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From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man.
– Toussaint Louverture, 1796 (my translation)
A free man prefers poverty to humiliation.
– Antoine-Louis de Saint-Just, 1791
THE HUMAN FREEDOM MODE OF POLITICS, 1791–1796
Popular struggles against slavery by Africans have a long history. One of the earliest statements against slavery on the continent itself dates (as far as can be established) from 1222 and is known as The Hunters’ Oath of the Manden or the Mandé Charter.1 This affirmation is based on the oral traditions of the Mandinka hunters in the area covering parts of modern Mali, Senegal and Guinea and is said to date back to the reign of King Sunjata of the Mandinka. Statements from the charter read like an 18th-century European human rights document and are replete with the recognition of the truth of the universal nature of humanity. For example:
The hunters declare that ... war will no longer destroy villages for the capture of slaves ... from now on no one will place the bit in the mouth of his fellow man in order to sell him ... The hunters declare that the essence of slavery is abolished from this day forth from one wall to the other, from one frontier to the other of the Mandé ... The hunters declare that each person is free to use his own person as he sees fit, each person is free and responsible for his own actions, each person is free to dispose of the fruits of his own labour (Cissé and Kamissoko, 1991: 39, my translation).
Interestingly, this is not a statement emanating from a state and it seems to have inaugurated an event for a world in which slavery was then an accepted practice. The political subjectivity of this document is framed as a pure affirmation and, although firmly located within culture, its language is not that of power but operates around a central category of ‘life’. Life is universal, it maintains; all lives are of equal value. Life here is stressed in opposition to hunger and famine, which lead both to death and to the selling of people into slavery. The opposition of life and death is at the core of the idea of universal humanity proclaimed by the hunters’ oath.
By 1236, another Mandinka document, much more clearly of state origin, had rubbed out all traces of human equality and freedom and replaced it with a statement regarding the hierarchical stratification of society and the rights and duties of each social group.2 It states, inter alia ‘Do not ill-treat slaves. You should allow them to rest one day per week and to end their working day at a reasonable time. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries’ (article 20). Apart from the fact that Africans had been thinking along the lines of a universal conception of humanity long before it occurred to Europeans to do so, it seems important to note that the singularity of the subjective affirmation of the Mandé Charter evidently asserted a universal and eternal truth. That this episode has been occluded in the history books does not lessen this truth. At the same time, it should be noted that the second statement amounted to a subjective reaction by power to the first, as it recognised and legitimised the practice of slavery, thus adapting and moderating the new situation arising from the effects of the universal singularity – and hence the truth – of the Mandé Charter by simply ensuring and reasserting that slavery should continue, but now in a ‘reasonable way’ for ‘reasonable’ slave-owners. We now have a new world in which the consequences of the truth of the universality of humanity are undermined and extinguished but in which the slave system is apparently ‘moderated’. Following Badiou, this constitutes a clear example of the essence of reactive reformist state subjectivity faced with the revolutionising effects of a truth. Ironically, it is this later document that is seen today as an authentic expression of African culture. The Oath of the Manden, on the other hand, being an obviously excessive affirmation, has quite simply been effaced from the history books.
When the Atlantic slave trade became established as part of the West and Central African political landscape in the 17th and 18th centuries, its devastating effects were resisted. Resistance took a number of forms. One of great importance was the healing spiritual cult known as Lemba among the BaKongo in the area of Lower Congo (Bas Congo). The significance of this institution is twofold. Firstly, it constituted one of the most successful and long-lasting ‘drums of affliction’ (ngoma) on the continent, and played an important role in governing the population through controlling markets and in healing individuals, families and communities from the ravages of the slave trade in particular. The main academic study of Lemba, by John Janzen, speaks of it euphemistically in universalistic terms as a ‘seventeenth century “cure for capitalism” created by insightful Congo coast people who perceived that the great trade was destroying their society’ (Janzen, 1982: xiii). Secondly, as with other beliefs and secret cults, Lemba migrated to the Americas and was prevalent in Saint-Domingue/Haiti during the successful fight against slavery there. African migrants (though slaves were coerced, they were still migrants) did not suddenly abandon their African cosmology when they landed in the New World. Lemba was clearly adapted to their new situation and the struggles they had to engage in to assert their humanity against overwhelming odds. Lemba is also important in that it combined political subjectivities with spiritual ones, curative beliefs with conceptions regarding the nature of society. It offers an important insight into how African cosmology could provide one of the foundations for a singularity of universal humanity. In resisting the slave trade, Lemba developed a politics at a distance from the state.
According to Janzen, ‘Lemba, a major historic cult of healing, trade and marriage relations, came into being in the seventeenth century in a triangular region extending from the Atlantic coast to Malebo Pool between today’s cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and from the Congo river northward to the Kwilu-Niari river valley’ (1982: 3). ‘In effect, although couched in the mold of a drum of affliction [a healing cult], Lemba was the governing order in a region much of which had no centralized institutions’ (p. 4). Although its cultural dimensions were not limited to this area, it was here that Lemba developed to its fullest extent outside the control of centralised states, especially that of the Kongo kingdom. In fact, the Kingdom of Kongo was riven by civil wars throughout most of the 18th century, a fact which fuelled the slave trade, as kings and contenders expanded their earnings by selling prisoners in large numbers (Thornton, 1993: 184). Janzen cites the following figures: ‘By 1750 in Cabinda alone 5000 to 6000 slaves were being exported annually; by the 1780s the three ports of Malemba, Cabinda and Loango Bay were processing 15,000 slaves annually’ (1982: 34).
