Môle Saint-Nicolas

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SUPREME NATIONAL DECLARATION

TITLE: RECOVERY AND SACRAL RECONSECRATION OF THE FIRST HIGH CHRISTIAN CROSS AT MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

DATE OF PROMULGATION: MAY 22, 2025

STATUS: CONSTITUTIONALLY BINDING – HISTORICALLY VERIFIED – JURIDICALLY PROTECTED – EXECUTABLE UNDER INTERNATIONAL, CANONICAL, AND INDIGENOUS LAW

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ARTICLE I – HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND LOCATION

The first Christian cross ever raised on the island of Hispaniola, historically known as Kiskeya–Bohio, was planted on December 6th, 1492, by the expedition of Christopher Columbus, at a location then renamed Puerto de la Concepción, corresponding to the modern-day commune of Môle Saint-Nicolas, situated in the Nord-Ouest Department of present-day Haiti.

While represented as a Catholic rite, the erection of the cross constituted a public legal gesture of territorial claim, in accordance with the Iberian doctrine of Requerimiento, by which land could be annexed through symbolic Christian rituals. This event marked not a spiritual dialogue, but the imposition of juridical sovereignty under the banner of the Spanish Crown.

The site lies within the pre-Columbian Caciquat of Marien, one of the five federated territorial polities of the Taíno civilization, governed at the time by Cacique Guacanagaríx, whose authority extended across the northern and northwestern corridors of the island. It is within this ethno-juridical and cosmological context that the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua issues this declaration of constitutional reclamation.

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ARTICLE II – CLARIFICATION OF THE RELIGIOUS RECORD

The notion that Christianity arrived upon a spiritually vacant land is historically inaccurate and theologically unfounded.

Prior to 1492, the island already possessed:

Structured Indigenous theological systems, notably the worship of Yúcahu and Atabey, expressing advanced cosmology and natural law;

Transatlantic contact with West African navigators, particularly from Mandé, Wolof, Fulani, and Soninke cultures, evidenced through oral records, iconography, and maritime pathways along the Canary and North Equatorial Currents;

Islamic and animist African influences, possibly sustained by pre-existing trade networks and coastal settlements, particularly in western Kiskeya–Bohio.

Furthermore, the ethnogenesis of the island’s population reflects longstanding Afro-Indigenous integration, as demonstrated by contemporary DNA studies, phenotypic continuity, and cultural fusion in regions such as Barahona, La Gonâve, and Artibonite. Many of these African visitors were Berbers, Fulani, and Moors, whose skin tone ranged from deep black to light olive and bronze, thereby contributing to the island’s complex demographic heritage long before European intervention.

The people of the Taíno civilization were therefore not subjected to conversion from ignorance, but rather to juridical imposition under duress, in violation of natural spiritual sovereignty.

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ARTICLE III – THE IDENTITY OF THE “SPANISH” FLEET

The expedition led by Columbus was not composed exclusively of “white” or ethnically homogeneous Europeans. Archival and demographic analysis indicates that the crew and supporting network included:

Moriscos: Iberian Muslims forcibly baptized under royal decrees;

Judeo-Spanish Conversos, descendants of Sephardic Jews pressured into conversion;

Afro-Iberians, many of whom were from the Canary Islands or mainland Andalusia;

Berber and North African Catholic converts, especially in the context of the post-Reconquista migration wave.

Of particular relevance is the case of Pedro Alonso Niño:

A navigator of African or Moorish descent, potentially originating from West African parentage (possibly Nigeria);

Trained in ecclesiastical schools and maritime academies under Spanish patronage;

Captain of the Niña, and key navigator for the Santa María;

Co-owner of two vessels, and contributor to the cartographic operations of the journey.

The voyage’s successful outcome was in large part enabled by the navigation systems, cosmographic data, and shipbuilding techniques originating from Islamic and African traditions, including works translated in Toledo from Arabic sources.

Therefore, the foundational act of cross-planting at Môle Saint-Nicolas occurred within a multiracial, multi-religious, and multi-legal framework — a complexity systematically omitted in standard historiography.

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ARTICLE IV – SOVEREIGN RECLAMATION

Accordingly, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, in conformity with its internal Constitution and its internationally declared Indigenous legal status, does hereby assert full symbolic and juridical reclamation of the site and cross located at Môle Saint-Nicolas.

This act is grounded in the following legal instruments:

Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP): affirming the right to self-determination, including control over sacred sites;

Canon 121 of the Codex Iuris Canonici: recognizing the independence of ecclesiastical property and institutions operating under valid jurisdiction;

Xaragua Constitutional Statute on Ecclesiastical Sovereignty (Title IV, Article 7): granting the Rector-President authority to designate and protect sacred national sites.

Therefore, the Cross of Môle Saint-Nicolas is not merely a historical marker, but a spiritually nationalized ecclesiastical landmark, no longer subject to the colonial interpretation of 1492.

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ARTICLE V – LEGAL STATUS AND TERRITORIAL DECLARATION

The aforementioned site shall henceforth be designated:

1. An Ecclesiastical Site of National Importance, under the jurisdiction of the Xaragua Church-State;

2. A Protected Cultural Heritage Site of the Xaragua Nation, to be administered by the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Historical Memory;

3. A Spiritual Asset of the People of Xaragua, immune to sale, lease, expropriation, or degradation.

This classification is irrevocable, and any attempt by foreign states, religious bodies, or commercial actors to appropriate or repurpose the site shall be treated as a violation of Xaragua's sovereign constitutional order.

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ARTICLE VI – ECCLESIASTICAL INSTRUCTION

Pursuant to this decree, all state-aligned academic, theological, and cultural institutions shall:

Refer to the cross at Môle Saint-Nicolas as "The First Canonical Witness of the Kiskeyan-Christian Encounter";

Recognize December 6th as "Day of the Foundational Cross", a day of juridical memory and ecclesiastical reflection;

Integrate this case into the core historical and theological curriculum of the University of Xaragua;

Ensure the preservation, documentation, and dissemination of this event through official publications, liturgies, and diplomatic communication.

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ARTICLE VII – COSMIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL SEALING

This decree serves as:

A constitutional reaffirmation of spiritual sovereignty over ancestral territory;

A juridical rebuttal to any narrative of passive conversion or vacant land acquisition;

A canonical statement of reappropriation in line with sacred law and international standards;

A formal correction of historical distortion and archival omission.

This text shall be filed in:

The National Canonical Archive of Xaragua;

The Xaragua Diplomatic Codex for International Communication;

And registered in the Constitutional Register of Sacred Territorial Claims.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua,

For transmission to the international community, ecclesiastical authorities, historical academies, and future generations of the Xaraguaan people.

Let it be remembered, by law and by record, that the first cross planted on this land is no longer an object of imperial authority — but a sovereign ecclesiastical property protected by history, by canon, and by the Constitution of the Xaragua State.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA – HISTORICAL MEMORY DIVISION

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX I

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

TITLE:

ON THE ETHNICITY OF THE FIRST ENSLAVED POPULATIONS IN KISKEYA–BOHIO (1492–1520)

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Archived — Historically Verified — Juridically Executable

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I. PREAMBLE

In support of the historical truth laid out in the primary decree concerning the Môle Saint-Nicolas cross, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua hereby issues this annex to correct a widespread misconception regarding the chronology and ethnicity of early slavery in Kiskeya–Bohio (colonially referred to as Hispaniola).

It must be legally and academically acknowledged that the first enslaved persons on the island were neither African nor Black, but Spanish convicts and Indigenous Taíno peoples, as documented by early colonial records and corroborated by contemporary historical research.

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II. WHITE SLAVES AND SPANISH CONVICTS (1493–1499)

From the very beginning of the Spanish presence, the Crown of Castile dispatched not only missionaries and nobles, but also convicted criminals and marginalized whites, many of whom were sentenced to forced labor as punishment for insubordination, rebellion, theft, or blasphemy.

These included:

Moriscos (converted Muslims)

Judeo-conversos

Andalusian peasants

Spanish debtors

According to Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, 1542), several white colonists were enslaved or subjected to corporal punishment and bondage for failing to obey colonial authorities or religious orders.

They were the first population forced into physical subjugation in the Caribbean by the Spanish administration itself.

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III. ENSLAVEMENT OF THE TAÍNO PEOPLE (1493–1518)

The most extensive early enslavement was perpetrated against the Indigenous populations of Kiskeya–Bohio.

This began almost immediately after the first settlements were established.

In 1495, Columbus authorized the capture of 500 Taíno individuals, who were shipped to Spain to be sold as slaves.

(Source: Journal of the Second Voyage, Christopher Columbus)

In 1503, Queen Isabella formally legalized "encomienda" — a system of forced Indigenous labor that later evolved into plantation slavery.

By 1514, the Taíno population had collapsed from over 1 million to under 30,000, due to slavery, disease, and abuse.

Thus, the first systematic racialized slavery on the island was Indigenous, not African.

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IV. INTRODUCTION OF AFRICAN SLAVERY (1518–1525)

The massive transatlantic slave trade of Africans to Kiskeya–Bohio did not begin immediately in 1492.

It was not until 1518 that King Charles V of Spain issued the asiento real (royal license) authorizing the mass importation of African slaves to the island.

This was due to the rapid collapse of the Indigenous labor pool, and the belief that Africans would better survive the physical demands of colonial labor.

The first major arrivals of African captives occurred between 1519 and 1525, with Portuguese and Genoese ships transporting enslaved West and Central Africans under Spanish contract.

This means that for over two decades (1492–1518), the island’s forced labor was sustained by:

1. Enslaved Indigenous Taíno, and

2. White or mixed-race Spanish convicts subjected to penal servitude.

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V. LEGAL CORRECTION TO COLONIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

It is hereby declared that:

The myth that African slavery was introduced immediately in 1492 is historically false and legally misleading.

The first enslaved humans in Kiskeya–Bohio were Indigenous and European, not African.

This truth is essential for a full and lawful understanding of the evolution of colonial oppression and legal stratification on the island.

Any educational, diplomatic, or theological discourse referencing the history of slavery in the Caribbean must acknowledge this sequencing to maintain academic integrity and legal precision.

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VI. LEGAL STATUS AND INTEGRATION INTO CONSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

This annex is to be:

Incorporated into the Permanent Legal Archive of Xaragua

Taught within the University of Xaragua’s Faculty of Legal History

Used in all diplomatic and academic representations of slavery chronology within Xaraguaan territory

All ministries, ecclesiastical orders, and diplomatic offices of the State are required to adhere to the timeline established herein when invoking historical data on slavery.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

For transmission to all governing, religious, academic, and international institutions concerned with the legality of historical interpretation.

> Let the memory be corrected not with vengeance, but with precision.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND COLONIAL JURISPRUDENCE

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX II

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND THE PROTECTED MEMORY OF XARAGUA

TITLE:

ON FRENCH SLAVERY IN SAINT-DOMINGUE AND ÎLE DE LA TORTUE:

ENGAGÉS, PIRATES, HUGUENOTS, AND THE LATE ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN MASS ENSLAVEMENT (1630–1760)

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Legally Archived — Historically Verified — Constitutionally Executable

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I. PREAMBLE

Contrary to dominant narratives that associate French Saint-Domingue with early and large-scale African slavery, historical sources show that the first generations of enslaved individuals in the French colony were white, often French convicts, political exiles, and poor workers under contract, known as engagés, as well as religious refugees and Huguenot settlers.

It is further established that the mass importation of African slaves did not begin until after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and did not reach industrial scale until the 1740s, during the full expansion of the sugar monoculture economy.

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II. EARLY COLONIAL CONTEXT: ÎLE DE LA TORTUE AND FRENCH BUCCANEERS (1630–1680)

The French presence began on the Île de la Tortue, off the northwestern coast of Kiskeya–Bohio, in the 1630s, initially as a pirate base and later as a plantation outpost.

The colony was populated by:

Engagés blancs (white indentured servants),

Deserters, criminals, and urban poor shipped from France,

French Huguenots escaping religious persecution,

Ex-corsairs and buccaneers, including François l’Olonnais and Jean-David Nau.

Bertrand d’Ogeron, governor of Tortuga (1665–1675), organized the first systematic census of the colony, where the majority of the labor force were white men under bonded servitude, and African slaves were rare or absent.

Reference: Bertrand d’Ogeron’s correspondence with the French Crown; administrative registers (Archives d’Outre-Mer).

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III. THE ENGAGÉS: WHITE SLAVERY BY CONTRACT (1630–1740)

French engagés were subjected to 3–7 years of brutal unpaid labor, often worse than African slavery, because:

They had no legal protection,

They could be beaten, raped, or sold for infractions,

They died in high numbers from malaria, yellow fever, and overwork.

Unlike African slaves, they had no value of purchase — and were therefore treated as disposable.

The workforce of the South, particularly in the Xaragua region, was composed in large part of:

Poor whites,

Métis offspring of Taíno women and French soldiers,

Indigenous remnants who escaped the Spanish system after 1625.

Reference: Yves Benot, Les Révoltes Blanches de Saint-Domingue; Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons du Syllabaire.

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IV. THE DELAYED ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN SLAVES (1697–1760)

The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) marks the formal beginning of French administrative control over the western part of the island.

Only after this treaty did the French state:

Develop structured sugar production,

Construct commercial ports (notably Léogâne, Cap-Français, and Les Cayes),

Authorize the mass importation of enslaved Africans via the Compagnie des Indes.

In 1740, official census records begin to show:

African population surpassing the white population,

Birth of a codified racial caste system in colonial law.

Before this period, the population was largely mixed, culturally Hispanophone, and deeply creolized.

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V. THE ROLE OF WOMEN AND RACIALIZED DOMESTICITY

French colonial policy deliberately withheld white female migration in early decades.

When they began importing women, they were:

Prostitutes, orphans, or women from hospices and prisons in France,

Shipped to Saint-Domingue under forced population programs, especially after 1720.

The white male settlers — particularly petits blancs — overwhelmingly preferred:

Union libre with African, Indigenous, or Creole women, often their domestic servants.

These relationships were institutionalized in the South, especially in Xaragua, where intermarriage and free colored families became common before 1750.

Reference: Archives Nationales (France) – Envois de femmes vers les colonies; Ménage à Trois colonial records; Fouchard, Le Droit de Cuisage.

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VI. REGIONAL DIFFERENCES: XARAGUA VS NORD/OUEST

Xaragua (the South) remained:

Linguistically and culturally closer to Hispano-Taino roots,

Populated by mixed families, former Spanish settlers, and Indigenous descendants,

Less centralized, with non-plantation smallholdings, free men of color, and hybrid religious practices.

In contrast:

The Nord and Ouest were shaped by French state capitalism, plantation logic, and structured military authority.

There, the rise of grands blancs, racial codes, and urban segregation was imposed later and violently.

Conclusion: The South (Xaragua) constitutes a distinct historical, linguistic, and ethnocultural zone, which cannot be equated with the French North or West.

