“Liberté ou la mort”: On the Haitian Revolution & Our Liberation

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'Black Spartacus': Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution by de Baptiste (1875) Credit: Photo 12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

"Zamba Boukman, also called Boukman Dutty, a Papaloi or High Priest, was a literate Muslim; his chief assistant, the mambo Cécile Fatiman, a likely cognate with Fatima (and indeed, Cesil Fatima in Haitian Kreyol), might also have been Muslim."

​ ​(Diouf 1998, 152-53, 229)

Do you sense it? The spiritual revolution awakened by Dutty Boukman in the mountains of San Domingue--present-day Haiti--to the rubble of Gaza? The great evil of European chattel slavery and occupation has kept this spiritual revolution alive.

When Cristóbal Colón (aka Christopher Colombus) a Spanish Jew, left Spain and landed in the islands of the Bahamas, he brought with him the oppression of the very empire that was oppressing his own people. Five centuries later, the ghost of that landing continues to haunt the world.

The Haitian uprising, its revolution, and its final phase of emancipation is a blueprint of how freedom is won. A man who wakes up to his own oppression and that of others, who sees that death is inevitable but an honourable life is not necessarily given to you, who becomes fully awake to the reality of his purpose, is a man that must be feared. He--like Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines--cements his name in history, carries his nation forward, and is the rallying cry of all oppressed people.

"...[C.L.R James] cast doubt on the assumption that the revolution would take place first in Europe, in the advanced capitalist countries, and that this would act as a model and a catalyst for the later upheavals in the underdeveloped world. Secondly, there were clear indications that the lack of specially-trained leaders, a vanguard, did not hold back the movement of the San Domingo revolution."

--C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the 20th Century

​As this new century marches forward, the old beliefs, ideas and traditional behaviors are again questioned. Societies and communities finding themselves in an existential crisis. The decay that the last century became with its excessive materialism, anti-God, individualistic humanism-- coupled with a loss of religious, social, and political community, and the destruction of familial bonds--has created (especially in Westernized societies) an apathy that is more destructive to the human soul than any other state.

We have to understand this is by design. The state actors involved in the push for apathy do not fear the people. They know that even though people are aware that their livelihood, communities, and societies in general are not quite what they should be, and that every generation is becoming not only spiritually poor but materially poorer than the previous generation, most just shrug this malaise off and lose themselves in the next shiny thing.

The debt of nations is out of control and personal debt is drowning many people. The notion of the traditional family has been obliterated, and traditional communities are, in many cases, fractured and disjointed. The war on religion has seen many churches closed; what used to be the center of Western communities and places of charity, commune and education, though flawed.

The school system, and education in general, have also come under attack through budget cuts, unsupported teachers and a general declining standard of education. The few non-apathetic people feel powerless to effect change and resort to safe methods of resistance without ever leaving the paradigm they have subscribed to.

Dissolution has set in and the rot continues to grow.

However, this can only last so long before someone or something begins to waken the minds yoked to this manufactured apathy. It is the law of all sick societies and systems--the disease eventually kills its host.

Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag.
Image Provided by: http://fineartamerica.com/
Painting by: Nicole Jean-Louis, Bronx, NY

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from conviction which produces action, uncompromising action. It also produces insurrection against oppression. This is the only way you end oppression—with power."

—Malcolm X

At the end of the eighteenth century, Boukman and Cécile Fatiman gather two hundred supporters in the Morne-Rouge area of Saint Domingue. After months of planning at a ceremony called Bois Caïman, the revolt begins.

Through strategic maneuvering, these leaders successfully unite a vast network of Africans, mulattoes, maroons, commanders, house slaves, field slaves, and free blacks. During the last weeks of August, the formally enslaved rebels move through plantation after plantation, burning, killing, and liberating many of the enslaved people who also join the rebellion. The plantation owners are overwhelmed immediately, French troops are badly beaten, and colonialist officials seek help from Cuba, Jamaica and the United States...but no help comes.

Battles rage and the capital eventually burns. Troops are sent from France and Boukman is killed in battle. The plantation owners, colonialists, and soldiers are vicious in their retaliation. Boukman’s head is severed and displayed as a warning and in revenge.

Despite shifting allegiances; power struggles between the French, Spanish, British and the United States; vicious attacks from colonial forces; and threats of slavery being re-enforced, the revolutionaries of Saint Domingue cannot be conquered.

After nearly twelve brutal years, the French surrender, the other colonial powers withdraw and the new Republic of Haiti is born.

"The renaming of French Saint Domingue as "Haïti" remains the only case of a Caribbean colony undergoing a radical change of name on achieving independence. Apparently meaning "rugged, mountainous" in the Taino Arawak language, the word was assumed to be the aboriginal term for the island Columbus christened "La Espanola." The choice of name raises interesting questions about ethnicity and identity, and historical knowledge in the Caribbean."

--New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 71 (1997), no: 1/2, Leiden, 43-68

In choosing a Taino name, 'Haiti' became a symbol of radical remembrance of their brothers and sisters who fell to the Europeans, but whose souls still imprinted themselves on that land.