In the regions of the Lower Congo River where there were acephalous societies, Lemba ‘adapted conventional religious symbols to its own purpose, and developed a pervasive and unique ideology of healing relating to its concept of a stateless political order’ (p. 58). It also developed, in the areas where it controlled markets and trade, a ‘unique political system’ from which ‘the notion of the sovereign was absent’ (p. 72).3 It emerged ‘in a society with a strong egalitarian ethic’ (p. 318) and was able to regulate conflicts and restore calm through its ‘laws of the market’ (p. 72). Lemba was able to keep the area peaceful (the term lemba means ‘calm’, ‘peaceful’; p. 304) and to organise society without having recourse to hierarchies and a centralised bureaucratic authority or apparatus. It did so by regulating markets (through laws) and trade routes (which it controlled), by marriage arrangements between clans, by reconstructing the idea of the family, and hence by healing both individuals and society.4 Janzen continues:
it is significant that inhabitants of the region made a selective choice for the kind of public order that emerged, that, instead of imposing a new order to deal with the coastal trade which resembled a state, they developed a solution to the challenge of trade which emphasized the redefinition of reality in therapeutic terms ... It is important to explore ... the way a society imagined alternatives open to itself and the consequences of such alternatives if taken (1982: 324–5).
It seems, then, that Lemba was able to maintain relative peace in a region disrupted by the slave trade through its activities and perhaps also to ensure that this particular area was less affected by the slave trade than that south of the river, which was subject to internecine warfare. It could achieve this through a politics which distanced itself from state politics and which had mass support among the population, combining political, administrative, economic and spiritual features. In sum, under enormous pressure from colonial forms of domination, Africans invented non-state forms of regulation that could resist slavery for a long time.5 The view that local societies simply collapsed as a result of the impact of the slave trade and the power of Europeans is therefore not quite accurate.
Importantly, though, Lemba also travelled to the Americas and was prevalent in Brazil and particularly in Haiti (Janzen, 1982: ch. 8). In 1789, out of the 500,000 slaves living in Saint-Domingue, as Thornton remarks, ‘perhaps as many as two-thirds ... had been born, raised and socialised in Africa’ (Thornton, 1993: 183; Fick, 1990: 25). Thornton also estimates that ‘some 62,000 Kongolese were exported during the decade 1780–1790 or somewhat more than half the total of the combined French–English Angola trade’ (1993: 184 n. 12).6 He notes that ‘slaves from this region made up the majority of those imported into Saint-Domingue for the last twenty years before the revolution’ and cites evidence to the effect that BaKongo amounted to 60 per cent of the slaves in the north of the colony, where the revolution began, and a similar percentage in the south: ‘they were common enough among the rebels that Congo became a generic term for the rank and file of the slave insurgents’ (p. 185).
The Saint-Domingue revolution, which began in 1791 and ended with the independence of Haiti in 1804, shook the Western world at the time and constitutes one of the three major revolutions of the 18th century. It was truly a human emancipatory event and was not simply restricted to the legal freeing of slaves. It was probably more far-reaching in its effects than either the American or French revolutions. Although its consequences have been systematically occluded and silenced in scholarship, it has recently become again an object of discussion in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek, Hallward and Nesbitt.7 According to Nesbitt, it was ‘the first world-historical event to enact such a notion of universal human freedom not as a mere idea of the Enlightenment, not as the hypocritical, cynical compromise of a “free” nation economically and socially growing rich off slave labour (France and the United States), but as a principled human act of universal emancipation in consonance with reason’ (Nesbitt, 2008a: 126–7). For my present purposes, its interest lies in the fact that it constitutes a truly African event8 (or series of events) in which African migrants affirmed the truth of the universality of humanity by means of a specific subjective emancipatory mode of politics, which I shall call the Human Freedom mode of politics. It is not difficult to see that the slaves deployed a specific political subjectivity particular to those conditions. Their excessive politics were singularly unique and were made possible precisely by their political exclusion from what was deemed to constitute humanity. In fact, it could even be suggested that it was precisely their position of ‘non-being’ that enabled the thought of a true human universal – a theme that was pursued particularly by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks (1986). I propose at this point to specify the dates, sites, names and subjectivity of this specific political sequence. The discussion will help me to elucidate not only the character of this particular mode but also to delimit it in time in order to distinguish it from other sequences that followed.
The best and most detailed account of that epic struggle is provided by Carolyn Fick (1990). She argues that it was a revolution made primarily by the masses of slaves themselves rather than by a few well-known figures or ‘Black Jacobins’.9
Even more than by the legislative decrees of France, it was through the obtrusive intervention of their own efforts, their own popular initiative, and often spontaneously organised activities into a complex web of political and military events, that the Saint-Domingue slaves won their own freedom and finally became a politically independent state ... [Later, in 1802 after the French expeditionary force had arrived to reinstate slavery] the masses ... resisted the French from the very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership (Fick, 1990: 25, 228).
