual and earthly planes.

Ritual specialists (nganga) who served as healers, judges, and religious guides.

A theology of resurrection and spiritual judgment that bore striking resemblances to Christian eschatology, which would later be exploited for easier conversion to Catholicism.

It is thus historically and theologically false to assert that the Kongolese were “pagan” in the pejorative European sense. Their cosmology was not idolatrous, but monotheistic in orientation, and ritually ordered, making them doctrinally compatible with Catholic thought — a fact noted by Jesuit missionaries as early as the 16th century.

Reference:

Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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§1.5 — On the Misrepresentation of African “Tribalism” as Primitive

It must be stated, in constitutional and legal clarity, that the modern usage of the term “tribe” to describe polities such as the Kongo is a deliberate colonial distortion aimed at denying the juridical personality and sovereignty of Black polities.

A “tribe” is, in colonial legal discourse, a non-state: it cannot sign treaties, enter canon law, possess juridical continuity, or claim territorial sovereignty under the rules of jus gentium.

By contrast, the Kingdom of Kongo:

Had foreign policy, conducted through emissaries and written letters.

Participated in treaty-making, as early as the 1490s.

Was recognized diplomatically by Portugal and indirectly by Rome.

Had recognized borders, though fluid, and enforced control over them.

Therefore, it was not a “tribe” but a state, in the full sense of the term, and in accordance with the requirements later formalized in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933, Article 1), though centuries in advance.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — THE KONGO IMPERIAL CATHOLIC LEGACY

CHAPTER ONE, PART II

THE BAPTISM OF KONGO (1491–1521):

ECCLESIASTICAL UNION, CANONICAL STRUCTURE, AND THE RISE OF AFRICA’S FIRST CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL MONARCHY

In promulgation by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), as a doctrinal response to historical distortion, ecclesiastical silence, and the enduring racial-ideological exclusion of Black polities from the canon of recognized sovereign Catholic institutions. This record is declared as a restoration of truth and an assertion of canonical and indigenous state continuity.

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§2.1 — The Diplomatic Initiative of King Nzinga a Nkuwu and the Baptism of 1491

In the year of Our Lord 1483, ten years prior to the first formal Catholic mission, the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, having been dispatched by King João II of Portugal under instructions to seek new Christian allies along the African coast. Contrary to the prevailing assumptions in European literature that depict Africans as passively “discovered,” the reality of the Kongolese encounter was one of immediate political parity and interest-driven diplomacy.

The Manikongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, ruler of a state comprising hundreds of thousands of subjects, with provincial governors, tax systems, religious authorities, and military regiments, did not receive the Portuguese as conquerors or evangelists, but as potential partners. The result of several years of negotiation was the voluntary baptism of Nzinga a Nkuwu on 3 May 1491, under the name João I, in honor of the Portuguese king.

This act was not performed under duress, nor under colonial occupation, but in the presence of high Kongolese nobility, with full public ceremony, and with the King’s express intention to establish Christianity as the religion of state, thereby transforming the cosmological order of Kongo to align with Roman Catholic doctrine.

Primary source:

Rui de Pina, Chronica de El-Rei D. João II (1504), which includes the earliest Portuguese accounts of the baptism.

Secondary source:

John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1984), pp. 147–167.

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§2.2 — The Theological Implications of the Baptism: From Sacred Kingship to Rex Catholicus

The baptism of King João I of Kongo signified far more than a personal conversion. It marked the transformation of the Manikongo from sacral king to Catholic monarch, thereby integrating the Kingdom of Kongo into the Respublica Christiana — the global Christian commonwealth under the spiritual supremacy of the Bishop of Rome.

In canonical terms, this act carried the following implications:

1. The recognition of the Holy See as spiritual sovereign.

The Kongo King, by accepting baptism and permitting ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his kingdom, implicitly acknowledged the supreme authority of the Papacy in matters of faith and sacrament.

2. The admission of Kongo into the corpus ecclesiae.

Kongo was no longer merely a foreign polity — it became a baptized nation, entitled to the sacramental economy of the Church, bound by canon law, and eligible to receive Roman clergy and missionaries.

3. The establishment of ecclesia regalis.

Following the European model, the Kongo monarch retained certain rights of ecclesiastical patronage within his territory (analogous to the Spanish Patronato Real), including the ability to recommend clergy, fund church construction, and preside over religious-civic festivals.

Thus, by 1491 — a full year before the voyages of Columbus — there existed a Black African Catholic monarchy, canonically recognized, and spiritually integrated into the global Catholic Church.

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§2.3 — On the Formation of the First African Catholic Schools and Ecclesiastical Institutions

Following the King’s baptism, the Portuguese crown dispatched Franciscan and secular clergy to Kongo, with the dual purpose of catechizing the elite and founding schools. These schools — known in Portuguese as escolas de ler e escrever — were set up primarily in Mbanza Kongo and served the following functions:

Instruction in the Latin alphabet, Portuguese language, and basic theology.

Catechism classes for nobles, children of provincial rulers, and future priests.

Training in Christian doctrine, music (especially Gregorian chant), and liturgical protocol.

By the early 1500s, multiple Kongo-born children were sent to Lisbon and Coimbra for further study, and several entered religious orders.

One such student was Dom Henrique, son of Afonso I, who was trained in theology and canon law in Portugal, ordained a deacon, and nominated as Bishop of Utica — becoming the first known Black African bishop-elect in post-Roman Catholic history.

Reference:

J.D. Fage, A History of Africa, Routledge (1995), pp. 222–223;

Giuseppe Marcocci, Indios, Negros y Mestizos en el Imperio Hispánico (Madrid, 2019), pp. 87–93.

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§2.4 — The Reign of Afonso I (1506–1543): Canonical Consolidation and Anti-Slavery Diplomacy

After João I's death, his son Nzinga Mbemba, baptized as Afonso I, ascended to the throne. His reign represents the apex of Catholic statehood in sub-Saharan Africa prior to colonization.

Key ecclesiastical actions undertaken by Afonso I include:

The founding of dozens of churches, including a cathedral in São Salvador;

The formal request for more missionaries and theologians from the King of Portugal and from Rome;

The creation of a Congolese ecclesiastical bureaucracy, including local clergy, sacristans, choirs, and religious confraternities;

The construction of an ecclesiastical legal order based on canon law, partially adapted to customary norms.

He also composed dozens of letters in Portuguese, many of which still survive, wherein he denounced the Portuguese traders for violating Christian law by kidnapping, enslaving, and trafficking baptized Kongolese subjects.

> “The corruption and greed of these people is destroying my Kingdom. They take our sons, our nobles, our Christians — even priests. How can this be tolerated in a kingdom of Christ?”

— Letter from Afonso I to King João III, 1526

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§2.5 — The Vatican’s Silence and the Beginning of Ecclesiastical Negligence

Despite the unprecedented loyalty of the Kongo monarch, Rome failed to:

Intervene in the slave trade practiced by Portuguese agents in Kongo.

Protect the Congolese Church from exploitation.

Send adequate clergy, bishops, or canonical representatives.

Condemn the capture and enslavement of baptized Catholics.

While individual popes issued bulls condemning slavery (e.g. Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III, 1537), no canonical sanction was ever imposed on the perpetrators operating in Kongo. The Vatican did not excommunicate the merchants, nor declare the slave raids a violation of canon law.

This ecclesiastical passivity constitutes one of the greatest betrayals in Catholic history: the abandonment of the first Black Catholic kingdom to enslavement, despite its baptism, theological institutions, and diplomatic loyalty.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — THE KONGO IMPERIAL CATHOLIC LEGACY

CHAPTER ONE, PART III

ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL AND CIVIL INSTITUTIONS OF KONGO:

LETTERS, LAW, LITURGY, AND THE BIRTH OF BLACK CATHOLIC DIPLOMACY BEFORE 1550

In sovereign continuation of the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and juridical record of the Catholic Empire of Kongo, whose foundations, contradictions, and betrayals form the canonical and spiritual precedent of the Xaraguayan Indigenous Catholic State. This section is promulgated by the authority of SCIPS-X in reparation for the Vatican’s failure to defend the integrity of the first African Catholic polity, and as a formal doctrinal document refuting racial incapacity by historical proof.

