Children of Guinea. Voodoo, The 1793 Haitian Revolution and After
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![began and their continent slipped forever over the horizon, with the same condescension that they were baptised Christian on boarding with a splash of brine from a bucket and an injunction in an alien tongue not to eat dogs or rats. In fact, slave owners were as indifferent to the spirituality of their property as they were to every other aspect of slave lfe other than that they worked hard and did not revolt. Article 2 of Louis XIV’s 1685 Code Noir may have insisted that “(a]ll the slaves in our islands will be baptized and instructed in the Catholic religion, apostolic and Roman’ but if slaves made outward signs of obeisance whilst contining in their hearts to revere Fa, the Oyo lord of fate, Legba who might cheat him, the Yoroba’s snake deity Dambala or any of the other gods and animistic totems of lost Africa, what was that to the law? This, then, was voodoo, an Africa hidden in the hearts of slaves, remembered traditions that formed the core of their identity. Believing that on death they would return home to this promised land, slaves would throw themselves overboard when bought up on deck for air during the Middle Passage rather than go on to Haiti or, on arrival there, curse the dawn of each day of plantation labour they were deprived of Africa and praise each premature death as Africa’s realisation. © Husbon, opcit p. 5.](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 6.png)
![destruction at their hands by October, Sonthonax freely distributed arms to the labourers and proclaimed the end of slavery:* If you wish to keep your liberty use your arms on the day that the white authorities ask you for them, because any such re- questis the infallible sign and precursor of the return to slavery. Whilst Sonthonx succeeded in further devastating Le Cap, he failed to win over rebels fighting from exile in Spanish San Domingue, who knew only the Assembly in Paris rather than its appointed commissioner had the power to end slavery. ‘The anti-revolutionary Spanish commander, the marquis d’Her- mona, had told the self-liberated slaves that had fled into his terri- tory that only a king could free slaves, conveniently enough for him as the French had just executed theirs. Despite this, the Spanish army was of necessity an incredible mixture of dissent and even saw royalist Whites under the command of voodooist Marroons like Biassou, whose tent was covered in amulets and whose Romaine de Prophetesse band carried cow tail charms into battle which they believed protected them from musket balls. A contemporary French account describes a raid on one of their camps:’ [1]n the ground along the route [were] large perches on which a variety of dead birds had been affixed ... On the road at intervals there were cut up birds surrounded by stones, and also a dozen broken eggs surrounded by large circles. What was our surprise to see black males leaping about and more than 200 women dancing and singing in all security ... The v00doo priestess had not fled . .. she spoke no creole . .. Both the men and the women said that there could be no human power over her . .. she was of the Voodoo cult. © ibid, p. 337, With typical hero-worship, James claims Toussainte first armed the people in (slow) response to the 1802 French invasion whilst dircetly quoting Sonthonax doing it decade caclier! 7 Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow Collins, 1986). p. 203 20](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 20.png)
![masses, asserting their caste credentials to tar their mulatto rivals as ‘blanc-identified’ but their aim was the same. To good degree, the unofficial history of Haiti has been the elites’ attempts to as- similate the peasantry and subordinate their culture, first through anti-blanc rhetoric whilst confining them to the plantations, then through limited land reforms, and finally (Soulougue being a bit of an unappreciated pioneer) through the appropriation of voodoo. How did Duvalier achieve this? Through voodoo, Duvalier may have superficially been appealing to the peasantry as a whole — and many of them bought this lie — but was in fact only appealing to the habi- tants, richer peasants that had done well out of cash cropping and their poorer neighbours being forced into landlessness by population pressures, etc. And what do you know, but there was a direct overlap between this classe intermediare and the houngans, those holding privileged positions in rural lfe in the economic sphere also doing so in the esoteric sphere, much as with European freemasonry?" This is frankly hardly surprising, as voodoo initiations — especially through all the offices of the hounfort (lodge) to the rank of houngan — are extremely expensive, the feasting and ritual paraphernalia associ- ated with each initiation typically amounting to six months wages for the average peasant. Additional to this, the model of authority supplied by the houngan even amongst the Maroons was then taken up as that of the national leader, a houngan writ large, especially in Duvalier’s case. How, then, does all this provide us with an appropriately revolu- tionary model of liberation, particularly Black liberation? Firstly, I want to explore what the peasantry were rejecting — in addition to the obvious — and why this was so intolerable to their rulers. In rejecting plantation labour — whether under old masters or new — the peasantry weren’t just rejecting the slave heritage those masters imposed on them but, more fundamentally, sheer physical effort.! Once ground in the interior had been broken, we’re talking Nicholl, op et p. 237 concurs here: “The people he [Duvalier] relied on in the countey were aften houngans o peasants from the intermediate class’ In his essay Primitive Afluence: A Postscript o Sahiins’ in Friendly Fire (Autono media, 1992). p. 24, Bob Black cites the Hanunoo subsistence horticlturalists of the 67](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 45.png)
![« Telling Haiti’s leaders whatever they wanted to hear whilst his army was landed without their opposition © Once the army had safely landed, capturing the leadership by offering them the honour of a trip to France and deporting them forceably as ‘outlaws’ if they refused Once the leadership had been neutralised, general disarmament of the population and the demotion of all Black officers (or, as the First Consul himself so unattractively put it, “rip[ping] the epaulettes off the shoulders of every nigger”). And afterwards, the reintroduction of the Napoleonic version of the anciente regime, slavery, mulatto discrimination and all. Even Napoleon’s brother-on-law general Leclere and others of the French high command did not know his ultimate aim and none of the 12,000 men gathered in the harbours of France in December 1801 awaiting their voyage to Haiti thought what was to come was anything short of another revolutionary ‘war of liberation’. The British were only too happy to let the invasion fleet proceed unharassed, knowing from their own bitter experience that Haiti was the graveyard of armies. Alerted by Napoleon’s failure to acknowledge letters from his own consul, Toussaunte arranged to eavesdrop on Leclere’s blandish- ments to Christophe when the general began disembarking his army at Le Cap on 2 February 1802. Two days later, Christophe took action, mobilising the garrison from nearby Fort Libertie to torch Le Cap and flee into the mountains. 100 million francs-worth of damage were done and of 2,000 homes in the port, only 59 remained standing after this start to Christophe’s scorched earth policy. This action certainly hurt the French war effort badly, as Leclerc noted in his dispatches:’* 1am here without food or money. The burning of Le Cap and the districts through which the rebels have retired deprives me ibid, p. 304 Leclere concludes by complining about the merchants of Le Cap being ‘most Jewish”,as if an accusation. Ant-semitism was one prejudice Napoleon did ot share with his brother-in-law. 2](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 70.png)
![of all resources of this kind. It is necessary that the Government send me provisions, money, troops. That is the only means of ensuring the preservation of San Domingo. “This was a good start, but because Toussainte had staked so much on France and alienated so many with his policy of reviving the plantations, the general population of Haiti were confused and he only roused them too late. Half of Toussainte’s generals joined their ‘allies’, the French, and even Toussainte’s own brother Paul was tricked into surrendering his garrison to them without a shot fired Whilst Toussainte dithered, Dessalines (who, unlike Toussaunte, had been viciously whipped as a slave and consequently had no love for Frenchmen) immediately marched his troops from St. Marc, burning towns and plantations en route to Le Cap to cut off French lines of supply. Frustrated in this, Dessalines made a stand against the bulk of the French army at the fortress of Crete-a-Pierriot, 20-24™ March 1802. Outnumbered ten-to-one and assailed by artillery under the command of the mulatto general Petion, willing and able to “pound the fortress and the redoubts to dust”, Dessalines ran up a red flag at each corner of the fortress indicating no quarter was to be given or received. He told his troops:” [T]ake courage, and you will see that when the French are few we shall harass them, we shall beat them, we shall burn the harvests and retire to the mountains. They will not be able to guard the country and they will have to leave. Then I shall make you independent. There will be no more whites among you Dessalines had spoken the words that had Sonthonax dismissed and Moise shot. He bestrode the ramparts of Crete-a-Pierriot with a bullet hole through his hat and bare to his waist to show the whip scars of his former enslavement. When the artillery made further defence of the fortress impossible, he cut his way out leaving 400 defenders dead to 4,000 French. A shocked Leclere begged his officers to conceal the extent of their losses from Napoleon. ibid, pp. 314-315. 27](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 71.png)
![Independence, Land and ‘Race’ When Dessaline’s intoxicated mulatto underling Boisrond-Ton- nerrer read the declaration of independence on 31 December 1803, he felt moved to complain’ ‘This doesn’t say what we really feel. For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a blanc for parchment, his skull for inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for pen! Dessalines signed anyway, becoming the first ruler of independent Haiti* later its self-styled emporer (a parody of Napoleon’s own imperial pretensions) and ironically a voodoo lwa. In fulfilment of the pledge he made at Crete-a-Pierriot, Dessalines then tore the white strip from the French flag at Archaie to create a new Haitian one, then tore the Whites from the island, issuing orders for their general massacre in January 1805. By fatally once again putting property before principle, thousands of the old plan- tocracy had remained after independence, those that did not fleeing to France or New Orleans.’ By the end of March, only the Polish HWP Hastford’s History of Haiti at hartford-hwp.com / archives / 43a / 106html, Part2,p. 1. Althovgh ‘Hait and ‘San Domingue’ have been used casually and interchangeably to mean what was fist called western Hispaiola throughout this piece, it was formally called ‘Haiti only on independence, break with the colonial past and a tribute to the isand’s original Awawak inhabitants, New Orleans was so atractive becanse wntil Napoleon sold it o the US government inlate-1803, Louisiana remained a French possession. There, the emigres continued all the colonial codswallop of lassifying others as quadzoons, octoroons and so forth, and maintaining their strange insistence that their mistresses must all be mulaito. Nor did they escape vaodo, with huge rites being held on the southern shores of Lake Pontrachene and a mortuary chapel for yellow fever vietims at the Lown limits even informally being dedicated to St Expedite (Legba). AL time of writin [2003]. occasionl offerings of cigars or flowers still getLeftin front of the chapel’s votive Statuett. Although slave sesistance was lasgely cultural rather than military, as on Haiti), the plantocracy had to contend with Marie Levau, who started her carcer as & 33](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 77.png)
![“madame” instead of “citizen”.** Admiring the upright military bear- ing of a French officer, Toussainte expressed his wish that “[m]y sons will be like that""” and then packed them off to Napoleon’s France, where the elder, Isaac, was so indoctrinated he wanted to return to the French during Leclerc’s 1802 betrayal. That Toussainte himself was to do pretty much the same thing only months later — unable to believe Leclerc’s perfidy had Napoleon’s blessing or “that the French ruling class would be so depraved, so lost to all sense of decency, as 10 try o restore slavery”™* — just goes to show exactly how greatly and how fatally he had bought into the myth of French civilisation. ‘The people — for whom French civilisation meant only the whip, the brand and a premature death through exhaustion and abuse — were not so easily fooled. A Marxist of the 1930s, CLR James had the same preference for Progress in the form of a harsh programme of economie development that centralises power as Toussainte and so could claim, without trace of irony. that “between Toussaint and his people there was no fundamental difference of outlook or aim.™* In fact, they had been promised the land as early as 27" August 1793 in Polveral’s proclamation at Le Cap, not in the abstract ‘nationalised" sense of Toussainte, but as small plots to be worked by individuals principly for their own personal benefit* In this, Polveral was more alive to traditional peasant aspirations than Toussainte, unsurpris- ingly as the peasantry was a motor of the French Revolution outside Paris. Key to Robespierre’s rise lo power was his commitment to abolishing feudal dues, which fell most heavily on the peasantry. Denied land by Toussainte, the labourers did what they always had under the old plantocracy, abandoned the plantation for Maroonage, a return to the traditional Affican peasant economy as transplanted to the Caribbean. When the French invaded in 1802, they fought for their lives and their land, not for some future state of ‘Haiti’ or any other treacherous manifestation of *higher civilisation’ Janes, p cit, pp. 246-247. bid p2 ibid. p. 252 ibid. p. 256 Nicholls, op it p. 54, 38](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 82.png)
![the sense of arguing some sort of biologically defined racial supe- riority. As with Dessalines — a figure idolised by the noirists — it was just felt that one ethnic group, the mulattos, were denying the basic equality of humanity by aceruing undue political and economic power exclusively to themselves. In 1844, he teamed up with three Black generals in Les Cayes and was arrested, accused of wishing to “annihilate the coloured [mulatto] population’. Salomon, in turn, raised the peasantry by charging Boyer with desiring to eliminate largely Black small landowners through his introduction of the Rural Code, something that did veer towards a disguising of class interests — Salomon’s advancement at their expense — with the rhetoric of caste solidarity. Both sides threatened to appeal to foreign powers for support. ‘The insurgent peasants under Jean-Jacques Acaau, Zamor and Jean Claude were an eruption of ‘shadow power’ into the squabbles of the ruling class. The overt demands of these piquets — named after the wooden pikes they armed themselves with® — were respectfully moderate, such as the release of Salomon and the ending of martial law, but their insurgents’ real aim was to turn the caste war into a class war. Acaau intended to redistribute the lands of the rich, regard- less of colour, and said “all poor mulattos should be considered as blacks, and . .. all rich blacks should be considered as mulattoes [We call all men our brothers without distinction” * A combination of this southern rising and Boyer’s failed military expedition into Spanish San Domnigue bought an end to his rule. 9 The pike was almost asiconic a weapon of sebels ofthe period as the AK47 s today. AU the same time piquets fought the class war in Haii physical force Chatists chubbed together in England to buy pikes both as 3 mark of their miltancy and o defnd thermselves from the lkes of the mounted yeomaney responsible for the 1519 Peterloo massace. Exhibit A on the South’s propaganda exercse against Kansas hased sbolitonist ueril John Brown following his 1859 exceution for the faled raid on Horper’s Ferry arcnal was wagonfullofpikes whih they said e ntended t arm nsurgent slaves. They drove i from tow 1o own, exhibitng it much as the Bush reime now exhibits World Trade Centre rubble and to cxacly the same poliical end. ncidentaly ‘pigueis unrelted t picket’, the latee meanin ‘sentry” * Nicholls. ap it p. 7. a2](children-of-guinea-voodoo-the-1793-haitian-revolution-and-after-john-connor 86.png)
John Connor
Children of Guinea.
Voodoo, The 1793 Haitian
Revolution and After
2003
Contents
Children of Guinea
Haiti, Fulerum of World Trade
Slavery: Life, Death, Work and Resistance
Bois-Caiman and Afler: the Haitian Revolution
Independence, Land and ‘Race’
Beyond Haiti
n
17
3
59
Children of Guinea
Papa Legha ouvi baye-a pou mwen
Pou mwen pase
Le ma tounen, ma salyie Iwa yo.
(Papa Legba, open the gate for me,
SoTcan go through,
When I return, I will honour the hwa.)
Traditional Voodooist Incantation to Legba,
Gatekeeper to the Spirit World'
Who were the slaves of Haiti? Slaves traded from Africa were
criminals, debtors or war captives, but first and foremost, they were
peasants* Wars in west Africa were made primarily against villages,
not armies, and even those captured on the field of battle were typi-
cally peasants levied by their kings for war rather than professional
soldiers, much as the the bulk of European armies in the Middle
Ages were peasants levied by their overlords to military service as
part of their feudal due.
Where did the slaves of Haiti come from? ‘Africa’ was first named
by the Arabs (“Affriq") — a name adopted later by Europeans whoalso
saw it principally as a source of slaves — but for Africans themselves,
there was no continent, only a patchwork of kingdoms. For west
Alfrica’s inhabitants, there was only Dahomey, Whydah, Owe and the
other petty empires of what is now Benin, their wars formented by
English and French money and shoddy one-shot muskets to ensure
a ready supply of slaves, up to 40,000 a year to Haiti alone.* It was
the slave traders that taught their captives they were ‘African’ (as
opposed to having distinct tribal identities) as the Middle Passage
Lacnnee Husbon's Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy (Tharmes & Hudson, 1995),p. 72
CLR Jasmes' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu:
tion (Allson & Busby, 1980 — first published 1938), p. 7.
Hugh Thomas’ The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1570
(Papermac, 1997), pp. 356-35.
began and their continent slipped forever over the horizon, with the
same condescension that they were baptised Christian on boarding
with a splash of brine from a bucket and an injunction in an alien
tongue not to eat dogs or rats.
In fact, slave owners were as indifferent to the spirituality of their
property as they were to every other aspect of slave lfe other than
that they worked hard and did not revolt. Article 2 of Louis XIV's
1685 Code Noir may have insisted that “(a]ll the slaves in our islands
will be baptized and instructed in the Catholic religion, apostolic
and Roman’ but if slaves made outward signs of obeisance whilst
contining in their hearts to revere Fa, the Oyo lord of fate, Legba
who might cheat him, the Yoroba’s snake deity Dambala or any of
the other gods and animistic totems of lost Africa, what was that to
the law? This, then, was voodoo, an Africa hidden in the hearts of
slaves, remembered traditions that formed the core of their identity.
Believing that on death they would return home to this promised
land, slaves would throw themselves overboard when bought up on
deck for air during the Middle Passage rather than go on to Haiti
or, on arrival there, curse the dawn of each day of plantation labour
they were deprived of Africa and praise each premature death as
Africa’s realisation.
© Husbon, opcit p. 5.
Haiti, Fulcrum of World Trade
Columbus came to Haiti (‘Ayti’ in the local Arawak language,
meaning ‘mountainous place’) in 1492 and called it Hispaniola. The
1.3 million indigenous Arawak and Taino were worked to death by
him through the forced mining of silver in under a decade, so the first
slaves arrived from Africa in 1503 and by 1517, Charles V authorised
the importation of 15,000 slaves
During the next century, the star of Habsburg dynasty fell in the
Europe-wide bloodletting of the Thirty Years War and the hyperinfla-
tion created by their glut of conquistador silver from the New World
Inits place rose the sun king Louis XIV and France, who appointed
Betrand d'Ogeron first French governor of buccaneer-colonised west-
ern Hispaniola — Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as they called it — in
1665 and formally annexed the territory in 1697 with the Treaty of
Ryswick.