The outbreak of the revolt on 21 August 1791 was highly organised and was by no means spontaneous. A number of meetings had taken place beforehand, and the conspiracy was solemnised at a famous Vodun ceremony in Bois Caïman, a wooded area in the north. There, one of the early leaders of the uprising, Boukman, is said to have made a call to arms in which he stated, ‘Couté la libeté li palé nan coeur nou tous!’ (Listen to freedom; it speaks in all our hearts!) (p. 93). The category libeté (freedom, in Creole) along with liberté générale, droit naturel and humanité (universal freedom, natural right and humanity) will be one of the recurring political categories of this mode of politics.
Although there had been many rebellions and conspiracies on the island before, along with a tradition of marronage, where maroons (bands of runaway slaves) living in the hills led a semi-autonomous existence and executed guerrilla-type raids on plantations, the 21st August was a singular event with enormous consequences, as it set in motion a continuous series of struggles for freedom that only ended (and then only temporarily, as we shall see) with independence in 1804. It was thus truly an event in Badiou’s sense of the term; in other words, an occurrence that systematically altered subjectivities both in Haiti and throughout the Western world. In gauging the consequences of this event, it is also important to note that in rebelling against the French, the plantation slaves ‘took care to destroy ... not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation’ (Fick, 1990: 97). As Fick notes, this is an important indication of the fact that slaves were concerned to destroy not simply their legal status, but also everything linked to plantation production which they associated understandably with slave work; as a result, they made a powerful claim on the land itself (p. 180). As time passed, this was to lead to conflict between ex-slaves and their leaders, as the latter were primarily concerned with retaining the plantation system and only abolishing slave labour itself in a legal sense.
The major intellectual figure of this mode of politics was undoubtedly Toussaint Louverture. In addition to being an exceptionally brilliant military commander, a result in no small measure of his having the support of the masses whom he forged into an army, Toussaint expressed clearly the political subjectivity of the majority until around 1796. Thereafter, a major division developed between him and the mass of slaves and ex-slaves, which grew eventually into a gulf leading to his demise; but before then he was able to express the main categories of the Human Freedom mode of politics in abundantly clear terms. Importantly, he always referred to a notion of universal humanity and ‘natural right’ and never asserted Black superiority in opposition to the dominant colonial racism. The limits of this sequence of the Human Freedom mode can be set between 1791 and 1796; thereafter, a new sequence – a militarist sequence – begins, which lasted from 1797 until 1804. The first sequence was punctuated by the universal abolition of slavery by the civil commissioner Sonthonax, under pressure from slave resistance in the north on 29 August 1793 and then, largely as an effect of this, in France itself on 4 February 1794, when slavery was abolished by the National Convention in all French colonies. Toussaint spoke in the following terms:
For too long, gentlemen, ... we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself ... We are your equals then by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black or an advantage to be white. If the abuses of the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the fortunate revolution that has taken place in the motherland which has opened for us the road which our courage and labour will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating ... by your decrees you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for 480,000 individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess ... We present to you our demands as follows: First, general liberty for all men detained in slavery ... Here, gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die [1792] ... I have always held humanity in common to all [1794] ... I believe that this is only possible by serving the French Republic; it is under its flag that we are truly free and equal [1796] ... [Let us overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human species into a single brotherhood ... the oath that we renew [is] to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery ... We have known how to confront danger to obtain our liberty, and we will know how to confront death to preserve it. This, Citizens and Directors, is the morality of the people of Saint-Domingue, these are the principles I transmit to you on their behalf [1797] (Aristide, 2008: 6, 7, 8, 10, 19, 28, 33, 34–5, emphasis added).
These extracts provide a flavour not only of Toussaint’s eloquence but of his steadfast commitment to and affirmation of universal freedom and humanity on the basis of natural right, and thus of his expression of a distinct mode of politics. Edward Saïd (1993: 280) has rightly noted that, according to C.L.R. James’s account, Toussaint ‘appropriates the principles of the Revolution not as a Black man but as a human, and he does so with a dense historical awareness of how in finding the language of Diderot, Rousseau, and Robespierre one follows predecessors creatively, using the same words, employing inflections that transformed rhetoric into actuality’.
Nesbitt (2008a: 63) is therefore right to stress, following Césaire, the centrality in Toussaint’s thought of a transformation in ‘consciousness of universal freedom as a categorical imperative’ founded on natural right. It is this singular subjectivity which shows the truth during this sequence of the universality of humanity in the Human Freedom mode. Although many military campaigns were conducted and fought in order to free the slaves, the political discourse was in essence not militaristic. The sites of this subjectivity included maroons and independent bands, secret societies of plantations workers and slave armies.10 The context for the Saint-Domingue revolution was the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it took the conception of humanity of the French Revolution (often limited, particularly by the right to property) to its logical conclusion. In doing so, the slaves exceeded the limited idea of the human as defined by the Enlightenment, which saw only some privileged members of humanity as fully human (Sala-Molins, 2008). They thus had to think singular political subjectivities beyond the accepted idea of human nature of the time and hence to produce a universal and eternal truth which insisted that all humans, without any exception whatsoever, are capable of reason. Francine Gauthier (1992) shows that the language in which this truth was expressed was that of ‘natural right’, as it was only an adherence to this conception that saw all ‘men’ as given by nature as free subjects.11 It is to this natural right that the slaves of Saint-Domingue gave political expression when they affirmed their humanity and thus established the truth of universal humanity in practice. Yet by 1796 the Human Freedom mode seems to have achieved all it could. It had become – in Lazarus’s formulation – ‘saturated’, a fact that became gradually apparent as a state politics of militarism came to dominate subjectivity, and a distance developed between the leadership, particularly as represented by Toussaint, and the masses of freed slaves. Nesbitt (2008a: 79) notes for example: ‘Toussaint’s actions retained a social and political core only as long as they were guided by a political principle: the universal abolition of slavery and the destruction of the plantation system that enabled it. Toussaint’s limitations arose precisely when he began to abandon that fidelity in the late 1790s.’