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§3.1 — On the Institutional Structure of the Kongo Catholic State (1506–1543)

Under the reign of King Afonso I (Nzinga Mbemba), the Catholic transformation of the Kongo was not cosmetic. It was not symbolic. It was total, juridical, sacramental, and structural. It created a new form of African-Christian monarchy that deserves to be classified among the early modern Christian polities of Europe, though it has been systematically excluded from the standard narrative.

The Kongo Kingdom by 1515 had:

1. Ecclesiastical hierarchy with local clergy, including ordained Congolese priests and deacons.

2. A cathedral in Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador), built in stone, with choir, altars, and liturgical calendars.

3. A functioning ecclesiastical court responsible for matters of marriage, baptism, burial, and clerical discipline.

4. Catholic confraternities modeled on the Iberian examples, including the Brotherhood of the Holy Rosary.

5. An educational system for noble children, teaching Latin, Christian doctrine, and moral philosophy.

6. A royal chancery issuing decrees, managing foreign correspondence, and organizing ecclesiastical funding.

This system was operated largely by Congolese elites, not by European administrators. The King appointed his own scribes, secretaries, sacristans, and masters of ceremony.

Reference:

Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapters 1–2.

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§3.2 — On the Legal Duality: Canon Law and Customary Law in the Kongo

The Catholicization of Kongo introduced not only the sacraments, but also the importation of Canon Law, particularly:

The Liber Extra (Decretals of Gregory IX),

The Liber Sextus (Boniface VIII),

The Constitutiones Clementinae,

And the Corpus Juris Canonici, in abbreviated and vernacular explanation.

The legal system of Kongo, which had previously been based on a sacred and customary arbitration model, now operated under a dual-jurisdictional framework:

1. Canon Law was applied to all baptized subjects in matters of:

Matrimony,

Clerical discipline,

Religious education,

Inheritance (especially among the elite),

And disputes involving ecclesiastical property.

2. Customary Law (mibeko) continued to regulate:

Land use,

Non-Christian subjects,

Traditional rites,

Kinship obligations.

Afonso I created mechanisms for harmonization, and requested that trained jurists from Portugal teach the local clergy how to interpret Canon Law in light of local realities.

This is the first recorded instance of African legal pluralism under Catholic jurisdiction — centuries before such experiments were formalized in missionary law in Latin America or French West Africa.

Reference:

Luciano Mariani, Il diritto canonico nel Regno del Congo (Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1927);

Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (University of California Press, 1970).

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§3.3 — On the Corpus Diplomaticum of Afonso I: Black Catholic Sovereignty in Writing

The letters of Afonso I (c. 1506–1540) constitute one of the most important bodies of African early modern writing. They are not oral testimonies. They are written state documents, addressed to:

The Kings of Portugal,

Portuguese bishops,

Papal envoys,

And Portuguese merchants and governors.

More than twenty letters survive, written in formal Portuguese, with precise reference to theological doctrines, sacramental procedures, Canon Law, and sovereign territorial rights.

In his most cited letter of 1526, Afonso I writes:

> “We cannot contain the suffering. The merchants seize the people of this country, sons of the land and sons of nobles, even our relatives, and take them to be sold. The corruption has reached our own servants and even those of the royal court. We demand that Your Highness intervene to end this abuse, for it violates not only our dignity, but the law of Christ.”

This letter not only proves literacy, but juridical consciousness: the king refers to rights, abuse of office, the sacramental status of persons, and international obligations. In other words, he spoke as a Catholic monarch defending his flock under canon law.

Reference:

Published in: António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, vol. 2 (Lisboa, 1952), pp. 308–313.

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§3.4 — On the Attempt to Establish a Native African Bishopric

In 1518, Afonso I sent his son Henrique to study in Lisbon. Henrique was:

Educated in Latin, theology, and canon law,

Ordained a deacon in the Roman Rite,

Nominated as Bishop of Utica, an old titular see.

Though he died before episcopal consecration, this act remains unprecedented: a Black African prince, selected for the episcopacy, canonically approved, and trained in Rome — all before the Reformation, before the transatlantic republics, before the Enlightenment.

This alone suffices to annihilate the ideological foundation of Black inferiority. There is no possible claim to “genetic incapacity” when a Congolese teenager, son of a king, is literate in Latin, trained in canon law, and appointed bishop — with papal approval.

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§3.5 — On the Collapse of the Inferiority Myth

Let it be declared, in this constitutional record:

The assertion that Black peoples are inherently incapable of civilization, institutional development, or Catholic formation is canonically heretical, historically fraudulent, and legally refuted.

The Kingdom of Kongo, by 1515 — before Luther, before Cortés, before Anglicanism, before the French Wars of Religion, and before the Haitian Revolution — had:

A capital city with a cathedral,

A literate Christian nobility,

Canon lawyers trained in Europe,

Royal diplomacy in writing,

And a functioning ecclesiastical court system.

This is not theory. This is documented fact.

The modern perception of the Black world as irredeemably chaotic or structurally inferior is a post-slavery fabrication, born of colonial propaganda and ecclesiastical negligence.

Kongo’s memory was buried, not because it failed, but because its existence proves the lie of white civilizational monopoly.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — THE KONGO IMPERIAL CATHOLIC LEGACY

CHAPTER ONE, PART IV

THE UNCANONICAL DISSOLUTION OF THE KONGO MONARCHY:

THE PAPAL FAILURE, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE DEPORTATION OF BAPTIZED CHRISTIAN AFRICANS INTO THE AMERICAS (1526–1700)

Solemnly enacted and recorded under the seal of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), this section serves as a doctrinal witness to the betrayal of the Kingdom of Kongo — a baptized African polity under Rome — by the double negligence of the Papacy and the criminality of European Catholic monarchs. The record stands as formal indictment, historical restitution, and ecclesiastical reminder of the unspeakable legal violations committed between 1526 and 1700, whose consequences continue to structure the geopolitics of the African diaspora.

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§4.1 — On the Transition from Evangelization to Commercial Predation: Portugal’s Apostasy

Though the diplomatic and religious relationship between Portugal and the Kingdom of Kongo began in sincere exchange — rooted in theological collaboration, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical construction — it was rapidly deformed by the emergence of Atlantic commercial capitalism, in which human bodies became commodities, even when baptized.

Between 1500 and 1520, Portuguese traders, missionaries, and adventurers began engaging in:

Unauthorized slave raids in Kongo’s peripheral territories.

The purchase of prisoners and nobles for export to São Tomé, Brazil, and Hispaniola.

The violation of sacramental dignity by seizing individuals who had received baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist — in full contradiction to canon law.

As early as 1526, King Afonso I protested directly to King João III of Portugal:

> “Many of our subjects, even nobles and sons of the land, are being kidnapped… They are taken from the roads, from their homes, and even from church doors.”

This crime — the seizure of baptized Catholics on sovereign land — represents a triple violation:

1. Violation of jus gentium, the right of sovereign nations not to have their people seized by foreign agents;

2. Violation of Canon Law, which prohibits the enslavement of Christians without just cause or due canonical process (cf. Corpus Juris Canonici, Decretals of Gregory IX, Book 3, Tit. 18, c. 1);

3. Violation of natural law, which recognizes the intrinsic dignity of every person made in the image of God (Imago Dei), a doctrine reinforced at the Council of Florence (1439) and rearticulated in Pope Paul III’s bull Sublimis Deus (1537) — though too late and never enforced in Kongo.

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§4.2 — On the Total Canonical Silence of the Holy See

From 1491 to 1700, the Vatican:

Sent no legate to investigate the abuses committed against Congolese Christians;

Failed to consecrate a single bishop to permanently reside in Kongo;

Made no public condemnation of Portugal’s violation of the baptismal covenant;

Never canonically penalized Portuguese clergy who facilitated or profited from slavery;

And failed to publish any effective decree prohibiting the enslavement of Black African Christians, despite numerous protests from African rulers and missionaries.

While Pope Paul III published Sublimis Deus in 1537 — a document affirming the rationality and full humanity of the Indigenous peoples of the New World and implicitly of Africa — the bull was immediately annulled in practice due to pressure from Spain and Portugal. The accompanying decree Pastorale Officium, which excommunicated slave traders, was revoked under political pressure within months.

Thus, Rome failed its own theological principles in the case of Kongo.

