The Enslaved Duelled by Rules — in a System That Had None

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The first scientific portrait of the Guadeloupean duel. It refutes the stereotype of brutality by a documented comparison, and traces the practice's African genealogy into its very name — mayombo, mayombé, mayolè. It is the first urgency of the BCAI's programme: mayolè is on the way to extinction.

Attested by the text that bans it

What do we know of the fights the enslaved fought among themselves in the Caribbean? The common imagination oscillates between two images: the brutal brawl of bodies stupefied by servitude, or the picturesque folklore of the wakes. The sources, submitted to criticism, refute both.

Begin with the attestation — it belongs to a documentary paradox found throughout the history of dominated practices: the first written trace is a prohibition. The regulation of the Count of Blénac and Intendant Bégon, dated 13 February 1683, provides: “That the said slaves shall be forbidden to hold any assembly by day or by night under pretext of weddings or otherwise, whether at their master's or elsewhere, and still less on the main roads, tracks or remote places where they hold combats of challenge.”

Read this text for what it reveals despite itself: combats of challenge, in remote places, frequent and organised enough for the colonial administration to legislate. The practice precedes its first written trace — and that trace is a prohibition. The pattern is familiar. It is the one Brazilian capoeira would know two centuries later. Prohibition as documentary birth certificate: the first kinship among the members of the family of the Black combat arts.

A craftsmanship of the duel

Once past the threshold of the prohibition, what do the archives reveal? An art in its own right — codes, symbolism, techniques. Nothing resembling an improvised brawl.

The most eloquent proof lies in the preparation of the weapons: a veritable ritual craftsmanship, spread over several weeks. The wood was chosen for its rigidity and its suppleness. A ritual fixed the moment of the cutting, the hardening by fire, the resting of the stick before the duel. The last third was covered with a piece of leather into which studs were set; at the other end, a leather cord kept the fighter from losing his weapon during the assault. And the sticks were “loaded”: maman-bila powder, inserted inside with a gimlet — thanks to which, according to the beliefs, the chances of winning were all but certain. The mayolè weapon was no picked-up cudgel. It was a technical and magical object — prepared, charged, personalised.

The ritual also enveloped the bodies. Before the fight, the fighters touched the earth with a finger, struck their chest and looked to the sky — so many signs of a call to divine forces. The earth, oneself, the sky. The duel opened on a liturgy.

The violence was on the masters' side

There remains the most tenacious prejudice: that of brutality. One must first question the witnesses. “Recall that at this time, Blacks were regarded as an inferior race close to animality. The description of their customs suffered, accordingly, from these prejudices.” To read those descriptions at face value is to renew their gaze.

At the end of this critique, the finding: “these duels were indeed without danger and, more generally, the expression of an elaborate culture of combat.” Then comes the comparison that settles the matter — and it turns the charge of barbarity around: “compared with the violence exercised inside the colony by the masters — burnings, amputations, dismemberments, lashes — the duels between enslaved Black people were policed. The violence was mastered. The blood cannot mask the absence of real trauma on the fighters' bodies. And when spirits flared, before the fight could degenerate into a brawl, the fighters were separated.”

Everything lies in the point of comparison. The stick duel, with its rules and its limits — down to the separation of the fighters when spirits flared — unfolded within a system whose violence knew neither rule nor limit. The civilised duel was on the side of the enslaved. The barbarity, on the side of the system that held them.

A god in the name of a stick

There remains the question of origins. It is resolved by an inquiry that is as much philology as history. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, the duellists used “sticks called mayombo”. And at the other end of the chain, a late nineteenth-century source describes, in the Congo, at Boma, during ceremonies in honour of a dead man “that he might obtain paradise”, stick duels amid “handclaps, strange dances accompanied by songs that always end with the word 'Mayombé' […] Mayombé meaning god”.

Mayombo. Mayombé. Mayolè. “The proximity of the terms, Africa as the bridge between the two, the very high number of enslaved people” deported to Guadeloupe draw the genealogy: a word that travels from Boma to Basse-Terre, a gesture that crosses the Atlantic in bodies, a god lodged in the name of a stick.

Mayolè is no local folklore. It is a living archive of the deportation — and one of the founding members of the family of the Black combat arts. It is also, today, a practice “on the point of dying”. The programme's first urgency.

SOURCES

“Règlement de MM. le comte de Blénac et Bégon sur la police et autres matières concernant les esclaves des îles d'Amérique”, 13 February 1683. — Moreau de Saint-Méry. — Flamme, J., Dans la Belgique africaine : notes de voyage, Brussels, A. Lesigne, 1908. — Malo, O., Une tradition guadeloupéenne défigurée : le Mayolè comme « corps-mémoration » de l'esclavage à la fin du XXe siècle, Master's thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2012. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, section B.1.

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Enslaved Duelled by Rules — in a System That Had None. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 17. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-enslaved-duelled-by-rules-in-a-system-that-had-none. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.