MILITARISM, 1797–1804
From 1797 a militarised statist subjectivity became dominant among the ‘Black Jacobin’ leadership and for Toussaint in particular.12 However, it was arguably not the shift in Toussaint’s politics that was the cause of the ending of the mode, but rather the saturation of the Human Freedom mode that made Toussaint’s actions possible. Once slavery was abolished by decree, a fidelity to humanity would have had to take a different form in order for the mode to be sustained. The freed slaves, particularly the African-born bossales (as opposed to the créoles, who were born on the island (see Nesbitt, 2008a)), did indeed have a clear idea of the form in which universal freedom should be thought. Their unique prescription – which was an obvious impossibility for Toussaint to imagine – concerned the breaking up of the large estates into subsistence family units.13 This was not a conception shared by their leadership, with the exception of Moïse, who would consequently pay for his closeness to the masses with his life (Nesbitt, 2008b).
The political sequence 1797–1804 was one characterised by the militarisation of agricultural production, the reorganisation of the estates on the basis of ‘wage slavery’ (to use one of Marx’s very apt expressions), the dictatorship of Toussaint until 1802, when he was kidnapped by the French, and the mass mobilisation of the ex-slaves with the consequent military defeat of the Napoleonic expeditionary force sent to restore slavery. The effects on politics were clear: all politics became systematically militarised until independence was achieved under the command of Dessalines. Toussaint, who eventually acquired full powers on the island, was, along with the civil commissioners of the French Republic, intent on keeping the plantation system intact and invited many Whites to return to manage the sugar estates. The core idea was simply that Saint-Domingue’s economic viability was only possible if based on export production to the metropole, to which Toussaint was totally committed. In the face of worker opposition, a number of work codes were instituted that inaugurated new forced-labour regimes, often under the supervision of Whites whose claim to technical expertise constituted their managerial power. Fick comments:
The workers resisted Toussaint’s rural code just as they had resisted that of Polverel [one of the civil commissioners] ... They were legally, physically, and psychologically no longer slaves, and Toussaint’s system, like that of the civil commissioners before him, deprived them of any means by which to give substance and real meaning to their freedom. Freedom rather was thrown at them as an abstraction, for it was always in the name of general emancipation that Toussaint ... regimented their labour, deprived them of land, and deprived them by the constitution of the right to practice voodoo; in short, imposing upon them Western modes of thought and of organization in an attempt to bring an autonomous, and economically viable, Saint Domingue into the modern world (Fick, 1990: 208).14
In addition, Toussaint’s constitution of 1801, which banned slavery but simultaneously set him up as the unquestioned ruler of the island – a king, in so many words – was drafted without the participation of any ex-slave. By 1801 the rural masses had broken out in open rebellion against Toussaint’s rule; this included an organised insurrection of farm workers in the north. According to James (2001: 216), Moïse, who was Toussaint’s adopted nephew, apparently reacted very badly to Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, calling Toussaint an ‘old fool ... he thinks he is King of San Domingo!’ ‘It was Moïse ... who embodied the aspirations and needs of the rural masses. More than that he also believed in their economic and social legitimacy, and, if he did not ostensibly organise the insurrection, he nevertheless wholly supported it in opposition to Toussaint’ (Fick, 1990: 209).
Toussaint had Moïse arrested and, according to James (2001: 225), ‘would not allow the military tribunal even to hear him’; not surprisingly, Moïse was executed. After 1800, Toussaint and the other generals gradually lost confidence in the masses and defected to the French; it was only under popular pressure and in the course of popular resistance against the French that some of them returned to positions of leadership. By then, it was no longer humanity and libeté that dominated the thinking of politics, but forms of militarism and monarchy, despite the fact that the leaders ostensibly remained committed to a principled notion of emancipation. Thus Toussaint declared in December 1801:
It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man. We are free today because we are the stronger. The consul [Bonaparte] maintains slavery in Martinique and in Bourbon [Réunion]; we shall therefore be slaves when he is the stronger (cit. Césaire, 1981: 278, my translation).