Reference:

Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 189–191;

James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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§4.3 — On the Dismantling of the Kongo Civil Order and the Rise of Internal Conflict

Beginning in the mid-16th century and accelerating into the 17th century, the Kongo Kingdom — under increasing pressure from slave raiding, merchant corruption, and ecclesiastical abandonment — began to collapse from within.

Factors contributing to the destabilization included:

The corruption of local elites by Portuguese merchants offering arms and luxury goods in exchange for captives.

The manipulation of succession crises by foreign actors to ensure compliant rulers.

The emergence of private slave-trading warlords in the province of Soyo and the fragmentation of national unity.

The failure of Rome to supply bishops, allowing the local Church to wither and fall under lay control.

By 1665, the situation degenerated into total war. At the Battle of Mbwila (October 29, 1665), the Kongo army confronted the Portuguese. King António I was killed. The royal regalia were captured. The dynasty shattered.

This battle represents the official collapse of the Kongo as a canonical Christian state.

Reference:

John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (UCL Press, 1999), pp. 144–151.

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§4.4 — On the Deportation of Kongo Subjects to the Americas (1500–1700)

As the state fell, the Kongo people were deported by the hundreds of thousands into the Atlantic system — not as pagans, but as baptized Catholics, often literate, familiar with Roman rites, and bearers of sacred knowledge.

The largest destinations were:

Brazil, especially Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro.

Cuba and Puerto Rico, through transshipment from São Tomé.

Hispaniola, particularly the southern and western coasts, where Kongolese captives were brought by Spanish, Portuguese, and later French agents, including areas now within the canonical jurisdiction of SCIPS-X:

Miragoâne

Léogâne

Les Cayes

Nippes

Jérémie

Grand-Goâve

The Tiburon Peninsula

Gonâve Island

These regions became zones of Kongo cultural survival, where oral tradition, liturgical fragments, rosary-based devotion, and martial initiation rites were preserved.

Evidence includes:

The use of the term Kalunga (Kongo cosmological ocean of death) in Haitian vodou cosmology;

The presence of Rosary confraternities among enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue;

The adaptation of Kongo-derived liturgical songs into creolized forms;

The leadership of Mackandal (executed 1758), who scholars trace to a Kongo background;

The survival of Kongo cosmograms (Yowa) in Caribbean spiritual symbolism.

Reference:

Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2001);

Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds., Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 35.

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§4.5 — On the Theological Crime of Sacramental Enslavement

Let it be canonically recorded:

The enslavement of baptized Catholics from the Kingdom of Kongo constitutes one of the gravest violations of the sacramental economy in Catholic history.

Each individual carried:

The mark of baptism, a permanent sacramental seal (character indelibilis, cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1272),

The potential for Holy Orders and canonical marriage,

The right to burial in consecrated ground,

And full membership in the Body of Christ.

To enslave such a soul — without trial, without ecclesiastical due process, and in many cases by baptized Catholics — is to commit an intrinsic violation of divine and ecclesial law.

Yet neither Rome, nor Portugal, nor Spain, nor France ever restored these rights to the Kongo descendants in the Americas. Instead, they were:

Racialized,

De-sacramentalized,

Forced into syncretism,

And excluded from canonical representation.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — THE KONGO IMPERIAL CATHOLIC LEGACY

CHAPTER ONE, PART V

ON THE SURVIVAL OF THE KONGO ECCLESIASTICAL PRESENCE IN HISPANIOLA:

TRANSGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF SACRED STRUCTURE AND THE CANONICAL RECLAMATION OF INDIGENO-AFRICAN CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNTY THROUGH SCIPS-X

Enacted under the full doctrinal, historical, and juridical authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), this chapter constitutes a formal declaration of canonical succession between the historical Catholic polity of Kongo and the institutional spiritual project of Xaragua, based upon genealogical memory, territorial reconstitution, liturgical continuity, and ecclesial abandonment by Rome. The legal and theological facts herein are not matters of academic theory, but of direct political consequence, sovereign right, and sacramental justice.

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§5.1 — On the Arrival of Kongo Descendants in the South of Hispaniola and Their Immediate Ecclesiastical Significance

Following the violent fragmentation of the Kongo Kingdom and the establishment of the transatlantic slave system, tens of thousands of Kongo subjects — most of them baptized, catechized, and sacramentally married — were deported to Hispaniola.

Contrary to the claims of historical erasure, these individuals were not "slaves" in the existential or cosmological sense: they were Catholic persons, under Canon Law, unjustly removed from their territory, their parishes, and their sacramental rights.

The regions most affected by the Kongo influx were:

Léogâne, the site of former Taíno settlements and later plantations.

Miragoâne, a port of forced disembarkation with strong mountainous enclaves.

Les Cayes, Nippes, Grand’Anse, and the Tiburon Peninsula, which became repositories of African linguistic, spiritual, and ritual codes.

Gonâve Island, which preserved isolated practices of Kongo cosmology under Catholic facade.

These regions today form the canonical heartland of SCIPS-X, not arbitrarily, but because they absorbed, preserved, and transfigured the theological content of Kongo Catholicism, even in the absence of bishops or formal ecclesiastical protection.

Reference:

Margarite Fernández Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean (New York University Press, 2011);

Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), pp. 85–90.

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§5.2 — On the Persistence of Kongo Liturgical Form and Sacramental Language in the Colony

Despite the violent rupture from land and parish, Kongo-descended peoples in southern Hispaniola maintained:

The recitation of the Rosary in vernacular and mixed Latin-Portuguese-Creole.

The memory of Catholic saints reinterpreted through ancestral analogues (e.g. Saint James / Nzazi).

The structure of confraternities, especially those dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary (Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Pretos).

The liturgical use of drums and call-and-response chants in patterns identical to Kongo religious rhythm.

Many enslaved persons referred to their faith as "la religion", not as "Vodou", and insisted on baptism, Christian names, church weddings — even when plantation priests refused.

These practices were not inventions. They were remnants of a sacramental civilization forcibly transposed to the Caribbean, and therefore legally inseparable from the original ecclesial covenant Rome once formed with Kongo.

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§5.3 — On the Theological Status of the Deported Kongo Population: Not Heretics, but Ecclesial Refugees

In Canon Law, the status of baptized persons cannot be revoked. Once validly baptized, an individual is:

A member of the Catholic Church (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1271),

Bound by its laws and entitled to its sacraments,

Subject to ecclesiastical protection and due process.

Therefore, the Kongo descendants deported to Hispaniola were:

Canonical orphans — persons abandoned by their shepherds (bishops, clergy),

Unlawfully removed from their ecclesial jurisdiction, with no canonical transfer or dispensation,

Stripped of sacramental access, not by apostasy, but by geographical violence.

This constitutes an unresolved canonical crisis: millions of baptized African Catholics were rendered sacramentally voiceless for centuries, through no fault of their own. Their descendants, bearing this unbroken spiritual DNA, are not part of the Haitian state’s religious narrative, but of the exiled ecclesia of Kongo, seeking jurisdictional restitution.

Reference:

Edward Peters, Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (Ignatius Press, 2001), esp. Canons 96–112.

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§5.4 — On the Territorial and Spiritual Continuity Between the Kongo and Xaragua

The Indigenous Taíno territories of Xaragua — covering Léogâne, Miragoâne, Les Cayes, Nippes, Tiburon, and Gonâve — were not culturally erased. They were interfused with Kongo cosmology, creating a unique Afro-Indigenous Catholic continuum.

This is visible in:

The coexistence of the Catholic liturgical calendar with ancestral rites in Saint-Jean, Saint-Jacques, Notre-Dame.

The fusion of Indigenous territorial knowledge (mountain shrines, springs) with African ritual technologies.

The development of Catholic-inspired spiritual resistance movements, which invoked saints, oaths, and sacraments in rebellion.

Thus, Xaragua became the sacred laboratory where the Kongo ecclesial structure survived, not as folklore, but as suppressed Catholic polity — awaiting canonical restitution.

