## Introduction: it was 'never a question of the slaves'  
By the time Anna Julia Cooper defended her thesis at the Sorbonne in 1925, the colonization of Africa had erased the continent's states from the map. America had become the name of a continent that had turned into the Nunna daul Isunyi, or 'trail of tears' of the Cherokee nation, as sung by jazz musicians and the Martinican trumpeter Jacques Coursil. In those days, the 'other side' did not exist; Anna Julia Cooper broke the silence of a story in which it was 'never a question of the slaves' (May, 2008, pp. 903-918).  
And yet, slavery had allowed indecent prosperity to flourish on an entire continent. This was displayed all over Saint Domingue. In 1777: 'André, from Martinique, a runaway from the schooner La Minerve [...] wearing an iron collar and a smaller ring on each foot'. Wanted, for a reward. In 1789: 'Runaways: Zaïre and Lucile, both from the Congo, not branded, aged 10 and 11'. Wanted, for a reward.  
In those days, the 'other side' was the other facet of the great western world. And seeking freedom was a crime that enslaved people were constantly committing. The walls of Saint Domingue were plastered all over with wanted posters for those of the enslaved who had run away. In 1767: 'Two Congolese Negroes, aged 26 [...] branded DM, ran away two months ago, plus two Creole Negroes, aged 25, named Antoine and Noël' (Le Glaunec and Robichaud, 2010, figure 1).  
Africans would run away from the 'other side', in the company of those who had already been born there. Two centuries later, there was something derisory in the momentary refusal to stand together. Yet the fact of African maroons and maroons from the 'other side' taking their freedom into their own hands quite simply makes clear the full meaning of the conceptual approach now governing the production of Volume IX of the General History of Africa.