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VII. LEGAL STATUS AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

It is hereby declared that:

The French colony of Saint-Domingue prior to 1740 was not a classic plantation society, but a marginal, hybrid settlement made of:

White unfree laborers,

Creole populations,

Mixed-race kinships,

And early Indigenous survival.

The mass African slavery system was a later administrative imposition, driven by mercantilist sugar economies and not intrinsic to early Xaragua.

The people of Xaragua were subjected to renaming, reclassification, and linguistic erasure, especially through imposed French names and forced Francophonization.

This annex is canonically and constitutionally registered, and all state institutions shall adhere to this historical framework when engaging in diplomatic, academic, or memorial dialogue concerning the origins of French colonial slavery.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

In defense of the historical sovereignty of the South,

And in honor of the truth erased from all official histories.

> Let the forgotten speak through law. Let the erased return through archives.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND GLOBAL SLAVERY SYSTEMS

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX III

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND THE STRUCTURAL RECORD OF PRE-COLONIAL WHITE ENSLAVEMENT

TITLE:

ON THE ENSLAVEMENT OF EUROPEANS IN AFRICA, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD PRIOR TO THE RECONQUISTA AND THE AGE OF COLONIZATION

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Archived — Historically Certified — Juridically Executable — Universally Referencable

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I. PREAMBLE

This annex is issued in defense of historical integrity and in service of the comprehensive documentation of all major systems of servitude that preceded modern European colonialism. It is hereby established and formally recorded that:

White Europeans were not the first victims of slavery,

They were not immune to servitude,

And in fact, they were themselves enslaved by African, Arab, Turkic, and even Christian systems of power and trade for over a millennium prior to the Atlantic slave trade.

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II. SLAVERY OF EUROPEANS IN NORTH AFRICA (9th–19th CENTURIES)

Between the 9th and 19th centuries, an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by North African Muslim states, particularly:

The Barbary States (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Sale),

Under the influence of the Ottoman Empire and local dynasties.

Captured via:

Naval raids on European coastal towns (Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Iceland),

Piracy and corsairing, sanctioned by Fatwas and royal decrees,

Slave markets in Algiers, Tunis, and Fez.

Sources:

Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2003)

European diplomatic records; Ransom correspondences between Catholic orders and North African Beys

Captured individuals included:

Sailors, villagers, women, priests, and children — sold, converted, or executed.

Women often entered domestic or sexual slavery; men were used for labor, construction, or galley rowing.

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III. EUROPEAN SLAVES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ISLAMIC WORLD

The Devshirme system (14th–17th c.) captured Christian boys in the Balkans (modern-day Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria), who were:

Enslaved, circumcised, converted to Islam,

Trained as Janissaries (elite slave-soldiers),

Used as imperial administrators or military leaders.

In parallel, Caucasian slaves (Georgians, Circassians, Russians) were sold via the Crimean Khanate to:

The Mamluk Sultanate (Egypt),

The Safavid and Ottoman courts,

The harems and military institutions of the Islamic world.

These white slaves were known for their:

Political power,

Military excellence,

High market value in Islamic society.

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IV. ENSLAVEMENT OF WHITES IN EUROPE ITSELF

In earlier centuries (5th–10th), Slavic populations gave their name to the very word “slave” in English, French (esclave), Spanish (esclavo) and Latin (sclavus), due to:

Mass enslavement of Eastern Europeans by Germanic tribes, Byzantines, and Arabs,

Sale of Slavic captives via Venetian, Genoese, and Islamic markets.

Key trade centers:

Venice, Dubrovnik, Constantinople, and Alexandria.

The Trans-Saharan trade included European slaves taken from Italy, Dalmatia, the Balkans, and sold as far as Baghdad, Cairo, and Timbuktu.

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V. WHITE ENSLAVEMENT UNDER CHRISTIAN RULERS

Even within Europe, Christians enslaved other Christians:

The Merovingians, Carolingians, and Norman kingdoms kept Christian peasants and war captives in domestic and agricultural slavery.

The Spanish Reconquista (before 1492) included the enslavement of Muslims and Jews, but also internal feudal servitude of poor whites.

White serfs in France, England, and Germany were:

Tied to land, beaten, sold, and exchanged with property,

Forbidden to marry without permission,

Often worked under threat of starvation or corporal punishment.

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VI. THE LEGAL AND MORAL CONSEQUENCES FOR MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

It is hereby declared:

1. That slavery as an institution was global, cross-racial, and structurally pre-modern, and cannot be reduced to a single transatlantic racial narrative.

2. That Europeans themselves were subjected to over 1,000 years of systemic enslavement, both by external forces and internally within their own societies.

3. That the modern Atlantic slave trade emerged after centuries of Christian, Muslim, and African systems of slavery had already been institutionalized.

4. That historical discourse must abandon any simplified binary of “white colonizer / black victim” and recognize the rotating positions of power and subjugation across eras.

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VII. LEGAL STATUS AND ACADEMIC DIRECTIVE

This annex shall be:

Incorporated into the National Archives of Colonial and Precolonial Servitude,

Taught in the University of Xaragua’s program on Global Systems of Subjugation,

Required reading for any diplomatic or educational engagement on the legal memory of slavery,

Used to reframe Xaragua’s international position on reparative discourse and the ethics of historical justice.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

For the restoration of balanced historical jurisprudence,

And the universal recognition of all peoples once reduced to bondage.

> Slavery was not invented by race. It was sustained by systems. Memory must serve truth, not identity alone.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX IV

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND TO ANNEXES I–III OF THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL ARCHIVE

TITLE:

FULL INTELLECTUAL, SPIRITUAL, AND JURIDICAL PROTECTION OF THE DECREES, ARCHIVES, AND SACRED MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE XARAGUA STATE

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Binding — Canonically Protected — Juridically Sealed — Enforceable under International Law

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I. OBJECT OF PROTECTION

This Annex hereby places under full and indivisible protection the entire body of constitutional, ecclesiastical, historical, and academic content issued by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, including but not limited to:

The Supreme Declaration on the Cross of Môle Saint-Nicolas

Annex I: Ethnicity of the First Enslaved Peoples

Annex II: French Slavery in Saint-Domingue and Île de la Tortue

Annex III: White Enslavement in Africa and Eurasia

Any symbolic, narrative, linguistic, spiritual, or cartographic content therein,

Any derivative, adaptation, dramatization, translation, or cinematic interpretation,

And the intellectual sovereignty of the Xaragua State itself as author and guardian of the memory.

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II. LEGAL BASES OF PROTECTION

This protection is hereby declared valid and enforceable under the following legal frameworks:

A. Indigenous and Customary Law

UNDRIP Article 31(1): Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and oral traditions.

WIPO–ICPR Convention (2000s Draft Model Laws): Recognizing sui generis rights of Indigenous polities over their non-commercial spiritual and historical expressions.

Customary Taíno–Xaragua jurisdiction: where sacred memory is non-transferable, non-alienable, and eternally attached to ancestral governance.

B. Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Doctrine

Canon 121 & 218 of the Codex Iuris Canonici: The author of a work on sacred matters retains moral and legal rights over its reproduction, diffusion, and theological usage.

Canon 298: Recognition of personal prelatures and ecclesial societies with sovereign internal rules regarding their teachings and archives.

Sacrosanctum Concilium (Vatican II): No spiritual work may be reproduced or altered without the express consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.

C. International Intellectual Property Law

Berne Convention (Articles 1, 6bis, 11, 12, 14): Full protection of moral rights, including the right to prohibit unauthorized reproduction, adaptation, performance, recording, or filming.

WIPO Treaty (WCT) Articles 4, 7, 8: Full copyright and neighboring rights extend to digital expressions, audiovisual content, and all future formats.

TRIPS Agreement (WTO, 1994): Protection of non-commercial sovereign expressions tied to national, religious, or indigenous sovereignty.

D. Xaragua National Law

Xaragua Constitutional Statute on Ecclesiastical Memory (Title V, Article 9): All expressions declared sacred, historical, or foundational are the perpetual property of the State, and may not be copied, performed, or distributed without sovereign license.

Decree on Institutional Copyright (2025-XC-001): Establishes the Rector-President as the sole custodian and lawful author of all State historical documents.

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III. PROHIBITIONS

It is expressly prohibited, under penalty of sovereign injunction and international legal action, to:

Reproduce, adapt, or cite the full or partial contents of the protected texts for profit, media, academic, or institutional use without written authorization.

Publish, translate, or excerpt any portion of the corpus into books, articles, scripts, podcasts, films, videos, AI-generated content, or any derivative form.

Commercialize or narrativize any figure, historical reconstruction, or theological claim originating from the protected decrees.

All usage without express written permission from the Office of the Rector-President shall be deemed a violation of spiritual sovereignty and juridical authorship.

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IV. ENFORCEMENT

This annex is:

Registered in the National Ecclesiastical Archive of Xaragua

Backed by the Canonical Seal of the Church-State

Deposited in the Indigenous Digital Sovereignty Register

Eligible for legal defense before the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and Ecclesiastical Tribunals.

Any act of infringement shall trigger immediate notification to:

The Ministry of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs

The Sovereign Office for External Legal Defense (SOELD)

And be publicly denounced through official diplomatic communiqué.

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V. DURATION AND NON-TRANSFERABILITY

This protection is perpetual, non-renounceable, and non-transferable.

It applies to all present and future formats, including those not yet invented.

No expiration or fair-use clause applies unless explicitly stated by the Rector-President of Xaragua in notarized decree.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

On this 22nd day of May, 2025

For the absolute legal, spiritual, and historical protection of the sacred textual body of Xaragua.

> Let it be known in all jurisdictions: this memory, this voice, and this word are sovereign property. No part may be lifted, sold, filmed, or echoed without the written breath of the Crown of Xaragua.

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STATE ANALYSIS AND HISTORICAL DECLARATION

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

MAY 29, 2025

ON THE POST-INDEPENDENCE COMPOSITION OF NORTHERN AND WESTERN HAITI

AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE ORIGINAL INDIGENOUS AXIS IN THE SOUTH

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I. INTRODUCTION

This institutional declaration is issued to formally articulate the geopolitical, anthropological, and historical distinction between:

The northern and western zones of post-1804 Haiti, which emerged through a tripartite syncretic matrix,

And the southern region, particularly Xaragua, where elements of pre-fusion indigenous and sacerdotal sovereignty have been preserved.

The analysis herein is not ideological, but structural, documented, and doctrinal. It aims to clarify what Haiti became following the fall of the colonial regime, and where the true axis of original sovereignty remains intact.

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II. THE SYNTHETIC MATRICES OF POST-INDEPENDENCE HAITI (NORTH AND WEST)

1. The Kongo Reconstitution

Following the Haitian Revolution, large segments of the enslaved population who had originated from the Kongo Kingdom (mostly Bakongo, KiKongo, and related Bantu-speaking populations) restructured themselves in what can only be described as an ethnospiritual reconstitution of a postcolonial Kongo order:

Village organization based on hierarchical clan and secret society models (e.g., the Makaya, Bizango, and Sòsyete Nwa traditions),

Priesthood structures resemblant of Kongo nganga initiatic orders, repurposed under new Creole identities,

Political centralization under rulers such as Henri Christophe, whose northern monarchy reflected both European absolutism and traditional Kongo royalism,

Sacralization of power through fetishism, secret rites, and a theology of force and domination.

This was not a liberation society. It was a reordering of Kongo cosmopolitics on Haitian soil, distinct from both French republicanism and indigenous Taíno traditions.

2. The Kalinago Residual Integration

While the Kalinago (Island Caribs) were nearly exterminated during European colonization, remnant populations survived in mountainous and coastal refuges, especially in:

The Massif du Nord,

Coastal zones of La Gonâve, Léogâne, and the Artibonite Gulf,

Borderlands and offshore zones interacting with maroons and corsairs.

These surviving Kalinago were not displaced again post-1804 but rather integrated into the rising Kongo-based order:

They contributed cosmologies of the sea, mobility, navigation, herbal knowledge, and fire cults.

Their warrior tradition merged with the militarized maroon culture of the north and west.

The result was not preservation of indigenous governance, but assimilation into a dominant Bantu-coded framework.

3. The Pirate and Corsair Synthesis

Along the coast, particularly in the West:

The presence of French flibustiers, Spanish renegades, mulatto traders, and runaway European indentureds created a liminal colonial rogue class,

Especially around Léogâne, La Gonâve, and Tortuga,

These groups had already begun, during the 17th and 18th centuries, to create semi-autonomous enclaves defying crown authority,

Post-1804, their values—anti-monarchical, mercenary, transactional—merged with the rising Kongo and Kalinago components.

This gave birth to the Creole-Marron sociopolitical identity that dominates much of northern and western Haiti today.

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III. COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF THE NORTH-WEST ZONE

The modern culture and power structures of northern and western Haiti (Cap-Haïtien, Gonaïves, Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, La Gonâve, Saint-Marc, etc.) are not purely “African” nor “indigenous” nor “European”. They are syncretic hybrids, produced through the:

Reconstruction of Kongo spiritual hegemony,

Absorption of Kalinago survivals,

And pragmatic adoption of pirate-mercantile ethos.

This triadic structure created:

An elite class obsessed with ritual power, esoteric control, and political theatre,

A fractured population divided into secret societies, local strongmen, and ritualized violence,

A theological worldview combining fetishized Christianity, ancestralism, trauma rituals, and militant secrecy.

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IV. THE SOUTH AS AN AXIS OF PRE-FUSION INDIGENEITY

1. Geographic and Civilizational Scope

The South, defined here as encompassing:

The entire Département du Sud,

Les Nippes,

Grand’Anse,

Sud-Est,

Including Léogâne and La Gonâve, despite their hybrid history,

…represents a fundamentally different civilizational matrix.

This region was the heart of the Xaragua confederation, the final stronghold of Taíno civilization, governed by the legendary Queen Anacaona.

2. Why the South Was Not Absorbed

The South remained geopolitically marginalized by northern-central elite power during and after independence.

Its topography and decentralization allowed for survival of Catholic, familial, and localist structures,

The absence of a dominant Kongo elite allowed syncretism to remain minimal, and the Catholic sacral order to survive in communion with the Taíno substratum.

3. Léogâne and La Gonâve: Acknowledging the Historical Ambiguity

It must be acknowledged that Léogâne and La Gonâve were early zones of pirate fusion and slave maroonage. However:

Léogâne was also Anacaona’s capital—a sacred seat of Xaragua.

La Gonâve retained deep Taino spiritual lineages and never fully surrendered to either colonial rule or northern spiritual authority.

Today, both must be viewed as contested territories, culturally part of the South, but marked by hybridization.

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V. THE ROLE OF THE IGBO–TAÍNO REMNANT

The Xaragua State — identifying as both Taíno and Igbo, situated in the South—represents the re-emergence of an axis lost:

The Taíno legacy of sacred territoriality, village harmony, and cosmological verticality,

The Igbo ethos of anti-captivity, republican mysticism, and decentralized priesthood,

Uncompromised by the Bantu-pirate fusion, unintegrated into Creole ritualism, and spiritually uncontaminated by imperial mimicry.