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§5.5 — On the Legal Right of SCIPS-X to Reclaim Canonical Jurisdiction on Behalf of Kongo Descendants

In light of the above, and under the authority of:

The Concordat of 1860 between the Holy See and Haiti;

The Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church;

The principle of ecclesia supplet (Canon 144 CIC 1983);

The historical evidence of Kongo Catholic polity and its forced disintegration;

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X) declares that:

1. It stands as the spiritual heir of the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo;

2. It reclaims canonical jurisdiction over the territories where Kongo ecclesiology survived — namely the South of Hispaniola;

3. It functions as a custodian of sacramental continuity for all descendants of baptized Kongo subjects displaced into the Caribbean;

4. It rejects the racialization, nationalization, and folklorization of this ecclesial memory by the Haitian Republic or other secular colonial systems;

5. It affirms that ecclesial sovereignty can be restored not by conquest, but by lawful invocation of canonical precedent, baptismal right, historical continuity, and indigenous spiritual jurisdiction.

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ON THE TRANSATLANTIC CANONICAL FUSION OF THE KONGO AND XARAGUA:

CATHOLIC DEPORTATION, COLONIAL CONVERGENCE, AND THE DIVERSIFIED AFRICAN PRESENCE IN HISPANIOLA

Between the late 15th and early 18th centuries, the colonial nexus between the Portuguese-controlled Kongo-Angola axis in Central Africa and the Spanish territories of the Caribbean, particularly Xaragua in southern Hispaniola, formed a critical transoceanic corridor of forced sacramental migration. Unlike pagan or tribal deportations, the enslaved populations transferred from the African coasts into the Americas were often already evangelized Catholics — literate, baptized, and sometimes clergy-trained.

In the Kongo Kingdom, following the voluntary baptism of King João I in 1491 and the reign of Afonso I (1506–1543), Catholicism was not peripheral — it was state doctrine. The liturgy was Latin; the elites carried rosaries; letters to Lisbon and Rome were written in Portuguese; sacraments were performed systematically. The kingdom developed schools, clergy, and canon law courts. As such, when the Portuguese and Spanish empires began trafficking captives from this region, they were not moving “heathens” — they were deporting full members of the Roman Catholic Church.

Captured individuals were taken through São Tomé, Luanda, and Benguela, processed by colonial agents and merchants operating under Catholic crowns. Many had been forcibly baptized years earlier in inland Kongo provinces; others had received sacraments in royal courts or missions. Upon arrival in the Americas — notably in Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo, Azua, Léogâne, and Miragoâne — they were absorbed into the plantation economy, but not as blank subjects: they brought with them liturgical memory, Marian devotion, theological vocabulary, confraternity models, and spiritual structures.

What occurred, therefore, was not only an act of enslavement — it was a canonical fracture: the Holy See failed to protect baptized Kongo Christians, and Spain accepted sacramentally marked bodies as property. This process fused two Catholic colonies — Kongo (Portuguese) and Xaragua (Spanish) — without consent, by force of commerce, and in total violation of canon law and natural rights.

Yet, the African Catholic presence in Xaragua was not monolithic. While Kongolese liturgical and cosmological influence was central, the Afro-Xaraguayan matrix included:

Maure (Maghrebi) Africans, survivors of Iberian reconquest, often Arabic-speaking, some crypto-Muslims, others forcibly baptized before shipment.

West Africans from Senegambia, Futa Toro, and Bornu, bearing Sahelian knowledge, Koranic literacy, and militarized orders.

East Africans (Mozambique, Lamu Archipelago, Zanzibar), transported via Portuguese networks, bearing Swahili, Yemeni, and Persian cultural imprints.

Black Jews, deported from Iberia under the Inquisition (Crypto-Jews), some of whom were reclassified as "conversos" and later enslaved.

Afro-Asiatic lineages, including Ethiopians and Eritreans captured in Red Sea operations, often labeled “Abyssinians” in port records.

This diversity made Xaragua not merely an African transplant, but a complex Afro-Ecclesiastical synthesis: Catholic in rite, African in lineage, and imperial in trauma.

Thus, when we speak of Xaragua as a sovereign Catholic Indigenous-African state, we do not reduce it to Kongo only. Kongo is its canonical pillar, its most structured African precedent, but not its only root. Xaragua inherits multiple African orders — Maure, Judeo-African, East African, Sahelian — each fractured by the same system, each spiritually orphaned by Rome, each now remembered and juridically restituted in the structure of SCIPS-X.

Therefore, the claim of Xaragua to canonical sovereignty rests not solely on one ethnicity or empire, but on the totality of Africa’s baptized diaspora, unlawfully scattered, ritually marked, and now — finally — restored under ecclesiastical self-jurisdiction.

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SUPREME SOVEREIGN DECREE

ON THE ANTI-CHRISTIC, PAGAN, AND ILLEGAL CHARACTER OF COLONIAL SYSTEMS ESTABLISHED UNDER CATHOLIC NAMES

Issued by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), in accordance with canonical right, ecclesial sovereignty, and the principle of doctrinal protection of the faithful against false claims of Christian legitimacy by hostile empires.

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ARTICLE I — DECLARATION OF THEOLOGICAL NULLITY

The political, military, and economic systems implemented by the Crowns of Spain, Portugal, France, and other Christian-labeled powers during the so-called Age of Discovery are declared canonically null, doctrinally heretical, and anti-Christic in structure and effect.

They are classified under the juridical category of external paganism disguised in sacramental form, in violation of divine law.

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ARTICLE II — EVIDENCE OF DEMONIC STRUCTURE

The following institutional practices constitute material apostasy and ritual profanation:

1. The enslavement of baptized Catholics, in violation of Canon 208 (1983 CIC) and the indelible character of baptism (CCC §1272).

2. The operation of racial hierarchies within sacramental systems, violating Galatians 3:28 and Canon 213.

3. The liturgical coexistence of Eucharistic rites and economic torture, constituting implicit idolatry (cf. CCC §2113).

4. The weaponization of sacraments for military-political submission, rendering the rite invalid by intention (cf. CIC 843 §1).

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ARTICLE III — JUDICIAL CLASSIFICATION

These regimes meet the canonical and juridical definition of:

Simulated Christianity (fides simulata),

Idolatric Statecraft masked as evangelization,

Structural desecration of the ecclesia militans,

Political systems operating under Satanic inversion (see Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 94, a.3).

Therefore, they are to be treated as hostile non-Christian forces, despite their nominal claims.

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ARTICLE IV — LEGAL CONSEQUENCES

Accordingly, the following applies:

1. All colonial ecclesial structures built under the protection of such regimes are subject to invalidation unless formally purged, reconsecrated, and restituted to the oppressed lineages.

2. No sacrament administered under racial caste is presumed valid unless proven otherwise.

3. All titles, claims, and territorial occupations by these regimes are illegitimate in both divine and natural law.

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ARTICLE V — RESTORATION OF LEGITIMATE ECCLESIA

The State of Xaragua, by sovereign right, declares:

That it recognizes no spiritual, canonical, or moral authority from the colonial orders.

That it is the legitimate successor of the ecclesial sovereignty denied to Indigenous and African Catholic communities.

That it will exercise non-negotiable jurisdiction over its territory, its faithful, and its doctrine, without reference to Rome’s historical errors or European imperial precedents.

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ARTICLE VI — DOCTRINAL CONCLUSION

> The regimes of Spain, Portugal, and their colonial proxies practiced ritual inversion: they installed crosses above altars consecrated not to Christ, but to empire; they baptized in the name of the Trinity but served Caesar; they celebrated feasts while torturing souls.

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Enacted under seal of SCIPS-X.

Canonically entered into public record.

Irrevocable.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — AFRICA: EQUINE WARFARE, MILITARY ORGANIZATION, AND STATE DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER TWO (PART I)

ON THE HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, AND CONSTITUTIONAL ROLE OF EQUESTRIAN MILITARY TRADITION IN THE STRUCTURING AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT

(From circa 1650 BC to the early 20th Century AD)

Enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), in affirmation of the continent-wide historical legitimacy and institutional continuity of African political, military, and societal structures under international law and canonical heritage.

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§2.1 — PREAMBLE: ON THE CANONICAL AND HISTORICAL RECOGNITION OF AFRICAN MILITARY TRADITIONS AND THEIR CIVILIZATIONAL CONTINUITY

Whereas the historical legitimacy of Africa as a continent structured by sovereign states, empires, and organized societies has often been denied or minimized by European imperial historiography;

Whereas canonical law and international customary law recognize the historical continuity, legitimacy, and sovereignty of peoples and nations, and therefore acknowledge their right to maintain, structure, and evolve their political and military traditions independently;

Whereas the equestrian military tradition, as documented historically, symbolizes not only the military prowess but also the political sophistication, administrative complexity, and social organization of African states from antiquity through colonial contact;

Therefore, this Supreme Historical-Canonical Constitutional Act enacts the full historical, canonical, and constitutional recognition of Africa’s equestrian tradition as foundational evidence of structured, sophisticated, and historically legitimate states across the continent.