We have seen already the liberality of this absolute monarch’s
Code Noir, which put (unenforceable) limits on the violence with
which masters could chastise their property (eg. beatings of over 100
blows were supposed to be referred to the tender mercies of a mag-
istrate) and even allowed manumission to any slave marrying her
White master. What this also did was racialise slavery, disguising its
originally purely economic basis. Before the Code Noir, poor Whites
as well as Blacks served as slaves in the plantations, though these
engages were more like indentured servants, bound to slavery for
only 36 months before being granted freedom.* Those that survived
went on to become the overseers, hairdressers and suchlike middle-
man parasites of the colony, the petit blanes beneath the propertied
landowners that ruled San Domingue, the grande blanc plantocracy.
With time and the burgeoning prosperity of the colony, the grey
(or rather jaune) area between Black and White was elaborated to a
degree bizarre outside apartheid South Africa. 128 different degrees
! Lacnnec Husbon's Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy (Thames & Hudson, 1995),p. 19.
of difference between ‘pure Blacks and ‘pure Whites' were recog-
nised, each prejudiced against those even a degree more ‘racially
impure’, but those possessing even one degree of Blackness not qual-
ifying for the legal and social privileges of the White master class
because of supposed loyalty to their slave mothers. In his Black
Jacobins, CLR James tells the story of one such individual, Monsieur
Chapuzet de Guerin, who fought for decades to blot out the 128
“St Kitts Negro” blood supposedly circulating within him, eventually
doing s0 by proving it was Carib (a people long dead and so not
covered by the colony’s discriminatory race laws) as no Black slaves
‘were on St Kitts at the time in question.*
A particular refinement of this racial discrimination that was to
blight the country’s politics for centuries to come was the legal cre-
ation of an intermediate ‘race’, the mulattos or jeunes’, who through
thrift, abstemiousness and other bourgeois virtue:
own plantations and keep their own slaves, particularly in the south
and east of San Domingue. Their success threatened the exclusivity
of the White plantocracy and excited the jealousy of petit blancs,
leading to the savagely draconian laws of 1758 and after to ‘put them
in their place’* It was legal for any White to take anything from
amulatto he thought better quality than he owned himself — be it
a piece of furniture, a horse or the coat off his back — and if that
mulatto was outraged enough as to raise a hand to stop this, then
the law also provided for his hand to be literally struck off. These
measures were depressingly typical of a first resort to ‘race’ as a
‘weapon of class conflict in Haiti, even in post-colonial times.
But what of the wealth of Haiti, so jealously guarded by the
colony's racial laws? HWP Hartford has described it as “nearly
a Jack-and-the-beanstalk land, throw some seeds over your shoulder
came to own their
CLR James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu
tion (Allson & Busby, 1980 — first published 1938), p. 42.
French for “yellow’, though appazently not meant in any more derogatory sense
than ‘Black’ or ‘Whitc
Janes, op cit, p. 41
and tomorrow there were crops.™® Cotton and indigo, both impor-
tant cash crops, grew naturally. Coffee, cocia and tobacco were of
world class quality and tobacco leaves grew larger on Haiti than in
any other region of the Americas. Haiti was the agricult-ural axis
of France’s triangular trade, much as Jamaica was Britain's. Haiti's
plantocracy were amongst the wealthiest people on the planet at
that time — equivalent to today’s ol tycoons — and one of the most
saught-after appointments at the French court was governor of San
Domingue, much as viceroy of India was later amongst the British.
In 1767 alone, the colony exported 123 million tons of sugar, a million
tons of indigo, two million of cotton, and much more besides.*
As well as the income to be made from marketing beverages de
rigeur to the rising metropolitan French bourgeoisie, the port of
Nantes existed almost exclusively for the shipping of slaves, some
30,000 a year, and the manufacture of shoddy glass beads and indigo-
dyed cotton indiennes to trade for them along the Slave Coast. The
other four key slave trading ports were Rouen, La Rochelle, Saint-
Malo and Bordeaux, the latter also shipping wine as a trade com-
modity.” In all, 2-6 million Frenchmen earned their living directly or
indirectly from the slave trade, perhaps a fifth of the country's entire
working population. The king, who granted these trading charters
and took a cut from every transaction (the Exclusive, much resented
by colonists), was also much enriched by it
HWP Hartford's History of Haiti at hartford-hwp.com / archives / 43 /107 htr,
“Haiti's Golden Days?" p2.
James, op ci, p45.
Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1570
(Papermac, 1997), pp. 250-253.
10
Slavery: Life, Death, Work and
Resistance
Half a million slaves laboured on Haiti, a land owned by 30,000
Whites and as many mulattos. They out-numbered the Whites more
than ten to one overall, and over 100 to one on the plantations.
Aside from being treated as mere property and beasts of burden,
the life of the slaves was extremely harsh. As it was considered
cheaper to buy in new slaves from Africa than to keep up numbers
through what was called ‘natural increase’, it was normal to work
slaves to death, usually in under ten years. Aside from a short siesta
under the midday sun and Sundays when they were allowed to attend
to their own vegetable patches, slaves were expected to work all the
time they weren't sleeping, from before dawn to after dusk. They
were fed half the calories they needed to sustain hard, protracted
field labour (hence Sundays off for the veg garden) and any daring
to nibble sugar cane to supplement their diet had tin-plate muzzles
strapped across their faces to prevent them from doing so again. It
was generally agreed that the worst aspect of sugar harvesting was
mill work, the cane being rushed to have its sweet sap crushed from
it between rollers. If a slave happened to get a limb caught in these
rollers through excessive haste or exhaustion, it was simply hacked
off with a machete and the wound cauterised with a torch rather
than production being slowed. When sleeping, slaves were crowded
together in hovels, dying quickly and in huge numbers whenever
epidemics spread amongst them or their crops. When sick or injured,
the slave owner felt no obligation to support the ‘useless’ slave and
when dead, they were unceremoniously dumped in the nearest ditch
or on the nearest waste ground available.
Slaves endured such conditions when the alternative was the
whip — typically a leathery stretched bull's pizzle or knotted cord
— or whatever savage punishments the slave-owner could devise.
Indulged in every whim from childhood and believing “the king is
too far and God too high” to stay their hands, these flowers of French
civilisation practised every brutality, from recreational rape through
11
to burying disobedient slaves in ant hills or packing their arses with
gunpowder and exploding them like sentient fireworks. Such pun-
ishments were not sadistic exceptions, they were so much the rule
that they acquired their own shorthand names in the colonialists'
argot (eg. “blasting a Black’s arse’). Execution was so common that
professionals went from plantation to plantation, each toting their
own price list — so much for the cropping of ears, so much more for
a burning, and so on. Like Machievelli, the owning class evidently
felt it better to be feared than loved, for all the paternalistic tales of
plantation life they told outsiders.
As “resistance is the natural human reaction to dehumanization”,"
50 the slaves insisted on working as slowly and stupidly as possible.
It was impossible to issue them with more complex agricultural
equipment than hoes — traditional African implements — as they
would either break it or pretend not to know what to do with it
When a slave was asked why he was beating his master's mule, he
replied “When T do not work, 1 am beaten. When he does not work,
Iheat him — he is my Negro™ This sort of resistance may have laid
the groundwork for racist stereotypes of Black people as stupid or
lazy (surely accolades, in context), but don't we all do it, even when
paid for the privilege of profiting some boss? Slave resistance went
rather further though. Suicide was common, not so much because
life was intolerable but to cheat the master of the slave’s value, both
as labour and as commodity. For the same reason, slaves fresh off the
boat were often offered poison, and infanticide was also a common
clandestine protest. This latter was not restricted to slaves. A third of
all White babies surcummed to “jaw-sickness”, an aflliction affecting
only them and transmitted by slave midwives.” Aside from revenge,
the motive was often economic. If more than one of the owner’s
sons survived to inherit, an estate would be broken up and slave
families with it
Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan; An Essay (Black & Red. 1953).
p. 184
CLR Jasmes' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu
tion (Allson & Busby, 1980 — first published 1938), p.15.
ibid, pp. 16-17.
12
Rather than staying on to sabotage the plantation, some chose
to resist by running away from it. The Code Noir specified flogging
and branding as a first punishment for this, and further branding
and the cutting of the escapee’s hamstrings for any second attempt
(o provision was made for subsequent offences, it was assumed
lamed slaves were unable to escape). Frequently, the escapee was
additionally humiliated by being forced to kneel before the nearest
chapel, publically asking forgiveness for “insubordination to the
situation which God has placed him”, a itual that no doubt increased
slave reverence for the merciful Christian deity of their masters
Runaway slaves were tracked by professionals, often free Blacks
with bloodhounds trained to kill. At any show of resistance from
the runaway, they were allowed to.
Some runaways didn't run far, hovering around the edges of their
plantation so their families could feed them, whereas others hid
alone in the forgotten places of Haiti leading a hand-to-mouth ex-
istence until recaptured by the slave-hunters. Not all did, though
From as early as 1681, when San Domingue was still a Spanish poses-
sion, there were warnings of Maroonage, when runaways banded
together to form their own outlaw communities. This was a problem
that rapidly got out of hand. Between 1764 and 1793, the newspapers
reported 48,000 runaways as Maroons (from the Portuguese cimmar-
ron, meaning;'wild').* The Maroons lived in self-sufficient, palisaded
communities in the mountains above Cap Francis, Cul-de-Sac and
southern Cayes. One community survived 85 years until the French
granted them de facto independence whereas else-where it was im-
possible for Whites to wander the hills day or night, even in groups.
Attempts were made to subdue the Maroons with armed expeditions
of mulatto marcehaussee, but they were going up against masters of
guerilla warfare with nothing to lose, so these expeditions typically
failed bloodily.
Life in the Maroon compounds was much like that in any African
village, although given their former masters’ foremost desire was
to painfully exterminate them, concerns about security were nat-
urally overriding. The former peasants returned to their peasant
© Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainborw (Collins, 1986). p. 194,
13
ways and a chief ruled, typically tyrannically.* Those fleeing to Ma-
roon communities had to be initiated by ordeal, their slave brands
being removed by scarification or the application of corrosive sap
from native plants. They were then taught the community’s secret
handshakes and passwords. It should be said here that those that
failed to escape to Maroon communities under their own steam —
for example, if captured during a raid on a plantation — were treated
as slaves, with death the punishment for any threatening the com-
munity’s security (eg. by trying to escape it). Sadly this, too, was
typically African. After all, almost no slaves arrived in Haiti that
were not first captured from one African kingdom by another. Their
fate would almost certainly have been either execution or farm work
for their captors if they had not been sold on to Europeans. Con-
tinuing enslavement was considered the penalty for their lack of
courage. Significantly, Maroon identity was not determined by tribe,
but by ritual initiation onto the secret society of the Maroons. Secret
societies were also key in cutting across clan and occassionally tribal
affiliations in west Africa,* so here voodoo was key in providing the
medium by which this cultural amalgamation was made possible.
As voodoo is strictly heirarchical, this also served to reinforce the
power of the chief, who was hougan (priest) and to whom those
he initiated owned absolute loyalty. Another significant factor in
‘maintaining the Africanness of Maroon communities — particularly
their spiritual orientation — was that many runaways were bossales
(newcomers), fled to them straight from the boat rather than from
plantations, apparently as many as a fifth by 1788. As Wade Davis
notes in his fascinating popular ethno-botanical account of Haitian
v00doo, The Serpent and the Rainbow’
[Tlhese fresh arrivals from Affica, ignorant of the ways of the
colony, were the ones invariably to flee to the hills. Thus a
good many of the recruits to the Maroon communities were the
i Sagan's At the Davn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Politcal Oppres-
sion and the State (Vintage, 1986), Part 1, shows this was typical African social
organisation, given s peasant cconomy.
Davis, op it p. 195
ibid, p. 195
14
individuals least socialized into the regime of the whites. Into
their new homes, then, they brought not the burdens of slavery
but the ways of Africa.
As the Maroons often found themselves in a war for survival
against Haiti's rulers, their resistance often segued into something
more militant than mere survivalism, taking the war to the enemy.
Even the Blacks that hadn't fled their plantation felt it worth losing
sleep to ceremonially drum and chant at night*
Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!
Canga, bafio te!
Canga, moune de le!
Canga, do kila!
Canga, i
(We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let
us die rather than fail to keep this vow:)
In 1671, Padre Jean killed his master and recruited twenty other
Africans to strangle every White on the island. Unsurprisingly, given
the small numbers and in-yer-face nature of this first revolt, it was
quickly and easily suppressed.
Half a century later the much smarter and stealthier runaway
Francois Makandal bought island-wide terror to the plantocracy.”
Originally Mandingue, when Makandal lost an arm to the sugar mil,
he claimed to have had a vision of the great cities of Guinea, mag-
nificent in comparison to Haiti's diminuitive capital Port-au-Prince,
described by one European as “a Tartar camp’, its streets running
with filth and its Christian churches with corruption. Immediately
after his maiming, Makandal affected the role of prophet and built a
considerable following in northern Limbe. By 1740, Makandal had
fled to the Maroons and used their secret networks to build a force
James, op cit, 18, As a rather doctrinaire Marxist, James seems excessively em
barassed by voodoo and disparages it s an *African cult” (ibid, p.13). His reasons
sehy Lwill return to later
* Davis, op cit, pp. 159-200.
15
of thousands across Haiti, infiltrating every home and plantation
and bringing poison to each, adapted from west African lore to local
cireumstances. Dependent on their servants, the plantocracy was
helpless as one day their livestock died, the next their domestic ani-
mals, finally themselves and their families. 6,000 were killed before
Makandal was through. The Whites’ powerlessness only increased
their brutality. Laws were passed prohibiting slave preparation of
any medicene except snakebite treatments, and all suspected poi-
soners were mercilessly tortured and burned. When — despite the
strictest security, including the poisoning of any thought traitors —
Makandal was finally betrayed and caught in 1757." the attempt to
burn him in the streets of Haitis second city, Cap-Francois, went
awry. Though only one-armed, he fought free of his shackles and
leapt from the flames. Rich Whites that had come to gloat fled in
terror. Though soldiers said they recaptured the prophet and had
thrown him back into the flames bound to a plank, the Blacks could
not give up their symbol of liberation and so claimed Makandal had
‘magically transformed himself into a fly and so escaped even that.
Tropical Haiti abounds with flies, each a reminder of Makandal and
ironically, they — or at least their cousins, the mosquitoes, as carriers
of yellow fever — did have as big role to play in subsequent struggle
for freedom. In his honour, even to this day, talismans, poisions and
even an entire voodoo society bear Makandal's name.
Makandal's revolt may have laid an island-wise network of se-
cret communication between the Maroon communities and into the
towns and plantations, but it was as nothing compared to what the
voodooists were to achieve from the Bois-Caiman ceremony of 14"
August 1791
. Lacnnee Hurbon's Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy (Thasmes & Hudson, 1995, p. 40.
16
Bois-Caiman and After: the Haitian
Revolution
‘The roots of the Haitian revolution are in the French revolution,
as the French revolution’s are in Haiti. The huge profits of the slave
trade gave the French bourgeiosie economic power and the confi-
dence to challenge a bungling and rapacious feudal taxation system
under Louis XVL It's unsurprising then that Enlightenment icons
like Voltaire, who best articulated this liberal discontent, had slave
ships unironically named after him." It's also unsurprising that it
was Club Massiac,? representing the colonial interest amongst the
‘Third Estate, that gave them the mettle to take the Tennis Court
Oath refusing to disperse without Louis XVI accepting bourgeois
demands. It was the monarch’s stalling on this that precipitated the
starving, street-level mob’s storming of the Bastille on 14" July 1789,
the start of the French revolution proper.
News of events in France emboldened the petit blancs in Haiti,
the Patriots of St. Mare declaring for the revolution. The plantoc-
racy, which had previously executed mulattos petitioning for an end
to discimination against them, then adopted them as fellow estate-
holders and their natural allies in order to drive the Patriots into
the sea. This alliance of class against race provoked much resentful
grumbling amongst petit blancs, who disregarded warnings not to
speak of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” before slaves.
‘The slaves, meanwhile, had already formed their own analysis,
that “the white slaves in France had risen, and killed their masters,
and were now enjoying the fruits of the earth™ Sensing freedom,
runaway coachman and hougan Boukman Dutty chose to follow
Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1570
(Papermac, 1997), p. 465
CLR James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu:
tion (Allson & Busby, 1980 — first published 1958), . 60.
bid, p. 31
17
their example, using his underground communication network be-
tween Maroon bands and plantation slaves to gather delegates in
the Bois-Caiman on 17 August. A young mulatto priestess Cecile
Fatiman led this rite by singing songs of Africa invoking Ogoun, god
of fire, iron and war, and sacrificing a black pig. After all present
had drunk its blood to bind themselves together in revolt, Boukman
addressed them*
‘The god of the white people demands of them crimes; our god
asks for good deeds. But this god who is so good demands
vengeance! He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Cast away
the image of the god of the whites, who thirsts for our tears,
and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in all of our hearts.
Word went back to the plantations and a week later, on 25%
August, came the Night of Fire.
Across the whole North Plain, 50,000 rose and, with them, an in-
ferno. 200 sugar plantations burned and with them s times as many
coffee plantations, a quarter of all those on the island. The flames lit
the night's sky and could be seen as far away as the Bahamas. For
three weeks afterwards, smoke and burning cane straw obscured
the tropical sun and choked the sea with ash. On each plantation,
slaves killed their own masters, those best treated — such as those of
Gallifet — paradoxically showing them least mercy. As CLR James
rightly put it®
For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that
power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you
controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been
taught
Thousands of plantocrats were strangled or battered to death
that first night. Each atrocity was repayed in kind. Grenada-born
Henri Christophe had a carpenter sawed to death between his own
boards. With the war cry of “Vengeance! Vengeance!”, Jean Jacques
4 Lacnnee Hurbon's Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy (Thames & Hudson, 1995),p. 4.
5 James, op cit, p. 55,
18
Dessalines carried a White child impaled on a pike before him as a
battle standard. As clear-sighted as the Luddites a generation later,
the insurgent slaves had no interest in preserving any part of the
system that was enslaving them and so destroyed without restraint.