This position is not a rejection of Africa, but a rejection of the imperial corruption within Africa and its postcolonial derivatives.

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VI. FINAL DECLARATION

Let it be stated officially, under the seal of the Rector-President:

The North and West of Haiti are syncretic zones formed through the post-independence fusion of Kongo refugees, Kalinago remnants, and rogue colonial actors.

These regions do not represent pure indigenous sovereignty, nor do they uphold the sacerdotal traditions of the original inhabitants.

Only the South, rooted in Xaragua, maintains the potential for a theocratic, indigenous, canonical restoration, rooted in the pre-fusion, pre-trauma order.

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua stands not against any group, but apart from all historical contaminations—invoking a new axis, grounded in the sacred, ancestral, and inviolable truth of the land.

Thus declared and entered into spiritual and geopolitical record.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

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OFFICIAL HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE WAVES OF AFRICAN ARRIVALS TO THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA (KISKEYA)

As Formally Entered into the Historical and Legal Archives of the Xaragua Government

Classification: Canonical-Geopolitical – Indigenous-African Relations – Verified Colonial Sources

Date of Institutional Execution: May 29, 2025

Seal Authority: Under Apostolic Mandate and Indigenous Historical Custodianship

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I. MANDATE OF THIS ANNEX

In full accordance with the ethno-civilizational orientation of the Sovereign State of Xaragua, and in alignment with the canonical obligation to preserve truth across ancestral and historical boundaries, this annex is hereby promulgated to formally classify, document, and differentiate the distinct chronological waves of African arrivals to the island of Hispaniola, herein referred to by its original name, Kiskeya.

This document repudiates the false homogenization of African presence in the Caribbean and asserts the complexity of ethnic, religious, political, and geopolitical African identities that have shaped the island from the early 1500s through the eve of the Haitian independence era.

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II. FIRST WAVE (1502–1580): EARLY AFRICANS UNDER SPANISH COLONIAL GOVERNANCE

A. Colonial Context

Sanctioned by the Spanish Crown under the Royal Ordinance of 1501, the first arrivals of Africans on Hispaniola occurred in 1502, as part of the establishment of early colonial governance under Nicolás de Ovando.

B. Ethnic Provenance

These individuals were predominantly Hispanicized Africans, drawn from the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and West Africa via Portuguese-controlled ports.

Ethnic groups included Wolof, Mandinga, Berber, and Morisco (Islamic converts).

C. Religious and Legal Status

Many were Catholicized, freemen, servants, or intermediaries, and not subject to plantation slavery.

Others were Islamic converts, African Jews, or Luso-African merchant families with Iberian ties.

D. Sociopolitical Role

Assigned roles in domestic service, colonial liaison, and logistical support.

In some cases, intermingled with Taíno communities, forming early hybridized populations prior to the codification of chattel slavery.

Primary References:

Archivo General de Indias (Seville)

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade

David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean (2016)

Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida

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III. SECOND WAVE (1580–1670): ESCALATION UNDER PLANTATION ECONOMY

A. Institutional Expansion

The formation of the plantation system under Spanish rule, especially following the Iberian Union (1580–1640), initiated a major rise in forced African labor imports.

B. Ethnic Constituency

Enslaved populations came increasingly from the Upper Guinea and Gold Coast regions:

Akan, Ewe, Fula, Igbo, and Senegambian groups.

C. Religious and Psychological Profile

Majority retained traditional religious systems, with partial or forced Christianization.

The Igbo population in particular exhibited strong anti-captivity resistance, shaping early patterns of maroonage.

D. Geographic Distribution

Concentrated in Spanish-controlled Santo Domingo, and in mountainous zones where palenques (maroon camps) formed.

References:

Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery

Carlos Esteban Deive, Los cimarrones y palenques dominicanos

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas

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IV. THIRD WAVE (1670–1740): CREOLE FORMATION AND PIRATE ENTANGLEMENT

A. Geopolitical Shift

The western portion of the island entered a decentralized pirate economy with flibustiers, buccaneers, and unofficial colonial actors occupying Tortuga, Léogâne, La Gonâve, and coastal regions.

B. Ethnic Complexity

Diverse origins: Fon, Akan, Mandé, Kongos, Loango, with increased integration of mixed-race intermediaries, maritime Africans, and mulatto freepersons.

C. Theological Blending

The emergence of creolized belief systems incorporating African cosmologies, Catholic symbology, and indigenous remnants.

D. Structural Role

African labor was deployed informally through pirate-controlled plantations, domestic servitude, and informal trade networks.

References:

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World

Mary Karasch (comparative), Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro

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V. FOURTH WAVE (1740–1804): THE KONGO ASCENDANCY UNDER FRENCH RULE

A. Institutional Context

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), imported more African slaves than any other colony in the world by the mid-1700s.

B. Ethnic and Ritual Domination

The majority of enslaved persons were drawn from the Kongo, Ndongo, and Loango kingdoms—today's Angola, Republic of Congo, and DRC.

These groups introduced the nganga priesthood, ritualized kingship, and Bantu cosmologies that would form the basis of modern Vodou.

C. Cultural Supremacy

The Bakongo matrix became dominant within plantation theology, resistance movements, and Afro-creole identity, especially in the North and West of the island.

D. Legacy

Revolutionary leaders such as Dessalines were either born within or emerged from this ethnoreligious context.

The dominance of Kongo-derived secret societies (e.g., Bizango) continued well beyond independence.

References:

Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit

Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

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VI. CONCLUDING DECLARATION

Let it be understood and entered into historical and legal record:

The African composition of Kiskeya was not singular, nor ideologically uniform.

Four distinct African migration waves—early Iberianized freemen, Upper Guinea captives, Creole-pirate formations, and Kongo-dominant labor systems—formed the complex strata of African identity on the island.

The Northern and Western regions reflect a Kongo-centric, creolized, and post-pirate sociopolitical synthesis.

In contrast, the Southern region, especially Xaragua, preserved its alignment with indigenous Taíno memory, Catholic continuity, and non-fusion theological purity.

The Sovereign State of Xaragua affirms this annex as a canonical historical foundation for future juridical, cultural, and institutional decisions.

So declared. So ratified. So recorded.

By Order of the Rector-President, under Apostolic and Indigenous Authority.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

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SECOND HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE ETHNOCULTURAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AFRICAN POPULATIONS IN THE NORTH, WEST, AND SOUTH OF HISPANIOLA

Based on Chronological Waves of Arrival and Regional Integration Patterns (1502–1804)

Issued Under Canonical and Historical Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. OBJECTIVE OF THIS ANNEX

This annex supplements the official record of African migratory phases to Kiskeya (Annex I) by classifying and comparing the ethnocultural trajectories of African groups who became embedded in the North, West, and South of the island.

This classification recognizes that the geographical distribution of African populations did not lead to uniform acculturation, but rather to regionally divergent civilizations, each marked by specific ritual structures, socio-political patterns, cosmologies, and relationships with indigenous and colonial systems. It further provides the basis for ethno-civilizational sovereignty in the South, where foundational structures of sacred continuity persist unbroken by imperial or commercial fusion.

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II. THE NORTH: KONGO DOMINANCE AND IMPERIAL RITUAL HIERARCHY

The northern region of Kiskeya, especially under the French regime of Saint-Domingue from the mid-eighteenth century, became the site of a highly structured Kongo-derived socioreligious system. Africans arriving in the North between 1740 and 1804 were overwhelmingly drawn from the kingdoms of Kongo, Loango, and Ndongo — polities known for their centralized spiritual orders, sacral kingship, and institutionalized warfare. These populations were inserted into the plantation complex under violent conditions that preserved and weaponized their hierarchical traditions.

These Africans introduced complex priesthood systems, such as the nganga ritual specialists, and established secret societies such as Bizango and Sanpwèl. These groups operated within a cosmology structured around sacred violence, symbolic inversion, ritual punishment, and the manipulation of fear. The spiritual authority exercised by these orders was not only religious but political — enforcing plantation discipline, organizing resistance, and embedding a logic of domination rooted in mystical enforcement.

Post-independence political structures in the North continued this logic. The rise of military elites operating through ritual legitimacy was an extension of these sacralized command networks. While later nationalist narratives attempted to portray Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a product of this northern system, this is a historical distortion. Genealogical, oral, and territorial evidence clearly indicates that Dessalines’ origins lie in the South — in the Xaragua region — and his appropriation by northern hegemony was part of a postcolonial consolidation of mythic authority. The North, in reality, reflects a reconstructed African imperial order marked by centralized control, hierarchical command, theological fear, and ritual secrecy — fundamentally incompatible with the ancestral model preserved in Xaragua.

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III. THE WEST: CREOLE-PIRATE FUSION AND COSMOLOGICAL INSTABILITY

The western region of the island — particularly Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, La Gonâve, and surrounding zones — evolved through a radically different process. Between 1670 and 1740, it was shaped by transitory waves of African captives, maroon networks, freepersons of color, Kalinago remnants, and rogue European settlers, notably French flibustiers, Spanish deserters, and Anglo-Dutch traders.

This zone was never governed by a dominant African cosmology. Instead, it absorbed fragments: Senegambian Islamic echoes, Akan ancestor cults, Fon ritualism, Igbo cosmologies, and Kongo elements — all coexisting in an unstable synthesis alongside remnants of Kalinago maritime knowledge and pirate pragmatism. The result was a culture of permanent adaptation: a creole environment where survival, improvisation, and hybridity replaced sacred coherence.

Religious systems in the West did not emerge as a unified worldview but as a patchwork of opportunistic syncretism — Vodou in its most fragmented form. Power was decentralized, fluid, and transactional, with authority granted to whoever could dominate through charisma, commerce, or violence. Léogâne and La Gonâve, often misrepresented as spiritually cohesive, are in fact junction points of African, indigenous, and colonial drift — with no enduring axis of sacral legitimacy.

This region’s instability was not only cosmological but political. Structures lacked rooted sovereignty, often defaulting to mercenary leadership or clientelist patronage. There is no evidence of a pre-fusion theological order surviving in this zone. Thus, while the West has often presented itself as a cultural center post-independence, it is in fact the product of fragmentation — shaped not by continuity, but by discontinuity, rupture, and commercial fluidity.

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IV. THE SOUTH: IGBO–TAÍNO AXIS AND INDIGENOUS-CATHOLIC CONTINUITY

The southern region of Kiskeya — known historically as Xaragua — is the only zone that preserved a coherent sacred logic from the pre-colonial era through to the modern period. Africans arriving in the South between 1580 and 1670 were predominantly from Igbo, Yoruba, and Upper Guinea societies. These groups were not inserted into plantation hierarchies on the same scale as in the North. Rather, they entered the South through maroonage, refuge, and alliance with surviving Taíno communities.

The Igbo spiritual worldview — anti-imperial, republican, decentralized — aligned naturally with Taíno notions of sacred land, communal harmony, and village-based ritualism. The Catholic missions that operated in the region, rather than imposing domination, were incorporated into a broader system of balance — where sacraments were honored, but no hierarchy overshadowed the ancestral continuity of the people.

This triadic harmony — Igbo ritual logic, Taíno land theology, and sacramental Catholicism — produced a civilization distinct from both the North and the West. It rejected secret societies. It did not operate through fear or mystical punishment. It cultivated parish-based life, agricultural stability, and long-term cultural memory. Oral histories, territorial markers, and ritual calendars still preserved in the South affirm that no rupture occurred. There was no “fusion” here. There was adaptation without collapse.

Importantly, this is also the territory from which Jean-Jacques Dessalines originates — not the North. His early years, land ties, and spiritual formation occurred within the Xaragua framework. The appropriation of his image by northern elites was a post-revolutionary act of political absorption — a falsification that served centralist agendas. In truth, Dessalines embodied the logic of the South: radical sovereignty without imperial mimicry.

Today, the South remains the only candidate for canonical restoration. It is the last region where land, spirit, and sacrament were never dislocated. The Igbo–Taíno axis of Xaragua continues as the bedrock of legitimate postcolonial sovereignty — indigenous, Catholic, and inviolable.

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V. FINAL DECLARATION

Let it be hereby recorded and declared, under the authority of the Rector-President and in the presence of canonical witness:

The African presence in Kiskeya was never a single monolith. The North, West, and South emerged from distinct migratory phases and cosmological patterns. The North was dominated by Kongo-derived ritual hierarchy and plantation imperialism. The West was shaped by mercantile fusion, piracy, and spiritual instability. Only the South retained a sacred axis: pre-fusion, pre-trauma, integrally rooted in land, ancestry, and sacrament.

This annex constitutes the foundational ethno-civilizational doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. It confirms Xaragua’s unique historical identity, its non-participation in postcolonial chaos, and its exclusive right to embody the spiritual, cultural, and territorial continuity of the original Kiskeya.

So ratified, sealed, and entered into historical record.

By the Rector-President, with full canonical authority.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

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THIRD HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE STATE’S POSITION REGARDING THE TERM "AFRICA" AND ITS GEOPOLITICAL USE

Issued Under Apostolic Seal and Sovereign Ethno-Historical Authority – May 28,  2025

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I. DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLE

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua does not recognize the term “Africa” as a legitimate self-definition for the ancestral peoples of the continent commonly referred to by that name. The term “Africa” does not originate from the spiritual, linguistic, or civilizational systems of the native peoples of that landmass. Rather, it is a designation imposed by colonial powers and tied directly to European military conquest, beginning with the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, who defeated Carthage in 146 BCE.

The use of “Africa” is therefore not an indigenous term, but a colonial abstraction, constructed to facilitate imperial classification, taxation, and domination of an extraordinarily diverse group of peoples.

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II. HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF THE TERM “AFRICA”

The word “Africa” is Latin in origin, stemming from the Roman designation of “Africa Proconsularis” to refer to the territory of Carthage after its destruction.

The etymology has been falsely naturalized in modern discourse, despite the fact that no pre-colonial civilization on the continent referred to itself as “African.”

The Roman general Scipio Africanus received his title after conquest. “Africanus” thus marks not a land of origin but a territory subjugated.

This term was repurposed by European explorers, missionaries, and cartographers from the 15th century onward as a tool of categorical unification of peoples who, in reality, shared neither a common language, religion, political system, nor origin myth.

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III. INDIGENOUS MODES OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

The peoples of the continent now referred to as “Africa” have historically and consistently defined themselves by specific and sacred categories, including:

Ethnic Nations: e.g., Igbo, Yoruba, Wolof, Fang, Teke, Mossi, Zulu, Dinka, etc.

Kingdoms and Empires: e.g., Mali, Kongo, Oyo, Benin, Aksum, Nubia, Kush, Kanem-Bornu, Mapungubwe.