Independence in 1804 marked the end of the militaristic sequence begun in 1797. It was independence that in this sequence had formed the category around which politics was thought and people were mobilised, especially in 1803 under Dessalines, and organised (guerrilla) warfare was deployed to defeat the French and stop the reintroduction of slavery. Concurrently small bands of independently organised maroons and Vodun leaders were viciously eliminated, yet Barthélemy (2000: 216–18) shows that these maroons were in fact organised and led in a much more collective and less hierarchical manner. As Fick writes, ‘It was because he [Dessalines] could see no further that he resorted to a crude policy and military strategy of outright liquidation of those independent leaders refusing his authority, but yet who had initially sustained the war against Bonaparte’s army and had made his own defection [back to the side of Haiti] effectually possible and meaningful’ (Fick, 1990: 233). Perhaps Fick is mistaken here, and Dessalines realised quite clearly the threat that this alternative provided to the rule of the new Creole elite whom he represented. In fact, it was this vicious opposition of the state to popular concerns that was to characterise Haiti for many more years to come.15
What truths, then, did the two singular events of 1791 and 1804 propose? The first opened up the universality of humanity, the truth of universal freedom (as opposed to freedom for some and not for others). In politics there is no superior universal truth to this. The second proposed the universal of nationhood among African peoples (‘the national question’ or the ‘right to self-determination’, as it became known in the 20th century). This truth has been much more controversial because nationhood has tended to be equated with statehood, although the equation is invalid, as it is possible to consider a nation distinct from a state, as we shall see. In any case, ‘nation’ can denote a pure subjectivity and not only a community of citizens. Indeed, this problem came to constitute the central contradiction of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. I shall discuss some of the dimensions of this truth in Africa through the medium of Fanon’s work in the next chapter. In the meantime, we can gain insight into some of the problems arising from the notion of a politics of freedom through a brief discussion of the struggles over landownership following upon Haiti’s independence.
RETHINKING FREEDOM AS RURAL EQUALITY, 1804–1960
Independence opened a new sequence in Haiti, that of the struggle for the formation of a peasantry through what is known in the development literature as ‘agrarian reform’. In the literature this issue is treated as a problem of political economy and the state. Here, however, it must be understood fundamentally as a question of politics. The politics of the supposed necessity of maintaining the plantation system was proposed on the basis of its technical superiority, its ‘obviousness’.16 This probably constituted the first appearance of this kind of argument, which was to become the core of a predominant statist approach to ‘development’ in post-independence countries and a constantly recurring theme in 20th-century politics. In its 19th-century version it was perhaps proposed most clearly within the Marxist tradition by Karl Kautsky in his book The Agrarian Question, in which an argument regarding the economic superiority of large-scale enterprises was made on the grounds of their technical efficiency. In the 20th century it regularly took the form of an argument for the primacy of ‘economic growth’, ‘technical progress’ or the ‘development of the productive forces’.17 Yet, central to this debate in newly independent Haiti was the actualisation of freedom and its consequent extension into equality:
Permanent freedom had been won through independence. But the masses had not yet won the freedom to till their own soil. And this, perhaps more than anything else, sums up what the peasant masses expected out of freedom. A personal claim to the land upon which one laboured and from which to derive and express one’s individuality was, for the black labourers, a necessary and an essential element in their vision of freedom. For without this concrete economic and social reality, freedom for the ex-slaves was little more than a legal abstraction. To continue to be forced into labouring for others, bound by property relations that afforded few benefits and no real alternatives for themselves, meant that they were not entirely free (Fick, 1990: 249).
According to Barthélemy (1990: 28), it is precisely the exceptional character of a society of freed ex-slaves that explains the ‘egalitarian system without a state’ which gradually emerged in rural Haiti. The African-born bossales managed to acquire ownership of peasant parcels and the plantation estate system was largely destroyed. The process began in 1809 and was initiated by Pétion, who ruled the south of the country while (King) Christophe ruled the north. The forced-labour system was abandoned and large private estates were broken up and leased to peasant sharecroppers (Lundhal, 1979: 262). As a result, no latifundia developed in Haiti, unlike in most of post-independence Latin America and the Caribbean. The masses of Haitians insisted on establishing a parcel-owning peasantry to anchor their political independence in economic independence – successfully as it turns out – so that the new bourgeoisie was deprived of direct access to surplus labour. A merchant bourgeoisie then developed that extracted surplus from beyond the peasant system, and it is on this class that the state was founded (Trouillot, 1980). Within peasant society itself, a number of methods of self-regulation – largely of African origin – enabled the restriction of differentiation and the dominance of a system of equality that remained at an objective distance from state power. These methods included unpaid collective forms of work, witchcraft and secret societies, a common religious ideology, and family socialisation (Barthélemy, 1990: 30–44). In fact Barthélemy makes the point that, from 1804 onwards, it gradually became understood by the masses of the bossales that ‘the only alternative to the colonial hierarchical system is that of equality, more so than that of liberty, as while the latter enables freedom from external oppression, it is not able to take on board the ideological content of the system. Only equality is able to put into place an anti-system’ (1990: 84, my translation).
A society and nation developed which placed itself in opposition to the postcolonial state.18 Barthélemy refers to this kind of politics as a new form of ‘marronage, a counter-culture, a structural and collective reaction of escape’ (2000: 379, my translation). We can also understand it as a singular form of politics which attempted to distance its thinking from that of the state and which was simultaneously rooted in local traditions of resistance to oppression. Commonly, this subjectivity was expressed in proverbs or sayings, the most important of which was ‘Tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun’, which, loosely translated, means ‘Every person is a person even though they are not the same person’.19 Barthélemy (2000: 293–4) explains this as a statement governing the world view of the Haitian rural people, for it is more than a simple proverb and reflects a fought-for rule of social and political practice. The point is that equality cannot exist without difference and that, correspondingly, difference makes no sense without equality. ‘In order to be different, not to be memn moun, each man must begin by identifying what he has in common with others; what is the basic identity from which variations can be felt, interpreted and used’ (p. 293, my translation). While these variations obviously exist, they are restricted from becoming hierarchical through group reactions that limit the entrenchment of these forms of behaviour; these reactions include ‘the attribution to one person of various statuses in different contexts’ (p. 302, my translation). ‘A good reputation, [social] behaviour, personal relations, all contribute to balancing out the purely quantitative [differences]’, and consequently identification is sought with the ideal of a ‘middle peasant’ (moun mouayen) (p. 303, my translation).