‘The squabbling between republican petit blancs and the alliance
of grand blancs and mulattos meant the slave revolt continued
unchecked for the next three months, at one point even threatening
the major port of Le Cap. However, confined by the fortresses of
Cordon of the West, the North Plain burned flat and with Boukman
killed in an ambush, the insurgents began to starve. Lesser Maroon
leaders like Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou secretly agreed to
sell them out in exchange for amnesty for the leadership. The freshly
reunited and arrogant plantocracy wouldn't even accept that, so they
then fled to the Spanish half of the island, Jean-Francois taking with
him as secretary someone stll calling himself Toussainte Breda —
‘named after the plantation that educated him and which he defended
until its destruction became inevitable — but later better known as
L'Ouverture as a consequence of his military prowess.
On 18" September 1792, commissioner Sonthonax arrived at half-
ruined Le Cap from Paris with news of the execution of Louis XVI
two months before. As in the English Civil War, the killing of the
king was a consequence of the will of the people in the streets, rather
than the aspirant bourgeois ruling class, who feared the precident
the lteral and symbolic decapitation of the State might set. By this
stage, the street-level sans culottes despised the ‘aristocrats of the
skin' (racists, particularly the White plantocracy) as much as the
‘aristocrats of the blood (the nobility) and ‘aristocrats of religion’
(the clergy). Robiespierre himself had effectively told the French As-
sembly “Perish the colonies rather than our principles”, meaning the
Rights of Man for all men, including those the plantocracy thought
better classified as mere property and so (for liberals) sacrosanct
Sonthonax was actually of the Right, associated with Club Massiac,
but of a character inclined to fulfil his commission way in excess
of cither the expectations or desires of those that gave it to him.
Sent to enforce mulatto rights, Sonthonax faced rebellion both from
his nominal allies, scarlet cockade-wearing Patriots, and Royalist-
commanded troops shipped in with him from France. Faced with
19
destruction at their hands by October, Sonthonax freely distributed
arms to the labourers and proclaimed the end of slavery:*
If you wish to keep your liberty use your arms on the day that
the white authorities ask you for them, because any such re-
questis the infallible sign and precursor of the return to slavery.
Whilst Sonthonx succeeded in further devastating Le Cap, he
failed to win over rebels fighting from exile in Spanish San Domingue,
who knew only the Assembly in Paris rather than its appointed
commissioner had the power to end slavery.
‘The anti-revolutionary Spanish commander, the marquis d'Her-
mona, had told the self-liberated slaves that had fled into his terri-
tory that only a king could free slaves, conveniently enough for him
as the French had just executed theirs. Despite this, the Spanish
army was of necessity an incredible mixture of dissent and even
saw royalist Whites under the command of voodooist Marroons like
Biassou, whose tent was covered in amulets and whose Romaine
de Prophetesse band carried cow tail charms into battle which they
believed protected them from musket balls. A contemporary French
account describes a raid on one of their camps:’
[1]n the ground along the route [were] large perches on which
a variety of dead birds had been affixed ... On the road at
intervals there were cut up birds surrounded by stones, and
also a dozen broken eggs surrounded by large circles. What
was our surprise to see black males leaping about and more
than 200 women dancing and singing in all security ... The
v00doo priestess had not fled . .. she spoke no creole . .. Both
the men and the women said that there could be no human
power over her . .. she was of the Voodoo cult.
© ibid, p. 337, With typical hero-worship, James claims Toussainte first armed
the people in (slow) response to the 1802 French invasion whilst dircetly quoting
Sonthonax doing it decade caclier!
7 Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow Collins, 1986). p. 203
20
Necessarily, Maroon tactics of deadfall booby traps, poison and
frenzied, mobbing ambush to the blare of the conch at bends in the
road predominated, but this was not for Toussainte L'Ouverture.
Like Fairfax and Cromvwell during the English Civil War, faced with
early defeat, he set about creating a small, well-armed disciplined
military force, much as his English revolutionary forebears created
the New Model Army. The muskets, powder and European drill
came from officers of Spain, but the troops' loyalty was to Tous-
sainte and Toussainte alone. Like his kindly masters on the Breda
plantation, Toussainte’s religious inclinations were European too,
his Catholicism being no mask for voodoo, a faith he disparaged as
enthusiastically as “backwards” as his hagiographer CLR James was
to doa century later.
It was as much a result of this training as his military and diplo-
matic skills that Toussainte found this war the making of him. He
gained much territory, recruits and thus power by going directly
against d'Hermona's orders and announcing emancipation as he
advanced into French San Domingue, something he couldn't have
got away with if he hadn't been surrounded by troops loyal to him.
Curiously, L'Ouverture claimed his African father was a “native
chieftain™ — consistent with the marquis' injunction, was Toussainte
liberating slaves as a king during his advance? History records no
answer either way, though when the French Assembly backed Son-
thonax’s proclamation ending slavery without debate in May 1793,
Toussainte immediately abandoned the Spanish cause for France's,
taking his 5,000 troops and his lieutenants Dessalines and Christophe
with him. In doing so, he left his Maroon rivals — all under Spanish
command and dependant on them militarily — way behind. Son-
thonax also needed Toussainte, having alienated even the mulattos
he was sent to liberate by his decree emancipating their human
“property’
As a result of Club Massiac plotting, Sonthonax was recalled to
Paris to face trial, replaced as commissioner by Leveaux as governor.
He had his work cut out for him as the British landed from Jamaica
* James,apit,p. 17
21
at Jeremie on 19" September 1794, their commander Dundas de-
seribing his invasion of the finest colony in the world in familiar,
hypocritical imperialist language as “not a war for riches or local ag-
grandizement, but a war for security”™” With allegiences of property
overriding those of patriotism, the plantocracy welcomed the British
and their policy of reintroducing slavery. By 4™ February 1795,
George IIIs birthday, they took Port-au-Prince, sealing their control
of the western seaboard and the south. After refusing their bribes,
Leveaus was forced to flee to the west. Only here and around the
southern seaport, the Mole St. Nicholas, did resistance continue. The
Mole was held by the mulatto Andre Rigaud, a compitent administra-
torand veteran not only of the war in the west but also under French
command during the American War of Independence. A militant for
his caste, Rigaud would allow no Black or White command over any
mulatto in his army and ruthlessly executed anyone taking bribes
from the British, who wanted to reintroduce legal discriminations
against mulattos as well as slavery.
As far as the British were concerned, Haitian liberty threatened
slavery in their own colonies, particularly Jamaica where Maroons
had already forced them to accept their autonomy. However, their
pro-slavery policy proved a complete liability in pacifying the West
and soon the war bogged down into a stalemate where the rainy
season, with its mosquitoes and their yellow fever, took its toll by
the thousands. Come 20" March 1796, mulattos less principled than
Rigaud and jealous of Toussainte’s pre-eminence attempted to break
this stalemate with a coup d'etat. After showing provocative con-
tempt for his decrees, Le Cap’s administrator Valatte seized governor
Leveaux and pronounced himself Haiti's ruler. Rather than see the
country turned over to the British, Toussainte had Dessalines march
on the city and expel Valatte. This proved to be a bit of a counter-
coup because no sooner where the victory celebrations over than
Toussainte suggested Leveaus was exhausted by his experience and
should return to France.
He was replaced by commissioners headed by Sonthonax who
landed at Le Cap on 11" May 1796. Sonthonax had been acquitted
ibid, p. 200
22
would assist in its “sacred mission to rehabilitate the whole black
race”® The British found this latter exercise particularly interesting,
as they were already using Liberia as a self-governing ‘homeland'
and “cradle of civilisation” for freed slaves regardless of their culture
or country of origin (returning them to Africa to prevent their com-
petition with free White labour), and Haiti might have served them
likewise.”
For all their attempts to conceal it the weakness in this argument
was the widespread persistence of the “African cult” of voodoo in
Haiti, s0 when mulatto general Geffrard ousted Soulougue in 1860
following the latter's failed campaign against Spanish San Domingo,
a concordat was signed with the Vatican making Catholicism the offi-
cial religion of Haiti** This measure was aimed as much at the Black
smallholding peasantry as at improving Haiti's image in European
eyes, opening the way to a more efficient export trade. It was success-
ful to the extent that the last Maroon band was suppressed in 1860,
but as a consequence voodoo went underground, sufficing peasant
society like an ‘invisible government™* and laying the groundwork
of resentment that Salomon used to surplant Geffrard’s fractious
mulatto successors as president in 1879
His overt motive, again, was mulattoes getting preference for
office and, as with the Piquets Uprising in 1844, Salomon was not
beneath raising the peasantry to seize power, in this instance the
mercenary cacos (including even some mulattoes), who waged a
protracted guerilla war in the North. It is noteworthy that they
typically came from the relatively privileged habitant middle class,
rather than the dirt-poor landless peasantry of the piquets, and so
had no particular revolutionary demands.” They were rewarded by
Salomon’s considerable sale of State lands in February 1883. Sixty
0 ibid,p. 127, Rather more exediby,his mulattosival Ption harboued Smon Bolvar
before his expedition o lierate the slaves of South America, an ‘iterference in
forcign afars’ Christophe condemned.
0 Hogh Thomas' The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1570
(Papermac, 1997, p. 575
%t Laennee Hurbon's Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy (Thames & Hudson, 1995),pp. 53-54.
3 Davis, apeit p. 212
Nicholl, op it p. 109,
45
years later, Duvalier was to call on this classe intermediare in his rise
to power. By this stage, caste politics in Haiti had institutionalised
to the extent that the Black elite was calling itself the National Party,
with the backing of the Army and a popularist rural orientation, and
the mulatto elite called themselves the Liberal Party, with a com-
mitment to foreign trade liberalisation and an elitist, technocratic
“government by the most compitent™ thanks to their ideologue, Ed-
mond Paul. The leader of one of the losing factions of the in-fighting
that cost the mulattoes power, Boyer Bazelais, landed an army from
Jamaica at Miragoane in March 1883 in order to reverse Salomon’s
land redistribution, but instead died as the city was besieged.
‘The ultra-nationals — also calling themselves piquets doctrinaires
— then pressed their advantage. Throughout the 1880s, Parisian-
educated son of a Protestant tailor and noirist revisionist historian
Louis Joseph Janvier led the anti-clerical campaign, an attempt to
reverse or minimalise the effect of Geffrard's 1860 concordat with
the Vatican on Haitian national life. Janvier was a freemason —
ironically, as the leading petit blancs of the colonial period also were
— and clearly not a voodooist:**
From a political point of view, Catholism is the negation of
patriotism; from a religious point of view, i is fetishism because
it s respectable.
Evidently, he felt utterly unembarrassed to use ‘divided loyalty"
arguments against Catholicism discredited as sectarian in Europe at
least half a century before. The Church — with its “petits Bretons™
priests — was suffering the consequences of its domesticating role
under slavery, being seen as both anti-Black and foreign-controlled.
‘The anti-clericals’ ultimate end was an Exastian-type church, totally
subordinated to the state, but their campaign’s main effect was to
give voodoo a much-needed breathing space
Whilst Janvier was jealously guarding Haiti against ‘Popish plot’,
his hero Salomon was on old form undermining national economic
bid p. 119
ibid. p. 115
46
independence, precisely what he always accused the mulattoes of.
His opening the way for the MacDonald contract — the sale of land
for an American railway on Haiti — also opened the way for the
1915 US invasion
In 1888, Salomon was bought down by a mulatto Northern alliance
under Firmin hostile to increased foreign trade links generally and
his Banque Nationale particularly and from then on in until the US
invasion, the ‘ding dong’ politics of Haiti continued, one would-be
president accusing the other of being a “mannikin in the hands of
the mulattoes”, only to be called a “pope of voodooism” in his turn,
and 5o on. Meanwhile, there had been real changes in demography
and land ownership in rural areas, identified by Hartford as:™*
o increasing population
« decreasing land plot sizes (mainly from selling off ancestral land,
orhaving it expropriated, and by dividing it amongall sons rather
than giving it to the oldest son
o increasing share-cropper status of the peasant as they lost their
land (again, either from sale or expropriation)
« decreasing land fertility due to poor farming methods.
To alarge extent, the peasantry were victims of their own success,
but their population growth meant that nowhere remained in Haiti
where it was practical for them to retreat away from government
intrusion. Furthermore, as some accumilated land to become middle-
classed, others lost it to become proletarianised, working either for
them o in coastal towns on cash crop exports. To that extent, Haiti
was driven towards the foreign trade links that compromised its
sovereignty despite itself.
It was the increasing number of German traders in Haiti that
provided an initial pretext for American imperial interest, although
it had been slowly digesting the Caribbean ever since the collapse
of Spain’s empire worldwide in 1898. According to the US State
Department, Germans controlled 80% of the trade in Haiti. Actual
% Hartford,ap cit, Hai's Golden Days?. p. 2
a7
US interests included realising the MacDonald contract and the es-
tablishment of a naval base at Mole St. Nicolas to compliment one
they'd already established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 27 July
1915 lynching of president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam whilst he sought
sanctuary in the French embassy gave the Americans the final excuse
they needed to portray Haitians as savages, incapable of self-gov-
ernment, and to send in the Marines to ‘restore order’ by installing
their puppet, Louis Borno. Whilst Sam’s lynching was indeed sav-
age — the crowd literally tore him limb from limb and paraded his
remains through the streets on poles, one participant carrying away
the ex-president’s thumb in his mouth exclaiming “Voici ma pipe,
m'ap fumin™ — the imperialists drew on half a century of racist
stereotyping of the Black state and of Africa (including claims that
Haitian voodooists practiced human sacrifice and ate “goats without
horns”, babies), and seemed genuinely offended at the scale of sub-
sistence in Haiti, which they saw as an obstacle to investment. US
financial advisor on Haiti Arthur Millspaugh argued the occupation
‘was “a unique laboratory for social, economic, political and adminis-
trative paternalism™* Come America’s 1917 entry into World War
One, such aspirations received a boost with the expropriation of all
German property in Haiti
Paternalistic aspirations were not easily realised. Attempts to
concentrate land ownership were denounced as “the legalised assas-
sination of the Haitian rural proletariat”. Introduction of the corvee
forced labour road-building system led to the last cacos rebellion by
Charlemagne Peralte and Benoit Batraville in 1918, After driving out
the local gendarmerie, Peralte established a provisional government
in the north which took the Marines to put down. Fighting only
ceased when both leaders of the revolt were killed by May 1920
Whilst Peralte was a sincere and devout Catholic, Batraville was
found in possession of what the US press described as a “voodoo
book”,* his catechism of revolution.
Nichalls, op it p. 146
ibid, p. 145
ibid, p. 297. Although the Revolutionary Prayer to our Saviour Jesus” explicitly
names o voodoo wa, it was intended to be made following sn animal sacrifice
48
Although this effectively marked an end to armed resistance, polit-
ical and cultural resistance only intensified, Jean Price Mars’ Union
Patriotique being founded in 1921 to end expropriation of the peas-
ants, martial law and the US occupation. The mulatto elite, many of
whom originally welcomes the US invasion as shifting the balance of
power in their favour, were shocked to discover they were just “nig-
gers speaking French” as far as the Americans were concerned. The
invaders' oafish indifference to the French high culture which mu-
attoes also felt marked them out as socially superior — as illustrated
by their taxing of pianos and not gramophones, and prioritisation of
technical over classical education — only increased their resentment
Confronted with American racism, mulattoes emphasised their Hait-
ian nationality rather than their caste, whilst Blacks under Price
Mars began elaborating the noirist position of Firmin and his con-
temporaries through an ethnographic movement exploring African
remnants in Haitian peasant folklore.
Price Mars published his findings in Ainsi parla I'oncle (“This is
What Uncle Said”, from the Creole that Price Mars argued should
be Haiti's first language), which firmly argued Haiti's culture was
African, not French, and so had no good reason to try to emulate
Europe in any other way, including its religion. As such, Price Mars
was recognised as the father of negritude, although as CLR James
fairly comments “The Haitians did not know it as Negritude. To
them, it seemed purely Haitian”.* Ideas of negritude were diffused
through Haitian exiles in Paris and Leon Damas of Cayenne, Aime
Cesaire on Martinique and Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal. They
profoundly influenced the great Marcus Garvey on Jamaica,* whose
belief in a Black deity Laid the basis for both the Rastafarian and
Black Muslim movements and whose newspaper, Negro World, was
required reading by Jomo Kenyatta, a founder figure in the move-
ment for African decolonisation. It's incidentally worth noting here
that voodoo's influence preceded negritude’s in terms of promoting
and much of the et of the Voodoo Book deals with charms and other traditional
Haitian magical pracices.
@ James, p it p. 394
“ i, pp. 396-397.
9
Black liberation, inasmuch as the glossolallia (speaking in tongues)
of the Pentacostal churches derives directly from the ‘horse and
rider” possession by the lwas central to voodoo worship, and it was
these churches that provided both the infrastructure for later Black
organisation for their civil rights and some of their most eloquent
spokesmen. The poetry of one of the Parisian exiles, the mulatto Carl
Brouard, demonstrates the mood of the new negritude is vastly at
odds with the tacit alignment with European values of the noirism
that preceded it:*
Drum
when you sound
my soul sereams towards Africa
Sometimes
Tdream of an immense jungle
bathed in moon-light
with hirsute, sweating figures,
sometimes
of a filthy hut
where I drink blood out of human skulls
Clearly, there is no claim being made here that Blacks were
civilised before Whites (as, in fact, they probably were), a claim
Brouard would probably have rejected as European-identified and
a perpetuation of the colonial mentality. Unlike the more cautious
Price Mars — who only had it in him to eventually give the major-
ity Haitian faith a distant nod of ethnographic approval — Brouard
actively practiced voodoo (probably with more authenticity than
modern wiccans practice witcheraft), but he gives the impression
of someone trying too hard, embracing European imperialist stereo-
types of Africa in a fervent attempt to reject imperialist Europe.
In rejecting Western civilisation, Brouard was a primitivist, but an
embarassing one. His privileged background, dodgy ethnography
and embrace of authority typified the next phase in the ideological
development of negritude.