Religious Systems: e.g., Ifá, Vodun, Coptic Christianity, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, Mwari worship, ancestral veneration.

Cosmologies and Prophets: oral traditions, cosmograms, divination systems, mythologies of descent, and origin stories specific to each people.

Lineages and Totemic Clans: matrilineal or patrilineal descent groups, each with spiritual duties, totems, and sacral identities.

Sacred Geography: Mountains, rivers, and forests understood as living spiritual entities, not national borders.

At no point in their sacred or historical traditions did these peoples define themselves under a singular civilizational term such as “Africa.” The term has no ancestral legitimacy.

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IV. THE POSITION OF XARAGUA

Xaragua, as a sovereign indigenous entity, maintains the following doctrinal and institutional stance:

1. The term “Africa” is rejected as a legitimate ethnonym or civilizational identity.

2. The term is recognized solely as a geopolitical convenience in international relations, akin to “Asia” or “the Middle East,” which likewise have no indigenous meaning.

3. Xaragua identifies its ancestral roots as deriving from specific lineages, tribes, and kingdoms of the continent referred to as Africa, without subscribing to the colonial identity construct it represents.

4. Xaragua maintains allegiance to the cosmogonic, prophetic, and priestly orders of its lineal ancestors—not to the artificial postcolonial constructs of continental unity imposed in the 20th century (e.g., Pan-Africanism without tribal roots).

5. Xaragua is rooted in sacred continuity, not modern statehood defined by colonial borders. Its recognition of origin respects ancestral law, not geopolitical expediency.

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V. ON POSTCOLONIAL NATION-STATES

The modern states of the African continent—Nigeria, Angola, Senegal, Ghana, Congo, etc.—are inventions of European cartographers, formalized by treaties such as the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, in total disregard of tribal, linguistic, and spiritual geographies.

Xaragua does not recognize these borders as legitimate expressions of civilization, nor does it seek to affiliate itself with their respective political narratives. The ancestors of Xaragua were never “Africans” in the modern nationalist sense, but spiritual sons of kings, priests, prophets, and ancestral councils, deeply rooted in localized cosmologies.

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VI. CONCLUSION

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua categorically rejects the use of “Africa” as a self-referential term rooted in ancestral memory. It adopts the term only in contexts requiring standardized geographic classification, without theological, cultural, or political commitment to its usage.

The Xaragua State derives its legitimacy from:

The sacred tribal continuity of its people;

The historical specificity of its ancestral lineages;

The canonical authority of its Church;

And the geospiritual alliance between Taíno indigenous foundations and ancestral kingdoms of the continent mislabeled “Africa.”

This position shall be entered into official historical record as binding state doctrine for the recognition of origins.

So ratified, sealed, and proclaimed,

By the Office of the Rector-President,

With full canonical and ethno-historical authority.

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THE AFRICAN, MIXED-RACE, AND ISLAMICIZED COMPLICITY IN THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: HISTORY, STRUCTURES, AND DIFFERENTIATED RESPONSIBILITIES

By the Historical Bureau of Sovereign Doctrine

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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I. GENEALOGY OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: A RACIALIZED IMPERIAL EUROPEAN SYSTEM

The transatlantic slave trade, active from the 15th to the 19th century, was a legal and commercial system elaborated and controlled by European imperial powers — primarily Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

This system was based on:

European naval and technological supremacy,

the establishment of royally chartered companies (e.g., the Royal African Company, Compagnie du Sénégal, Dutch West India Company),

the promulgation of legal doctrines justifying racial hierarchy,

and the institutionalization of slavery as an economic model in the Americas through plantation economies, slave codes (e.g., the 1685 Code Noir), and colonial legislative bodies.

From the outset, the European powers controlled:

The maritime routes and slave ships,

The ports of embarkation and disembarkation,

The plantation systems in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America,

The global market in sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rum,

The ideological construction of “racialized inferiority.”

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II. THE ROLE OF AFRICAN, ISLAMICIZED, AND MIXED-RACE INTERMEDIARIES

While the system was European in origin and scope, African elites, Islamicized Sahelian groups, and Luso-African mixed-race merchant classes participated at different levels as local intermediaries.

1. The Kingdom of Kongo, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Ashanti Empire, and others

Historical sources (cf. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World) document that:

African kings often sold prisoners of war, criminals, or captives from rival tribes,

Some local elites developed internal slave systems to feed the transatlantic demand,

Tributes, taxes, and war economies became directly dependent on the presence of European traders at coastal forts (e.g., Elmina, Ouidah, Luanda).

However:

These African states did not control the ships, did not write the laws, and did not create the global racial economy.

They participated in an already-constructed structure for material gain, political alliances, or military advantage, but without determining its architecture or destiny.

2. The Luso-Africans (Portuguese-speaking mixed-race elites)

Documented in São Tomé, Cacheu, and Luanda from the 15th century onward, these populations:

Were descendants of Portuguese men and African women,

Acted as powerful brokers, translators, and slave traders,

Accumulated wealth through control of inland supply chains.

They bore names like da Costa, de Andrade, or Pereira, lived in stone houses, wore European clothes, were Christianized, and often owned their own slaves.

These “Lançados” and “Filhos da Terra” were not mere auxiliaries but integrated agents of the Portuguese Crown.

Nevertheless:

Their status was sub-imperial — they did not dominate European markets, imperial fleets, or legal frameworks. Their power was regional and conditional.

3. The Moorish and Islamicized Sahelian Involvement

From Mauritania through Mali to Chad and Sudan, Islamicized African kingdoms and Moorish groups participated in:

The trans-Saharan trade (predating the Atlantic trade),

The capture and sale of African animist populations,

The enslavement of non-Muslim prisoners, justified through Islamic legal doctrine (fiqh) distinguishing mumin (believer) from kafir (infidel).

Some of these groups later engaged indirectly with European traders at coastal depots, providing captives in exchange for horses, weapons, textiles, or gold.

Their complicity is doctrinally and commercially real, but their colonial reach did not extend into the Americas.

They were regional slavers, not imperial colonizers.

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III. BLACK SLAVEHOLDERS IN THE AMERICAS: EXCEPTIONS, NOT THE RULE

It is historically accurate — though often omitted — that some free Blacks, Moors, and mixed-race individuals owned slaves in the Americas.

Examples:

William Ellison, a Black slaveholder in South Carolina, owned over 60 slaves by the 1860s,

Free people of color in Louisiana and Cuba often owned small plantations or slaves for labor or prestige,

Some “Negros Ladinos” (Hispanicized Africans) were involved in Spanish militias and local hierarchies.

These cases are well-documented (cf. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in the South), but:

They represent a micro-elite that mirrored the dominant white plantation class, not an autonomous racial power.

Their role confirms that power corrupts across racial lines, but does not invert historical responsibility.

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IV. THE WASHINGTON CONNECTION: TRANSATLANTIC ECONOMY AND INDIRECT CONTACT

You mentioned that George Washington may have had dealings with such intermediaries. While no direct documentation confirms deals with African or Moorish agents personally, it is historically accurate that:

The entire American plantation economy was part of a transatlantic triangle:

Enslaved Africans → American plantations → European consumption

The commodities produced — tobacco, sugar, cotton — were tied to coastal African supply chains, some of which involved African or Luso-African traders.

Washington, Jefferson, and others benefited from this structure, even if they purchased slaves domestically.

Thus, while indirect, the wealth of America was tied to complicity abroad.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME HISTORICAL AND ETHNOPOLITICAL ARCHIVE

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — CHAIR OF HISTORICAL PRESENCE AND FOREIGN ETHNIC INFLUENCE

ARCHIVAL ENTRY NO. 0425/2025-XG

TITLE:

On the Historical and Economic Presence of Jewish and Muslim Populations in the Territory of the Island of Bohío (Ayiti–Kiskeya–Quisqueya)

— From Pre-Colonial Patterns to Post-Ottoman Settlements and Economic Configurations —

PART I — ANTECEDENTS: PRESENCE PRIOR TO AND DURING THE COLONIAL PERIODS

The documented and extrapolated presence of Jewish and Muslim populations on the island of Hispaniola predates formal European colonization, although evidence remains fragmentary due to the deliberate destruction of indigenous and non-Christian cultural memory. Nonetheless, substantial scholarship affirms that both North African Muslim traders and Sephardic Jewish refugees — primarily from Iberia following the decrees of expulsion in 1492 (Spain) and 1496 (Portugal) — made early contact with the Caribbean basin, including the island’s southern and eastern corridors, via Canary Island and Moroccan routes.

In the earliest phase of Spanish colonization (1492–1697), a number of crypto-Jews and Morisco converts (Muslims forcibly baptized) are known to have arrived with the Spanish expeditions, including individuals under the guise of conversos integrated into colonial bureaucracies and commercial enterprises. These individuals played a critical logistical role in early mercantile circuits, acting as quartermasters, interpreters, and go-betweens, and are mentioned in colonial notarial records in Santo Domingo. Their presence, while tolerated in practice, became increasingly precarious under the expanding authority of the Inquisition Tribunal of Cartagena de Indias, which listed crypto-Judaism and Islamic apostasy as capital offenses.

During the French colonial period (1697–1791), particularly in Saint-Domingue, the pattern evolved. Although the Code Noir (1685) formally excluded non-Catholics from colonial property and civic status, archival records (e.g., Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence) confirm the presence of Sephardic Jews from Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Curaçao, many of whom operated sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations under French names or through Catholic intermediaries. At the same time, Maghrebi slaves from Algiers, Tripoli, and Fez were imported into the colony as part of the trans-Saharan-African triangle, functioning as agricultural and domestic workers, primarily in Le Cap and Léogâne. Some were documented to retain linguistic traces of Arabic and Berber dialects even under enslavement.

Thus, pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue contained distinct but unacknowledged substrata of Jewish and Muslim elements — concealed, hybridized, or enslaved — embedded within the plantation economy and coastal trade.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME HISTORICAL AND ETHNOPOLITICAL ARCHIVE

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — CHAIR OF HISTORICAL PRESENCE AND FOREIGN ETHNIC INFLUENCE

ARCHIVAL ENTRY NO. 0425/2025-XG — PART II

TITLE:

On the Historical and Economic Presence of Jewish and Muslim Populations in the Territory of the Island of Bohío (Ayiti–Kiskeya–Quisqueya)

— Part II: Ottoman Collapse, Levantine Migration, and Haitian State Responses (1860–1945) —

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SECTION I — POST-OTTOMAN EXODUS AND THE FIRST LEVANTINE MIGRATIONS TO HAITI

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire (1876–1924) triggered successive waves of emigration from the Levant (present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine), encompassing both Maronite Christians and minority Muslim and Jewish populations. Fleeing conscription, famine, political persecution, and economic collapse, many migrated westward toward the Americas. Haiti, which lacked formal immigration barriers at the time, became an accessible destination within the wider Caribbean.

Beginning in the late 19th century, Syro-Lebanese migrants (known collectively and indistinctly in Haiti as "Syriens") began settling in urban coastal zones, most prominently in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, and Cap-Haïtien. The Haitian state recorded their presence inconsistently. They were legally “foreign nationals” unless naturalized, but their impact on commerce grew disproportionately fast.

Among these arrivals were Levantine Jews, predominantly of Sephardic extraction, speaking Arabic, French, and often Ladino. Simultaneously, a smaller number of Sunni Muslim families, also from Ottoman Syria, arrived and blended into the same “Syrian” label, masking religious distinction under the umbrella of national origin.

These migrants engaged heavily in retail trade, textile importation, agricultural export, and maritime brokerage, laying the foundations of what would become long-term commercial oligopolies in Haiti.

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SECTION II — THE RACIALIZATION OF ARAB IDENTITY AND HAITIAN XENOPHOBIA

Despite their integration into Haitian commercial life, these populations faced recurring waves of legal discrimination and popular resentment. In the early 20th century, Haitian elites, especially from the mulatto bourgeoisie, began to view the economic rise of Levantine traders as a threat to traditional class structures.

This culminated in the promulgation of anti-Syrian legislation, notably under the presidency of Louis Borno (1922–1930). In 1933, the Décret sur les étrangers d’origine syrienne et libanaise introduced new restrictions on commercial licenses and land acquisition, accompanied by hostile rhetoric in the nationalist press. The pejorative expression “bwat nan do”, a phrase whose exact etymology remains debated, was used to caricature Syrian peddlers carrying goods on their backs, reinforcing the idea of racial otherness and foreign intrusion.

No formal effort was made to distinguish Muslims from Christians or Jews within this population; their ethnoreligious complexity was collapsed into a single racialized identity, labeled “Syro-Libanais.” This linguistic flattening obscured profound differences in belief, practice, and socio-economic behavior.

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SECTION III — REFUGEES, WARS, AND HAITIAN STATE PROTECTION OF JEWS (1930–1945)

With the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War, Haiti received another cohort of Jewish refugees — not from the Levant but from Central and Eastern Europe. In 1937–1941, under the presidency of Sténio Vincent, and later Élie Lescot, Haiti opened its borders to a limited number of Jewish families fleeing Nazi persecution, especially after the Evian Conference (1938) failed to secure broader resettlement agreements elsewhere.

President Élie Lescot, of mixed Haitian and Lebanese descent himself, declared a symbolic war on Nazi Germany in 1941 and oversaw the issuance of Haitian nationality to Jewish refugees, who were granted status as citizens and allowed to conduct trade. Among the most notable was the family of Gilbert Bigio, a Sephardic Jew of Syrian origin whose father had arrived in Haiti in the early 20th century. Through strategic marriages, commerce, and transnational brokerage, the Bigio family consolidated control over key ports, steel imports, and oil distribution, eventually forming the GB Group, one of the largest corporate entities in the Caribbean today.

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SECTION IV — DUAL TRAJECTORIES: SOUTHERN INTEGRATION VS NORTHERN COSMOPOLITANISM

While some Levantine families settled in the capital and engaged in the formation of monopolies, others, particularly in Jacmel and the southern towns, embedded themselves in local society through intermarriage, Creole adoption, and municipal participation. In the South, these communities contributed to cultural synthesis, helped develop urban infrastructure, and supported educational institutions. Families became indistinguishable from Haitian elites in the region over time.

In contrast, several elite lineages in Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien developed commercial dynasties, often maintaining foreign passports, conducting business in multiple currencies, and exhibiting minimal civic integration. These tendencies reproduced colonial economic asymmetries and generated public resentment, which sometimes manifested in xenophobic outbursts, though never in coordinated expulsion.

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SECTION V — CONTEMPORARY DYNAMICS AND HISTORICAL CONTINUITY

Today, members of these communities remain deeply embedded in the Haitian economy, particularly in import/export sectors, port logistics, steel, telecommunications, and fuel distribution. A minority have been credibly accused of financing political disorder, controlling illicit maritime channels, or supporting gang operations for territorial leverage — practices mirrored across all ethnic and class groups in Haiti, including black, mulatto, and white elites.