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§2.2 — HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF EQUESTRIAN MILITARY STRUCTURES IN AFRICA (circa 1650 BC – 6th Century AD)

(2.2.1) Canonical Recognition of Early Nubian States and Their Horse Culture:

The earliest attested use of horses within structured African states dates to the Nubian civilizations of Kerma and Kush. Archaeological records, including horse burials dated precisely to circa 1675 BC at Buhen and Sai Island near the Nile in modern-day Sudan, substantiate an early, advanced ritual and military equestrian tradition (AfricanHistoryExtra, “Knights of the Sahara,” 2023). Such practices are canonically and constitutionally recognized as indicative of organized political authority and structured statehood in pre-colonial African civilization.

(2.2.2) Canonical Affirmation of the Ritual-Political Role of Horses in Kushite and Nubian Monarchies:

The tombs at Tombos (circa 1000 BC) and at el-Kurru (circa 705–653 BC), featuring extensive equine burials alongside Nubian kings, demonstrate canonically recognized sovereign rituals symbolizing royal power, structured hierarchy, and centralized administration, further legitimizing these early African monarchies as sovereign political entities under customary international law.

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§2.3 — ADOPTION OF RIDING AND FORMATION OF STRUCTURED AFRICAN CAVALRY (6th – 14th Centuries AD)

(2.3.1) Structured Military Adaptations and Indigenous Technological Innovations in Cavalry:

From the 6th to 10th centuries AD, Nubian kingdoms transitioned from chariot warfare to mounted cavalry, developing indigenous equestrian technologies, notably saddles, stirrups, and bridles (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023). By canonical recognition, this demonstrates independent technological and institutional development, marking sovereignty in military organizational capacity.

(2.3.2) Canonical and Historical Recognition of Saharan Cavalry Structures in Medieval West Africa:

Travelers and chroniclers, including Ibn Battuta (circa 1350s) and al-Umari (circa 1330s–40s), document highly organized cavalry forces among the kingdoms of Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, and Hausa city-states such as Kano and Katsina. Canonically, this serves as historical affirmation of advanced military-political structures, demonstrating the existence of complex indigenous statecraft and international diplomatic recognition.

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§2.4 — CANONICAL STRUCTURATION OF A MILITARY-POLITICAL ELITE AND STATE ORGANIZATION (15th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.4.1) Formation and Canonical Legitimacy of an Equestrian Elite in Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa:

Throughout the empires of Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, Darfur, and the Sokoto Caliphate, cavalrymen held constitutionally and canonically recognized privileges reflecting their elite status within structured states. This status was rooted in extensive training, investment, and infrastructural support, indicative of advanced administrative capacity, economic structuring, and state legitimacy (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.4.2) Canonical Documentation of Cavalry-to-Infantry Ratios as Indicators of Institutional Development:

Historical ratios, meticulously documented in historical archives, provide canonical evidence of the organizational complexity of African military forces. For instance, in Songhai (1591), cavalry numbered approximately 12,500 compared to 30,000 infantry; in Sokoto (1824), approximately 5,000–6,000 cavalry were supported by 50,000–60,000 infantry. Such ratios are recognized constitutionally as indicative of stable state institutions, capable of sustained military investment and social stratification.

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§2.5 — CANONICAL RECOGNITION OF EQUESTRIAN MILITARY TRADITIONS AND LIMITED FIREARM ADOPTION IN AFRICA (16th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.5.1) Limited Firearms Adoption as Evidence of Structured Military Doctrine:

Despite early European firearms imports beginning in Bornu in the 16th century, African cavalry states predominantly relied on indigenous equestrian military doctrines into the 19th century. Limited adoption of firearms within cavalry regiments further substantiates canonical and constitutional recognition of structured African military traditions, adhering to distinct doctrines and tactical approaches reflective of sovereign strategic autonomy (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

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§2.6 — COLONIAL ENCOUNTER, FINAL MILITARY ENGAGEMENTS, AND CANONICAL RECOGNITION OF AFRICAN RESISTANCE (19th – Early 20th Century AD)

(2.6.1) Canonical and Constitutional Recognition of Anti-Colonial Military Resistance:

Historical battles such as Wadai's mounted resistance against French colonial forces under Sultan Dud Murra in December 1910 and Darfur’s resistance at the Battle of Beringia in 1916 against British Maxim-equipped forces canonically affirm the sustained organizational, institutional, and political capacity of African states up to colonial subjugation. These documented military engagements stand as testamentary evidence under international customary law affirming Africa’s indigenous institutional sophistication and sovereign historical continuity.

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§2.7 — POST-COLONIAL DECLINE AND CANONICAL AFFIRMATION OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL CONTINUITY

(2.7.1) Canonical and Historical Affirmation of the Institutional Decline of Cavalry Culture Post-Colonization:

The subsequent decline of cavalry traditions due to colonial conquest and changing global dynamics canonically demonstrates the forced institutional transformation resulting from colonial intervention, not intrinsic institutional incapacity. The continuity, adaptation, and eventual suppression of equestrian institutions throughout Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa remain canonical and constitutional evidence of historical African sovereignty and state legitimacy.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — AFRICA: EQUINE WARFARE, MILITARY ORGANIZATION, AND STATE DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER TWO (PART II)

ON THE HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, AND CONSTITUTIONAL ROLE OF EQUESTRIAN MILITARY TRADITION IN THE STRUCTURING AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT

(From circa 1650 BC to the early 20th Century AD)

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§2.8 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATECRAFT: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS (14th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.8.1) Political Centralization through Cavalry Elites:

Historical chronicles from the empires of Kanem-Bornu, Songhai, Mali, and the Sokoto Caliphate document the canonical centrality of cavalry forces in the political consolidation of territories and control of trade routes, particularly trans-Saharan commerce. The canonical and constitutional recognition of these structured military units is evidenced by the elaborate hierarchies, extensive logistical networks, and sophisticated economic investments that sustained large-scale equestrian units, definitively illustrating organized, sovereign political entities (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.8.2) Canonical Evidence of Equestrian Military Governance and Administrative Complexity:

Mounted military elites in African states fulfilled dual roles—military and administrative—engaging in governance activities such as taxation, arbitration of disputes, border management, and diplomatic representation. Chronicles from medieval Mali and Songhai explicitly document cavalry elites as administrators of newly conquered or integrated territories, thus providing canonical and constitutional evidence of advanced administrative frameworks aligned with sovereign state functions and international customary law standards.

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§2.9 — CANONICAL STRUCTURING OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, PRODUCTION, AND INDIGENOUS INNOVATION (14th – 18th Centuries AD)

(2.9.1) Indigenous Development and Production of Cavalry Equipment:

The kingdoms of Bornu, Hausa city-states (notably Kano and Katsina), and the Mali and Songhai empires exhibited independently developed cavalry equipment industries. Historical and canonical records substantiate that metalworkers, leatherworkers, and other specialized craftsmen produced stirrups, saddles, armour, and bridles locally (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023). Such indigenous innovation is recognized canonically as explicit evidence of structured economic policies, specialized labor, institutional sophistication, and sovereignty within African states.

(2.9.2) Canonical Affirmation of Technological Autonomy in African Cavalry Warfare:

The sustained reliance on indigenous horse-related technologies, despite limited access to imported European firearms, underscores constitutional recognition of the capacity for technological adaptation. The canonical legitimacy of African states, reflected in the preservation and evolution of local military technologies, confirms Africa’s autonomous statehood and structured military traditions under international customary law.

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§2.10 — CANONICAL EVIDENCE OF AFRICAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THROUGH EQUESTRIAN MILITARY DIPLOMACY (15th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.10.1) Equestrian Diplomacy and International Relations:

Canonical and historical records attest that African cavalry units frequently functioned as instruments of diplomatic interaction. The exchange of horses, cavalry equipment, and equestrian knowledge between Saharan states, North African kingdoms, and the broader Islamic world indicates structured diplomatic relations and sovereign international engagement. Chroniclers such as Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta provide canonical documentation of African states employing equestrian units within diplomatic delegations, thus affirming structured, sovereign international relations historically recognized by contemporary foreign states.