Nicholls,op it p. 161
50
‘The US withdrew in 1933, leaving Haiti in the hands of their in-
vestors and a new president, Stenio Vincent, who promoted their
interests through a burgeoning middle class, Black as well as mu-
latto. In part, the occupation had been ideologically sustained by
the stigmatisation of voodoo, with lurid journalistic accounts of non-
existent ‘voodoo dolls’ (actually a European witchcraft tradition —
pins — with appropriately coloured threads attached — are stuck
into figurines in voodoo to heal through sympathetic magic rather
than to harm) and cannibalistic ‘Congo Bean Stew” recipes. In this
political climate, the griot movement was formed by Brouard and
promulgated in Haiti by the ‘three D's, Louis Duaquoi, Lorimer De-
nis and Francois Duvalier. The Griots were named for the traditional
poets, story-tellers and magicians of Africa and they supported the
contention of the racist Arthur de Gobineau that some races were
biologically superior to others — except they argued that it was Black
race that had superior physical and spiritual strength. Just as Nor-
man Cohn noted in his study of the bogus ‘Protocols of the Elders of
Zion', Warrant for Genocide, that the rationalist Napoleonic invasion
of Germany led to a backlash of folKloric nationalism that created
the Nazis, 5o the US invasion of Haiti created the ultimate extension
of Price Mars' ethnographic movement, the Griots. They were un-
equivocal in affirming anti-rational, authoritarian political principles,
claiming them as traditionally African. They desired dictatorship, *
reason and will allied to force in the service of the nation
Authority is a sacred thing. Let us establish the mystique of
authority. Force remains a beautiful thing, to be respected even
when it crushes us.
Ifthese sentiments sound familiar — and not particularly African —
it's because of Griot affinity for Italian fascism which, strangely, was
seen as a counterpoint to British and French imperialism prior to the
invasion of Ethiopia.* Even faced with the invasion of the one nation
bid, p. 172
Mussolin was clearly imperialist himself, spiring to re create the Roman empirc!
1 incidentally noteworthy that under French domination, nationalists n Syria
and Iraq adopted Italian fascism as ther ideological model for the Ba'ath Pty
51
that had stayed free of European domination during the scramble for
Africa and with whom Haiti had had good diplomatic relations since
the Nord presidency in 1904, the Griots chose to side with Ethiopia
only because it was Black rather than because they opposed fascist
imperialism. Given the role of the Black generalissimo as an avenue
of advancement and in representing Black interests (though actually
usually prineiply their own), the appeal of an indigenous fascism to
the Griots is understandable, i still inexcusable.
With the rise of former Haitian ambassador to the US, Elie Lescot,
to the presidency in 1941, the Griots found themselves confronted by
a blatant programme of mulatrification (the systematic appointment
of mulattos to high office) and a foreign Catholic clergy directed
by the fascist regime of marshall Petain launching a new anti-su-
perstition campaign against voodoo which involved auto de fe of
ritual objects and 100,000 swearing an oath denouncing hougans as
“slave(s) of Satan” and the lwas as “representations of the evil one” %
Even in the mid-20"" century, this was recognised as somewhat cul-
turally insensitive and noirists exploited resentment against it to
the hilt. Even Marists like Jacques Roumain spoke out against it,
recognising it as an elitist attack on the Black, rural masses, allied to
expropriation of their lands for foreign capital. Ulimately with the
end of World War Two, a broad alliance including even the French
surrealist Andre Breton saw an end to the Lescot regime through
mass strike action in 1946.
‘The fissioning of this alliance set the stage for the 1057 election
and the Duvalier dictatorship. Whilst serving as a minister under
Lescol’s successor, president Dumarsais Estime, Duvalier continued
to trash the Church as foreign-controlled, pressed for the incorpora-
tion of folkloric material into school cirriculums, and built support
amongst the Black middle class and the rural peasantry. With his
ethnographic training and track record of opposition to the anti-su-
perstition canmpaign, Duvalier was able to appeal directly to voodoo
hougans and through them, to the ‘invisible government’ of the coun-
tryside. When the chaos of military coups that followed the 1950
Nichalls,op it p. 179-150.
bid p. 152,
52
fall o the Estime government settled down, Duvalier was able to get
three times the vote won for the presidency by his mulatto rivals,
Clement Jumelle and the Catholic-backed Louis Dejoie.
‘The backing of the Kebreau junta that called the election didn't do
Duvalier's cause any harm either, but knowing that the army’s sup-
port could be fickle, Duvalier then used voodoo to cement his power.
He not only explicitly rehabilitated the faith and appointed a priest
sympathetic to voodoo Pere Jean-Baptiste Georges as secretary of
state for education, * he also changed the Haitian flag back to the red
and black of Christophe’s kingdom (incidentally voodoo colours),
and incorporated other voodoo symbolism directly into the iconog-
raphy of the Haitian state. Beyond symbolism, Duvalier organised
a paramilitary force, first simply called cagoulards (‘hooded ones’)
and then tonton macoutes (after the wicked uncle of Haitian folklore
that carries away naughty children), to check and then break the
power of the Army. The tonton macoutes weren't just an instrument
of dictatorial terror — they were also an avenue of advancement, a
route by which Duvalier could confer direct personal favour. Even
more than that, they were his way into the Bizango societies, as
much counterpoint and controller of them as of the Army:*"
‘The leaders of the secret societies almost inevitably became
powerful members of the Ton Tom Macoute, and if the latter
was not actually recruited from the Bizango, the membership of
the two organizations overlapped to a significant degree. In the
end, one might almost ask whether or not Francois Duvalier
‘himself did not become the symbolic or effective head of the
secret societies.
How Duvalier made this claim to leadership was extraordinary
for a 20 century statesman: he claimed to be the personification
of the Iwa Baron Samedi, adopting his dress style (dark glasses and
suit, narrow tie, etc) and attributing magical and divine powers to
Davis, op it p. 256
ibid, p. 256
ibid. p. 257
53
himself, and he also claimed to be guided by the spirits of Padre
Jean, Mackandal and Boukman. houngans that disagreed with Duva-
lier's auto-apotheosis were quickly replaced and, in fact, he oversaw
the appointment of every voodoo chef de section on Haiti. As well
as replacing foreign clergy with un clerge indigene, Duvalier re-
placed their prayerbooks with his Breviaire d'une revolution and
their prayers with those exalting him. For example, the new Lord’s
Prayer began:*
Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life,
hallowed be thy name
by generations present and future,
thy will be done
in Port-au-Prince and in the provinces
Duvalier encouraged a mystical identification not only between
him and his land, Haiti (much as the Medieval absolutist kings of
Europe did), but also between him and Christ, official portraits car-
rying the traditionally Catholic refrain “Ecce homo” that they attril
uted to their own particular vegetative man-god incarnation. The
completion of large-scale civil projects like the dam at Peligre were
attributed to Duvalier's divine power rather than engineering skill
in official propaganda.
As with the rule of Soulouque a century before, the racist Euro-
pean and north American press seized on this propaganda for home
audience consumption and attempted to ridicule and discredit the
Black state internationally through it with fabricated and sensation-
alistic tales of ‘Papa Doc’ communing with the severed heads of his
enemies or meditating in the bath dressed in a white top hat. Rather
than take offence or attempt to repudiate these stories, Duvalier only
used them to reinforce his occult reputation with his power base,
the voodooist peasant masses of the Haitian countryside.
Although Duvalier's early Griot ideology acted as a template for
his rule, it would be wrong to attibute excessive coherence to it
As Duvalier himself conceded: “My government wasn't what I had
Nicholls, p ct, p. 235
54
intended”* His main concern was simply with retaining power,
using the macoutes to drive his election rivals, the Jumelle broth-
exs, into exile and then to violently depoliticise the Army. During
Duvalier's protracted illness in May-June 199, the macoutes’ com-
‘mander Clement Barbot effectively ran Haiti and planned Papa Doc’s
assassination during the 1960 Carnival, demonstrating that each con-
centration of power outside the direct personal control of a dictator
comes to threaten him. As it was, Duvalier recovered and had Bar-
bot arrested and ultimately assassinated. With an ‘all things to all
people’ stance typical of fascism, Duvalier tried to hold the support
both of the Marists that first supported his revolution and of the US
embassy, hence his June 1960 ‘Cri de Jacmel’, where he threatened
to move towards a non-aligned diplomatic position if the US didn’t
increase development aid to Haiti and stop complaining about the
excesses of the macoutes. Duvalier didn't hold back from self-serv-
ing norist historical revisionism, nor from using the celebration of
Haiti's history as pure spectacle to divert the masses from his blatant
looting of the economy, as can be gauged from the tone of the civic
ceremonies recorded by Nicholls
‘The unveiling of the impressive monument to the marron in-
connuwas for Duvalier the realisation of a dream; it represented
the pioneering role played by Haiti in the assertion of black
dignity. “We constitute for the negro-African masses of the uni-
verse”, he declared, “the highest exponent or a kind of common
denominator of all national and racial consciousness™. At the
opening ceremony Paul Blanchet portrayed Duvalier as him-
self continuining the work of the marron. In the homage paid
to Martin Luther King after his assassination in 1968 Duvalier
pointed to the fact that Haiti was the first black republic in the
ne of
world, and he decreed four days of official mournin
the street’s capitals was renamed Avenue Martin Luther King
Haile Selassie’s visit to Haiti in April 1966 has also provided the
opportunity for a reaffirmation of Haiti's claim to joint leader-
ship of the African race, and indeed the third world.
S ibid, p. 255
55
Against all expectations of a regime based on personal rule, Du-
valier's control continued after his death in April 1971, were he was
succeeded by his 19-year old son Jean-Claude, better known as ‘Baby
Doc’. The stationing of US gunboats around Haiti’s coast to prevent
the return of dissenting exiles had much to do with it and, in return,
Jean-Claude Duvalier did much to upgrade the infrastructure of his
country and tun it into a US coffee patch.
“This was not to last. An outbreak of swine fever wiped out US-im-
ported pigs Duvalier had been pushing on the peasantry instead of
hardy local breeds, and with it most of their savings. Duvalier's
power base — neglected anyway with excessive investment in the
cities and ittle or nothing in the countryside — was alicnated, trigger-
ing the 7'" February 1986 dechoukaj (‘uprooting’), the mob destruc-
tion of all symbols of Duvalier’s authority, including the lynching of
macoutes and those houngans that had worked magc for the regime.
‘These disorders persisted for three months until Duvalier fled the
country (again under US protection) and every sect of backwoods
Protestant missionary descended on Haiti like lice, seeing it as a
golden opportunity to “confound Satan and Catholicism” by propa-
gating the slogan “an’n dechoke gangan” (‘destroy the houngan’).**
Despite this, voodoo was tolerated and, after a period of military
rule, the Catholic liberation theologian Jean-Bernand Aristide was
elected president in 1990. Recognising its significance for the masses
and secking national reconciliation, Aristide encouraged the wear-
ing of the red kerchief emblematic of voodoo (and once Duvalier-)
affliation and restaged the Bois-Caiman ceremony on its centenary,
227 August 1991. Despite these popularist measures, the military
expelled him in under a year (by 29" September 1991) and it took
Bush Sne’s Marine-backed invasion, Operation Restore Democracy,
to reinstall him three years later Despite the usual self-serving
claims claims this was to ‘defend human rights’,this rather il-fated
foreign adventure is more usually held to have been an early post-
Hurbon, op et p. 122,
Bob Shacochis's The Immaculate Invasion (Sloomsbusy, 1999) provides a colourful if
irvitatingly journalistic and analysisfree account of the 1991-1994 US accupation
and Aristide interregnun.
56
Cold War experiment in imposing the New World Order and cre-
ating a more stable investment climate for US coffee corporations,
pretty much the same rationalle as the 1917 US occupation
57
58
Beyond Haiti
We are Neg Guinee, the people of Africa’
Password to Voodooist Ceremony
For anyone that thinks history is like walking, just putting one
step in front of the other — ‘ware Haiti, for it is full of swamps
Haitian history is even more highly politicised — and racialised
— than usual, with eriticism of a national leader of a century ago
immediately assumed to be criticism of the nation’s current leader
also. In part, this is the heritage of noirism — with its insistence on
elevating former Black leaders — but mulatto reactions to this have
been equally partisan. Alfred Viau, who was to turn against Duvalier
as an incidental candidate in the 1956 election, argued there were*
two tendencies at work in Haitian history: louverturisme,
which stood for the union of black and white against mulatto,
“to the detriment even of the sovereignty and independence of
the country™; and petio-dessalinisme, representing the union
of black and mulatto Haitians against the whites, with the aim
of complete independence of the country.
What's wrong with this picture? Apart from the ommision of any
valatteo-colonialistisme, where mulattos and Whites ally against the
Blacks to their own overall disadvantage, the whole history of Haitiis
seen in terms of the policies of its leaders rather than the experiences
of the common people, the peasantry — and it wouldn't be unfair to
suggest that the race of those leaders also features prominently in
Viau's schema.
S0 is an objective history possible? Probably not, and I certainly
haven't attempted one. It's surely enough to lay cards on the table
and for readers o use their own judgement. I make no pretence to be
Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow (Collns, 1956),p. 264
David Nicholls' From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence
i Haiti (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 206.
59
anything other than an amateur with limited sources and resources,
and hope to provoke better analyses than my own! In this, I am
only following CLR James' example, where he prefaces his Black
Jacobins:*
Twas tired of reading and hearing about Africans being perse-
cuted and oppressed in Africa, in the Middle Passage, in the
USA and all over the Caribbean. I made up my mind that [
would write a book in which Africans or people of Aftican de-
scent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples’
exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on
a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs.
I'm inclined to agree that a constant barrage of victimistic pro-
poganda empowers no-one but liberals and in a 1980 Foreward he
also triumphantly notes how his account of the role of the mulattosin
the Haitian revolution aided anti-apartheid activists in South Africa
to form an effective analysis of how best to co-operate politically
with those classified as Coloureds there.
What I found exceptionally irritating about James' analysis was
that his solution to the problem of victimism is to create a role model,
Toussaint L'Ouverture as untutored child of the Enlightenment and
revolutionary hero in the mould of Lenin. This might have been a
riposte to the rising Griot movement in Haiti — which James, as a
good Marxist wedded to Progress and internationalism, could only
abhor — but he clearly attributes heroic revolutionary deeds to Tou-
ssainte that had already been achieved earlier elsewhere by others
(Sonthonax's arming of the people is a case in point) and fails to dis-
tinguish between the interests of Toussainte as ruler and the masses
he ruled. O course, such cults of personality look archaic, even
sinister, from a post-1990 perspective and I'd argue it's impossible
to understand the subsequent history of Haiti if you don't under-
stand why the people hated Toussainte for trying to return them
to the plantations, something James’ adoration of centralised, state-
CLR Jasmes' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu
tion (Allson & Busby, 1994 — first published 1938) p. v
controlled economic development didn't equip him to do (‘Five Year
planning, comrades?”)
But what of my own interests, rather than those of James as my
principle source? Like most movements for social transformation,
anarchists are fond of flagellating themselves for having insufficient
minority representation:* “where are the workers?”, “where are the
women?”, “we only have one token Black — does that make us
racists?” (granting Bob Black’s dictum: ‘those that act most guilty
about such issues usually have good reason to be’ — probably). It's
been simple common sense to me that minorities don't rush to join
revolutionry movements for the same reason the overwhelming
‘majority of people don't, because reformism provides sufficient pal-
liatives to make their lives tolerable enough to make revolutionary
solutions too much extra effort to be bothered with.
And, of course, there’s the way these movements work too. For-
mally or informally, they are usually highly authoritarian and the last
thing people want in seeking for their liberation is a revolutionary
organisation that they're going to need to liberate themselves from
to0, complete with a new boss (usually too useless and uncharismatic
10 boss people about in the big, wide world outside the goldfish bowl
of his — and it usually is his’ — little sect) imposing ‘correct thought'
and formal or informal organisational discipline. This situation is
doubly hard when the boss doesn't understand the interests of the
minorities seeking a revolutionary solution through him, and crassly
tries to have them mouthe a nonsensical ‘party line’ (typically with
their concerns featuring only as some sort of ‘bolt-on extra’) instead
of compromising his authority by treating them as equals and try-
ing to find out what the real issues are through a mutual, learning
dialogue.
Despite what I've said immediately above, I'm suspicious of sim-
ply ‘asking the people’, because as I've also said above, the majority
‘minority representation” yes, T totally hate this term too, given that globally
sworkess, women and Black peaple are al majortis, and thatin my opinion no one
has a right to represent anyone but themselves, and even then at dread injury to
their Being and a higher unity with ‘others’ Im just using the language disguised
liberals in the movement can relate to,the better to upset and lampoon them later
61
are satisfied with reformist solutions to their life-situations — un-
til they're implemented and found wanting > Then, at best, another
layer of the onion of oppression is unpeeled, but itll take a lot more
peeling and a lot of tears to get to the bottom of it all. And — to
murder the metaphor — you might just end up going round and
round in circles instead, as evidenced by the endless contradictory
social science fads imposed on minorities one year to the next. Enter-
taining and lucrative though they are to the liberals dreaming them
up, running courses on them, and implementing them in classic Or-
wellian ‘double think’ fashion, they just serve to preserve the system
of oppression in classic Red Queen fashion (‘running so fast just to
stand still") rather than fundamentally challenging it. The liberal
— particularly Leftist-liberal — propensity for accusing those with
even minor divergences of opinion from their grant-securing canon
of being ‘racists’ when they are clearly only career- and ideological
competitors s so transparent that it's more comic than tragic, though
certainly also ugly, contemptible and pathetic. My view was that if
you wanted to find out what made Black people revolutionaries, you
needed to look at Black revolutionaries and the Black revolutions
they made and, I suppose, that also made them.
Inevitably one ends up picking and choosing according to one’s
own previous political predilections — in my case, Green — but one
thing that would surprise those that think all you need to do is to
post the word ‘racism’ endlessly or wave placards portraying icons
of the latest Black victim of police violence to get the Black masses
flocking in eager for revolutionary enlightenment is that the most
authentic revolutionary Black groups, like the MOVE Organization
in Philadelphia or the Earth People of Jamaica, actually don't put
a great deal of emphasis on racism. They are not ‘colour-blind" (as
many of the more old school Leftist groups are, curiously including
Haiti's small Communist Party) but do see racism as part of a totality
of oppression and it s that totality that needs to be challenged to
A hilarious illustration of this ‘ask the people’ approach gone wwry came up in
Nottingham a ew years back, where the people’ revolutionary demand for them
to medinte was the removal of dog shit from the city strcets. The group concerned
then earnestly set about this heroic labous,even establishing a liaison commiltee
with dog-owness “so they didatfeel excluded”!
