Marronnage
Saint-Domingue
Affiches américaines · The complete corpus of runaway announcements · 1766–1791
The Affiches américaines was published weekly in Saint-Domingue from 1766 until August 1791, and I want you to hold that fact for a moment before you read anything else. The people who placed these announcements were enslavers who had lost control of human beings they claimed to own. The precision of the language is worth sitting with: height in feet and inches, African nation of origin, brand marks burned into skin, direction of suspected flight, money offered for return.
These were not records kept for posterity. They were operational. They were meant to end freedom. They were written to hunt my ancestors.
I want to tell you what it took to build the thing you are looking at.
I am a software engineer with advanced formal training in applied mathematics and statistics. I am an amateur historian who has spent over four decades inside the scholarship of Haiti, its revolution, and the deep African roots of its resistance. For five years I hosted the Nèg Mawon podcast, where I read a book a week just to do each episode justice.
All of those things are present in this site, and none of them work without the others. The mathematics trained me to read data without flinching, to understand what a distribution reveals, what a spike in frequency is trying to say, what silence in a dataset means. The engineering gave me the capacity to act on what the scholarship demanded. The history gave the engineering a reason to exist.
Istwanou is what happens when all three converge on the same problem: how do you give a people back what was taken from them, at scale, without barriers, in the languages they speak.
That convergence built this archive. The REST endpoints, the filters, the 10,412 records translated into English and Kreyòl, the flip cards that surface on the Jou calendar on their exact publication date, the search that finds a name across a quarter century of colonial newsprint: these are engineering decisions made in the service of history.
But I need you to understand what 10,412 means. And what it does not mean.
These are 10,412 acts of resistance, every one of them. But they are not the only form resistance took. This number counts what one colonial newspaper chose to record, from one territory, across 25 years. It leaves out the people who fled and were never reported, whose enslavers gave up or could not afford the announcement fee. It leaves out those who ran into the mountains and never came back, who built free communities in the highlands that Saint-Domingue spent decades trying and failing to destroy.
It leaves out the poisoners who moved through plantation kitchens like water, the work-slowers, the saboteurs, the midwives carrying knowledge across generations, the men and women already building toward Bwa Kayiman while this newspaper was still printing their descriptions.
Resistance was not one thing. It was everywhere, in every register, at every hour.
You will find traces of those other resistances throughout this site, in the Timeline, in the primary sources, in the entries that sit alongside these announcements and reveal what was happening in the world that made people run. Because that is the other thing this data shows: when you lay these 10,412 records against the timeline of events, the spikes speak. The frequency of flight rises and falls with the world outside the plantation gate. When news of the American Declaration of Independence reached Saint-Domingue in 1776, people ran. When the French Revolution began dismantling colonial authority in 1789, people ran faster.
The archive does not just record individual acts of courage. It records a population that was watching, reading the moment, and moving when the moment came.
10,412 is one battle front. The war was on a hundred fronts at once.
What this archive reclaims is not the memory of defeat. These people were not defeated. They won. What it reclaims is presence. Each date stamp is an act of witness. January 15, 1766: a Congo-born wigmaker, 33 years old, five feet three inches tall, gone. He was here. He chose to go. The announcement meant to end his freedom preserved his existence in the archive of the civilization that hunted him.
We take it back now.