Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 260

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture," by Sudhir Hazareesingh.

Toussaint’s rise perfectly symbolized the broader characteristics of this age of revolution: its global nature (his parents were African-born slaves who were forcibly transported to Saint-Domingue); its defiant martialism (he rose through the ranks to become a French general); its unsettling of existing social hierarchies (he went from being a slave herdsman to assuming the governorship of Saint-Domingue); its shaping by European ideals (he was brought up in the Catholic faith, and in sincere admiration of the French grande nation); its immersion in Enlightenment culture (he championed administrative and economic reforms, and profoundly believed in the power of scientific ideas); and its dedication to building a better society, and even a better species of humankind. In Toussaint’s words: ‘reason and education will spread across our regenerated soil; once crushed under a yoke of enslavement which was as odious as it was degrading, man will elevate himself on the wings of liberty’.

At the same time, Toussaint epitomized the uniqueness of Saint-Domingue’s revolution. It was the age’s most comprehensive example of radical change, combining democratic and republican goals with an emphasis on racial equality, and became a just war of national liberation which foreshadowed the anti-colonial struggles of the modern era. Saint-Domingue was also exceptional in that the driving forces of its revolution were not white bourgeois liberals but black slaves, who were partly revolting against slave-owning supporters of the French Revolution, such as the merchants of Bordeaux and Nantes. It was a revolution, too, which forced French leaders locally and in Paris to face up to the issue of slavery and proclaim its general abolition in 1794. This revolution wiped out the colony’s old ruling class, pioneered guerilla warfare and successfully confronted the military might of European imperialism. It shook the Enlightenment’s belief in the inherent superiority of all things European – its primary agents drew on native American forms of spirituality and African political cultures, and embodied the mutinous spirit of the African American rebels who disrupted colonial authority across the black Atlantic in the late eighteenth century.

In short, Toussaint embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution by confronting the dominant forces of his age – slavery, settler colonialism, imperial domination, racial hierarchy and European cultural supremacy – and bending them to his will. Through his dynamism he acquired some striking epithets. His republican friends hailed him as the ‘Black Spartacus’, the modern incarnation of the legendary gladiator who led his fellow slaves against the Roman Republic; his miraculous appearance in Saint-Domingue had, in the words of one of his admirers, ‘transformed the chaos of destruction into the seeds of new life’. He was also described as the father of the blacks, the black son of the French Revolution, the black George Washington, the Bonaparte of the Caribbean, the African hero, the Hannibal of Saint-Domingue and the centaur of the savannah (a tribute to his horsemanship; his white steed Bel Argent was integral to his myth). By the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s newspapers were referring to him as ‘the celebrated African chief’.

"Louverture" symbolized not just an individual ambition, but Toussaint’s aspiration to provide a brighter future, in particular for black people; the ‘opening’ was to be taken as a new departure. He would have known, in this context, that one of the most revered vodou deities was Papa Legba, the spirit of crossroads; a popular kreyol chant at the beginning of ritual ceremonies was ‘Papa Legba, ouvri barriè pour moins!’ As he galloped across Saint-Domingue on his steed, Toussaint was poised to open the gates of destiny.

 

 

 

Toussaint Louverture decisively shaped the course of the Haitian War of Independence. But fighting it had brought him back to his republican self and reminded him of the extraordinary qualities of the ‘immense people’ whose destinies he had steered from the mid 1790s. By the time of the French invasion, the people of Saint-Domingue understood, largely due to Toussaint, that their freedom was not a quality bestowed upon them by a benevolent authority but a right which they had seized through struggle; during his military reviews he often used to seize a rifle, brandish it in the air and shout: ‘this is our freedom’. The people knew, too, that this right would be taken away from them if they allowed themselves to be disarmed, and that their strength lay in their collective force. This was another legacy of Toussaint’s: as he boarded the ship that would take him away from Gonaïves, he made the point to his captors – ‘by striking me, you have cut the tree of black liberty in Saint-Domingue. But it will spring back up from its roots, for they are many and deep.’