62
sweep racism away. Seen from a political perspective, this should
be uncontroversial — if racism is 2 social control mechanism, then
this should bring all other social control mechanisms into question
for revolutionaries, and the type of society that needs social control
atall. Similarly. historically, racism as a specific means of defining
the ‘Other’ is relatively recent — if not as recent as the 19" century
imperialist anthropology discussed in this essay, certainly not much
more than half a millennium old.*
However, we're talking about relatively small, marginalised
groups here — inevitably, given the ascendancy of reformism — and
this is what led me to look at Haiti, at how a Black revolution was
made and at what happened next. I confess Lo finding the material
pretty difficult to deal with, given the deep and often absurd racial an-
imosities created by the colonial legacy, the genocidal violence (not
that there's anything wrong with offing our oppressors, of course),
and the Haitian cult of authority, both generalissimo and houngan
‘The issues certainly weren't all ‘black and white’ — whilst Haitians
understand their national history in terms of race, as we have seen
above, this history is replete with contradictions. The politique de
doublure inevitably had mulattos endorsing Black rulers and their
Black rivals condemning them. Each ruling party would pretend
there was no caste prejudice in Haiti as those they were excluding
from power would charge it — but, with rare exceptions like the Gri-
ats, because this violated principles of racial equality rather than in
order to assert their own. Although the noirist hero Dessalines” pol-
icy was to create an external enemy, the blanes as agents of slavery,
his shift in terminology from mulattos and Blacks to anciente libres
and nouveaux libres demonstrated an economic understanding of the
conflicts in Haiti. It was colonialism that fitted people to particular
power niches according to colour, 5o it's understandable polities was
Probably the firs instance of racism as it s currently understood was the Spanish
inquisitor Torquemada defning conversos a Jews “by blood to justify their perse.
cution in the 1490s. The carly colonial extension of this formulation i explored in o
ot more detailin my essay Prelude to the New Worldin The Ris o the West (Green
Anarchist Books, 2001). By way of contrast, the Medieval defined ‘Otherness” in
relation to religious afiliations 'Christendom’, ‘slam’ etc) and ancient Rome was
an empire indifferent to race, defning the ‘Other’ in relation to Roman citizenship.
63
articulated in those terms. And, most importantly, appeals to caste
over class have again and again been shown to be consciously eyni-
cal, as Salomon's sell-out of the piquets most effectively illustrated
— which suggests a way beyond this colonial heritage.
The question of authority is in a way both more troubling and
more illuminating. Franz Fanon argued that wars of national inde-
pendence restore self-respect to the formerly colonised, a sort of
expiation through blood, but also noted:’
the danger of national independence obtained by war — and
unfortunately this s the only means of obtaining it with dignity
— is that the heroes of this war necessarily become, after the
victory, the effective representatives of power, having in their
hands the military force which is the instrument of coercion at
the same time as being the means of defence.
Moreover, with particular reference to the Haitian experience,
Nicholls adds that such a revolution also “provides no insurance
against the development of a personality cult, and in the case of
Haiti it was the basis upon which such hero worship was built” I
suspect that Toussaintes campaign from Spanish San Domingo also
illustrates a couple of other bases for Haitian autocracy. Firstly, by
forming a disciplined core of troops using European drill, Toussainte
helped release an organisational virus (the Europeans themselves
being its progenitors, of course) where military discipline through
a chain of command replaced the much less formalised and more
charisma-orientated patterns of authority that existing in the Maroon
bands previously resisting colonialism. His troops were expected to
function as cogs in the military machine, their every action set by
pattern book regulation and performed in unison by force of instilled
habit, each accepting orders without question. Thus Toussainte’s
adoption of European military organisation was as much a political
as a military tool for achieving power. This only serves to emphasise
what CLR James had to say on the subject, Toussainte”
Nicholls,op it p. 231
b ibid, p. 251
" James, op cit, p. 287,
64
left even his generalsin the dark. A naturally silent and reserved
man, he had been formed by military discipline. He gave orders
and expected them to be obeyed. No one ever knew what he
was doing,
‘There is no way such a leadership style would have been accepted
in Maroon bands, where people expected to know the why of what
they were doing in order to retain trust in their leader (this also
allowed for more individual initiative and flexibility, a prerequisite
in guerrilla warfare)." People joined Toussainte because his troops
had been trained to fight the colonists — and later British invaders
— head-to-head using their own tactics. That, and a very traditional
west African regard for kingship and its prerogatives. It's already
been argued that Toussainte may have laid claim to the persona of
a king to authorise him to free slaves during his advance into Haiti.
Whether this was the case or not, kingship was part of the folk cul-
ture of the ex-African slaves and Toussainte certainly laid claim to
noble lineage and was playing the role of a king, whether he explic-
itly declared himself as such or not. Dessalines and Christophe’s
subsequent assumption of kingly roles — much ridiculed in Europe,
a subcontinent itself still hardly through with monarchy — were sim-
ply trying to bolster their authority in the most obvious and popular
However, just as class interests peep from behind the race ques-
tion, 5o they do from behind this question of authority. The leader’s
interest is not necessarily that of the led, even if they share a common
caste, and this is most dramatically the case in Haiti. I've mentioned
Hartford's ‘two nations’ analysis of Haiti above — that of the ruling
elites and of the tending-to-subsistence peasantry — a separation
Nicholls re-emphasises when discussing the Duvalier regime:*
Tappreciate this transition from charismatic to burcaucratic authrity through the
medium of regimented social organisation has a Foucaudian tone (Discipline and
‘Punish: The Birthof the Prison (Penguin translation, 1977) noting that the fest mass
organisations were armies, in fact), and make no apologies for this. Toussainte's
interference in bis officers’ private morality i also a classic illustrat-ion of this
transition to even greater sacictal control, and one reason it is so unpopular with
the masses
6
‘The fact that his government did almost nothing to improve
the lot of the average Haitian was irrelevant to his claims to
legitimacy. No government in the history of Haiti had done
anything significant to improve the lot of the masses and this
was not the criterion by which a regime was judged. At least
Duvalier usually refrained from interfering with the life of the
peasant, and this i all they could hope for from a government
As you'll see, I profoundly disagree with Nicholl's assessment
that Duvalier had a *hands-off” attitude to the peasantry™, but at
this stage I'm just arguing that the peasantry were more keen their
rulers didn’t interfere in their lives than their rulers were not to
interfere in them. We've seen already that throughout the 19"
century, the Haitian peasantry rejected the plantations and did their
best to retreat as far as they could from government taxes, wars and
conscription, preferring simple lives of subsistence.
Where — apart from the simple common sense of harm avoidance
— did the peasantry choose this lifestyle over that their leaders so
generously offered them? It s the inheritance of Africa, as preserved
through the Maroons, the ‘wild ones’ that burst the bonds of slavery,
and through its cultural survival in voodoo. With some adaptations
to local circumstance — for example, the use of secret society ini-
tiation Lo eliminate tensions potentially caused by the ethnic mix
created by the African diaspora — the Maroons were recreating west
Africa in the mountain fastnesses of Haiti. This was the rock on
which their resistance rested — and still does. Having inherited the
culture of their former colonial masters, the mulatto elite’s penchant
for anti-voodoo leagues can clearly be seen as an attempt to bring
the disengaged (would it be too satiric to say ‘socially excluded’?)
peasantry back into the formal economy and their control. The
Black elite was in a slightly more ambiguous position viz a viz the
Nicholls,op it p. 247.
“This trick is being continued through Aristide, though 1 suspect the sheoric of
iberation theology is quickly transforming into that of social democracy, welfsre
provisions under state control, thus forcing participation in tate society and control
of the broader population through it. If Hait could ever afford a welfure state, of
66
masses, asserting their caste credentials to tar their mulatto rivals
as ‘blanc-identified’ but their aim was the same. To good degree,
the unofficial history of Haiti has been the elites’ attempts to as-
similate the peasantry and subordinate their culture, first through
anti-blanc rhetoric whilst confining them to the plantations, then
through limited land reforms, and finally (Soulougue being a bit
of an unappreciated pioneer) through the appropriation of voodoo.
How did Duvalier achieve this? Through voodoo, Duvalier may have
superficially been appealing to the peasantry as a whole — and many
of them bought this lie — but was in fact only appealing to the habi-
tants, richer peasants that had done well out of cash cropping and
their poorer neighbours being forced into landlessness by population
pressures, etc. And what do you know, but there was a direct overlap
between this classe intermediare and the houngans, those holding
privileged positions in rural lfe in the economic sphere also doing so
in the esoteric sphere, much as with European freemasonry?" This is
frankly hardly surprising, as voodoo initiations — especially through
all the offices of the hounfort (lodge) to the rank of houngan — are
extremely expensive, the feasting and ritual paraphernalia associ-
ated with each initiation typically amounting to six months wages
for the average peasant. Additional to this, the model of authority
supplied by the houngan even amongst the Maroons was then taken
up as that of the national leader, a houngan writ large, especially in
Duvalier's case.
How, then, does all this provide us with an appropriately revolu-
tionary model of liberation, particularly Black liberation? Firstly, I
want to explore what the peasantry were rejecting — in addition to
the obvious — and why this was so intolerable to their rulers.
In rejecting plantation labour — whether under old masters or
new — the peasantry weren't just rejecting the slave heritage those
masters imposed on them but, more fundamentally, sheer physical
effort.! Once ground in the interior had been broken, we're talking
Nicholl, op et p. 237 concurs here: “The people he [Duvalier] relied on in the
countey were aften houngans o peasants from the intermediate class’
In his essay Primitive Afluence: A Postscript o Sahiins’ in Friendly Fire (Autono
media, 1992). p. 24, Bob Black cites the Hanunoo subsistence horticlturalists of the
67
about a likely halving of their day in terms of the amount of work
required to meet subsistence needs. As we're seen above, after the
war of liberation, coffee production went even a stage further, the
crop simply being gathered from coffee bushes run wild in an almost
forager-type way. Toussainte may have exhorted the labourers that
“work is necessary ... it is a virtue”, but their sons would never
grow up to be like those fine French officers Toussainte so admired
— nor did they wish them to, having had their fll of Frenchmen,
their bloodhounds and other ‘blessings’ of the self-styled “higher
culture’. In rejecting large-scale production for export and their own
proletarianisation to this end, the labourers also made it impossible
for Haiti — once the “finest colony in the world” — to take its place
in the world economy. In fact, they'd have preferred to burn Haiti
end to end rather than submit to this, as the Night of Fire spectac-
ularly demonstrated. This is no bad thing, inasmuch as it was just
a producer of primary resources and a net importer of food, so this
would have inevitably been a subordinate position profiting mainly
‘middle-who/men, but the bottom line is that the logic of the lives of
the masses won out over that of their rulers. In choosing to live lives
immediately and to their greatest convenience, they also chose to
reject abstract Progress alongside what is now commonly described
as economic development, restricting their leaders’ power and oppor-
tunities for self-aggrandisement. In Civilisation and Its Discontents,
Freud wrote that the pleasure principle had to be repressed for Civil-
isation to survive, even if that lead to neurosis. Himself stridently
bourgeois and a somewhat driven devotee of the Protestant work
Phillppines as devoting an average of only of “less than 2 hours and 45 minutes &
day” 1o agricultural actvites. No figare is iven for typical daily working time with
traditionally more intensive west African agriculture, though even si times this
swould be less than the hours expended on plantation labou — snd for more imme.
diate reward. Black does cite the Kpelle though, dry rice faemers in Liberia, whose
work i governed by linee (*joy"). the accompanying ofal abous with communal
music, dance and drinking ofrice wine 15 3 way of pleasurably intcgrating it with
the restof daily lfe (ibid. p.31). Given voodoo ceremonial, this is also most likely
the way Hait's free peasants chose to tend their gardens following the revolution
5 James, op cit, 135-156.
68
ethic / Jewish achievement ethic, Freud was largely talking about sup-
planting pleasure with production — precisely what was intolerable
to the Haitian peasantry.
Ithink it's also helpful to explore the ‘how’ of this rejection. Sub-
jeet to qualifiers below, it was total and it was armed, by a people
armed of practical necessity, each to assure his or her own liberty
and survival in the face of a campaign by former owners of literally
genocidal ferocity. James sneered at the insurgents as “primitive” for
destroying the means of production — by which he meant the planta-
tions — and compared this to that of Medieval millenarian peasants
in Europe. Indeed, and a comparison to their great credit, as such
were far more radical and challenging to the existing order than
modern, industrial revolts that leave the mechanics of subordination
inherent in such production intact and a ‘new guard filling the old
‘managerial class roles.' There was no need to stay their hand, to
compromise with and / or assume the manner of their old masters,
1o need to preserve any part of their past oppression for some ab-
stract “higher stage’ in future — they could live without all that and
were the better off for it. And what stopped a return to such subordi-
nation for a very long time — certainly the better part of a century —
was the peasantry’s ability not only to live self-sufficiently outside
the formal economy, but the means to prevent its encroachment by
force of arms, just as the Maroons had previously done against the
blanc plantocracy.
So much for what the peasantry were rejecting. What they
affirmed, principally, was voodoo, but I want to argue this is more
than just a cultural relic, an affirmation of some sort of ‘Africaness’
too easily dismissed as a colonial construct anyway (the original
slaves were no Africans, but instead Dahomeyans, Whydah, Owe
and so forth). In his novel anti-Occupation novel, Gouverneurs de la
rosee, the Haitian Communist Party founder Jacques Roumain wrote
“Ihave respect for your traditional customs but the blood of a cock
John Zerzan's ‘Who Killed Ned Ludd?” and ‘Industrialism and Domestication’ in
Elements of Refusal(Paleo, 1999) explores the historical processes whercby organis
ing the masses just made them more controllable (disciplined) and less rebellius,
ot least because their leaders could not effctively critcise Authority whils being
models of authority themselves,
69
ora goat cannot change the seasons™ Of course, this argument was
as unscientific as the voodoo it challenged — until such sacrificial
blood is withheld under controlled conditions, it is mere dogmatic
assertion. As far as voodooists are concerned, their ritual practices
have got results in a way those of dialectical materialism have sin-
gularly failed to do in Haiti — especially when it comes to sparking
revolution. Far from being Marx's metaphorical ‘opiate’, voodoo has
for centuries prevented the mass of people being co-opted by ruling
class ideology — to the point that Duvalier was eventually forced
to"go through the back door’ and co-opt them by co-opting voodoo
itself — and has on many occasions driven them to the most inspired
resistance. I am not dodging Roumain’s point here, I am pointing
out that voodoo's persistence despite objectivistic challenges to it's
truth-claims show such objections are irrelevant to voodoo's power
and appeal as far as the oppressed are concerned.
What, then, is this appeal? It is not enough to say it is mere
‘identity’ because that doesn't explore the content of that identity,
most importantly whether it is something specific and therefore
of local significance only or whether it has some more general or
universal utility in facilitating revolution. As I see it, a sense of
identity comes from a conjunction of its history and of daily practice.
‘The history we now know, a history African origins and myth, of
genocidal exploitation, and of cultural, ritual and physical resistance
toit. Thave no particularly problems with this — a powerful enough
story siding with the oppressed and not even exclusive of blancs
provided they also side against oppression and accept a new, political
identity as notional ‘children of Guinea’.
In terms of daily practice, there is a voodooist community that
reinforces its values through close mutual association and mutual
support (often the only such support available in rural areas), a
reading of the world for significance through voodoo eyes (ie. world-
view), and the enactment of voodoo ceremonial at the hounfort. Itis
this last that I want to focus on as a potential road out of the usual
problems of cultures being self-contained and self-affirming rather
Nichalls, op it p. 175
70
than particularly liberating.* In these rituals, individuals strive us-
ing pretty standard techniques of intoxication, thythmic music and
dance, to become timeless, selfless receptacles for the lwas. Some
will argue this is mere role-play, probably unaware of what people
are capable of in these altered states. Regardless — and I am not
much interested in arguing with rationalists here, a mere variant on
the counter-revolutionary Marxist tradition — this ‘horse and rider’
process demonstrates the boundaries of selfdom and of a dull, ex-
ternally-controlled reality are highly elastic and vulnerable. Why is
this particularly significant? John Zerzan's ‘origins’ essays® demon-
strate that our lives are not only ruled by abstractions such as Time,
‘number and language, but that these are a product of Civilisation,
our enemy, which is relatively recent historically (at best 10% of
human history, rather than an inevitable component of our human-
ity). As far as the 'horses’ — and those sharing their experiences at
the hounfort — are concerned, these mediations have been broken
through for a glimpse of ‘Africa’, our free, unmediated heritage and
a liberation from Civilised symbolic accretions that reaffirms the cel-
ebrants’ faith in their undesirability. To repeat myself, against these
powerful and unifying experiences, dogmatic Communist quibbles
about the efficacy of cock and goat blood must have seemed pretty
thin stuff.
Some would argue that whilst this insight may be useful and the
orgiastic nature of voodoo rites certainly provide a counter-point
that disinclines the majority of the oppressed associated with it
from work, that the celebrants experiences are structured by the
houngan or otherwise directed away from opportunities to make for
‘meaningful social change:
Early religion s wildly orgiastic, clearly reflecting the lost way
of life for which people longed. But by separating this wild
abandon into the realm of the spirit, which is in reality just
a realm of abstract ideas with no concrete existence, religion
8 See Feral Faun's “The Anarchist Subeulture’ n Feral Revlution (Elphani, 2000)for
comprehensive critique
1 Zersan, op. et chaps 2-5.
2 Feral Faun's ‘The Quest for the Spiritual’ op ci 5.
7
made itself the handmaiden of civilized, domesticated culture.
Soit is no surprise that in time shamans evolved into priests
who were functionaries of the State.
Whilst I will willingly concede that some are more receptive
“horses” than others, another key point is that it is not the houn-
gan that typically enters these states — though s/he would not be a
hounganif incapable of this — but the other celebrants, many of the
congregation.
Additionally, we have accounts from the revolution of Maroon
mobs armed only with clubs or even just their bare hands rush-
ing disciplined European troops armed with muskets, bayonets and
artillery at the blast of the conch. Despite their technological disad-
vantage, the Maroons proved “unstoppable” — even thrusting their
arms down the muzzles of cannon, believing this would prevent
them discharging — because of the visions of Africa before them,
demonstrating that they can be evoked anywhere, even in battle,
rather than being separated from daily life in the hounfort. In fact,
the whole point of voodoo is the imminence of the lwas, their ‘here
and now" availability — even unwanted intrusion, on occasion! — to
all celebrants.