Little is truly known of the contact between the remaining Taino peoples and the leadership and architects of the Haitian revolution; what is known is that there was some knowledge and awareness of Haiti's former inhabitants. Some Taino still lived in the remote southern coast of Haiti; those remnant people resisted colonial erasure.

The renaming of Saint Domingue to Haiti was also, at the time, an acceptance of the multi-ethnic society. With the various enslaved Africans, mixed race peoples, and indigenous Amerindians brought to Saint Domingue, a neutral, anti-European name helped connect and unite all inhabitants in this new free country. 

​The Baron de Vastey (1814:2-3), a leading statesman of new Haiti, began his Système Colonial Dévoilé, published in 1814, with a long reflection on the fate of the Tainos.

 “O soil of my country! ...Is there another whose unhappy inhabitants have experienced greater misfortune? ...Everywhere I tread or cast my gaze, I see shards, jars, tools, figurines, whose form bears witness to the infancy of art, [and, in mountain caverns, whole whitened skeletons] these remains that attest the existence of a people who are no more.”

Andre Normil's 1990 painting, "Ceremonie du Bois-Caiman."

“Natives of Haiti! I stood guard, I fought, sometimes alone, and if I am delighted to put back in your hands the sacred trust that you confided in me, remember that it is now your turn to preserve it…And you, a people who has experienced misfortune for too long, witness of the sermon that we utter, remember that it is on your constancy and courage that I relied when I embarked on the career for liberty, in order to combat the despotism and the tyranny against which you fought for fourteen years…”

--Procès-Verbal de la Proclamation de l’Indépendance d’Haïti (Statement on the Proclamation of the Independence of Haiti)  Dessalines

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When the people of Haiti won their freedom, they celebrated by eating soup joumou. This was a revolutionary act. The hearty dish commemorates January 1, 1804, the day Haiti was liberated from France. The soup was once served to French slave masters, but the slaves who cooked it were forbidden to eat it. After they won their independence, Haitians prepared and ate the soup to celebrate their freedom.

Haiti was the world’s first and only slave nation in history that won its own freedom. The brutality of chattel slavery in Haiti, and in the Caribbean in general, turned this simple act into a rallying cry to all of the Americas. The making of this soup wasn’t about imitating the master, or of creating a sense of equality.

When one understands the utter depravity experienced by the enslaved Haitians and of the enslaved in general, one can see that this act of eating soup joumou was an act of re-establishing their humanity, dignity and ownership of their own production and of their economic ownership over what they laboured to grow. Every ingredient came from their labour, made the colonial powers rich, and kept slavery lucrative.

​And thus Soup Joumou, once used as a dehumanizing tactic, became a dish of liberation.

"Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown for the blow struck at Harper’s Ferry. . . and to the anti-slavery societies at home and abroad; but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century."

— Frederick Douglass

The Haitian revolution did not just have a ripple effect throughout the nations of that time but continues to be felt to this day. European chattel slavery was a brutal system sanctioned by the Church and almost overwhelmingly accepted by European societies. The colonialist power players worked hard to dehumanize African human beings, creating racial hierarchies to permanently enslave Africans and their descendants.

The Haitian revolution destroyed those beliefs; the successful planning, execution and demands of the revolutionaries shocked Europeans and their American counterparts and planted the seeds of revolt throughout the Americas.

Violence kept slavery going and that became the basis of the United States. The gun prevalence in the U.S. began as the way to slaughter and subjugate the indigenous tribes, fight the British, and keep the enslaved in line. The legacy of slavery ushered in the consumeristic society we live in today. People suffered and died for luxury goods like sugar, coffee, chocolate, and indigo. Oil and mineral extractions being brought out of the earth continues this legacy of overconsumption of non-essential items, which has caused a poisoning of the air, water, and earth, making us all sicker--just as their counterpart, sugar, does.

And yet, freedom was gained through violence...but that is because of the violent nature of slavery itself. It would have been impossible for the enslaved to gain their freedom or for lands to become independent peacefully.

The idea of a ‘peaceful’ revolution came from the landowner class, such as Ghandi, who himself wanted liberation from the British...but was accepting of the status quo of the caste system and the continuation of the lower caste under subjugation. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders of the mid 20th century were heavily influenced by Gandhi.

Malcolm X famously said, "You don't get freedom peacefully. Freedom is never safeguarded peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach by the ones who are being deprived of their freedom."

As this new century marches on, we must remember, learn, and honour the people that fought to live in freedom, dignity, and in control of their own livelihood. We cannot stay in this apathetic, static lifestyle while new imperialistic power structures are being implemented. Our perceived rights and freedoms can easily be rolled back to the 17th century. Our societies can easily become like enslaved societies again. We can already see many gains disappearing while we scroll endlessly on devices powered by rare earth minerals dug out of the earth by Congolese and Southern American mine ‘workers’ with very few rights, whose countries receive very little to no financial returns on their labour.

Haitians haven't forgotten their past and even if they wanted to, the European powers do not allow them to forget. They are financially punished to this day for their victory against France and, in fact, against the holy belief in white supremacy itself. 

"The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba--yes Cuba too."

— Malcolm X