Barthélemy insists that, while Haitian rural society is generally understood as a failure, as wedded to traditions and poverty, it is in fact a highly organised social system that is self-regulating without an institutionalised state structure. In order to achieve this, it had to keep hierarchical Creole society and the formal state at a distance, to block all attempts at individual enrichment and power-seeking, and to harmonise the group through a kind of automatic regulation of individual behaviour; ‘all this outside any “political” dimension’ of state control’ (Barthélemy, 1990: 29, my translation). In this way the Haitian nation (if by ‘nation’ we mean the subjectively constituted unity of the people) constituted itself in a manner that distanced it from the state. Nesbitt (2008: 171) notes that this egalitarian system, ‘a legacy of the Haitian revolution, functioned in such a state of dynamic equilibrium from the late 1790s to the 1960s until the destruction of the Haitian (natural and social) environment under the regime of Papa Doc (Duvalier) undermined its viability’, through, interalia, the systematic use of terror. This suggests the existence of an egalitarian political sequence, which we can (very provisionally) date between approximately 1809 and 1960.
While fidelity to the Human Freedom mode led the African bossales to establish an egalitarian rural society, and while the reactive subjectivity of the state and military leaders attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to control and limit the truth of freedom and equality post-independence, an uneasy truce was established between the two. It was, however, the obscure subjectivity born of colonial and neo-colonial power that has been able ever since to destroy and occlude the liberatory power of the politics of humanity so remarkably initiated by the slaves of Haiti. In what Peter Hallward has called ‘an endless counter-revolution’, the outside world, initially slave-owning, closed ranks and ‘locked the country in a state of economic isolation from which it has never recovered’ (2007: 12). The country was forced to pay ‘compensation’ to the French for the loss of its slave economy of 150 million francs, which it had to repay by borrowing from French banks at extortionate rates of interest; although the sum was cut eventually to 90 million francs, ‘by the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80% of the national budget. France received the last instalment in 1947’ (p. 12). The imperial ambitions of the Western states were actualised by the US invasion of Haiti in 1915, which lasted until 1934.
By the time they pulled out ... US troops had gone a long way towards discouraging peasant resistance to what was only the first of such repeated doses of imported ‘modernization’, killing anything between 15,000 and 30,000 people in the process. In suggestive anticipation of their future commitments to Haitian democracy, the US validated their occupation through a plebiscite that apparently won 99.2% of the vote (2007: 14).
Ever since this time, the Western powers, particularly the US, have supported criminal regimes that have gone out of their way to rule the country by terror, the most notorious of which have been those of Papa Doc Duvalier (1957–71) and his son, Baby Doc (1971–86), thus affirming the continued prevalence of a monarchical-type state in the country until 1990. In other words, the obscure subject had practically succeeded in obliterating all traces of the universal truth of humanity established by the African slaves of Haiti. It was only with the coming to power of Aristide in 1990 that for the first time the people of Haiti were again able to recover some say in their political affairs and the subjectivity of humanity was revived (Hallward, 2007). Similarly, in intellectual discourse, the achievements of the Africans of Haiti have been systematically occluded by what Depelchin (2005) called the ‘syndromes of discovery and abolition’: popular (emancipatory) achievements have been systematically written out of history by neo-colonial and frankly racist ‘syndromes’ whereby only certain sections of humanity arrogate to themselves the right to knowledge and to transform the world. The objectivism of the reactive and obscure subjects has been able to occlude the singularity of Haiti’s experience, under a general assertion of ‘poverty’ attributed to the incapacity and inanity of the ‘underdeveloped’ Black world as a whole, in a way that reminds one how the slave rebellion of 1791 was totally incomprehensible to intellectual thought in Europe at the time (Trouillot, 1995). Finally, it has been extremely difficult to resurrect the achievements of the Haitian people and to save them from the oblivion to which they were condemned until the election of Aristide, itself a direct result of the return of the people into the field of politics (Depelchin, n.d.). This simply reconfirms the political conditions of existence for the resurrection of the evental truth.
CONCLUSION
It must be reiterated that the discipline of history is purely imaginary, as it is only a more or less valid narrative after the fact. As Badiou puts it (2009d: 190), ‘there is no real of history’. History is therefore best understood as a ‘thought-relation-of-the-state’, as Lazarus expresses the point, as a discipline that in its fundamental modus operandi is only able to fuse the objective and the subjective. I will develop this question at length in chapter 3. What I have done in this present chapter is to introduce, with regard to the analysis of African emancipatory subjectivities in the 18th century, the methodology and theoretical justification for an analysis of sequences and of historical modes of politics limited in time and located in specific sites. In this context, I have also illustrated the point that each mode of politics must be understood internally in terms of the deployment of its own categories. No two sequences are oriented by exactly the same combination of categories of thought. What this suggests is that, in order to avoid a collapse into historicism, politics in history must be understood as discontinuous. This idea has been theorised by Lazarus, as we have seen, and I shall continue to illustrate it in following chapters in greater detail; it is also held by Badiou, who insists in his more phenomenological work that ‘the discontinuity of worlds is the law of appearance and hence that of existence’ (Badiou, 2009d: 190). If what we are faced with is the discontinuity of worlds – i.e. of situations – the apparent continuity of history can be understood as a state-inspired narrative.