But,yes, I would agree that the houngans o exert undue authority
in voodoo and, more to the point, voodoo is structured in such a
way that they can do that. Initiations have to be bought from the
houngan and the knowledge needed to ‘make the grade’ can only
be taught by him or her to the initiate. This insistence on absolute
loyalty (which may be enforced by direct action or at least social
ostracism) is much akin to that between guru and disciple, and is
an inheritance of west African traditions where a similar rigidity
prevails in moities and secret societies there, themselves a reflection
of it's peasant-orientated agricultural economies. 1 argue that it
doesn’t have to be that way and it shouldn't be that way if voodoo's
full liberatory potential is to be released.
‘The ‘weak alternative s simple competition between visionaries,
each arguing for the potency of their vision and attracting follow-
ings according to how is best vindicated by subsequent events. Such
competitions were common in native American shamanism and still
72
are in Latin America (though we're not talking Santarea here.) and
a byproduct of this would be a leakage of higher initiation secrets
to tempt the faithful, inevitably leading to further diversity of vi-
sionaries and a democratisation of such knowledge. However, the
societies we're talking about here are hunter / gatherer or horticul-
turists (slash ‘n’ burn gardeners), so I think this route wouldn't make
much of a dent in the more structured voodoo set up. It demands a
Lot of knowledge is accumulated before the process can start really
rolling, that competition would be tolerated (though, to a certain
extent, it is), and still implies a superiority of houngan over all lower-
initiation celebrants
However, the ‘strong alternative is that as the lwas speak through
all celebrants and not just the houngan, then they all demand the
ability to interpret and acquire other withheld houngan skills as a
matter of right — each his or her own houngan, in effect. Many
hunter / gatherer societies do not have spiritual specialists at all and,
strange as this sounds, this approach is actually much more akin
to other West African / West Indian traditions than the matter of
competing shamans above. The Tn'T' of Rastafarianism, for example,
is about the spiritual imminent in the personal with no formal higher
level of institutionalised spiritual organisation. In this insistence on
personal spiritual insight (and toleration of others diverse from their
own), the Rastas of Jamaica are very much akin to those radicals of
the Civil War period, the Ranters, and incidentally are also highly
aware of and articulate concerning their own African heritage. There
is even a mechanism that exists for this in voodoo (allowing for a
bit of ‘back room’ arm-twisting when it comes to accessing ritual
secrets) — possession not by Iwa but by deceased houngan, claims
Duvalier was big on, as we've seen.
T've placed great emphasis on breaking down the houngan's polit-
ical and spiritual authority as it is a model-in-miniature of political
authority as a whole — as the Duvalier dynasty demonstrated — and
besides at a village level, the houngan's authority is real whereas
the president’s is a distant abstraction. Given the Haitian history of
resistance through withdrawal into the local, I see this bottom-up ap-
proach to dehierarchicalising Haitian society as most likely relevant
and effective — first the ‘invisible government’ of Haiti, then the
73
notional government in consequence. Would this destroy voodoo?
1 consider the collective knowledge, the history and experience of
believers to be of more relevance to it and to its potential for hu-
man liberation than any authoritarian structure traditional to it. We
are talking more a democratisation of voodoo than its destruction.
Frankly, it is better such knowledge is communicated more freely,
at least amongst those within this faith community. It would cer-
tainly proof it against the corruption and external political manip-
ulation through leadership co-option that occurred under Duvalier
that threatened voodoo's integrity and very existence during the
1986 dechoukaj. In my view, it would actually strength voodoo on
the “Where there was one Toussainte, now there are a thousand”
principle, as well as deepening its insights.
Is spiritual insight enough to change a society? In isolation, ob-
viously not, but after voodoo serving as a powerhouse for popular
resistance in Haiti and such minor impacts of belief on European
history as the Reformation, I think only a fool would dismiss it as
simple hocus-pocus and thin air. And voodoo does not exist in isola-
tion from either Haiti's community — in fact, it is the heart of rural
communities — nor its history, a generally proud (if sometimes hor-
rifying) one of popular resistance from these self-same communites.
‘The democratisation I've suggested above — and I hate the term —
would only increase the conjunction between spiritual insight and
social action — principally against hierarchy. The peasantry are con-
stantly mindful of land issues. The insight and means now exist to al-
low population reductions to make subsistence a viable option again
for the majority — permitting withdrawal from a grossly exploitative
world economy and a return to the 19" century ‘golden age of the
peasant’ on Haiti — and also a will to fight for land redistribution
to meet immediate subsistence needs, with an emphasis on infor-
mal occupation rather than involving central government officials
who will inevitably favour powerful export landowners, especially
the US ones and will play political games (maybe even a revival
of the ineredibly idiotic mulatto v. Black stupidity that Aristide at
least largely saw the back of) to keep them up as middle-wo/men
regardless. Such land re/oceupation movements are stock-on-trade
in the Third World, and some — such as the Movement Sem Terra
74
(MST) in Brazil — are highly effective too. Now as then, the costs of
involvement in the external economy well outweigh the gains for
the rural masses. And from the start, this is clearly a class issue that
will disadvantage only exporting urban / coastal elites — something
the latter may try to dress up in caste terms, but irrelevant if the
rural masses do not have to seek their favour.
Does this model have wider revolutionary implications, particu-
larly for Black people? I'm sure some of you are scoffing already:
‘Not that many hounforts in south London — or smallholdings go-
ing free either’. Obviously not, but you're picking up on the wrong
points of example — and some will do this deliberately to keep their
typically White-run indocritinating, reformist anti-racist rackets tick-
ing over regardless, which they're welcome to for all the good they'll
do anyone.*
My first point is that pretty much every oppressed minority (in-
cluding eventually even the oppressed majority — revolutionaries
will get my drift) have got their own history and their own culture
Some of this derives simply from their own particularly experience
of oppression, the way they've been classified as Other and resisted
such treatment. But usually it's more than that. For a start, the cul-
ture has to start somewhere and unless it's taken such a hammering
that these origins have been wholly obliterated by the dominant
culture — and it happens, even down to elimination of folk memory,
in which case pick it up where you can — and this will prove a rich
resource in terms of unique insight and analogue with the current
situation. Iam certainly not saying people should be insular or chau-
vinist — we can learn from everyone — but I do think that as people
start from their own unique culture, they should cherish and under-
stand it because they — of all people — are also the ones best placed
Weitng this essay. | found the early Haitan leaders pushing White missionaries on
Africa to ‘civilise it even aftr their own slave experiences at the hands of ofcial
Catholicism pretty incredible and disgraceful, for example, more than 1 found the
Griots”aflations to fascist racial supremacism cven.
Similarly, current western European culture seems geared around debumanising
Progress-pasitive ideclogics that stemimed from the Enlightenment. Despite having
Long critiqued their deep perniciousness, 1 stillcatch myself using programning
analogies when discussing my own thinking processes and those of others.
75
to criticise and improve on it (criticising other peoples’ cultures is
also acceptable, if you first understand what first prompts you to do
50 in your own culture and are sensitive to genuine, unjustifiable
contradictions in that of others)
My second point concerns this matter of criticism. One needs
review one’s own culture to discover what in it has liberatory po-
tential and what actually only furthers your oppression and that
of others. On the positive side, there are probably immediatist or
perhaps mystical traditions that talk about evoking the sort of im-
minence I was discussing above with ‘horse and rider’ in voodoo
ritual. These need to be checked to see if strict hierarchies inhere in
them (as with voodoo initiations) and whether these can be bypassed,
whether their association with social militancy / resistance led to
their corruption into cultish or otherwise authoritarian forms (or,
equally bad, promotes quietism and extreme social disengagement —
the latter hardly a path to selfless unity in real world terms), whether
their repertoire of analogue has effective and powerful resonances
with you or not. The point of trying to achieve this aphoric state
through a tradition that has most relevance to you — and I'm not
saying your culture of birth is destiny here, if this doesn't have the
strongest resonances for you — to give you the strength of mind to
take on a whole civilisation that is excluding you from all that. 1
am not advocating this sort of spiritual quest as a *hobby high so
you can take a holiday from their ‘reality” to pep yourself up and
dive back in, keeping the bloody system going! I hope this proviso
is enough to shoo off hippy recuperators. This is not hot air or for
personal indulgence — it's about finding somewhere to see the sys-
tem from where it most is not, where it will appear most intolerable
from, and where you can develop your critique of it and your own
positive values. The point is to build belief and strength of mind, as
well as strength of arms — for the point when there is no turning
back. On the negative side, there's going to be a lot in your culture
that's alienating rubbish — as Fanon notes, the colonised also inter-
nalise the values of their oppressors — and you have to understand
why this is, because you're going to have to argue this through with
yourself and others close to you
76
‘The third point — possibly simultaneous with the second as a
collective project to stop insularity and egotism — s that when you
are exploring the best and worst of your own (and other) cultural
traditions , you want to start living it and (without proselytising,
a sure sign you're sinking into uncritical dogmatism — believe me,
people’s own dissatisfaction will be the source of their affinity with
you, not any clever or persistent arguments you may dream up)
encouraging others close to you to do likewise. There's no need to
trumpet this from the rooftops — as MOVE found out at Osage Av-
enue, sometimes drawing too much attention to yourself can have
fatal consequences. The dominant culture devalues yours and exists
to ridicule, minimise and ultimately obliterate it. Like the slaves in
Haiti, the point is to take nothing from it, especially such hostile
judgements. Criticise your culture in your terms — especially if
you're excluding people on grounds that just feel like plain prejudice
to you or which you can't satisfactorily justify — but not that of the
dominant culture, which is designed to steamroller over you. There's
1o point having a nice liberal ‘dialogue’ with it when the point of
such is only to change your mind. Your culture, your liberatory
interpretation of it, should be your rock, the emotional support of
yourself and others close to you. As you'll e, in the end, that's all
there is
And so, my fourth point — although you may have withdrawn
mentally from Civilisation already, a time will come for ‘fight or
flight, withdrawing your co-operation physically from the economy
also, as Haiti's plantation slaves fled to the Maroons. In the titular
south London situation above, there is almost no way of making
a living without feeding the system somehow, even if it's supply-
ing some untaxed, under-the-counter niche. The Earth People in
Jamaica are lucky enough to have a communal, self-sufficient or-
ganic lfestyle, but there aren't that many Maroons out there and if
you're planning on starting your own enclave, land is sparse and it
costs. When asked, an associate of mine working with the Hadza, a
hunter / gatherer tribe in central Africa, told them to “take nothing™
offered by Civilisation, as this was a sure route to assimilation. As
20 Years on the Move (MOVE Organization, 1996), pp. 40-45.
7
we generally are assimilated to the extent they have taken all means
of living from us, only to sell it back to us, I'd say take the absolute
minimum from them to survive, stealing it or otherwise obtaining
itin a way that minimises their profit and your contact with them
ifat all possible, and try to figure out how to do without even that.
Obviously search your own cultural history (and that of other op-
pressed groups, where relevant and useful) as to the best ways to
“fight or flight’, how others survived before you and how that can
be made relevant for today, but the bottom line is that this Civilisa-
tion is as much a prison, as much akin to a slave compound, as pre-
revolutionary San Domingue. As far as they're concerned, you owe
them a living and no-one’s allowed to just leave voluntarily. If weak,
you can stay in place building culturally and emulating the slaves'
covert sabotage (at least upping the cost of your ongoing captivity),
but if there are no other options, you should be building for your
“Night of Fire', crashing as much of the system as possible so it's
impossible for them to hold or control you any longer. That's why
Twas saying to do your utmost to break any imposed dependency
on a system you're going to have to destroy as the insurgent slaves
of Haiti did, as completely and with as little compromise as possible.
Any dependency will only stay your hand to that extent. However
useless you've made yourself to them economically, they need you
~ you shouldn't need them. Your cultural contacts are natural allies,
but the point of not isolating yourself from other oppressed groups,
of also seeking to understand both the liberatory content and op-
pressive potential of their perspectives, is that they too are potential
allies, equally keen to break free. On Haiti, the ‘Night of Fire’ was
about destroying the plantations that both imprisoned the slaves
and supplied the rationale for their masters to remain in the colony,
using the traditional weapon of the oppressed, fire. Realistically, in a
modern industrial economy characterised by a highly specialised di-
vision of labour, we are talking small numbers prepared to act unless
there is a serious broader societal crisis — so clandestine, targeted
attacks on the power, communications and transport infrastructure
are most likely to precipitate such crisis. What would the military
bomb in a war to paralyse a country? So you have your target list —
though lacking B52s, you need to think of techniques available to all
78
to take them out. Too many groups have been compromised chas-
ing rare, specialist kit from compromised suppliers when something
nearly as good was available for £1.99 from the local hardware store
— where anyone else can get it too if they share your grievances
Lastly on this, never think you can’t win. That's the first thing the
dominant culture teaches you — powerlessness. Against all the odds,
the barefoot slaves of Haiti typically armed with only clubs and the
promise of Africa won, seeing the back not of one but of two of the
greatest powers of the Napoleonic era.
My last point — and one easily forgotten — is that when you get
out, they're still not going to let you go. Most of the history of
Haiti was attempts to drag it back into the world economy by hook
or crook, even when it was grossly impoverished. If you sneaked
out, they Il search for you. If you're weak, they'll drag you back. If
not (unlikely, given you're up against nation-state sized opponents
here!), they Il offer to trade with you or otherwise cut you into their
power games as a disposable ‘ally’, anything to make you dependent
on them. And, finally, there’s the ‘Hussite” gambit, whereby they
concede they can't get in or compromise you, but surround you
and hope things rot in there, that hierarchy and domination return,
typically justified with reference to their external threat. Never
forget the vision of autonomy and equality — and “take nothing”.
“This game of pockets of freedom breaking through and then in weeks,
years, decades even, being reabsorbed will go on until the end of
history, the end of Time, but just as they may get us in the end, there
is an example of free community to set and to enjoy in the meantime
As they're not in the habit of lopping off feet like the old slavers, you
can start building for your next break for it as soon as they drag you
back into Civilisation’s belly, no doubt with more support each time
due to the example you've set.
Unlike CLR James, I'm not concluding this essay with any
grandiose claims. I doubt it will supply any analysis that will help
dismantle the equivalent of apartheid, influence affairs of state in
Haiti or even add anything to the dogmatic stew that is movement
politics in UK. Despite the perhaps excessively imperative tone of my
closing five points, I have written this simply to bring the inspiring
and largely ignored story of the Haitian revolution to your attention
79
and to clarify my own thinking on questions of ‘race’, culture and
revolution. You may profoundly disagree with my account of Haiti's
history or the conclusions I have drawn from it. As one that scorns
authority, I welcome this — evidently you do too and have shown
you are prepared to think for yourself. I welcome debate through
the address concluding this pamphlet.
80
‘The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright
May 21, 2012
John Connor
Children of Guinea. Voodoo, The 1793 Haitian Revolution and Ater
2003
For John Moore (1956-2003)
‘and for Mumia and the MOVE 9.
Green Anarchist Books,
BCM 1715, London WCIN 3XX.
Published by Green Anarchist Books 2003
Anti-Copyright @ 2003,
Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from wiww greenanarchist org
for his handling of the colony following the fall of Robespierre, but
his handling of the investigation of Valatte's coup showed charac-
teristically disasterous zeal and tactlessness. To discover whether
Rigaud had any hand in it, he sent him a delegation including one
general Desfourneaus, a man who had previously tried to assassinate
Rigaud and who seduced his flancee on arrival in Les Cayes. Per-
haps this was a deliberate provocation, as Sonthonax had also been
briefed to end discrimination in the colony (by as well as against
mulattos) and bring Rigaud under his command. Instead, rumour
was spread that the French wanted to reintroduce slavery, leading
the massacre of republican White and Rigaud's break with France
‘Thereafter, French proclamations were dragged through the streets
of Les Cayes at the tail of an ass.
On 17" August 1797, shortly after being appointed governor and
commander-in-chief on Sonthonax's recommendation, Toussainte
expelled him with the same warm praise that he had sent Leveaux
packing. The people were dumbfounded — Sonthonax was a virtual
saint to them, having forbidden beating on plantations, issued anti-
slavery proclamations in creole and encouraged Black literacy to
break their administrative dependence on White or mulatto clerks,
amongst other things — but Toussainte claimed that he had suggested
they “kill all the whites and make ourselves independent”."* If he
had suggested such a thing, the commissioner was well in advance
of Toussaintes own analysis and more akin to that of the people.
Sonthonax had been in Paris to see the end of the Terror — where
the ‘aristocracy of the blood’ met the same fate courtesy of Madame
Guillotine that he advocated for the British-supporting ‘aristocracy
of the skin’ on Haiti — and CLR James suggests that independence
was the country's only guarantee against the reimposition of slavery
from France now the mercantile Right had resumed control of the
Directory. For reasons that will be discussed below, a break with
France was inconceivable for Toussainte. He even had his adopted
son Moise executed for advocating the same thing just prior to the
bid, pp. 174175,
ibid. p. 159
ibid, p. 195
23
French invasion four years later. It would be ungenerous to suggest
Sonthonax was also removed as an obstacle to Toussainte’s Lenin-
like ambition to accumilate all power to himself, but not unlikely.
By January 1798, the British under general Maitland finally
admitted defeat and negotiated their departure via the Mole St
Nicholas. The British military historian Sir Jeffery Fortesque con-
cluded:
After long and careful study, I have come to the conclusion that
the West Indian campaigns, both to windward and to leeward,
which were the essence of Pitt's military policy, cost England
in Army and Navy little fewer than one hundred thousand
men, about one-half of them dead, the remainder permanently
unfitted for service. . . England’s soldiers had been sacrificed,
her treasure squandered, her influence in Europe weakened, her
arm for six fateful years fettered and paralysed.
