Haiti: The Toussaint Louvertures Biography by Sudhir Hazareesingh – Culture

The history of enlightenment and human rights cannot be written without the Haitian revolution. From its historical beginnings, the emergence of modern constitutional states based on free and equal rights was not only tied into a mutually intertwined and conditional context of Atlantic revolutions, which included the North American and French as well as the Haitian. In addition, it reveals the blind spots and contradictions between a European self-image of being a genuine representative of universal values ​​and rights, and the historical fact that these are often first spelled out by discriminated and subaltern actors in the resistance against the barbaric dominance practices of the European colonial powers and have been fought through.

In the colony that was the most profitable at the time and, at the expense of the accelerated deportation of hundreds of thousands of slave workers who were abducted from Africa and exploited on the plantations, rose to become the undisputed export world champion of colonial goods such as sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton, it was the slaves themselves who, beginning with uprisings in the early 1790s pushed through the abolition of slavery and with the declaration of independence of 1804 gave the first historical example of a successful non-white decolonization.

With Sudhir Hazareesingh’s 2020 biography of the most important protagonist of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint Louverture, published in the English original and translated into German by Andreas Nohl, one can bring oneself up to date with the international state of knowledge. On the basis of source material that has been researched to an unprecedented extent and with a high methodological sensitivity to the asymmetries of the history of transmission dominated by the colonial powers, Hazareesingh tells Toussaint’s life consistently against the grain of a Eurocentric imitation narrative, according to which the Haitian revolution is a mere colonial appendage of the events in Paris Central to understand.

Louverture called the adaptation to local conditions “raffiner de politique”

In the complex and highly explosive field of imperial power competition between France and Great Britain and an island economy based on the murderous slave economy, Toussaint thus becomes recognizable as an actor whose political actions were oriented towards a specific rationality saturated with experience and appropriate to the local circumstances, which weighed his successes against all Probabilities and military power relations made possible. Using a twist from sugar production, Toussaint himself described this rationality as “raffiner de politique”.

According to Hazareesingh, he presented the racist social hierarchy of a few, mostly white plantation owners, a minority of European-indigenous gens de couleur and the black majority of the population, in which “the different shades of skin color distinguished the oppressor from the oppressed” (Toussaint). of “Creole republicanism” and a multi-ethnic society based on equal rights and a balance of interests.

Toussaint was born around 1740 as the son of parents who came from what is now Benin and were abducted to Haiti on a sugar plantation. Due to his skills, he was soon employed there for service and administrative work as a coachman, animal keeper and herbalist. He was formally released in his mid-thirties and had even become a plantation owner himself before the revolution broke out.

He skillfully used his privileged position and his intimate knowledge of different social and ethnic groups to help the slave rebellion of 1791 to a decisive success. He used the military resources of the Spanish royalists, who were allies with Great Britain and ruled the eastern part of the island, but at the same time placed the slave revolt in the conceptual horizon of the French revolutionary discourse.

While the envoys of the French Republic verbosely invoked human rights (“their tongues didn’t know a Sunday,” Toussaint was amazed at their garrulousness), but nevertheless paternalistically insisted on their rights as a colonial power and only granted civil rights to the gens de couleur, Toussaint kept up the pressure maintained until the Paris National Assembly in the spring of 1794 abolished slavery for the first time in human history. Only now did he join the French Republic and saw himself as a free citizen of France from then until the end of his life.

In a four-year defensive battle, he successfully defended the new freedoms against the counter-revolution that began immediately by white plantation owners and the British army by countering the overwhelming military superiority of the invaders with the partisan tactics of a “Marronist” resistance developed in decades of slavery. As a former coachman, he knew the island’s topography like no other and always arrived on the battlefield before his adversaries. Using his knowledge of botany and ecology, he turned the island’s natural forces into effective allies (for example, by staging battles into the rainy season).

Open detailed view

He showed diplomatic skill in rebuilding the island economy, which had been devastated by the wars. He concluded trade agreements with the US government, achieved the lifting of the American and British naval blockades and – provided the new order was recognized – brought back emigrated white plantation owners whose trade connections and commercial knowledge were indispensable. He strengthened the cultural cohesion of society through a liberation theology composed of European-Catholic elements and African Vodou traditions.

In 1801, he enacted a new constitution that not only abolished slavery “forever” and laid down the same basic rights for people of all skin colors, but also guaranteed former slaves 25 percent of the yield from their plantation. He accompanied the whole thing with text production and public relations work – the full extent of which can be seen here for the first time – which included correspondence averaging 200 letters a day as well as countless announcements and press articles in newspapers from Philadelphia to Paris. His pen knew no Sunday.

Frequent complaint: slavery has been replaced by mere “indentured bondage”.

Despite all the sympathetic portrayal, Hazareesingh always shows the contradictions and paradoxes of Toussaint’s political actions. The forced economic reconstruction was only successful at the price of an almost militaristic reorganization of the plantation economy. The workers were now formally free shareholders, but at the same time there was a strict lifelong ban on dismissal (which also included a ban on divorce). Not without justification, many blacks complained that hated slavery had been replaced by mere “indentured servitude”. The consequences were uprisings and – fueled by the European colonial powers by supplying arms to all parties – new civil wars flared up, to which Toussaint reacted with increasingly autocratic government practices.

Toussaint did not live to see the end of the Haitian Revolution with the declaration of independence in 1804. Napoleon, who was now in power in Paris, sent an army of up to 40,000 soldiers to the island in 1802 to secure French rule and reintroduce slavery. Under the pretense of negotiations, Toussaint was deported to France and imprisoned in a mountain fortress in the foothills of the Alps, where he died in solitary confinement and without any medical attention in 1803. Much too late, when he himself had been shipped to the South Atlantic island of St. Helena by the British for imprisonment in 1821, Napoleon regretted the removal of his most successful Caribbean general from power as one of his greatest mistakes.

Nevertheless, as Hazareesingh shows in a detailed final chapter, Toussaint’s bold fight for the recognition of universal rights was not forgotten afterwards. The various decolonial liberation movements, from the United Irishmen to New Zealand Maoris, abolitionists from the North American civil war and the current Black Lives Matter movement, recognized Toussaint as a forerunner who brought their demands onto the world political stage for the first time. Enlightenment and human rights are not only historical achievements – this can also be learned from Hazareesingh’s brilliant study – but also always something that is to come, something that has to be realized anew.