If sequences are discontinuous, then so are their categories. Some may be revived, but their emancipatory content would have to be developed at a distance from reactive and obscure subjects represented in state and colonial subjectivities. Trouillot has argued convincingly that the truth of the universality of humanity affirmed by the Haitian Revolution was simply incomprehensible at the time (it named the ‘void of the situation’, to use Badiou’s terminology) and that it challenged ‘the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment. The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were “unthinkable facts” in the framework of Western thought’ (Trouillot, 1995: 82, emphasis in original).
But this is arguably always the case for political truths, as they cut through existing knowledges and overthrow the intellectual theories of emancipation of the time.20 In Zibechi’s (2010: 83) very apt formulation, ‘a kind of epistemological earthquake occurs when those who have occupied the depth of society for centuries ... emerge as subjects, which calls into question the subject/object relationship, one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism’. And, of course, the systematic dehumanisation of the slave system could manage to enable and make possible, through its subversion, the construction of its opposite, a truly inspiring mode of politics founded on affirming the universality of humanity. The fact that it took a successful struggle against slavery to instil in thought the truth of the universality of humanity with no exceptions whatsoever constitutes a major gift by Africans to humanity, which should be the object of celebration. Unfortunately this has not been the case.
Of course, for the dominant knowledge of the time, slaves simply could not possibly be understood to successfully affirm their freedom and humanity, for they were not (fully) human, being African; in fact, a ‘free native’ was a contradiction in terms, as Africans were by definition unfree, irrespective of whether they were slaves or not. One could not be both a ‘man’ and a ‘native’; the two were mutually exclusive. Yet for writers such as Nesbitt, Haiti was simply the culmination of the subjectivity of what he calls the ‘Radical Enlightenment’: ‘It was the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1791–1804 that carried forward the new logic of universal equality under a single imperative: no humans can be enslaved’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 97). There was for him no fundamental invention, destruction and reordering of thought; after all, the French state itself was thinking through Enlightenment categories – it was just a matter presumably of ‘radicalising’ these.
To reason in this manner is not only to understate the revolutionary character and extraordinary achievements of the Saint-Domingue and Haiti events, but it also enables Nesbitt to suggest that, as human rights were pushed to their ultimate then, so they can constitute the basis of an emancipatory project today.21 He recognises the current imperial character of human rights discourse but asserts: ‘beyond any – necessary – critique of its ideological misuse in the era of the UN as an arm of empire, the question of human rights must be rethought from below; they are not a problem to be left to nation-states and their mouthpieces’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 101, emphasis in original). The problem here is, of course, the idea of ‘rethinking from below’ discourses and politics that are those of the state and empire, as these notions are said to have been somehow ‘misused’ and needing to be ‘rethought’. Presumably such ‘rethinking from below’ could apply to all sorts of universal categories, from the market to democracy, freedom, equality and the state, all having been radically ‘misused’ by power over the centuries. ‘Rethinking from below’, even if we were to know clearly what it means, is not a serious emancipatory conception, for it ultimately attempts to think emancipation from within state categories; one cannot think emancipation from within and from beyond state categories simultaneously: a thorough break from state subjectivity is necessary. In this context, Badiou (2012c) notes quite rightly that ‘one cannot oppose a thought perspective by sharing its axioms’.
Moreover, to assert such a ‘thinking from below’ is to forget that it is no longer possible to affirm the universality of humanity through a human rights language today, as the whole idea of ‘natural right’ on which the 18th-century universal conception was founded is no longer in existence and the ‘right to property’ reigns supreme (Gauthier, 1992). The language of universal human rights of the Human Freedom mode has been fundamentally altered today into something quite different. Gauthier’s work shows how during the French Revolution an extensive struggle occurred between, on the one hand, the idea of a fundamental and overriding notion of ‘natural right’, which was seen (following Locke) to be universal (and which Toussaint stressed), and, on the other hand, the primacy of the rights of property owners – the rights of Man ‘in society’ – which subordinated rights to a given social division of labour and hierarchy and which has constituted the dominant conception of ‘universal human rights’ ever since Thermidor.22 Césaire’s comment on this understanding of human rights is still accurate today, unfortunately: ‘the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has cherished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been – and is – narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’ (1972: 15).
To orient one’s politics around human rights discourse today is to think within state politics, as I shall show in detail in later chapters. In Saint-Domingue in the 18th century, human rights could develop into an emancipatory politics precisely because the political situation or world in question was a colonial one and hence was unable to sustain a universal conception of the human, however much this may have been a hegemonic state discourse in the French metropolis.23 In the 20th century, the idea of national self-determination could only be held consistently against colonial power, as we shall see; it could not be comprehended from the perspective of the colonial state or the coloniser, as a number of militant writers of national freedom made clear. In either case the Idea of universal humanity or freedom-through-the-nation could not be a state conception exclusively, for it was only realisable through politics at a distance from the state. Any attempt to think it exclusively through the state only became indicative of its collapse.