Tronically, then, the insurgent slaves of Haiti may have been the
unintentional saviours of the French revolution. Stll, the British
had the last laugh. Dedicated to reviving Haiti's economy, Tous-
sainte needed to export cash crops to America and to import guns
Even then masters of the sea in the Caribbean, the British threat-
ened to blockade Haitis ports, preventing this trade, unless they
were allowed to use the ports themselves. Toussainte was reluctant
to do this as Britain was then at war with France. By agreeing to
British terms, Toussainte earned the animosity of Rigaud, precipi-
tating a civil war between northern Blacks and southern mulattos*
that made Toussainte even more militarily dependant on the British.
Dessalines' intemperate massacre of hundreds of Rigaud's officers at
the end of the war made for a heritage of bitterness between Blacks
and mulattos. Furthermore, Toussainte’s expulsion of Sonthonax’s
replacement as France’s agent, general Hedouville, sowed seeds for
bid, pp. 213214,
Although personal racial prejudice by both Rigaud and Toussainte have been
strongly denied — not least as a sgnificant portion of Toussainte’s offiers were mu
latto themselves — the basis of Rigaud's power was mulatto solidarty and,sightly
o wrongly, the war was sccn i these terms on the geound by its participasts.
2
Napoleon's 1802 invasion. Mindful of the post-war situation, it was
Hedouville that poisoned relations between Toussainte and Rigaud
and later pressed for French invasion.
Rigaud's defeat and Hedouville's expulsion removed Toussainte’s
last obstacle to absolute power, as reflected in his July 1800 Consti-
tution, which he published without consultation with fellow Black
generals Christophe and Dessalines or even his adopted son Moise
(whose fate we already know). The Constitution was not a declara-
tion of independence, but it made any French official a mere guest
of Toussainte rather than having a permanent place in Haiti's power
structure. It was not a declaration of independence as Toussainte
wanted to retain French trade links and, as consul, France also formed
a basis of his legitimacy over and above the pure military force of
the Army. Still this and the annexation of Spanish San Domingue
gave Napoleon ample excuse to invade.
‘There were strange parallels between Napoleon and Toussainte.
Both came from lowly, provincial origins with claims to distant,
minor nobility. Both were opportunistic power seekers that rose
through organisational and military genius. As noted above,
Napoleon probably indirectly owed Toussainte much, yet he chose
to war on someone he could have more easily simply done business
with. CLR James suggests this was down to Napoleon’s racism, his
early career advancement being stalled by the mulatto general Du-
mas, ® whereas others have suggested it was ex-colonist (and ex-Roy-
alist) Josephine that incited him. More relevantly, San Domingue
was still Frances’s richest colony and after Napoleon’s coup, it was
the mercantile bougeoisie rather than 1792 san culottes enraged at
‘aristocracy of the skin’ that held sway. Napoleon had the latter
cowed with his secret police and grapeshot.
Napoleon's invasion plan considered of three phases:
5 James, opcit, pp. 269-270.
25
« Telling Haiti's leaders whatever they wanted to hear whilst his
army was landed without their opposition
© Once the army had safely landed, capturing the leadership by
offering them the honour of a trip to France and deporting them
forceably as ‘outlaws’ if they refused
Once the leadership had been neutralised, general disarmament
of the population and the demotion of all Black officers (or, as
the First Consul himself so unattractively put it, “rip[ping] the
epaulettes off the shoulders of every nigger”).
And afterwards, the reintroduction of the Napoleonic version of
the anciente regime, slavery, mulatto discrimination and all. Even
Napoleon’s brother-on-law general Leclere and others of the French
high command did not know his ultimate aim and none of the 12,000
men gathered in the harbours of France in December 1801 awaiting
their voyage to Haiti thought what was to come was anything short
of another revolutionary ‘war of liberation’. The British were only
too happy to let the invasion fleet proceed unharassed, knowing
from their own bitter experience that Haiti was the graveyard of
armies.
Alerted by Napoleon’s failure to acknowledge letters from his
own consul, Toussaunte arranged to eavesdrop on Leclere’s blandish-
ments to Christophe when the general began disembarking his army
at Le Cap on 2 February 1802. Two days later, Christophe took
action, mobilising the garrison from nearby Fort Libertie to torch
Le Cap and flee into the mountains. 100 million francs-worth of
damage were done and of 2,000 homes in the port, only 59 remained
standing after this start to Christophe’s scorched earth policy. This
action certainly hurt the French war effort badly, as Leclerc noted in
his dispatches:'*
1am here without food or money. The burning of Le Cap and
the districts through which the rebels have retired deprives me
ibid, p. 304 Leclere concludes by complining about the merchants of Le Cap being
‘most Jewish”,as if an accusation. Ant-semitism was one prejudice Napoleon did
ot share with his brother-in-law.
2
of all resources of this kind. It is necessary that the Government
send me provisions, money, troops. That is the only means of
ensuring the preservation of San Domingo.
“This was a good start, but because Toussainte had staked so much
on France and alienated so many with his policy of reviving the
plantations, the general population of Haiti were confused and he
only roused them too late. Half of Toussainte’s generals joined their
‘allies’, the French, and even Toussainte’s own brother Paul was
tricked into surrendering his garrison to them without a shot fired
Whilst Toussainte dithered, Dessalines (who, unlike Toussaunte, had
been viciously whipped as a slave and consequently had no love for
Frenchmen) immediately marched his troops from St. Marc, burning
towns and plantations en route to Le Cap to cut off French lines of
supply. Frustrated in this, Dessalines made a stand against the bulk
of the French army at the fortress of Crete-a-Pierriot, 20-24™ March
1802. Outnumbered ten-to-one and assailed by artillery under the
command of the mulatto general Petion, willing and able to “pound
the fortress and the redoubts to dust”, Dessalines ran up a red flag at
each corner of the fortress indicating no quarter was to be given or
received. He told his troops:”
[T]ake courage, and you will see that when the French are few
we shall harass them, we shall beat them, we shall burn the
harvests and retire to the mountains. They will not be able to
guard the country and they will have to leave. Then I shall make
you independent. There will be no more whites among you
Dessalines had spoken the words that had Sonthonax dismissed
and Moise shot. He bestrode the ramparts of Crete-a-Pierriot with a
bullet hole through his hat and bare to his waist to show the whip
scars of his former enslavement. When the artillery made further
defence of the fortress impossible, he cut his way out leaving 400
defenders dead to 4,000 French. A shocked Leclere begged his officers
to conceal the extent of their losses from Napoleon.
ibid, pp. 314-315.
27
Despite this, resistance erumbled. Toussainte sent Christophe to
negotiate with Leclere only to have him defect, taking a third of
the Haitian army with him. Toussainte continued to negotiate with
Leclere through Chistophe and then came to Le Cap himself to sue
for peace by April 1802. His terms were that his army remain intact
(s0 no epaulettes torn from shoulders), but as he'd seen his mulatto
rival Rigaud forced onto a French ship and bundled off to Madagascar
at the start of the war of independence, so Toussainte was shanghied
himself on 7% June 1802, believing Leclerc was exceeding his orders
and Napoleon would understand if only he could put his case in
person. Toussainte died of neglect a year later in the mountain prison
of Fort-de-Jour, spending his last days writing pathetic appeals to
the First Consul, unable to believe Napoleon himself was the one
responsible for his deprivations.
In the year it took Toussainte to die, Leclerc's army was destroyed
by yellow fever and the guerrilla tactics of Maroon bands under the
likes of Derance, Samedi Smith, * Jean Panier and others. So many
died that it was impossible o give them individual burials — they
were merely heaped in pits. Leclere, who thought his troubles were
over with the deportation of Toussainte now complained “Where
there was one Toussainte, now there are a thousand”. His own
army exhausted, Leclere turned to Dessalines and Christophe to put
down the Maroon bands. Rather than exploiting his weakness, they
readily complied. Christophe kept channels of communication open
‘with the very Maroons his troops were hunting, so enfeebled was the
French cause, and regularly begged Leclerc to evacuate him to France.
Dessalines — with his talk of “independence” at Crete-a-Pierriot —
may have been biding his time and eliminating rivals for power on
his Maroon hunts, but there was no doubt which master he served
when he was doing this either. As the historian Lacroix observed:'”
[1)n the new insurrection of San Domingo, as in all insurrections
which attack constituted authority, it was not the avowed chiefs
‘A voodooist name i ever there was onel Baron Samedi was dety of death wor.
hippe at crossroads and wasltter ssumed s poliically opportune persona by
Jean Claude Duvalier
0 James, op it p. 555
28
who gave the signals for revolt but obscure creatures for the
greater part personal enemies of the coloured generals
It s also worth noting that there was an element of religious
warfare in all this. It was voodooist Maroons that kept the indepen-
dence struggle alive whilst the Black generals, professing Christian-
ity, served the counter-revolution.
‘The counter-revolution dealt itself blow after blow. Over-confi-
dent from Leclerc’s exaggerated reports, general Richepanse had
slavery voted back in May 1802. The old plantocracy began return-
ing under the slogan “no slavery, no colony” and if that did not
convince the people their liberty was threatened, escapees flecing
the Cockarde slave ship in Le Cap harbour come July 1802 certainly
did. Horrified by the unveiling of Napoleon’s hidden intentions,
Leclerc wrote frankly to his brother-in-law at last.2*
My letter will surprise you, Citizen Consul, after those I have
written to you. But what general could calculate on a mortality
of four-fifths of his army and the uselessness of the remainder,
who has been left without funds as I have, in a country where
purchases are made only for their weight in gold and where
with money I might have rid of much discontent? Could I
have expected, in these circumstances, the law relating to the
slave-trade and above all the decrees of General Richepanse
re-establishing slavery and forbidding the men of colour from
signing themselves as citizens?
Despite this, Christophe and Dessalines continued to support him.
When desperation and shortage of troops led Leclere to decide on
a war to the death, massacring every Black without distinction —
in effect, a course of genocide — Christophe and Dessalines were
his willing agents. Only days before Leclere himself surcummed
to yellow fever on 18" October 1802, Christophe and Dessalines
were still actively supporting him. They only jumped ship to the
resistance when they had no other option left if they were to retain
ibid, pp. 343344
29
their armies and their power — and only then because their mulatto
rival Rigaud had done so first
Leclerc was succeeded by Rochambeau, who arrived on Haiti just
as the fever season was receding with 10,000 reinforcements. He
‘was bent on continuing Leclere's policy of genocide: “A point no less
essential for the success of our army is the total destruction of the
black and Mulatto generals, officers and soldiers™" At this point, all
that had any option were under arms, all were soldiers irrespective
of age or gender. Rochambeau and the returned plantocracy’s intent
was to kill each and every one tainted with liberty and restock the
island in entiris from Africa. To this end, Rochambeau drowned
S0 many captives in Port-Republicain® harbour that locals refused
to eat fish from it and the town’s commander refused to accept
delivery of a further 10,000 shot used to weight down those next to be
drowned. Rochambeau banished him for it and then imported 1,500
bloodhounds, whose arrival was greeted by the cream of colonial
society at a fete held in the ampitheatre of a former Jesuit colony.
Like the slaveholding predecessors they so admired, the Romans,
they proceded to hold a circus where Black captives were literally
thrown to the dogs. When the animals failed to do their duty, the
French commander®®
jumped into the arena and with a stroke of his sword cut open
the belly of the black. At the sight and scent of the blood the
dogs threw themselves on the black and devoured him in a
twinkling, while the applause ran round the arena and the band
played
French ladies in all their finery then kissed the dogs and licked
the bloody saliva from their lips.
Such terror tactics were borne of desperation and failed. Each
French atrocity was met in kind — in one celebrated incident,
Dessalines responded to the burial alive of 500 labourers by hanging
ibid, p. 357
The French revolutionary name for Port-au Prince.
Janes,op cit, . 360.
30
an identical number of French officers from every available tree —
and the absence of any expectation of mercy only strengthened re-
solve. The wife of Maroon chieftain Chevalier told him “how sweet
it to die for liberty” and her daughters “Be glad you will not be
the mothers of slaves” when they hesitated at the foot of the gallows
before placing the noose around her own neck.* Death, moreover,
represented a eturn to Africa. Rochambeau’s troops proved no more
immune to fever than Laveau’s, they experienced the same hunger
as the island burned from end to end, and they too realised they
were fighting for a most unjust cause. On hearing the Blacks singing
the Marseillaise and the Ca Ira, Polish troops fresh from their own
subjugation by Napoleon in the name of liberty defected. Nor were
they the only ones.
Come 16'% November 1803, Haitian armies under Dessalines con-
verged on Le Cap and a week later drove Rochambeau into the sea
OF 60,000 that sailed from France during the war of independence,
not one escaped death or capture by the British navy blackade. OF
all defeats Napoleon suffered before the invasion of Russia, this was
his greatest, though almost totally excluded from orthodox histories
of the era. Napoleon admiltted as much himself in final exile on St
Helena * The victors also suffered greviously, with agriculture re-
duced to ashes, and half the island’s 30,000 mulattos and more than
a third of its 500,000 Black inhabitants dead. Despite this, it was
also the most successful slave revolt in history, the first victorious
‘modern anti-colonial war.
“The French loss of Haiti had two other consequences of worldwide
significance.
“The first was that the frustration of Napoleon's imperial ambitions
in the Caribbean led him to sell of the huge tract of land between the
Mississippi delta and the Canadian border discovered the previous
century by the duke of Lasalle in order to finance his military adven-
tures in Europe. The November 1803 Louisiana Purchase allowed US
expansion, first into Texas and then the West, a key step towards
its becoming a 20'" century superpower. It also led to war with the
bid, pp. 36
ibid. p. 373
362
31
British, who had their own Caribbean ambitions. These, too, were
frustrated at the 1814 battle of Chalmette on the swampy southern
outskirts of New Orleans, where a ragtag collection of city militia,
pirates under Pete Retief and a local native American band defeated
the British expeditionary force, confirming the city as an American
holding.
‘The second consequence was Pitt's decision to abolish the slave
trade, a measure approved by Parliament on 1% May, 1807. This
has often been represented as a victory of liberal conscience over
hard economics, but CLR James argues convincingly that it was in
fact a strategic attack on France's remaining Caribbean colonies
such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, largely supplied with slaves
by British merchants who were, in effect, trading with the enemy.*
Britain had achieved global naval dominance following Nelson's
victory over French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805 and used
slavery as a pretext to reinforce this dominance by searching ships
of other nations — acting as a ‘world policeman’, in effect * It's
noteworthy that Britain didn’t abolish slavery itself until 1833, so
as not to disadvantage their own plantocrats in Jamaica, who relied
on ‘natural increase’ in the interim. Thereafter, their interests were
sidelined by the metropolitan industrialist victors of the great Reform
debate.
% bid,pp. 5154
¥ Thomas, op it p. 575
32
Independence, Land and ‘Race’
When Dessaline’s intoxicated mulatto underling Boisrond-Ton-
nerrer read the declaration of independence on 31 December 1803,
he felt moved to complain’
‘This doesn't say what we really feel. For our declaration of
independence, we should have the skin of a blanc for parchment,
his skull for inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for pen!
Dessalines signed anyway, becoming the first ruler of independent
Haiti* later its self-styled emporer (a parody of Napoleon's own
imperial pretensions) and ironically a voodoo lwa.
In fulfilment of the pledge he made at Crete-a-Pierriot, Dessalines
then tore the white strip from the French flag at Archaie to create
a new Haitian one, then tore the Whites from the island, issuing
orders for their general massacre in January 1805. By fatally once
again putting property before principle, thousands of the old plan-
tocracy had remained after independence, those that did not fleeing
to France or New Orleans.’ By the end of March, only the Polish
HWP Hastford's History of Haiti at hartford-hwp.com / archives / 43a / 106html,
Part2,p. 1.
Althovgh ‘Hait and ‘San Domingue’ have been used casually and interchangeably
to mean what was fist called western Hispaiola throughout this piece, it was
formally called ‘Haiti only on independence, break with the colonial past and a
tribute to the isand's original Awawak inhabitants,
New Orleans was so atractive becanse wntil Napoleon sold it o the US government
inlate-1803, Louisiana remained a French possession. There, the emigres continued
all the colonial codswallop of lassifying others as quadzoons, octoroons and so
forth, and maintaining their strange insistence that their mistresses must all be
mulaito.
Nor did they escape vaodo, with huge rites being held on the southern shores of
Lake Pontrachene and a mortuary chapel for yellow fever vietims at the Lown limits
even informally being dedicated to St Expedite (Legba). AL time of writin [2003].
occasionl offerings of cigars or flowers still getLeftin front of the chapel's votive
Statuett.
Although slave sesistance was lasgely cultural rather than military, as on Haiti),
the plantocracy had to contend with Marie Levau, who started her carcer as &
33
‘mutineers, reclassified as ‘Black” in the political rather than pheno-
typical sense, survived and Dessalines issued a further proclamation
banning any foreigner from owning any land or business in Haiti
Blackness became a precondition for citizenship of Haiti, proudly
the Caribbean’s first Black state.
Often dismissed as a “barbarian” because of his proclamation of
January 1805, Dessalines’ prohibition on foreign ownership — and
even today in Haiti, ‘blanc’ as often means ‘oreigner” as ‘White’ —
showed considerably more foresight than Toussainte’s policies and
even those of the majority of 20 century national liberationists.*
Before the term was even coined, he appreciated the dangers of neo-
colonialism, that by allowing foreign control of the Haitian economy
he would open up the way to a new, economic servitude and possible
re-establishment of the old regime of the plantocracy on ts coat tails.
Despite the racialised tone of Dessalines’ politics — a terminology
inherited from colonialism — he was actually typical of Haitians in
believing in racial equality, politically defined blancs being excluded
only because they denied this fact of Nature in an attempt to gain
political and economic ascendency. In fact, Dessalines needed racial
equality to stay in power, the mulattos being classified as “anciens
libres” along with the small numbers of pre-1791 free Blacks, and
the majority of others designated as “nouveaus libres”. As Thomas
Madiou observed®
hairdresser in mulatto homes and then used the gossip she overheard there to
cast herself s a voodoo prophetess, wreaking havoe and accumsilating considerable
influnce by sabotaging upper classrelationships. Her torb in charming but chaotic
New Orleans Cemetary #1 also still atracts invocatory offerings of penies and
flowers, though probably more from tourists rather than devout voodooists
With inereased formal Black education dusing Reconstruction, voodoo's influcnce
in Louisiana receded, but has stll lef its mark in New Orleans in the form of
the spectacular ‘updown’ and ‘dowatown’ Mardi Gras costumes of Black carnival
clowns, the funerary rits of the marching bands, and occassional resort (o mojo
bags (good luck charms) by garmblers
CLR James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouserture and the San Domingo Revolu
tion (Allson & Busby, 1980 — first published 1938), p. 393.