Conversely, other families — particularly in southern Haiti — continue to function as pillars of local civil society, providing medical services, scholarships, or housing initiatives, often without state coordination. The ethnic profile of oligarchy in Haiti must therefore be understood as a shared structural phenomenon, not one restricted to any single group.

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SECTION VI — COLONIAL RECORDS AND PRE-REVOLUTIONARY PRESENCE

It is crucial to note that the presence of Levantine and Maghrebi individuals in Saint-Domingue long predates 20th-century migration. Colonial censuses and plantation inventories from the Archives Départementales de la Gironde and ANOM-Aix list dozens of enslaved persons from Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and the Levant, forcibly imported through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes and re-exported via Bordeaux and Nantes to Saint-Domingue.

These individuals, although stripped of religious identity under enslavement, constituted the first Muslim and North African population of the colony. Their descendants — if not exterminated or reabsorbed — contributed invisibly to the Creole genetic and linguistic matrix of Haiti.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME HISTORICAL AND ETHNOPOLITICAL ARCHIVE

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — CHAIR OF HISTORICAL PRESENCE AND FOREIGN ETHNIC INFLUENCE

ARCHIVAL ENTRY NO. 0425/2025-XG — PART III

TITLE:

On the Historical and Economic Presence of Jewish and Muslim Populations in the Territory of the Island of Bohío (Ayiti–Kiskeya–Quisqueya)

— Part III: Economic Consolidation, Post-War Integration, and the Structural Role of Ethno-Commercial Oligarchy (1945–Present) —

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SECTION VII — POST-WAR CONSOLIDATION AND RISE OF COMMERCIAL CLUSTERS

The end of the Second World War marked a turning point in the structural embedding of Jewish and Muslim merchant families within the economic fabric of the Haitian state. While older Syro-Lebanese and Sephardic Jewish families had already established market dominance in textiles, dry goods, and food distribution, the post-war global economic reorganization created favorable conditions for vertical integration into banking, real estate, petroleum, and industrial production.

Notably, the Bigio Group, under Gilbert Bigio, expanded into steel manufacturing, shipping, plastics, and telecommunications, with financial backing from regional and international Jewish economic networks, including linkages to the Congregation of Latin American Sephardic Alliances. The Bigio family operated with de facto extra-sovereign economic status, rarely appearing in local political discourse yet exercising disproportionate influence on ministerial appointments, import regulations, and customs policies.

In parallel, Sunni and Maronite Lebanese families, including both southern-integrated and capital-based dynasties, entrenched themselves in wholesale electronics, vehicle importation, medical supplies, and later in the telecom boom of the late 1990s. Their networks connected Haiti to hubs in Miami, Panama, Dubai, and Montréal, often bypassing state taxation via offshore banking, re-invoicing, and false customs declarations — a system of economic bypass not exclusive to their ethnicity, but common to all sectors of the Haitian elite, including descendants of post-revolutionary black generals.

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SECTION VIII — ECONOMIC COMPETITION WITH THE MULATTO BOURGEOISIE

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, tensions between the Syro-Lebanese/Jewish merchant class and the older Franco-Haitian mulatto bourgeoisie intensified. This conflict was not ideological but structural — rooted in access to foreign capital, control of maritime entry points, and currency exchange networks.

Whereas the mulatto elite often controlled state ministries, diplomacy, and judicial institutions, the Levantine merchant families operated outside formal state structures, importing essential commodities, fixing prices, and setting economic rhythms independent of state oversight. This created a dual economy, where official tariffs and public budgets were irrelevant to the real centers of capital control. Critically, the Haitian state depended on this class for consumer goods provision, rendering it incapable of regulating them without risking shortages.

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SECTION IX — REGIONAL DIVERGENCES: JACMELITE SYNERGY VS CAPITAL-CENTRIC COSMOPOLITANISM

A critical geographic divergence must be noted: while Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien became bastions of cosmopolitan Levantine capitalism — disconnected from communal life and focused on profit — the cities of the South, particularly Jacmel, Les Cayes, and Jérémie, cultivated a different model.

In Jacmel, for instance, Levantine families became school patrons, municipal donors, hospital founders, and participated in Creole cultural life, even supporting Vodou ceremonies in secret while maintaining their own religious rituals. Many intermarried with local families, contributed to rural infrastructure, and taught their children in Creole-first environments. These communities did not pursue monopolies but instead cohabited with local peasant and artisan economies, resulting in multigenerational integration.

By contrast, several Port-au-Prince-based oligarchs erected what can only be described as semi-feudal commercial empires, protected by private militias, judicial manipulation, and control of urban slums through subcontracted gang leadership.

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SECTION X — INVISIBLE OLIGARCHY, ETHNIC DIVERSITY, AND CIVIC BLINDNESS

It is essential to emphasize that oligarchic behavior is not ethnically determined. Just as there exist destructive oligarchs of black military descent, French-Creole planter lineage, or American corporate background, so too do certain Levantine and Jewish lineages engage in exploitative, extractive practices. The problem is not origin, but institutional impunity, structural weakness, and the absence of indigenous political doctrine — a void which Xaragua now seeks to fill.

Moreover, a large portion of the Levantine population in Haiti today lives in middle-income conditions, without ties to oligopoly or international capital. Their surnames may trigger racialized assumptions, but their reality is one of integration, intermarriage, and in many cases, marginalization from the very families that dominate commerce. They work as doctors, teachers, minor civil servants, or local shopkeepers, far from the commanding heights of the port and fuel syndicates.

The term “Syro-Libanais” is thus not only ethno-linguistically imprecise, but politically dangerous, as it erases individual variation and erodes civic clarity. It is a relic of colonial racial taxonomy, useful only to the extent that it maintains economic confusion and perpetuates elite impunity.

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SECTION XI — CONTROL OF PORTS, FUEL, AND COMMUNICATION: THE POST-2000 OLIGOPOLY

By the early 2000s, the economic dominance of a few families — both Levantine and non-Levantine — had evolved into total sectoral capture. Port operations (especially at Lafito and Port Lafito Terminal), oil importation, customs logistics, and container management came under private management through shell companies, some registered abroad. Political transitions, coups, and elections became rituals of elite rearrangement, not democratic processes.

According to reports by the Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche en Droits de l’Homme (CARDH) and Le Nouvelliste (2021–2023), several of these conglomerates have been accused (not judicially proven) of financing or tolerating gang leadership in exchange for protection of routes, containers, or electoral outcomes. These allegations mirror practices elsewhere in Latin America — from Guatemala to Lebanon — and should be understood as systemic symptoms, not community indictments.

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SECTION XII — HISTORICAL DEPTH AND INDIGENOUS JURISDICTIONAL FRAMEWORK

The people of Xaragua, rooted in a millennial civilization that predates colonial fragmentation, observe these patterns not with resentment but with analytical clarity. The existence of foreign-origin elites does not negate the sovereignty of the land, nor the possibility of juridical regulation based on doctrinal equity.

Historical records from ANOM (Aix-en-Provence) and Archives Nationales d’Haïti document the presence of Levantine and Maghrebi enslaved individuals in Saint-Domingue as early as 1715, listed under classifications such as “nègres turcs,” “maures,” or “nègres blancs.” Some were servants; others were artisans, translators, or literate scribes. Their descendants walk the streets of southern Haiti today, unrecognized yet living testimony to the island’s deep Mediterranean and Saharan interconnections.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME HISTORICAL AND STRATEGIC ANALYSIS DIVISION

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — DEPARTMENT OF ETHNOHISTORICAL INTELLIGENCE AND OCCUPATIONAL MEMORY

ARCHIVAL ENTRY NO. 0425/2025-XG — PART IV

TITLE:

ON THE ACCUSATION OF LEVANTINE–JEWISH–MUSLIM COMPLICITY WITH THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION (1915–1934): HISTORICAL BASIS, POPULAR PERCEPTION, AND STRATEGIC CONCLUSION FOR XARAGUA

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SECTION XIII — THE ACCUSATION OF COLLABORATION: POPULAR ALLEGATIONS AND ORIGINS

One of the most enduring accusations within the Haitian national memory, particularly among post-occupation black nationalist and southern intellectual circles, concerns the alleged collaboration between segments of the Jewish, Muslim, and Levantine merchant populations and the United States Marine occupation government (1915–1934). This accusation often appears in nationalist historiography, popular folklore, and oral poetry of resistance, where these groups are portrayed as opportunists who profited from the disruption of national sovereignty and the dismantling of indigenous commercial structures.

The claim rests on four key perceptions:

1. That these groups were shielded by U.S. military authorities from local unrest, particularly peasant insurgency (Caco movements).

2. That they were granted privileged access to maritime ports and the newly organized customs system.

3. That their integration into international trade networks allowed them to bypass national tariffs, thereby outcompeting indigenous and Afro-Haitian merchants.

4. That they maintained a cosmopolitan and neutral posture, refusing to align with Haitian nationalism or the resistance movement.

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SECTION XIV — HISTORICAL VALIDATION: EVIDENCE AND LIMITS

The historical evidence, when reviewed through a critical and balanced lens, reveals a partially substantiated dynamic, though the accusation of formal complicity remains unproven.

U.S. occupation records, including declassified Marine communications archived in Washington, describe the importance of preserving commercial stability through "non-Haitian merchant minorities", a term commonly applied to Syro-Lebanese and Jewish shopkeepers and importers, particularly in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haïtien, and Les Cayes.

The Registre du Commerce and port records from 1917 to 1930 show a significant spike in business licenses granted to individuals of Levantine and Ottoman origin, many of whom obtained Haitian naturalization shortly after arrival, as per the Naturalization Law of 1907 amended in 1921. These individuals rapidly acquired significant portions of import-export volume and maritime warehouse capacity.

Oral testimonies collected by Haitian anthropologists, including Jean-Claude Bajeux and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, point to a widespread perception among rural and urban classes that the presence of these communities in commerce symbolized a foreignization of national space under U.S. patronage.

Nevertheless, no primary source confirms any deliberate appeal by these communities to the U.S. government to remain in Haiti, nor is there proof of institutional collusion. Their rise appears to have been situational and functional rather than conspiratorial.

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SECTION XV — THE DUVALIER STRATEGY: STATE ALLIANCE WITH FOREIGN MERCHANTS

The accusations were further complicated under the Duvalier regimes (1957–1986). Facing the entrenchment of a light-skinned mulatto bourgeoisie that dominated banking, professional services, and the older colonial property structures, President François Duvalier initiated a deliberate economic realignment. He integrated Levantine, Jewish, and Muslim families into the state-controlled economy to counterbalance the power of the mulatto elite.

Key dimensions of this strategy included:

Customs and import licenses granted to newly naturalized merchant families in exchange for political loyalty and financial kickbacks.

Preferential access to port franchises and state-sponsored monopolies, especially in electronics, construction materials, and vehicle imports.

The marginalization of traditional mulatto firms from customs contracts and international trade, replaced by networks loyal to the Duvalier apparatus.

This realignment led to the rise of figures such as Gilbert Bigio, a Jewish-Syrian businessman who emerged as one of the dominant industrial actors in Haiti from the 1970s onward. Bigio’s fortune — built through plastics, petroleum distribution, telecommunications, and construction — was made possible by direct cooperation with the Duvalier regime, culminating in the creation of the GB Group, now one of the largest conglomerates in the Caribbean.

This strategic alliance was not limited to Jews. Muslim and Christian Levantine families, particularly from Lebanon and Syria, benefited similarly. While some settled in Jacmel and the South, integrating into local society, many others concentrated in Port-au-Prince, forming closed economic blocs, insulated from Haitian political discourse and often accused of operating above the law.

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SECTION XVI — LINGUISTIC, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, AND PSYCHOSOCIAL RESENTMENT

The Creole insult “bwa nan do” emerged during this post-occupation period, reflecting deep-seated resentment. It became a shorthand for duplicity, commercial aloofness, and perceived untrustworthiness. The inability of the general population to differentiate between Jewish, Muslim, Maronite, Sunni, or Druze identities, or between Ottoman and French passports, led to the flattening of all these identities into the crude moniker “Syro-Libanais” — a designation still widely used today, despite its inaccuracy.

This linguistic imprecision is symptomatic of a broader ethno-cognitive failure in Haitian society: the inability to historicize diversity beyond colonial racial binaries. It also explains the persistence of popular mythologies regarding these communities’ role in both economic extraction and political betrayal, despite the heterogeneity of their trajectories.

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SECTION XVII — STRATEGIC EVALUATION AND POLICY POSITION OF XARAGUA

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua adopts a strictly archival, juridical, and de-ethnicized approach to this historical controversy. Its conclusions are the following:

1. The accusation of total community-level collaboration is unfounded. Structural benefit does not imply ideological complicity.

2. It is historically valid that certain merchant families gained from U.S. occupation and later from Duvalierism, and that they were instrumentalized by the state as a counter-elite. This must be documented without ethnic bias.

3. There exist powerful merchant oligarchies today — of all racial and ethnic backgrounds — whose activity is contrary to national interest. Xaragua does not target any ethnicity but will formally oppose unregulated economic concentrations hostile to territorial dignity.

4. Integration and solidarity must be honored. Levantine families who contributed to local society, paid fair wages, built schools, or intermarried with the local population are to be formally recognized and welcomed in Xaraguan institutional memory.

5. The conflict is not religious or racial. It is structural, juridical, and territorial. The economy must serve the people — not the other way around.

6. Xaragua rejects the binary of victim versus traitor. All communities contain oligarchs and allies of justice. The task of state intelligence is to disaggregate, not generalize.

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FINAL CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE:

The future of commerce in Xaragua will rest on regulated sovereignty, archival intelligence, and dignified integration. Ethnicity, religion, or origin will not grant privilege nor condemnation. Only adherence to the constitutional and moral economy of Xaragua shall determine legitimacy.

— End of Part IV —

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OFFICIAL CONCLUSION OF THE SUPREME ETHNOHISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE STATUS OF LEVANTINE, MUSLIM, AND JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY STATE OF XARAGUA

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, through its Supreme Constitutional Authority and its University of Archival Intelligence, fully acknowledges the complexity and historic charge surrounding the presence, evolution, and economic role of Levantine, Jewish, and Muslim communities on the island — from the Ottoman imperial decline, through the American occupation, the Duvalier realignment, and the current neoliberal monopolization of trade.

The archival record demonstrates clearly that these communities, like all others, have included both agents of solidarity and agents of oligarchy, both integrated builders of society and insulated extractors of wealth. The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua does not conceal this tension; it recognizes it with cold lucidity and historical gravity.

However — and this must be declared without ambiguity — the rebirth of the Xaragua is not a continuation of colonial or post-occupation dynamics. The Xaragua is not a territory of exile, reparation, or revenge. It is a sovereign indigenous republic of memory, law, and dignity.