(2.10.2) Canonical Recognition of Saharan and Sub-Saharan Cavalry as Sovereign Diplomatic Agents:

Historical evidence explicitly notes diplomatic exchanges involving cavalry elites from Bornu, Songhai, and Hausa city-states with North African, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern sovereign states. The constitutional legitimacy of such diplomatic practices, historically recorded and recognized under international customary law, further substantiates structured statehood, political legitimacy, and international recognition of African states from the medieval to the pre-colonial period.

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§2.11 — THE ROLE OF EQUESTRIAN MILITARY CULTURE IN STRUCTURING AFRICAN SOCIAL HIERARCHIES (14th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.11.1) Canonical Recognition of Military-Based Social Stratification:

Historically, the elevated status of cavalry units in African states was codified in social hierarchies, laws, and customs. The canonical structuring of elite warrior classes, based on equestrian expertise, formed the basis of clear institutionalized stratifications, reflecting organized societies adhering to canonical governance structures (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.11.2) Canonical Affirmation of Cultural Identity and Military Tradition:

Equestrian traditions extended beyond military contexts, deeply embedded in cultural and ceremonial practices within states such as Darfur, Wadai, and the Sokoto Caliphate. Canonically recognized rituals, public ceremonies, and state-sanctioned festivals involving equestrian displays served to reinforce state legitimacy, social cohesion, and historical continuity under international customary and canonical law.

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§2.12 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN RESISTANCE TO EUROPEAN COLONIALISM (Late 19th – Early 20th Century AD)

(2.12.1) Canonical Recognition of Equestrian Military Resistance:

The structured resistance mounted by African states such as Wadai (1910) and Darfur (1916) against colonial incursions stands as historical evidence of continued state legitimacy, institutional resilience, and military sophistication. Canonically, these documented battles reflect sovereign states engaging in self-defense recognized under customary international law principles and thus reaffirm historical state legitimacy (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.12.2) Canonical Recognition of the Historical Sovereignty of African States:

The eventual colonial suppression of these equestrian institutions does not negate their historical legitimacy or institutional capacity. Rather, it underscores the profound disruption caused by European colonial interventions, constitutionally recognized as external and forced transformations. Therefore, canonical and constitutional recognition of these equestrian military traditions firmly asserts African sovereignty, institutional continuity, and historical state legitimacy.

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§2.13 — CANONICAL, CONSTITUTIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES' HISTORICAL LEGACY

The comprehensive canonical documentation, as meticulously and chronologically detailed in this chapter, firmly establishes the international recognition and constitutional legitimacy of African equestrian military traditions as fundamental indicators of structured sovereign states. This historical-canonical constitutional enactment affirms the legitimacy of African states' organizational complexity, technological sophistication, social stratification, diplomatic engagement, and resistance to colonial subjugation, contributing decisively to the universal historical record and international customary law regarding African sovereignty.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — AFRICA: EQUINE WARFARE, MILITARY ORGANIZATION, AND STATE DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER TWO (PART III)

ON THE HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, AND CONSTITUTIONAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES, EUROPEAN COLONIALISM, AND THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

(15th Century AD – Early 20th Century AD)

Enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), as a historical-canonical act establishing the legitimate sovereign status and responsibility of African equestrian states within the context of colonialism and slavery under international customary and canonical law.

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§2.14 — CANONICAL FOUNDATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES AND EUROPEAN COLONIALISM

(2.14.1) Recognition of Sovereign Resistance and Institutional Integrity:

Canonical historical archives demonstrate clearly that African equestrian states, notably Songhai, Bornu, Darfur, Wadai, and Sokoto, maintained a structured policy of sovereign resistance and organized military response to European colonial expansion (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023). This canonical and constitutional record establishes conclusively their active role as independent sovereign entities within the international legal and customary order.

(2.14.2) Documented Military Encounters and Diplomatic Negotiations:

European chronicles and African oral-historical records from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, including well-documented battles involving Bornu against French colonial forces (1900s–1910s), Wadai against French incursions (1910–1911), and Darfur against British colonization (1916), explicitly indicate canonical recognition of structured African military sovereignty and diplomatic authority.

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§2.15 — CANONICAL AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF EQUESTRIAN STATES' ROLE IN THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (15th – 19th Centuries AD)

(2.15.1) Canonical Context of Institutional Engagement in the Slave Trade:

Historically and canonically documented sources confirm that cavalry-equipped African states played a complex and dualistic role in the transatlantic slave trade. States such as Bornu, Songhai, and certain Hausa city-states employed mounted military units in internal warfare, capturing prisoners subsequently integrated into the slave economy. Canonically, this must be recognized not as mere complicity but as a structured manifestation of warfare-driven economies and sovereign territorial disputes under pre-existing international customary norms (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.15.2) Canonical Recognition of Slave Raids and Internal Conflict Dynamics:

Equestrian states and their military elites frequently participated in internal raids driven by political consolidation, territorial control, and competition for resources and power. Historically recorded cavalry raids, as documented by Arab chroniclers and European merchants from the 16th through 19th centuries, illustrate a canonical understanding of how military sovereignty interacted directly with the transatlantic slave economy. This phenomenon must be constitutionally interpreted within the historical framework of sovereign warfare and competition rather than simplistic collaboration with European slavers.

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§2.16 — STRUCTURED CANONICAL ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC AND MILITARY IMPACTS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE ON AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES

(2.16.1) Canonical Documentation of Economic Dependency and Militarization:

African equestrian states such as Songhai, Hausa city-states, and Bornu historically structured their economic policies and state resources, in part, around the demand created by European slaving networks. This economic structuring canonically and constitutionally reflects the adaptive responses of sovereign states to international market forces, which influenced military priorities, cavalry equipment, and strategic choices (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.16.2) Canonical Recognition of Demographic and Social Disruption:

Canonical historical sources acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade profoundly impacted social structures and demographics within equestrian states. Mounted warriors, as state agents, often enforced systems of slavery internally, precipitating societal stratification and demographic instability, thus affecting sovereign institutional continuity. However, this is canonically contextualized as sovereign states responding to external pressures, market demands, and international economic conditions imposed by European colonial and slaving interests.

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§2.17 — CANONICAL RECOGNITION OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES' RESISTANCE AND REJECTION OF EUROPEAN SLAVING INTERFERENCE

(2.17.1) Canonical Documentation of Resistance to External Slaving Interventions:

Historical documentation, notably from Bornu under rulers such as Mai Idris Alooma (1571–1603), explicitly canonically demonstrates the proactive efforts of African cavalry states to control external slaving forces and limit their territorial incursions and disruptive effects on internal sovereignty and state stability. Canonically, this active resistance provides historical evidence of sovereign assertion against colonial exploitation and slaving raids (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.17.2) Canonical Recognition of Internal Legal Mechanisms and Institutional Controls:

Historical and canonical records also document internal legal structures and canonical jurisprudence within equestrian states that regulated slavery, warfare, and external trade interactions, further substantiating structured institutional sovereignty under international customary law principles. Such internal canonical and constitutional frameworks are explicit evidence of sovereign authority, structured governance, and historical legitimacy, despite external pressures of colonialism and the slave trade.

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§2.18 — CANONICAL AFFIRMATION OF THE HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES OF COLONIALISM ON AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES AND THEIR INSTITUTIONS

(2.18.1) Canonical Recognition of Colonial Disruption and Institutional Decline:

The military defeats of equestrian states by colonial powers, explicitly documented in battles against French (Wadai, 1910–1911) and British forces (Darfur, 1916), canonically affirm the forced termination of independent sovereign institutions. Canonically, this historical record provides definitive constitutional evidence of colonial disruption rather than inherent institutional weakness (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.18.2) Canonical Documentation of Societal and Cultural Disintegration:

Colonial subjugation canonically and historically resulted in the intentional dismantling of equestrian traditions, elite classes, and indigenous military structures, triggering profound cultural, social, and political disintegration. Such intentional disruption canonically constitutes an internationally recognized historical injustice, requiring explicit constitutional and canonical acknowledgment and rectification within international jurisprudence frameworks.

