Black Spartacus

Toussaint Louverture was undoubtedly one of the great heroes of history, as the subtitle “The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture” makes very clear.?He led the only successful slave revolt in history.??The story is incredibly complicated and began with the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789.??The slaves of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) took the message to heart, and in 1791 there was a spontaneous uprising, of which Toussaint Louverture soon became the leader.?His parents were both African and both came from the Ewe-speaking region of West Africa in what is now Ghana.?It is possible that his family were noble because of the respect in which they were held by the other slaves on the Breda Plantation.??Toussaint himself was freed from slavery, and continued to live in some modest comfort on the Breda estate in the 1780s.?We also know that he spoke French, Kreyol and Ewe, and that he was able to write.??All of this shows that he was a remarkable man, but gives no indication of the significant role that he was to play in the liberation of his country.

The story of the rebellion is extremely complicated.?In 1791, the slaves seized on the slogan “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” with great fervour.??Unsurprisingly, they took it to mean that no-one should be a slave, that all were equal and the colour of someone’s skin did not matter and that solidarity should be a guiding principle of life.??This came as quite a shock to the French, especially to the plantation owners and their white employees, who were known by the collective term colons, and to the merchants of the ports of the French Atlantic coast, especially Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux, who had made considerable profits from the slave trade.?Basically, the slaves un Louverture liberated themselves, leaving French revolutionaries, like Abbe Gregoire and Robespierre to trail along in their wake, and leading to the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies in 1794.

Louverture was now in control of Saint Domingue, but that did not mean that he controlled the whole of Hispaniola.?Three-fifths of the island was the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.??The Spanish had been forced to concede the western part of Hispaniola to the French at the Treaty of Ryswick, ending the War of the British Succession, in 1698, and they wanted the territory back because it was extremely profitable.?They also did not want the idea of slave emancipation spreading to their own plantations in the eastern part of the island.?A sizeable number of the French colons were supporters of the Ancien Regime, and fled to Santo Domingo as a safe haven from which they could conduct military operations against Louverture and his armies.?Meanwhile the British, who were at war with Revolutionary France, were also alarmed about the idea of emancipation spreading to nearby Jamaica, and they decided to invade.?Thus, Toussaint found himself fighting the three great European Imperial powers of the time, and did not receive very much in the way of military assistance from Revolutionary France.

How did Toussaint achieve this???He defeated the French colons, the Spanish and British armies.??Defeating the colons was not that surprising.?The 1791 uprising was a levee en masse, and sheer weight of numbers overpowered the enemy.?Defeating the Spanish and British armies was another matter entirely.?Both the Spanish and British commanders speak admiringly about Toussaint’s army, praising the fighting qualities of his troops, both as guerrillas and in open battle. ??This is not achieved quickly, and yet Toussaint was able to inspire his combatants, both male and female, to take on and defeat well-equipped armies.

The answer may lie in two facts that the author mentions in passing.?First, more than half the population of Saint Domingue (Haiti) was born in Africa.?That the French had to import slaves in such numbers speaks volumes about the way in which the Ancien Regime colons treated their slaves.?Importing new slaves from Africa must have been cheaper than providing decent living conditions, including medicines.??The second fact is that the largest linguistic group amongst the slaves imported from Africa were the KiKongo from the Kingdom of Kongo in northern Angola.?The Kingdom of Kongo had not yet been conquered by the Portuguese colonialists, and had been at war with them, intermittently, since 1622.??It is therefore possible that many of these slaves were prisoners of war, soldiers, capturing during the fighting with the Portuguese.??They would have been skilled in the use of muskets and artillery which were supplied to the Kingdom of Kongo by the Dutch, who were at war with the Portuguese for a considerable period of the seventeenth century, and then by other European powers competing with the Portuguese for control of the slave markets.?I can only wonder why the Portuguese preferred to sell KiKongo speakers to the French colons in Saint Domingue, rather than sell them in their own colony of Brazil, which was only a third of the distance across the Atlantic.?It does suggest that they knew they would be troublesome, and offloaded them at a profit on another colonial empire.?There is no documentary evidence to prove any of this.?I just have a suspicious mind.

There is a final complication in this history of the Saint Domingue slave revolt.??The fall of Robespierre led to a move to the right in French politics, and the newly-installed Directory was much more favourable to the merchants of the Atlantic seaports, and so began the campaign for the re-establishment of slavery in the French Caribbean.?This is reflected in the relationships between Toussaint and the agents, the principal French officer on Saint Domingue.?Basically, they came into conflict and Toussaint, as Commander-in-Chief of the French Republican army on Saint Domingue was able to arrange for their removal.?This brought him into direct conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul of the Republic.?Bonaparte sent an army, under the command of his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to overthrow Toussaint and his supporters and to reinstate slavery on the island.

Toussaint, who up to that point had been a loyal French citizen and a determined republican, led the resistance from the moment that Leclerc and his army arrived.??The expedition was a disaster.?The French army, being from Europe, had no immunity to yellow fever, and thousands fell ill.?Meanwhile Toussaint inflicted several defeats on the French army.??His mistake was to trust Leclerc’s honour.??He went to a parlay, was kidnapped and sent to France, where he died in a prison in the Jura mountains.??

Sudhir Hazareesingh tells this complicated story with consummate skill.?He guides us through the complexities as revealed by new discoveries from the archives in France, Spain and Great Britain.?He shows that Toussaint could not always rely on his subordinates, and he guides us through the arguments between blacks, whites and people of colour, which affected the course of the struggle.?But most of all it is his use of archival discoveries that were not available to CLR James when he wrote the Black Jacobins, because no-one was aware of their existence.

Toussaint’s legacy is in the fact that the French were able to reimpose slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, but when they tried it in Saint Domingue, there was a repeat of the levee en masse of 1791, and the French armies were defeated by generals who had gained their military experience under Toussaint Louverture.

The emergence of the first black-governed republic, free of slavery, was Toussaint Louverture’s great contribution to the history of our planet.

This book helps to make it explicable.