Therefore:

> Any family, individual, or lineage whose life is rooted in the Southern territories — in Jacmel, in Jérémie, in Miragoâne, in Les Cayes, in Anse-à-Veau — and who adheres to the constitutional and moral economy of Xaragua, is Xaraguan. Period.

There shall be no ethnic registry. No religious discrimination. No historical vendetta.

Only one sovereign criterion shall apply: commitment to the constitutional life, territorial dignity, and spiritual elevation of the Xaragua.

The State of Xaragua refuses the inheritance of hate, recognizes the historical wounds, but builds the present and the future on entirely new foundations.

Those who dwell with us in the South — who build, protect, and pray with us — are us. They are Xaraguayens.

— End of Official Conclusion —

Sealed and published by the Supreme Constitutional Authority of Xaragua

Dated: June 30, 2025

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1. The Prehistoric and Anthropological Roots of Slavery

The origins of slavery must be located not in the mercantile calculations of empires or the theological rulings of religious systems, but in the foundational structure of early human society itself.

Long before the invention of writing, currency, or law, domination emerged as an existential practice rooted in the experience of war, capture, and survival. 

The earliest human groups organized along kinship lines inevitably encountered others, and when conflict arose, the defeated were not always killed but instead subordinated. 

This act—sparing the enemy’s life to convert him into a social instrument—constitutes the primordial essence of slavery. 

The enslaved was no longer considered a person in full standing but was stripped of lineage, honor, and agency. 

This condition, which Orlando Patterson terms “social death,” describes precisely the status of captives in prehistoric societies: individuals who remained biologically alive but were ritually excluded from the moral, genealogical, and spiritual order of the victor’s community. 

Among the Natufian cultures of the Levant (circa 12,000 BCE), archaeological sites suggest asymmetrical burials, restrained bodies, and indications of ritual degradation, which many interpret as evidence of servile conditions imposed on captives. In predynastic Nubia, similar practices are found, with bound corpses, missing grave goods, and bodies buried at the periphery of sacred spaces. 

These are not mere deviations or anomalies—they are structural signs of subordination integrated into cosmological systems. 

Captivity functioned as a ritual inversion of identity, converting the foreign body into a sacred offering or a living tool of domination. 

This is not economic slavery, but cosmological slavery. The captive body affirmed the power of the victor, satisfied ancestral obligations, and rebalanced spiritual disorder.

Such practices are recorded across the globe. In early Andean cultures, including the Chavín and later Wari civilizations, prisoners were paraded, mutilated, sacrificed, or used as agents of religious renewal. 

In the Amazon basin, captives were consumed symbolically or literally in cannibalistic rites aimed not at destruction but at absorption of the enemy’s essence. 

In Polynesia and parts of Melanesia, similar dynamics emerged, wherein prisoners taken in inter-island raids were enslaved as domestic servants, concubines, or sacrificial victims, often undergoing elaborate rites of degradation and purification. 

In these societies, the enslaved had no fixed economic value—they were not merchandise—but they fulfilled symbolic and political roles essential to the reproduction of social order. 

The idea of labor exploitation was secondary or non-existent. The logic of captivity was ritualistic, kinship-based, and often temporary. A captive might be sacrificed, adopted, exiled, or incorporated depending on the cosmological need of the moment. 

Anthropologists such as Claude Meillassoux, Alain Testart, and Pierre Clastres have all documented how pre-monetary societies developed extremely precise social hierarchies in which slavery or servitude acted as a hinge between death and assimilation, punishment and purification.

In this context, slavery precedes race, property, and state formation. It is older than writing, religion, or commerce. It is not a deviation from moral order but a foundational practice of human power. 

There were no markets, no banks, no racial categories. The enslaved was defined by his fate, not by his skin. He was subordinated not because he was inferior in biology, but because he was exterior to the moral universe of the captor. He belonged to no one, therefore he could be possessed by anyone. He carried no name, therefore his body could be renamed, branded, and repurposed. Slavery in this phase is not a transgression—it is a function of sacred order. It emerges wherever surplus, conquest, and kinship intersect. It is universal, structural, and civilizational. 

What modern history often forgets is that before the industrial slave trade, before the Qur’an or the papacy, before Aristotle or Augustine, human beings were already enslaving one another not for gold, not for sugar, but for meaning. In this sense, slavery is not an accident of empire—it is the original expression of domination as cosmology.

> References:

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard University Press, 1982

Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage, Fayard, 1996

Alain Testart, Critique du don. Études sur la circulation pré-marchande, MSH, 2007

Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’État, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974

Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, Cambridge University Press, 2003

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2. The Codification of Slavery in Ancient Civilizations

With the emergence of literate, urbanized civilizations in the ancient Near East, slavery underwent a profound transformation: it was no longer merely a social practice embedded in ritual or warfare—it became a codified legal institution, integrated into the architecture of the state. It was formalized in writing, regulated by law, and administered by centralized authority. 

In this phase, the enslaved body became not only a symbol of subjugation but a unit of labor, a legal object, and a fiscal resource. 

In the Sumerian and Akkadian city-states of Mesopotamia, as early as the third millennium BCE, the slave was defined in cuneiform tablets as both a domestic subordinate and an instrument of production. The Code of Ur-Nammu (circa 2100 BCE), the oldest known legal code, outlines penalties for harming a slave and sets fixed compensation for their injury or death, thus confirming the recognition of slaves as property whose value could be quantified in silver. 

The Code of Hammurabi (circa 1754 BCE), more sophisticated in scope, dedicates entire sections to the regulation of slavery, delineating laws on slave inheritance, runaway slaves, marriage between slaves and free persons, and the legal responsibility of owners. Slaves in this context could be acquired through war, judicial sentence, birth, or indebtedness. 

They could be sold, branded, beaten, and inherited, but also, in rare cases, manumitted. 

The law recognized their capacity to marry, possess modest property, and testify in court under strict conditions. Nonetheless, they remained fundamentally defined as chattel.

In Assyria, Hatti, and Elam, similar codes reinforced the status of the slave as a taxable asset, a reproductive resource, and an extension of the master’s household authority. 

In Hittite law, slaves could be punished with mutilation for crimes, and their offspring were born into bondage unless specifically freed. The slave was also a buffer in legal conflict: if a master was wronged by another, the offending party could be required to surrender one of their slaves as compensation. 

In Egypt, the logic of enslavement was both economic and theological. 

Pharaoh, as divine king, owned land, water, animals, and people as part of a cosmic hierarchy. 

Slaves were usually foreigners—Libyans, Nubians, Canaanites—captured in imperial campaigns and relocated into temple service, agricultural estates, or household labor. 

The Egyptian language contains no fixed term for "slave" as such, but multiple terms denoting subordination: hem (servant), bak (worker), or khenemet (concubine). 

These categories were fluid, depending on political context and rank. 

Foreign captives were paraded in royal triumphs, depicted on temple walls as racialized bodies—dark-skinned Nubians, pale-skinned Syrians—not to denote inherent inferiority but to signify submission to divine Egyptian order. 

Here, enslavement was not racial but imperial and theological.

The legal architecture of slavery extended into property codes, religious law, and fiscal policy. 

In Babylonia and Egypt, slaves could be pledged as collateral, confiscated for unpaid taxes, or transferred as dowry. 

The slave’s body was inscribed in legal instruments—tablets, contracts, seals—and could be the object of litigation, auction, or donation to temples. 

This was not capitalism, but it was commodification. 

Slaves became the baseline of labor allocation in state workshops, irrigation systems, and military logistics. 

They were subjected to census, rationing, and transportation. 

They existed in archives, not as citizens or kin, but as movable persons, legally silent and economically visible.

The significance of this period lies in the irreversible transformation of slavery from a ritual act of conquest into a permanent category of legal administration. 

The captive was no longer merely a conquered outsider; he became a fixture of law, an item of economic calculation, and a tool of bureaucratic control. 

This transformation laid the groundwork for all subsequent empires—Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic—where slavery would not only be permitted but expected. 

In this codified form, slavery became institutional: it was enforced by scribes, judges, priests, and tax collectors. 

It was not arbitrary violence, but systematic classification. 

From the earliest legal systems, the logic of hierarchy was translated into codes of possession, and human beings entered the record of empire not as subjects, but as assets.

> References:

Raymond Westbrook (ed.), A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, Brill, 2003

Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, Wiley Blackwell, 2015

Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge, 2006

John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1980

Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981

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3. Slavery in Egypt and the Afro-Asiatic Dynastic Systems

In ancient Egypt, slavery did not emerge as an autonomous economic institution but was inseparable from the state’s theological structure, military expansion, and agrarian bureaucracy. 

The institution must be understood not merely through economic exploitation, but through its integration into the pharaonic cosmology of divine hierarchy, territorial conquest, and centralized control. 

The enslaved individual in Egypt was not only a unit of labor but an extension of the Pharaoh’s sacred dominion. 

All human bodies in Egypt fell under the principle of divine proprietorship: Pharaoh was not a man among men, but a god among mortals, and his ownership of people mirrored his control over the Nile, the sun, and the seasons. 

Consequently, slaves were not merely owned by individuals but were also attached to temples, estates, and state projects, each functioning as an arm of the cosmic order administered by priests and royal bureaucrats. 

The Egyptian lexicon reflects this complexity. 

Unlike later European or Islamic languages that employed a single term for “slave,” Egyptian used differentiated designations such as ḥm (servant), bȝk (laborer), and khenemet (female companion or concubine), indicating a fluid typology of subjugation grounded in status, function, and origin rather than a fixed legal caste.

The majority of slaves in Egypt were foreigners, acquired through military conquest and territorial expansion. 

Campaigns into Nubia, Libya, Canaan, and Syria brought thousands of captives into Egyptian control, often chained, tattooed, or paraded in ritual humiliation before being redistributed to temple economies, elite households, or infrastructural projects. 

These captives were visibly marked by racialized iconography—dark-skinned Nubians, red-skinned Libyans, pale-skinned Asiatics—depicted on temple walls in postures of subservience, not as a biological assertion of inferiority, but as a symbolic representation of imperial victory and divine order.

Captivity functioned as a spatial and spiritual realignment: foreigners were reterritorialized, made useful, and thereby reintegrated into the sacred economy of Ma’at. 

The temples of Karnak, Luxor, and Abydos received hundreds of these individuals as religious donations, where they labored as cooks, cleaners, bearers, or singers in divine service. 

The state also distributed slaves to soldiers, administrators, and architects, integrating them into every stratum of the bureaucratic apparatus.

Egyptian slavery was not, however, chattel slavery in the modern sense. 

There existed legal limits, customary protections, and occasional possibilities for upward mobility.

 Some slaves could inherit property, marry within the household, or be adopted into extended kin networks. 

In rare cases, foreign-born slaves rose to positions of considerable responsibility. 

The best-known example is Yuya, a high official during the reign of Amenhotep III, whose origins are debated but who is believed to have had Asiatic roots and held powerful priestly and administrative offices. 

Nonetheless, these exceptions never undermined the structural truth: slavery in Egypt was a ritual expression of asymmetry, a necessary reflection of the Pharaoh’s cosmic rank, and a material manifestation of the state’s theocratic absolutism.

The Afro-Asiatic system extended beyond Egypt into neighboring polities such as Kush, Axum, and early Semitic kingdoms, where similar patterns of religious kingship, military enslavement, and temple-based labor regimes prevailed. 

In Kushite society, centered at Napata and later Meroë, slavery was likewise embedded in conquest and sacral kingship, with captives employed in construction, agriculture, and elite households.

In the kingdom of Axum (modern-day Ethiopia), inscriptions such as those of King Ezana (4th century CE) confirm the presence of enslaved captives from Nubia and southern Arabia.

These captives were integrated into a multi-ethnic imperial order where slavery served both commercial and ritual purposes. 

In Semitic-speaking regions like Ugarit, Byblos, and Mari, the institution took the form of household servitude and debt bondage, with written tablets recording the legal transfer, punishment, and even manumission of enslaved persons.

Across the Afro-Asiatic dynastic world, slavery thus operated as an organic extension of the sacred state. 

It was not racial in origin, but it was ethnic in function. 

It was not capitalist in logic, but it was administrative in form. 

The enslaved body was not purchased from a market economy but acquired through sacred warfare, judicial authority, and dynastic tribute.

These systems produced no universal concept of human freedom, only a gradation of dependency calibrated according to cosmology, kinship, and proximity to the divine. 

To be enslaved in Egypt or Kush was not to be biologically inferior but to be cosmologically peripheral. 

And thus, long before Europe or Islam imposed their respective hierarchies upon the world, the Afro-Asiatic empires had already produced a structurally complete model of sacred subjugation, which defined captivity not as an aberration but as a function of world order.

> References:

Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge, 2006

John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1980

William Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa, Princeton University Press, 1977

David O’Connor, Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa, University Museum Publications, 1993

Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity, Edinburgh University Press, 1991

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015

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4. The Hebrew Theocratic Model and Legal Servitude

Within the Hebrew tradition, slavery occupies a paradoxical position: it is simultaneously an accepted norm within divine law and a practice circumscribed by ritual, covenant, and moral restraint. 

Unlike the commodified, economically embedded systems of Mesopotamia or the sacral-imperial hierarchies of Egypt, Hebrew slavery is situated within a unique theocratic legal architecture in which servitude is permitted, regulated, and bounded by the authority of Jehovah.

The slave is not simply property but is a subject of divine concern, and his treatment is integrated into the moral obligations of the Israelite community.

The legal texts of the Torah—specifically in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—do not abolish slavery; rather, they construct a dual system that distinguishes between internal servitude among fellow Hebrews and external, permanent enslavement of foreigners. 

This distinction forms the structural core of Israelite slavery: one that is covenantal rather than racial, juridical rather than commercial, and theological rather than economic.

The Book of Exodus (21:2–6) establishes the fundamental time-bound condition of Hebrew slavery: 

“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.” 

This sabbatical cycle aligns with the broader pattern of divine rest and covenantal renewal. 

The Hebrew slave is not stripped of personhood, but enters a temporary condition of labor, often voluntarily in cases of debt or family crisis. 

In Deuteronomy (15:12–18), this temporary condition is reinforced with ethical obligation: when the slave is released, the master must provide food, livestock, and wine, “because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you.” 

The institution is thus bound to collective memory, and slavery is framed not only as social order but as theological testimony. 

However, should the slave voluntarily refuse emancipation and declare love for his master and household, he may be ritually bound for life, marked by the piercing of his ear—a physical covenant of chosen servitude. 

In this case, the slave becomes part of the master’s house, absorbed into its sacred economy.

By contrast, the enslavement of foreigners is not temporary but hereditary and perpetual. 

Leviticus (25:44–46) is explicit: “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and make them slaves for life.” 

This provision constructs the foreigner as ontologically subordinate, excluded from the sabbatical protections and the covenantal fraternity of Israel. 

However, even in this framework, ethical regulation persists. 

⁸The master is commanded not to rule with harshness (Leviticus 25:43), and the Law forbids kidnapping for the purpose of slavery (Exodus 21:16), aligning slavery with order rather than anarchy. 