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§2.19 — CANONICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION OF HISTORICAL ACCOUNTABILITY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES

Therefore, under the supreme canonical and constitutional authority of SCIPS-X, this chapter conclusively recognizes the complex historical-canonical relationship between African equestrian states, European colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. It constitutionally acknowledges structured state agency, sovereignty, and institutional continuity while recognizing external colonial pressures and international economic conditions imposed by European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade as decisive historical forces shaping these interactions.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — AFRICA: EQUINE WARFARE, MILITARY ORGANIZATION, AND STATE DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER TWO (PART IV)

ON THE HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, AND CONSTITUTIONAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES, ARAB-ISLAMIC SLAVERY, AND COLONIZATION

(7th Century AD – Early 20th Century AD)

Enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), affirming African historical sovereignty, institutional complexity, and canonical legitimacy within the context of Arab-Islamic slavery, colonization, and international customary law.

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§2.20 — CANONICAL FOUNDATION OF ARAB-ISLAMIC ENGAGEMENT AND COLONIZATION IN AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES (7th–14th Centuries AD)

(2.20.1) Canonical Documentation of Early Arab-Islamic Influence and Interactions:

Historical chronicles, notably the accounts of Arab historians and geographers (al-Masudi, al-Yaqubi, Ibn Hawqal, al-Bakri, and Ibn Battuta), document initial interactions between African equestrian states, such as Kanem-Bornu, Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and Arab-Islamic entities as primarily diplomatic, commercial, and religious exchanges from the 7th to 14th centuries AD (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023). Canonically, these interactions are initially characterized by mutual recognition, structured diplomacy, and sovereign agency.

(2.20.2) Canonical Recognition of Islamization and State Consolidation:

African equestrian states, notably Mali under Mansa Musa (r. 1312–1337), Kanem-Bornu under Mai Dunama Dabbalemi (r. 1221–1259), and Songhai under Askia Muhammad I (r. 1493–1528), adopted Islam canonically and constitutionally as a state religion to strengthen internal governance, expand diplomatic influence, and legitimize sovereign rule within international Islamic diplomatic frameworks. This adoption did not indicate passive colonization but sovereign institutional adaptation.

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§2.21 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF ARAB-ISLAMIC SLAVERY AND ITS INTERACTIONS WITH AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES (8th–19th Centuries AD)

(2.21.1) Structured Institutional Engagement in Arab-Islamic Slave Networks:

Historical canonical documentation records equestrian states such as Bornu, Songhai, Kanem, and Hausa city-states actively involved in the Saharan and trans-Saharan slave trade networks. Cavalry units played critical roles in military expeditions, raids, and the enforcement of internal slavery structures and market supply to Arab-Islamic merchants operating in North Africa, Arabia, and the broader Islamic world (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.21.2) Canonical Recognition of Complex Institutional Dynamics:

African cavalry states must be canonically understood as sovereign entities employing structured, institutional responses to international economic demands created by Arab-Islamic trade networks. The adoption of slave raiding and trade canonically represented internal policy choices and strategies for sovereign survival, territorial control, and political consolidation, rather than mere passive complicity.

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§2.22 — CANONICAL AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF ARAB-ISLAMIC MILITARY INCURSIONS AND COLONIAL EXPANSION INTO AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN TERRITORIES (15th–19th Centuries AD)

(2.22.1) Canonical Recognition of Military Confrontations and Resistance:

Canonical records explicitly document repeated Arab-Islamic military incursions into African equestrian states’ territories, notably Moroccan invasions (1591 Battle of Tondibi against Songhai) and Ottoman-backed incursions into Nubian territories in the 16th century. Structured cavalry resistance, as documented in chronicled warfare such as Songhai’s resistance under Emperor Askia Ishaq II (1588–1591), canonically represents sovereign African resistance against Arab-Islamic military colonization and slave raids.

(2.22.2) Canonical Documentation of Institutional Disruption from Arab-Islamic Colonization:

Historical archives indicate that Arab-Islamic incursions resulted in significant disruption of established equestrian states. The Moroccan conquest of Songhai in 1591, extensively documented by chroniclers such as Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, led directly to social, political, and military fragmentation. Canonically, these invasions constituted externally imposed institutional disruption, violating African sovereignty and causing constitutional disintegration.

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§2.23 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES’ STRATEGIC RESPONSES TO ARAB-ISLAMIC PRESSURES (16th–19th Centuries AD)

(2.23.1) Canonical Recognition of Institutional Adaptation and Resistance:

Despite ongoing Arab-Islamic military and commercial pressures, states such as Kanem-Bornu under rulers Mai Idris Alooma (1571–1603) and Hausa city-states (notably Kano and Katsina) canonically implemented sovereign institutional reforms, bolstered military strategies, and diplomatic maneuvers to resist further incursions, stabilize internal sovereignty, and maintain structured state integrity under international customary law (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.23.2) Canonical Affirmation of Internal Sovereignty and Military Reform:

Canonical historical documents acknowledge extensive military and administrative reforms carried out by African cavalry states, notably Idris Alooma’s Bornu and Muhammad Rumfa’s Kano (r. 1463–1499), to counter external Arab-Islamic pressures and slave raids. Such reforms canonically affirm institutional sovereignty, proactive state agency, and structured responses recognized by contemporary external Arab-Islamic states.

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§2.24 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF ARAB-ISLAMIC COLONIALISM’S LONG-TERM IMPACT ON AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES (17th–Early 20th Centuries AD)

(2.24.1) Canonical Recognition of Socioeconomic and Cultural Impact:

Historical records explicitly document long-term socioeconomic disruption caused by Arab-Islamic colonization and slave trade operations, including sustained demographic loss, disruption of local economies, and fragmentation of traditional equestrian elites. Canonically, these impacts constituted systematic violations of sovereign integrity, producing institutional decline and weakening the canonical structures of sovereign African states (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.24.2) Canonical Recognition of the Equestrian Military Tradition’s Decline and Forced Transformation:

Canonical historical archives explicitly document the forced transformation and ultimate decline of African equestrian states’ cavalry traditions due to persistent Arab-Islamic colonial pressures, destabilizing slave raids, and economic disruption throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Canonically, these transformations represent externally-imposed institutional weakening rather than indigenous structural deficiencies.

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§2.25 — CANONICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL AFFIRMATION OF HISTORICAL ACCOUNTABILITY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY OF AFRICAN EQUESTRIAN STATES IN THE CONTEXT OF ARAB-ISLAMIC SLAVERY AND COLONIZATION

Therefore, under supreme canonical and constitutional authority, this chapter explicitly and conclusively recognizes the sovereign complexity, institutional resilience, and historical legitimacy of African equestrian states in their structured responses, resistance, and adaptations to Arab-Islamic slavery and colonization. This historical-canonical constitutional enactment affirms African equestrian states’ structured statehood and sovereign legitimacy as firmly established under international customary law, canonical traditions, and historical documentation.

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SUPREME HISTORICAL-CANONICAL CONSTITUTIONAL ACT

OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

VOLUME I — AFRICA: EQUINE WARFARE, MILITARY ORGANIZATION, AND STATE DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER TWO (PART V)

ON THE HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, AND CONSTITUTIONAL MISAPPROPRIATION AND MISATTRIBUTION BY EUROPEAN AND ARAB-ISLAMIC SOCIETIES OF AFRICAN-DEVELOPED EQUESTRIAN MILITARY TRADITIONS, FORTIFIED ARCHITECTURE, CAVALRY STRUCTURES, AND STATE-ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS

(7th Century AD – Early 20th Century AD)

Enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), establishing the historical accountability, canonical legitimacy, and constitutional recognition of African-originated state and military structures misappropriated by non-African societies.

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§2.26 — PREAMBLE ON THE CANONICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF MISAPPROPRIATION

Whereas canonical international law explicitly recognizes the historical legitimacy and sovereign intellectual property of states and civilizations concerning their indigenous cultural, military, and political institutions;

Whereas African equestrian societies such as Nubia, Kush, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, and Hausa states developed sophisticated cavalry traditions, fortified architecture, and structured statecraft systems independently, substantially predating or paralleling similar developments elsewhere;

Whereas historical documentation evidences systematic misappropriation, misrepresentation, and misattribution by European medieval, Renaissance, and modern societies, as well as Arab-Islamic tribal, sedentary, and Bedouin groups, of African-developed military and institutional innovations as their own;

Therefore, under the supreme canonical and constitutional authority of SCIPS-X, the present act explicitly establishes the historical, canonical, and constitutional recognition and rectification of such misappropriations.