David Nicholls’ From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colous and National Indepen
dence in Haiti Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 9.
34
He conceived the generous and salutary idea, after the deporta-
tion of Toussaint L'Ouverture, of reuniting the two castes whose
interests were the same, and of opposing them in a single body,
to their oppressors; this was the constant and peristent theme
of his whole life.
Perhaps Dessalines argued his case too well because ultimately
economic considerations won out over his thetoric of racial unity and
led to his assassination at Pont Rouge, on the road to Port-au-Prince,
in October 1806. Black generals jealous of his constitutional mo-
nopoly of power were jointly responsible with mulatto merchants
angered at his 10% import tax and an export tax on their principal
post-colonial export, coffee, imposed the preceding month.
Despite this, Christophe played the race card by blaming the mu-
lattos and bought off the Black generals by ennobling them as he
crowned himself King Henry I This gesture divided Haiti, Petion
being elected president of a seceded mulatto-ruled South in March
1807. Fourteen years of civil war ensued, not only between the
northern Kingdom and southern Republic, but between Petion and
Rigaud, who returned from Madagascar in 1810 to form a break-
away southern state with the aid of Maroons. This turmoil ended
only with Christophe’s suicide and reunification under mulatto Jean-
Pierre Boyer in 1520.
Where were the people during this protracted quarrel amongst
property-owners? As a former overseer of livestock from when he
was at Breda, Toussainte’s opinion was that they should be back on
the plantation. He prided himself that under his administration, two-
thirds of the plantations had been restored to production, despite
the abundant evidence of the Night of Fire that the people wanted
nothing more to do with them. Everywhere he went, Toussainte ex-
horted the labourers “Work is necessary, .. . it is a virtue,its for the
general good of the state™ and those disinclined to agree were con-
fined to their plantations anyway and thrashed with cocomacaque
sticks — Sonthonax having prohibited whips — if they proved insuffi-
ciently ‘virtuous' (productive). His system of fermage allowed for
& James,apcit, pp. 155-156.
35
state control of the plantations, with 257% of profits from the crop
going to the plantations’ managers and 25% divided up amongst the
workers.” Despite these payments, many labourers found this forced
labour system virtually indistinguishable from slavery (in fact, it
was a kind of serfdom, already seen as a Medieval relic everywhere
in Europe except in absolutist Russia), especially when Toussainte
parcelled out management of the plantations to emigre plantocrats
as an inducement to them to return and to his own generals as an
inducement to their loyalty to him. Dessalines himself owned thirty
plantations when he was serving under Toussainte, o it's not un-
reasonable to see Toussainte’s motive in prohibiting non-passported
movement off plantations as stemming from the same motive as
the old plantocracy’s — to prevent the defection of labourers to the
Maroons — and Dessalines’ campaign against the Maroons under
Leclere being little more than a defence of his own property and
privilege.
Itis easy to divine simple motives of profit- and power-seeking
in Toussainte's agricultural policy, and this would also explain why
he wanted the emigres back and to retain links with France — to
show he was the man to do business with and thus assured power,
and to provide a market for Haiti's cash crops to bring profit to
the plantations, further reinforcing his position. What was “for
the general good of the state” was certainly also for the particular
good of Toussainte and his cronies. However, it's not that simple.
Toussainte’s enthusiasm for all things European went beyond this. In
a strange mirroring of the colonial mentality (*wogs can't run their
own country, it's gone to hell since we left ‘em to it”, etc), Toussainte
wanted the emigres back because he didn't think his fellow Blacks
could run their own plantations and, certainly, the vast majority
wouldn't have worked them if they hadn't been forced to. He even
cultivated the old colonial cash crops at the expense of indigenous
staples that could have reduced dependence on European mercantile
bourgeoisie supplying them. He had the labourers chant the slogan
“Ido not want to be any Coast Negro” — a reference to those ‘straight
7 Harford, op et p. 2
* James, op et p. 186
36
off the boat’ who, as we have seen, had most affinity for Africa and
Maroonage — and persecuted voodoo.” CLR James is quite explicit
about Toussainte’s motivations and describes some of his methods:*"
Toussaint knew the backwardness of the labourers; he made
them work, but he wanted them civilised and advanced in
culture. He established such schools as he could. A sincere
Catholic and believer in the softening effects of religion on man-
ners, he encouraged the practice of the Catholic religion, and
wrote to an old friend of the Blacks, the Abbe Gregoire, for
advice. He favoured legitimate children and soldiers who were
married and forbade his officials and commandants to have
concubines in the houses of their wives, a legacy of the old
disreputable white society. He was anxious to see the blacks
acquire the social deportment of the better class whites with
their Versailles manners.
‘The whole point of “Versailles manners”, as Norbert Elias makes
endlessly clear in his classic The Civilizing Process, " is to tame soci-
ety through propagating a code of polite individual behaviour and
thus make the whole more easily governed by its ruler, this domes-
ticating process starting with the ruler's own courtiers. Similarly,
one only needs a nodding acquaintance with the excesses of modern
missionaries to know the sort of religious education programme
Toussainte instituted, all about inculeating passive obedience in the
masses and destroying the influence of Maroon voodoo by coun-
terposing it to institutionally-backed Christian myth, exactly the
Chureh’s role under the anciente regime of colonial days.
Whilst seeking to destroy African culture amongst the Black
labourers, Toussainte held salon-style soirees to celebrate French
culture amongst the new ruling class, where the favoured ‘small
circle” were principally White and the women attending were called
bid, p. 156
ibid, p. 246
Norbert Elas’s The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation
and Civlization (Blackwel, 1952 — originally published 1939).
37
“madame” instead of “citizen”.** Admiring the upright military bear-
ing of a French officer, Toussainte expressed his wish that “[m]y sons
will be like that""” and then packed them off to Napoleon’s France,
where the elder, Isaac, was so indoctrinated he wanted to return to
the French during Leclerc’s 1802 betrayal. That Toussainte himself
was to do pretty much the same thing only months later — unable to
believe Leclerc's perfidy had Napoleon's blessing or “that the French
ruling class would be so depraved, so lost to all sense of decency, as
10 try o restore slavery”™* — just goes to show exactly how greatly
and how fatally he had bought into the myth of French civilisation.
‘The people — for whom French civilisation meant only the whip,
the brand and a premature death through exhaustion and abuse —
were not so easily fooled. A Marxist of the 1930s, CLR James had the
same preference for Progress in the form of a harsh programme of
economie development that centralises power as Toussainte and so
could claim, without trace of irony. that “between Toussaint and his
people there was no fundamental difference of outlook or aim.™* In
fact, they had been promised the land as early as 27" August 1793 in
Polveral’s proclamation at Le Cap, not in the abstract ‘nationalised"
sense of Toussainte, but as small plots to be worked by individuals
principly for their own personal benefit* In this, Polveral was more
alive to traditional peasant aspirations than Toussainte, unsurpris-
ingly as the peasantry was a motor of the French Revolution outside
Paris. Key to Robespierre’s rise lo power was his commitment to
abolishing feudal dues, which fell most heavily on the peasantry.
Denied land by Toussainte, the labourers did what they always had
under the old plantocracy, abandoned the plantation for Maroonage,
a return to the traditional Affican peasant economy as transplanted
to the Caribbean. When the French invaded in 1802, they fought for
their lives and their land, not for some future state of ‘Haiti’ or any
other treacherous manifestation of *higher civilisation’
Janes, p cit, pp. 246-247.
bid p2
ibid. p. 252
ibid. p. 256
Nicholls, op it p. 54,
38
An American entrepreneur that visiing Haiti shortly after the
revolution, James Franklin, observed the consequences of this flight
from the plantations:”
Hayti abounds with these small proprieters. . ., their patches
of land, with their huts upon them, are generally situate in
the mountains, in the recesses, or on the most elevated parts,
o spots, as the poet has described, “the most inaccessible by
shepherds trod”. They are therefore lost for the purposes of
agriculture.
By “agriculture”, Franklin means the big plantations, of course.
From him, we learn that even coffee, once the colony’s second largest
export, was typically gathered by subsistance farmers as a concession
to the cash economy from trees planted many years ago and now
gone almost wild. It was possibly as a measure both to increase
his grassroots popularity and to bring such runaways back where
they could be found, taxed and subjected to the other exactions of
government that Dessalines proposed limited land redistribution
towards the end of his reign:**
‘The sons of colonists have taken advantage of my poor blacks;
the properties which we have conquered by the spilling of our
blood belong to us all; T intend that they be divided with equity.
Dessalines never said what this “equity” meant in practice, but it
was enough that the “sons of colonists” were necessarily mulattos
coming into the estates of their emigre fathers and those likely to
benefit from their break up were nouveaux libre “sons of Africa” for
this promise of land distrubution to supply the underlying cause for
his 1806 assassination.
Following this disappointment of the popular desire for land, Hart-
ford writes very acutely about how"”
bid. p. 6.
ibid, p. 35
HWP Hartford's History of Haiti at hartford-hwp.com / archives / 43 / 107 ol
“Haiti's Golden Days?" pp2-3
39
two countries emerged, and I'm not referring to the Kingdom
of Christophe and the Republic of Petion. Rather, there was the
real country of Haiti, the consti-tutional government in force,
which, while not having international recognition, was the de
facto government of Haiti, and controlled the coastal towns
and major markets of the countryside. Then there was the
borderless Haiti at large. A largely anarchic world of peasants
who had retreated as far away from the Haitian government
and lived a life beyond the pale of formal law, commerce, and
the western concept of development and so-called progress.
‘They traded their right to live under government and the possi-
bility of participation in it, for the freedom, to avoid its worst
abuses. In exchange they lived their lives of pre-industrial sim-
plicity, but, until the turn of the twentieth century, not lives of
misery.
Apparently, when trade was needed with the formal economy, it
was the women that went to market, so that the men couldn’t be
conscripted to whichever of their nominal rulers’ petty wars were
ongoing ast the time.
Hartford's vision of rural Haitain life during the 19 century is
impressive and appealing, particularly to anarchists, but I would
respectfully disagree with his contention that it was a society free of
governance. As we have already seen, Maroon bands were actually
autocracies on an African model, and there seems little to doubt that
after the revolution, things were not much the same. As always, this
was justified in terms of communal self-defence
[The role of the Maroons was transformed from fighting the
French to resisting a new threat to the people — an emerging
urban economic and political elite distinguished not by the color
of their skin but by the plans they harbored for both the land
and labor of the peasants
2 Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow (Callins, 1986), p212.
A great deal of Haitian politics from this stage has been about
trying to capture the support of this ‘shadow society” parallel to
that of formal power structures. Towards the end of their war,
both Christophe and Petion began parcelling off the plantations
into pocket handkerchief plots, over 10,000 in Petion’s case.* Just as
Christophe’s policy was a promise delayed ten years in its fulfilment
and then likely only because he was spurred on to it by Petion’s own
gesture in that direction, Petion’s land redistribution policy was al-
most accidental. His treasury exhausted, he chose to pay his army in
land instead — and with the proceeds of land sales to the peasantry.
‘This move into subsistence was only accelerated by Petion’s suc-
cessor Boyer who — staring down the barrels of 14 French warships
in Port-au-Prince harbour — agreed to compensate the remnants of
the plantocracy 150 million francs in exchange for formal recogni-
tion of Haitian sovereignty (and, incidentally, his right to rule) on
17" April 1825, Like a modern Third World country, Haiti found
itself saddled with a national debt so vast that it couldn’t even pay
the 26 million francs annual interest, not least because many es-
caped austerity measures in the form of grossly increased taxation
by disappearing into the interior to join subsistence farmers already
sheltering there. They felt it unjust to pay their former owners again
for a freedom already bought in blood. Boyer tried to prevent this
exodus by passing the 1826 Rural Code, confining labourers to their
estates, but its failure in fact saved Haiti from worse French interven-
tion than the imposition of preferentially reduced customs duties. In
terms of its formal export economy, Haiti — once “the finest colony
in the world” — was by then just too poor to loot
Boyer had not been magnanimous in his victory over the Black
north either. There were particular concerns that the most influ-
ential official posts were going mulattoes exclusively. One of the
major Black landowners remaining in the South, Louis Erinne Ly-
sius Felicitie Salomon, articulated this dissent through an ideology
of noirism, emphasising Black contributions to Haitian history and
denitigrating that of mulattos. Noirism was not a racist ideology in
Nicholls,op et p. 54
ibid, p. 6.
i
the sense of arguing some sort of biologically defined racial supe-
riority. As with Dessalines — a figure idolised by the noirists — it
was just felt that one ethnic group, the mulattos, were denying the
basic equality of humanity by aceruing undue political and economic
power exclusively to themselves. In 1844, he teamed up with three
Black generals in Les Cayes and was arrested, accused of wishing
to “annihilate the coloured [mulatto] population’. Salomon, in turn,
raised the peasantry by charging Boyer with desiring to eliminate
largely Black small landowners through his introduction of the Rural
Code, something that did veer towards a disguising of class interests
— Salomon’s advancement at their expense — with the rhetoric of
caste solidarity. Both sides threatened to appeal to foreign powers
for support.
‘The insurgent peasants under Jean-Jacques Acaau, Zamor and Jean
Claude were an eruption of ‘shadow power’ into the squabbles of
the ruling class. The overt demands of these piquets — named after
the wooden pikes they armed themselves with® — were respectfully
moderate, such as the release of Salomon and the ending of martial
law, but their insurgents’ real aim was to turn the caste war into a
class war. Acaau intended to redistribute the lands of the rich, regard-
less of colour, and said “all poor mulattos should be considered as
blacks, and . .. all rich blacks should be considered as mulattoes
[We call all men our brothers without distinction” * A combination
of this southern rising and Boyer's failed military expedition into
Spanish San Domnigue bought an end to his rule.
9 The pike was almost asiconic a weapon of sebels ofthe period as the AK47 s today.
AU the same time piquets fought the class war in Haii physical force Chatists
chubbed together in England to buy pikes both as 3 mark of their miltancy and
o defnd thermselves from the lkes of the mounted yeomaney responsible for the
1519 Peterloo massace.
Exhibit A on the South's propaganda exercse against Kansas hased sbolitonist
ueril John Brown following his 1859 exceution for the faled raid on Horper's
Ferry arcnal was wagonfullofpikes whih they said e ntended t arm nsurgent
slaves. They drove i from tow 1o own, exhibitng it much as the Bush reime
now exhibits World Trade Centre rubble and to cxacly the same poliical end.
ncidentaly ‘pigueis unrelted t picket’, the latee meanin ‘sentry”
* Nicholls. ap it p. 7.
a2
‘Their end achieved, the Black elite settled their differences with
their mulatto equivalents by appointing general Faustin Soulouque
as a mutually agreed president, whilst exiling the piquets and exe-
cuting their most prominent leader by this stage, Pierre Noir. Sa-
lomon demonstrated that noirism weren't going to be inconve-
nienced by Dessalines’ economic nationalism when he took his cut
as Soulougue’s finance minister, an appointment most appreciated
by blancs, “particularly the members of the old commercial houses
who were witnesses to his administrative capacity and benefitted
largely from it”* Concerned he would be seen as a front man for
the rich generally and rich mulattos particularly (the politique de
doublure, mulatto rule through a Black puppet), Soulougue made
popularist gestures like declaring himself Faustin I in the manner of
Dessalines in 1849 and also — much more importantly as far as the
people were concerned — tolerating voodoo.
‘The racist European and American press jumped on this, por-
traying Soulougue as a buffoon for having the same pretensions as
European monarchs and churning out ‘missionaries in cooking pots'~
level propaganda against Haiti. Wider forces were, of course, in play
— the US was within years of its Civil War and Europe was already
starting to probe Africa with missionaries and traders with an eye
to extending empire there. In both cases, it was in their interests
to claim Black people were incapable of running their own lives as
a mandate for their own rule, and Haiti had to be discredited as a
counter-example to this. Predictably, they enlisted Science to their
cause, founder anthropologist Arthur de Gobineau claiming Black
people were racially “incapable of civilization” and Haitians were “as
depraved, brutal and savage as in Dahomey or among the Fellatahs”.
Unsurprisingly, the international Anthropology Society counted gov-
ernor Eyre of Jamaica, a man who had argued the abolition of slavery
“had done the Negro race much injury by their absurd and unwar-
rantable attempts to prevent Africa from exporting her worthless or
surplus population”, amongst its honoured members. Following the
publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and its appropriation by
TH Huxley for imperialism and laissez faire economics, ex-British
bid, p. 35
3
ambassador to Haiti Sir Spenser St John maintained, from his experi-
ence of the Black state, that™
1 now agree with those who deny that the negro could ever
originate a civilisation, and that with the best of education he
remains an inferior type of man . .. incapable of the art of
government.
Noirism was as much a reaction to this sort of self-serving impe-
rialist ideology as it was to the ascendency of the mulattos under
Boyer, the two even being related inasmuch as trader mulattos were
generally more inclined to challenge Dessalines’ 1804 prohibitions
on foreign ownership. Against arguments of Black racial inferior-
ity, Haitian writers like Etienne Firmin used the example of ancient
Egypt, a Black civilisation (racially indistinguishable from Ethopia)
when the ancestors of the esteemed British and French students
of anthropology cited above were scampering around the bracken
painted in woad, later to be enslaved by Rome. However, as David
Nicholls rightly pointed out in his ground-breaking analysis of race
questions in Haiti, From Dessalines to Duvalier:¥
[Their purpose was basically to persuade European readers
that Haiti was a ‘civilised’ country and that black people are
capable of civilisation according to European criteria. These
writers rarely challenged the superiority of European culture
and they maintained the role of African elements in the heritage
of the Haitian people.
European assumptions about the backwardness’ of Africa in the
19 century were shared by Haitian writers, even the need for
them to assume a sort of ‘White man’s burden’ to civilise Africa
Christophe supported British missionary expeditions into the inte-
rior® and immigration from Africa and America were also encour-
aged in the belief that their experience of the higher culture of Haiti
bid p. 128
ibid. p. 129
ibid. p. 46.
44