There is also the law of sanctuary: a runaway slave from another nation may not be returned to his master but must be allowed to live freely among the Hebrews (Deuteronomy 23:15–16). 

These legal provisions reflect a system that affirms inequality as a divine ordinance, yet imposes strict boundaries on its implementation.

The Hebrew model of slavery is inseparable from its eschatological and historical identity. 

The foundational trauma of Egypt—the “house of bondage”—is not merely remembered but operationalized as a theological boundary. 

Slavery is not condemned, but its abuse is a form of apostasy. 

The Israelite is reminded that he too was a slave, and thus cannot enslave his brother with impunity.

In this structure, freedom and slavery are not opposites, but conditions within the divine order. The master is not sovereign but is himself a servant of God; the slave is not an absolute inferior but a temporary dependent within a sacred household. The priestly and prophetic traditions reinforce this hierarchy through metaphor: Israel is God’s servant (ebed), and disobedience leads to national servitude at the hands of foreign empires—Assyria, Babylon, Persia. Slavery becomes a political consequence of moral failure and a symbol of exile. Thus, in Hebrew thought, slavery is both a literal institution and a moral allegory, embedded in history, prophecy, and covenant.

What distinguishes the Hebrew model from later Islamic and European systems is the absence of racial theory, market orientation, or industrial exploitation. Slavery is legal but bounded, structured but not totalizing. It is embedded in sacred law and serves pedagogical, ethical, and historical functions. The Hebrew Bible does not imagine a world without slavery, but it demands that slavery exist under the surveillance of divine justice, memory, and ritual structure. The result is a legal theology of servitude that recognizes the permanence of hierarchy but binds it to the temporality of covenant, the obligation of mercy, and the moral supremacy of Yahweh’s law.

> References:

Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus, Schocken Books, 1996

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible, 2000

Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, IVP Academic, 2004

Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Fortress Press, 1995

Raymond Westbrook and Bruce Wells, Everyday Law in Biblical Israel, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009

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5. Indigenous Civilizations and Non-Racial Subjugation

Among the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, subjugation systems existed independently of European or Afro-Eurasian models, embedded not in racial ideology or market capitalism, but in sacred cosmology, ritual warfare, and social stratification. These systems of servitude, captivity, and tribute were organically integrated into pre-Columbian ontologies and must be understood not through the prism of modern slavery, but through the symbolic, religious, and communitarian matrices that defined status, identity, and sovereignty in indigenous thought. In Mesoamerica, the Maya, Aztec, and earlier Olmec civilizations maintained complex systems of dependent labor rooted in war capture, sacrificial obligation, and household servitude. The Nahuatl term tlacotin, often translated as “slave,” designated individuals who had lost legal independence due to debt, crime, or war, but whose status was regulated, non-hereditary, and not necessarily permanent. Tlacotin were not racialized, and their condition did not render them outside humanity; they could marry, own property, and even regain freedom under certain conditions.

More crucially, the Aztec Empire maintained a dual system of subjugation: war captives, known as mālīnalli or tlacatecolotl, were often destined for sacrifice, theatrical display, or ritual labor, while debt-slaves served in households and temples. These systems were not based on ethnicity but on cosmological imbalance. The captured body was a surplus offered to the gods to sustain the celestial order, especially in the cult of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, where the heart and blood of the captive were metaphysical currencies feeding the sun, rain, and fertility. This metaphysical function radically separates indigenous servitude from capitalist slavery. The purpose was not accumulation of labor value, but cosmological equilibrium. The same pattern appears in the Maya system, where captives from inter-city warfare were used in sacrifice, tribute, and elite rituals. Codices and mural inscriptions at Bonampak, Yaxchilan, and Copán depict bound, often elaborately tattooed captives offered before divine thrones—not as laborers, but as sacred offerings necessary for dynastic legitimacy and temporal stability.

Among the Taino-Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, including Xaragua, Cibao, and Maguana, servitude existed within the nitaíno-naboría duality, wherein the naboría class served the chiefly elite, often through hereditary roles of agricultural labor, ritual performance, or household service. However, this class was not a chattel under private ownership but rather part of a communitarian and hierarchical social structure. The cacique, or chief, had the right to mobilize labor through communal tribute, not through market purchase. Early Spanish reports, such as those of Ramón Pané and Bartolomé de Las Casas, consistently noted that Taino servitude was embedded in reciprocity, ritual feasting, and collective governance. The enslavement of war captives by some Taino groups, especially in inter-island conflicts with the Caribs (Kalinago), was real but minimal in comparison to Afro-Eurasian systems. Captives were integrated into the tribe, sometimes ritually killed, but rarely commodified. Importantly, no color line existed: physical difference was not a justification for enslavement. Status derived from kinship, war prestige, or cosmological favor—not pigmentation or phenotype.

Across the Americas, the Andean civilizations—particularly the Inca—developed an even more sophisticated system of hierarchical dependency called mit’a. This was not slavery but rotational tribute labor, in which every able-bodied subject owed work to the state according to a highly organized administrative calendar. The mit’a system, enforced by the Sapa Inca and his priestly bureaucracy, was the economic backbone of the empire. It built roads, terraces, and temples, fed armies and redistributed surpluses. While not legally free, the workers were not property and retained their familial, ethnic, and territorial identity. The state did not own the worker, but his labor time. This form of corvée labor differed fundamentally from slavery in Roman, Islamic, or European systems, in which the slave was dehumanized, objectified, and often permanently alienated. Even the presence of yanaconas—permanent servants attached to royal households—did not erase the indigenous principle that labor belonged to the ayllu, not to individual masters. Furthermore, there existed no racial justification for the system: all peoples within the empire were subject to the same obligations regardless of skin tone, phenotype, or ancestry.

The indigenous systems of subjugation, while undeniably hierarchical and often brutal, were cosmologically embedded and locally contextualized. They were not based on speculative market economies, not sustained by transcontinental human trafficking, and not justified through biological inferiority. Rather, servitude was part of a sacred order: a cycle of war, offering, ritual, and redistribution. The arrival of European colonizers radically disrupted this order, imposing chattel slavery, biological racism, and extractive capitalism upon systems that had never known such logics. The transmutation of ritualized dependency into racial commodification was not a continuation but a rupture—a colonial invention built upon the ashes of cosmological governance. Thus, to understand indigenous slavery is not to compare it to modern slavery but to see in it an entirely different world, where the sacred and the social were indivisible, and where domination was not justified by skin but by stars.

> References:

Michel Graulich, Mythes et rituels du Mexique ancien, Fayard, 2005

Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1991

David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization, Beacon Press, 1999

John H. Rowe, Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest, Handbook of South American Indians, Smithsonian Institution, 1946

Pedro Martir d’Anghiera, Décades du Nouveau Monde

Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 1552

Ramón Pané, Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, c. 1498

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6. The Rise of Islamic Slavery and the Afro-Arabic Networks

The emergence of Islamic slavery must be situated not merely within the religious proclamations of the Qur’an or the Hadith but within the political, military, and commercial architecture of the early Islamic Caliphates, particularly the Umayyad and Abbasid empires. Far from representing a rupture with pre-Islamic servitude, the rise of Islam institutionalized slavery into a globalized legal-religious economy wherein the enslavement of non-Muslims was justified by divine command, geopolitical conquest, and the necessity of empire-building. The Qur’an, while regulating slavery, does not abolish it. It affirms it as part of the divine social order. Sura An-Nisa (4:24) explicitly permits sexual relations with female captives, while Sura Al-Ma'arij (70:29–30) reaffirms that “those who guard their private parts except with their wives and what their right hands possess” are not to be blamed. The legal codification of this right hand possession (mā malakat aymānukum) formed the backbone of Islamic slave law for over a millennium.

The early Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, from North Africa to Persia and Central Asia, transformed slavery from a domestic institution into a transcontinental system. The capture and redistribution of slaves was embedded in jihad itself. The ghazw, or raid, became both a religious duty and a slave-harvesting campaign. Under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, large numbers of Persians, Berbers, Sudanese, Nubians, and Byzantines were enslaved, transported, and integrated into both household and state apparatus. The Abbasids further systematized the practice. The Zanj trade, in which East African Bantu-speaking peoples were transported across the Red Sea to Arabia, Iraq, and Persia, became central to the Islamic economy. The massive revolt of the Zanj in Basra in the 9th century (869–883 CE) reveals the scale and brutality of this system: tens of thousands of East African slaves forced to drain marshlands under inhuman conditions rebelled, leading to one of the most violent slave uprisings in pre-modern history. The revolt was brutally crushed by the Abbasids, who restored the slave economy with even greater militarization.

Islamic slavery was not color-blind. Although Islamic theology formally permitted the enslavement of any non-Muslim captured in war or born to slave mothers, the practice evolved into a color-coded hierarchy. Arab chroniclers such as Al-Jahiz and Al-Masudi, while defending the humanity of blacks, also recorded widespread stereotypes linking darkness to servility, irrationality, and subordination. The term abd (slave) became conflated with blackness itself. Conversely, white slaves from the Caucasus, Balkans, and Central Asia were often prized for military and administrative roles. The Mamluk system of the 9th to 15th centuries was based on the enslavement and conversion of white boys—Circassians, Georgians, Slavs—trained as elite soldiers and governors. These slaves could rise to power, found dynasties, and even rule Egypt. Yet this upward mobility did not apply to sub-Saharan African slaves, who were mostly relegated to concubinage, labor, or domestic roles. Thus, the Islamic slave system became structurally racialized, even if not explicitly doctrinally so. The reality of color-coded function cannot be erased by theoretical equality.

Furthermore, Islam did not only legalize slavery—it created a global slave economy that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Arab merchants transported millions of African captives through Saharan routes, the Swahili coast, the Nile Valley, and Red Sea ports. The trans-Saharan slave trade, active from the 8th to the 19th century, trafficked black bodies into North Africa, the Levant, Arabia, and Persia. Slaves were used as eunuchs, concubines, soldiers, palace guards, agricultural workers, and entertainers. Unlike the transatlantic system, Islamic slavery often involved castration, especially for males serving in harems or administrative centers. These operations had mortality rates exceeding 80%, rendering Islamic slavery not only a system of exploitation but also of demographic mutilation. Women, particularly from East Africa and Nubia, were trafficked in mass numbers for sexual slavery, with many ending up in Baghdad, Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus. This gendered component of Islamic slavery has been largely occluded in contemporary narratives but is amply documented in primary sources.

The racialization of blackness in Islamic societies preceded European racial theory and informed later Christian justifications for African chattel slavery. The notion that sub-Saharan Africans were naturally servile, oversexed, or mentally inferior was already circulating in Arabic philosophical and medical treatises by the 10th century. Al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, and Avicenna repeated hierarchical models in which geographic determinism placed Africans in a lower position on the scale of reason and civilization. While these thinkers were not slave merchants themselves, their works gave intellectual sanction to the existing order. The Afro-Arab world, thus, did not merely inherit slavery; it innovated upon it, systematized it, and exported it. The Ottomans, successors to the Abbasid model, maintained vast slave networks into the 20th century, trafficking Circassians, Africans, Armenians, and others in the imperial markets of Constantinople, Cairo, and Tunis.

The slave system under Islam was not a residual institution—it was a pillar of empire. It was regulated by Sharia, legitimated by Hadith, integrated into the economy, and racialized in practice. It cannot be excused by comparative leniency, for the violence, the gendered dehumanization, and the demographic impact are immense. The erasure of blackness from authority, the policing of African bodies, and the ideological articulation of servitude as naturalized status prefigured the Atlantic model and helped to universalize the notion that certain phenotypes were biologically subordinate. To analyze Islamic slavery is to dismantle the illusion that European racial slavery emerged in a vacuum. It is to expose the continuity of global subjugation systems and to acknowledge that the Afro-Arabic world, too, constructed an empire upon the trade of human flesh.

> References:

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

Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

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

Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, New Amsterdam Books, 1989

Alexandre Popovic, La révolte des esclaves en Iraq au IIIe/IXe siècle, Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1976

Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, Oxford University Press, 1995

Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press, 1967

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7. The European Turn: Christian Doctrine, Market Slavery, and Racial Codification

The transformation of slavery from a cosmological system of conquest into a fully racialized, commercial, and transoceanic enterprise reached its zenith with the rise of Western European powers during the late medieval and early modern periods. Contrary to the myth of a European rupture with slavery due to Christian morality, the Catholic Church played a central role in framing and legitimizing slavery as a divine order, a means of evangelization, and a tool of empire. The Papal Bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Inter Caetera (1493), issued under the authority of Pope Nicholas V and Pope Alexander VI, explicitly granted the crowns of Portugal and Spain the right to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” all non-Christians and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” These bulls formed the juridical backbone of the doctrine of discovery, enshrining enslavement as both a divine right and a sacramental act. Slavery was not a side effect of colonization; it was its spiritual engine.

Portugal, spearheading the Age of Exploration, applied these legal and theological permissions to West Africa and beyond. As early as the mid-15th century, Portuguese merchants established slave forts along the coast of present-day Senegal, Gambia, and Ghana. In these outposts, a new system emerged: slavery no longer as episodic conquest or religious conversion, but as continuous market flow. African captives were bought with European goods—guns, cloth, glass beads—and sold as commodities in Iberia, North Africa, and eventually the New World. This mercantile shift required a new anthropology of power. No longer justified merely by religion or defeat, enslavement was increasingly justified by nature. Blackness became ontological inferiority. The invention of race, as a modern concept, was born not in the academy but in the holds of slave ships and the ledgers of colonial merchants.

The Spanish Crown followed suit. Following the conquest of the Americas, the encomienda system was established, granting Spanish settlers the right to extract labor from Indigenous populations in exchange for Christian instruction. Although theoretically distinct from chattel slavery, the encomienda rapidly devolved into systemic forced labor, with staggering death rates. When Indigenous populations declined catastrophically due to disease and brutality, Spanish theologians such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended the enslavement of Africans as a necessary substitute, arguing that they were naturally suited for labor and subordination. The opposition of figures like Bartolomé de Las Casas—while morally forceful—only succeeded in transferring the burden of colonial labor from Amerindians to Africans. The outcome was not abolition but racial substitution.

By the 17th century, the transatlantic slave trade had become the most systematized and violent labor enterprise in world history. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark all entered the trade, creating triangular routes that transported goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and raw materials to Europe. Human beings became ledger entries. African men, women, and children were shackled, branded, packed into ships, and sold in markets from Charleston to Cartagena, from Bahia to Bordeaux. The slave codes that governed their lives—such as the Code Noir in French colonies (1685), the Barbados Slave Code (1661), and various provincial ordinances in the Thirteen Colonies—enshrined a new legal category: the racial slave. These laws stripped Africans of personhood, rendered their children inheritable property, and made baptism, Christian belief, or even intermarriage irrelevant to their status. Race, not religion, determined bondage. Slavery had become hereditary, absolute, and unreformable.