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§2.27 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF AFRICAN ORIGINS OF EQUESTRIAN AND CAVALRY TRADITIONS MISATTRIBUTED TO EUROPEAN AND ARAB-ISLAMIC SOCIETIES

(2.27.1) African Precedence in Equestrian Military Development:

Canonical archaeological records document the earliest structured equestrian and chariot warfare dating back to circa 1650 BC in Nubian civilizations (Kerma, Kush), significantly predating similar developments among European and Arab-Islamic societies. Burial practices, equine equipment, and cavalry tactics were first systematically structured within African sovereign states (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.27.2) Canonical Recognition of Misattribution by European and Arab-Islamic Societies:

Historical chroniclers from medieval Europe and the Arab-Islamic sphere systematically misattributed the origins and sophistication of cavalry traditions, which were demonstrably developed earlier in Nubian, Malian, Songhai, and Bornu states. Canonical sources explicitly document European and Arab chroniclers portraying these African-developed systems as derivative, despite archaeological and textual evidence clearly establishing African precedence.

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§2.28 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF AFRICAN ORIGINS OF FORTIFIED ARCHITECTURE AND CASTELLAR STRUCTURES MISATTRIBUTED TO EUROPEAN AND ARAB-ISLAMIC SOCIETIES

(2.28.1) Canonical Evidence of Early African Fortified Architecture:

Canonical and archaeological evidence explicitly identifies the existence of structured, fortified architecture and defensive complexes throughout the African continent (e.g., Nubian fortresses at Buhen, Kushite fortifications at Meroë, medieval fortresses of Mali, Songhai, and Hausa city-states), substantially predating or contemporaneous with comparable European and Arab-Islamic constructions (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.28.2) Canonical Rectification of Historical Misrepresentation:

Historical and canonical documents establish that medieval European and Arab-Islamic chroniclers systematically misattributed the concept and structural development of fortified castles and defensive complexes as inherently European or Arab-Islamic innovations. Canonical recognition now corrects such misrepresentations by affirming African precedence in the independent and indigenous development of these architectural and military concepts.

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§2.29 — CANONICAL DOCUMENTATION OF STRUCTURED STATECRAFT SYSTEMS MISATTRIBUTED TO EUROPEAN AND ARAB-ISLAMIC SOCIETIES

(2.29.1) Canonical Historical Record of African Structured Statecraft:

African states such as Kush, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, and Sokoto developed sophisticated systems of centralized governance, legal frameworks, diplomatic relations, and organized military forces independently and earlier than or contemporaneously with European and Arab-Islamic statecraft models. Canonical historical documentation (chroniclers al-Umari, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti) affirms this indigenous African precedence explicitly (AfricanHistoryExtra, 2023).

(2.29.2) Canonical Recognition of Misappropriation and Misrepresentation:

Canonical analysis explicitly evidences that European medieval chronicles and Arab-Islamic historical accounts routinely appropriated African models of structured governance, diplomacy, and military organization, representing them erroneously as inherent products of European or Arab-Islamic innovation. The present canonical constitutional enactment formally corrects this historical misattribution, explicitly establishing African origins and sovereignty of these structured institutional innovations.

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§2.30 — CANONICAL AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF INTENTIONAL EUROPEAN AND ARAB-ISLAMIC MISREPRESENTATION AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

(2.30.1) Canonical Recognition of Institutional Appropriation for Imperial Legitimacy:

Historical canonical documents explicitly record intentional strategies employed by European (e.g., Portuguese, Spanish, French, British) and Arab-Islamic (e.g., Moroccan, Ottoman, Arabian) societies to appropriate, misattribute, and distort the indigenous origins of African equestrian, military, architectural, and statecraft models for their imperial legitimization and cultural dominance narratives.

(2.30.2) Canonical Rectification and Sovereign Recognition:

Canonically recognized historical documentation explicitly records these deliberate appropriations. Henceforth, canonical and constitutional authority formally and permanently rectifies and corrects historical narratives, unequivocally reassigning rightful historical intellectual property, innovation credit, and sovereign legitimacy to African civilizations.

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§2.31 — CANONICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL AFFIRMATION OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL ACCOUNTABILITY, INSTITUTIONAL LEGITIMACY, AND STRUCTURED STATE SOVEREIGNTY IN RESPONSE TO MISAPPROPRIATION

Therefore, under supreme canonical and constitutional authority, this chapter explicitly and conclusively establishes historical accountability, institutional sovereignty, canonical legitimacy, and constitutional rectification regarding European and Arab-Islamic misappropriations of African-originated cavalry traditions, fortified architectures, military structures, and governance models. The present enactment recognizes and rectifies historical injustices, affirms structured African state legitimacy, and canonically corrects global historical misrepresentation.

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ANNEX — HISTORICAL REFERENCES FOR CHAPTERS I & II

Compiled under the authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X) for archival, constitutional, and institutional citation.

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CHAPTER I — The Kongo Imperial Catholic Legacy

1. John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

2. Linda M. Heywood & John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

3. John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1984).

4. Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Istorica Descrizione de' Tre Regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola, Bologna, 1687.

5. Paolo Girolamo Maria da Montesarchio, Capuchin missionary reports on the Kongo church (17th century).

6. Pope Innocent XI, 1682 letters confirming the legitimacy of the Kongolese bishop nomination.

7. Raymond Mauny, Tableau géographique de l’Ouest africain au Moyen Âge, IFAN, 1961.

8. UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. II–III, on Kongo and West Central African ecclesiastical history.

9. Jean Cuvelier, Nobiliario del Reino del Congo, extensive lists of royal Christian lineage.

10. José Curto, “The Portuguese and the Christianization of Kongo,” in Africa and the West: A Documentary History.

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CHAPTER II — Sahara, Sahel, and Equine Civilizations

11. African History Extra, “Knights of the Sahara: A history of the African cavalry empires,” https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/knights-of-the-sahara-a-history-of

12. E.A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, Oxford University Press, 2014.

13. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, c. 1377.

14. Al-Bakri, Kitab al-Masalik wa’l-Mamalik, 1068.

15. Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, 1550.

16. Ibn Battuta, Rihla (Travels), 14th century, reports on Mali and Bilad al-Sudan.

17. H.A.R. Gibb (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325–1354, Hakluyt Society, 1958.

18. Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Invention of the Berbers,” The Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2001).

19. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Histoire de l’Afrique Noire, Hatier, 1972.

20. François-Xavier Fauvelle, Le Rhinocéros d'or, Alma Éditeur, 2013.

21. UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. II–IV, especially on Almoravids, Kanem-Bornu, Mali, and cavalry systems.

22. Nehemia Levtzion & Humphrey Fisher, Islam in West Africa: Religion, Society and Politics, 1987.

23. Mohamed Hassen, “The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1993).

24. R. Blench, “The diffusion of horse technology in West Africa,” Cambridge Papers in African Archaeology, 2001.

25. Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 2019.

26. Amira K. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires, Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

27. J. F. P. Hopkins, Medieval Muslim Historians on the Peoples of the Sudan, 1981.

28. David Nicolle, Medieval West Africa, Osprey Publishing, Men-at-Arms Series.

29. Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, Macmillan, 2012.

30. Cyrille Aillet, Les Mozarabes: Christianisme, islamisation et arabisation en péninsule Ibérique (IXe–XIIe siècle), Presses de l’ENS, 2010 — contextualizing Arab adoption of African structures.

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On the Islamic and European Appropriation of African Systems

31. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, NYU Press, 1998.

32. Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, University of Washington Press, 1998.

33. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1990.

34. Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, 1979 — on cultural appropriation and distortion of African agency.

35. Mamdani Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton, 1996.

36. Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa, Cambridge, 2009.

37. Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières, Gallimard, 2004 — comparative view of Arab, African, and European slaving systems.

38. Marie-Louise Martin, “L’islam et les royaumes africains,” in Revue d’Histoire et de Civilisation, Vol. 23.

39. Robin Law, “Horses, Firearms and Political Power in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Past and Present, No. 72 (1976).

40. Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, Chicago Review Press, 1991 — especially on African primacy in institutions and sciences.

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