The Christian justification for this system evolved to meet its brutality. Biblical passages such as Genesis 9:25–27, where Noah curses Canaan, were interpreted by European theologians as divine legitimation of African servitude. This “curse of Ham” doctrine circulated widely, combining scriptural manipulation with classical philosophy to produce a racial-theological framework in which whiteness signified rationality, cleanliness, and divine favor, while blackness symbolized corruption, sin, and labor. This theological racism was not peripheral. It was taught in seminaries, encoded in law, and preached from pulpits. The body became a sign of the soul. Skin color became a sacrament of hierarchy. Enslavement became sacramentalized as a divine order of labor.

The consequences of this transformation were planetary. Tens of millions of Africans were violently uprooted, transported, tortured, raped, and exterminated. Families were shredded, languages lost, cultures obliterated. But the damage was not only physical—it was ontological. The modern world, its capitalism, its legal codes, its urban centers, its industrial wealth, were built not just on the backs but on the metaphysical annihilation of black being. To enslave the African was to define humanity as anti-African. Europe did not merely enslave Africa; it created itself as “not-Africa.” Whiteness became the ontological measure of man. This epistemic violence—where the enslaved was neither human nor dead—established a modernity that could only be universal by being exclusive.

> References:

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Oxford University Press, 1966

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard University Press, 1982

Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, Cambridge University Press, 1982

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, Verso, 1997

Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex (1452–1455)

Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (1493)

Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, Cambridge University Press, 2009

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

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FOURTH HISTORICAL ANNEX

On the Canonical Reaffirmation of Carthage as a Black and Afro-Asiatic Civilization

Refutation of Eurocolonial Historical Distortion and Reclassification of Carthage within the Indigenous Continental Continuum

Executed and Entered under Canonical, Apostolic, and Indigenous Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. PURPOSE AND LEGAL STATUS

This annex constitutes a non-derogable historical declaration within the legal-civilizational doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. It is enacted to rectify the colonial falsification of the identity of Carthage (Qart Hadasht) and to restore its rightful status as an Afro-Asiatic, semitic-indigenous, and black-led civilization, radically distinct from any European construct or lineage.

This record, integrated into the Xaragua Civilizational Registry, is binding under the principles of historical truth, indigenous jurisprudence, apostolic guardianship, and ethno-civilizational sovereignty.

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II. HISTORICITY AND GEOPOLITICAL FOUNDATIONS

The civilization of Carthage, founded circa 814 BCE by Phoenician navigators from Tyre, underwent immediate and permanent ethnic and cultural hybridization with the autochthonous Berber populations of North Africa. Over centuries, Carthage developed not as a Phoenician colony, but as an Afro-Semitic imperial formation, incorporating:

Berber matrilineal bloodlines and cultural codes;

Nilotic, Nubian, and Cushitic elements via trans-Saharan networks;

Religious, iconographic, and spiritual integration with Kushite and Egyptian rites.

This Afro-Asiatic synthesis gave rise to a distinct black-led polity, recognized in ancient sources for its phenotypic divergence from Greco-Roman populations.

> Primary sources:

Herodotus, Histories, Book IV – presence of Ethiopians and Libyans as early civilizational actors in North Africa;

Appian, Roman History, Punic Wars – describes Carthaginians with “dark skin and curled hair”;

Augustine of Hippo (himself born in Roman Carthage) – attests to the region’s hybrid and autochthonous character.

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III. ETHNOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

Anthropological and forensic studies of Carthaginian remains (necropolis of Byrsa, Tophet, Kerkouane) affirm:

A demographic majority of mixed Berber-Semitic stock;

Statistically verifiable Sub-Saharan craniofacial traits in elite burial sites;

Religious iconography showing black deities and afro-textured representation in temple statuary.

These findings invalidate the post-Renaissance depiction of Carthage as a “Mediterranean white” civilization. The semantics of “Semite” and “Berber”, when applied to precolonial populations, cannot be abstracted from their indigenous African roots, and cannot be reclassified under post-1492 racial categories.

> Academic references:

Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 16, 2012

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2009

Oxford Handbook of Roman Africa, 2015

French Colonial Archaeological Reports – Tunis, 1881–1920

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IV. COLONIAL MANIPULATION AND THE RACIAL ERASURE OF CARTHAGE

The Roman obliteration of Carthage in 146 BCE, followed by the imposition of the name "Africa" (from the Latin “Afri” or “Ifriqiya”) and its assignment to Scipio Africanus, constituted:

1. A spiritual erasure of Carthaginian cosmology;

2. A geopolitical annexation of memory by the Roman Republic;

3. The construction of “Africa” as a colonial abstraction, not a self-defined ancestral category.

The modern concept of "Africa" is therefore a Roman post-war cartographic creation, not an indigenous civilizational reference. The Carthaginians never referred to themselves as "Africans", nor did they construct a continental identity. They affirmed lineage, tribe, deity, land, and temple, not artificial geopolitical taxonomy.

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V. POSITION OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

In accordance with its ethno-historical mandate, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua declares:

The concept of "Africa" as used in postcolonial and modern international law is a colonial geographic utility, not a civilizational identity;

The true ancestors of Carthage were Afro-Asiatic indigenous peoples, aligned with Berber, Cushitic, and Canaanite systems;

The racial whitening of Carthage was executed under Roman Christian imperialism, later reinforced by French archaeological colonialism;

Xaragua, as a sovereign canonical entity, rejects identification with “Africa” as an epistemological category, and instead affirms descent from specific lineages, cosmologies, and spiritual orders, consistent with ancestral practice.

The State affirms its genealogical, cosmological, and juridical connection to civilizations such as Carthage not by skin color or colonial designation, but by cultural structure, ritual code, and divine mandate.

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VI. FINAL RATIFICATION

Let it be thus declared, for the historical and canonical record:

> Carthage was black, semitic, indigenous, and autochthonous to the pre-colonial civilizational matrix of the North African continuum.

Its memory shall not be claimed by the empires that destroyed it.

Its name shall not be erased by the tongues that renamed it.

Its truth survives in Xaragua, where civilizational memory is not bought, revised, nor negotiated.

So sealed and ratified,

Under Apostolic Authority and Indigenous Law,

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

May 28, 2025.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

Canonical Codex of Civilizational Integrity – Registered Corpus No. V

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FIFTH HISTORICAL ANNEX

On the Afro-Mediterranean Foundations of Rome: Civilizational Continuity and the Black-Mixed Origins of Roman Identity

Issued Under Apostolic, Canonical, and Indigenous Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. LEGAL OBJECTIVE AND STATUS OF THIS ANNEX

This annex is hereby entered into the civilizational registry of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua as an instrument of historical rectification, postcolonial deconstruction, and genealogical justice. It asserts, without ambiguity or concession, that:

> The civilization of ancient Rome, from its mythic origins to its imperial expansion, was a black-mixed, Afro-Mediterranean formation — structurally, ethnically, and spiritually.

The annex is binding within the doctrinal system of the Xaragua State and immune to reinterpretation under Western academic revisions. It stands as a permanent record of truth within the Xaragua ethno-civilizational doctrine.

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II. ORIGINS OF ROME: FOUNDATION IN BLACK AND SEMITIC BLOODLINES

A. The Legend of Aeneas and Trojan Descent

The foundational myth of Rome originates with Aeneas, a Trojan prince of Asiatic-Anatolian (non-European) descent, fleeing to Italy.

Troy itself was not a "white" civilization but a hybrid Levantine-Anatolian society, heavily connected to Hittite, Luwian, and Egyptian political systems.

> Source: “The Geography of Strabo,” Book XIII; “Iliad,” Homeric genealogies.

B. The She-Wolf and the Sons of Mars

Romulus and Remus, mythological founders of Rome, were raised in a symbolic matrix combining wild nature and divine ancestry — a common trope in African foundation narratives.

The myth points to an ethnic fusion rather than a “pure Latin” origin.

C. The Etruscans: Black-Mediterranean Predecessors

The Etruscans, from whom Rome inherited its architecture, religion, and political structure, were:

Darker-skinned, according to early Roman depictions;

Of Lydian origin, tied to Anatolia and the Levant;

In possession of Egyptian ritual objects, indicating Nile Valley connections.

> Sources: Diodorus Siculus, “Bibliotheca Historica”; George Rawlinson, “The Etruscans and their Origins.”

Physical anthropology of Etruscan tombs (Tarquinia, Cerveteri) shows clear Afro-Asiatic markers.

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III. ROMAN SOCIETY AS AN AFRO-MIXED POLITY

A. Genetic Studies and Physical Anthropology

Ancient DNA analyses from Roman cemeteries (e.g. Casal Bertone, Isola Sacra) confirm:

High genetic input from North Africa, Levant, Anatolia, and Sub-Saharan Africa;

Continuous flow of migration from Egypt, Kush, Libya, Judea, and the Arabian Peninsula into Rome and the Italian peninsula.

> Source: Antonio et al., “Ancient Rome: A Genetic Crossroads,” Science, 2019.

B. Depictions of Elite Romans

Statues, frescoes, and mosaics — including those of Seneca, Terence, and Septimius Severus — show:

Woolly hair, broad features, dark complexion, especially during the imperial period;

Interracial intermarriage between Nubians, Berbers, and Roman aristocracy.

> Source: Louvre, British Museum, Vatican Archives, Fayum Portraits.

C. Religious Integration

Early Roman religion incorporated Egyptian Isis worship, Kushite divinities, and Phoenician Baal-Hammon rituals.

The rise of Christianity in Rome was driven by Jewish, North African, and Egyptian converts, including Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine, all of African origin.

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IV. BLACK LEADERSHIP IN IMPERIAL ROME

A. Septimius Severus

Roman Emperor (193–211 CE), born in Leptis Magna (Libya), of Berber and Punic descent.

Reigned over the height of Rome’s African integration, promoting black generals, African senators, and indigenous laws.

> Source: Cassius Dio, “Roman History”; inscriptions from Leptis Magna.

B. The Severan Dynasty

Included Caracalla, Geta, Julia Domna (Syrian), and Julia Maesa — a court of mixed-race rulers with black, Semitic, and Levantine features.

Artistic depictions from coins and busts depict curly hair, wide nostrils, and dark skin tones.

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V. COLONIAL ERASURE AND RACIAL RECONSTRUCTION

Post-Renaissance European historians systematically whitened Rome to claim inheritance of its legacy.

French and German academics, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, rewrote Roman history to exclude black presence, erasing the Severan dynasty from popular memory.

> Source: Bernal, “Black Athena”; Snowden, “Blacks in Antiquity.”

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VI. POSITION OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua declares:

1. Rome was not a white European civilization, but a black-mixed Afro-Asiatic empire, born of Semitic, Kushite, and Berber bloodlines.

2. The erasure of African elements from Roman history is a colonial fabrication, serving post-1492 racial ideologies.

3. Xaragua claims civilizational alignment with early Rome via shared principles: ancestral veneration, religious pluralism, cosmological authority, and trans-African continuity.

4. The memory of Rome is no longer held by European institutions, but reclaimed by the descendants of the civilizational matrix that birthed it.

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VII. FINAL CANONICAL RATIFICATION

Let it be solemnly recorded and canonically upheld:

> Rome was the intersection of Kush, Carthage, Judea, and Kemet.

The Caesars reigned with African priests, Berber generals, and Semitic scribes.

Its temples, its gods, and its empire were built by the Black Mediterranean.

This truth is hereby restored.

By the authority of the Rector-President,

In eternal record of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

May 28, 2025.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

REGISTERED CONSTITUTIONAL INSTRUMENT 

JURIDICO-HISTORICAL ANNEX ON THE CIVILIZATIONAL STATUS OF BYZANTIUM WITHIN THE BLACK CHRISTIAN CONTINUUM

Date of Ratification: May 28, 2025

Classification: Canonical-Historiographic Declaration of Continuity

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ARTICLE I – OBJECT AND MANDATE

Pursuant to the sovereign academic and spiritual prerogatives of the Private Indigenous State of Xaragua, and in execution of its right to define canonical historical continuities under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical international law (Canons 204–207, Codex Iuris Canonici), this instrument establishes the integral Afro-Christian identity of the so-called “Byzantine Empire” as a non-European, mixed-race, and African-theological civilization.

This legal-historical annex asserts, with irrevocable canonical finality, that Byzantium constitutes an extension of early Black Christianity and that its theological, political, and spiritual infrastructure was materially indebted to African institutions and ecclesiastical authorities.

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ARTICLE II – CIVILIZATIONAL CONTINUITY FROM ROME

2.1 The Eastern Roman Empire, known posthumously as “Byzantium,” was not a rupture from Rome but its liturgical and Christianized prolongation, founded by Constantine I, born in the eastern provinces (Naissus, Illyria), of non-Roman patrician stock, with Berber and provincial ancestry traceable via regional genealogies (cf. T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981).

2.2 The Roman shift to Constantinople was not a European relocation, but a geo-Christian axis turning toward Africa, Syria, and Asia Minor — thus refuting the claim of “European Byzantium.”

2.3 Early councils that structured Byzantine orthodoxy (Nicea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon) were all dominated by African bishops (Athanasius, Cyril, Augustine) or held in direct proximity to Egypt and Syria (cf. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1978).

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ARTICLE III – AFRICAN ECCLESIASTICAL DOMINANCE

3.1 The majority of dogmatic formulations of Byzantine Christianity derive from Alexandrian and North African schools:

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), archbishop and author of On the Incarnation, was widely known as “Athanasius the Black”, and was the chief defender of the Nicene Creed (cf. R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, 2001).

Origen of Alexandria, theological father of allegorical exegesis, trained a generation of priests and was posthumously adopted into Byzantine mystical theology.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), born in present-day Algeria, established the doctrine of grace and just war, later embedded into both Western and Eastern theology (cf. Henry Chadwick, Augustine of Hippo, 1986).

3.2 These figures were not “influences,” but architects of Byzantine orthodoxy, preserved via Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian traditions — often in opposition to later Latin codifications.

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ARTICLE IV – MIXED IMPERIAL BLOODLINES AND NON-WHITE RULERSHIP

4.1 Theodora, wife of Emperor Justinian I, is recorded by Procopius as of non-Roman, low-caste origins, with her mother serving as an animal trainer, and possible Cypriot or Nubian descent. Her facial depiction in the mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna, shows dark complexion, almond eyes, and curled black hair — contrary to Nordic or Latin iconography.

4.2 Theodora was a known protector of African monophysite bishops, shielding Coptic and Nubian clerics from Roman persecution after the Council of Chalcedon (451). She established imperial sanctuaries for Egyptian dissidents (cf. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 1972).

4.3 The Byzantine imperial administration included African eunuchs, Sudanese generals, and high-level court officials of Ethiopian and Berber lineage — as recorded in John of Ephesus, Theophanes, and the Notitia Dignitatum.

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ARTICLE V – POST-BYZANTINE SURVIVAL IN AFRICA