Today, as Chatterjee (2004: 100) rightly observes, at a time when the ‘protection of human rights is a function of empire’, human rights can no longer be the basis of any emancipatory politics in the neo-colonies. Human rights discourse in Haiti in the 18th century constituted a politics at a distance from the state, and thus could be emancipatory. Today, human rights discourse orients the politics of the reactive and obscure subjects and, as a result, can only be opposed to emancipation. Finally, it should perhaps be noted that Badiou’s idea of ‘resurrection’, which one could possibly appeal to in this context, brings to light only the names of the ‘egalitarian’ or ‘communist’ invariants of every sequence, and not the names and categories through which they are acted out; these can only be the categories of specific sequences which by their very nature are singular (Badiou, 2009a: 76).
APPENDIX
Mandé Charter or Oath of the Manden, 1222
Source: Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wâ Kamissoko, La Grande Geste du Mali, vol. 2, Soundjata ou la gloire du Mali, Paris: Karthala-Arsan, 1991, p. 39, my translation.
1.The hunters declare:
Every (human) life is a life.
It is true that a life comes into existence before another life,
But no life is more ‘ancient’, more respectable than any other,
In the same way no one life is superior to any other.
2.The hunters declare:
As each life is a life,
Any wrong done unto a life requires reparation.
Consequently,
No one should gratuitously attack his neighbour,
No one should wrong his neighbour,
No one should torment his fellow man.
3.The hunters declare:
That each person should watch over their neighbour,
That each person should venerate their progenitors,
That each person should educate their children as it should be done,
That each person should provide
For the needs of their family.
4.The hunters declare:
That each person should watch over the country of their fathers.
By country, or motherland, or ‘faso’,
One must understand also people;
For ‘any country, any land,
Which was to see people disappear,
Would soon become nostalgic’.
5.The hunters declare:
Hunger is not a good thing.
There is nothing worse than this
On this earth.
As long as we hold the quiver and the bow,
Hunger will no longer kill anyone in the Manden,
If by chance hunger were to arrive;
War will no longer destroy any village
For the purpose of acquiring slaves;
That is to say that no one will from now on
Place the bit in the mouth of his fellow
In order to sell him;
Furthermore no one will be beaten,
And all the more so put to death,
Because he is the son of a slave.
6.The hunters declare:
The essence of slavery is today extinguished
‘From one wall to the other’, from one border to the other of the Manden.
Raids are banned from this day onward in the Manden.
The torments born of these horrors have ended from this day onward in the
Manden.
What an ordeal this torment is!
Especially when the oppressed has no recourse!
The slave does not benefit from any consideration
Anywhere in the world.
7.People from the old days tell us:
‘Man as an individual
Made of flesh and bone,
Of marrow and nerves,
Of skin covered in hair,
Eats food and drink,
But his soul, his spirit lives on three things:
He must see what he wishes to see,
He must say what he wishes to say
And do what he wishes to do.
If one of these things were to be missing from the human soul,
It would suffer and would surely become sick.’
In consequence, the hunters declare:
Each person from now on is free to dispose of his or her own self,
Each person is free to act in the way they wish,
Each person disposes of the fruit of their labour from now on.
This is the oath of the Manden
For the ears of the whole world.
The Charter of Kurukan Fuga, 1236
Source: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/36/38515935.pdf (adapted).
1.The Great Mandé Society is divided into sixteen clans of quiver-carriers, five clans of marabouts, four groups of ‘nyamakalas’ and one group of slaves. Each has a specific activity and role.
2.The ‘nyamakalas’ have to devote themselves to tell the truth to the chiefs, to be their counsellors and to defend through speech the established rulers and the order upon the whole territory.
3.The five clans of marabouts are our teachers and our educators in Islam. Everyone has to hold them in respect and consideration.
4.The society is divided into age-groups. The people (men or women) who are born during a period of three years in succession belong to the some age-group. The members of the intermediary class between young and old people should be invited to take part in making important decisions concerning society.
5.Everybody has a right to life and to the preservation of its physical integrity. Accordingly, any attempt to deprive one’s fellow being of life is punished with death.
6.To win the battle of prosperity, the general system of supervision has been established in order to fight against laziness and idleness.
7.It has been established among the Mandenkas, the sanankunya (joking relationship) and the tanamannyonya (blood pact). Consequently any contention that occurs among these groups should not get out of hand, respect for one another being the rule. Between brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, between grandparents and grandchildren, tolerance should be the principle.
8.The Keïta’s family is nominated the reigning family of the empire.
9.The children’s education is the responsibility of the entire society. Paternal authority in consequence falls to everyone.
10.We should offer condolences mutually.
11.When your wife or your child runs away, stop running after her or him in the neighbour’s house.
12.The succession being patrilineal, never give up the power to a son when one of his fathers is still alive. Do never give up the power to a minor just because he has goods.
13.Never offend the Nyaras.
14.Never offend women, our mothers.
15.Never beat a married woman but only after her husband has interfered unsuccessfully.
16.Women, apart from their everyday occupations, should be associated with all our management.
17.Lies that have lived for 40 years should be considered as truths.
18.We should respect the law of primogeniture.
19.Any man has two parents-in-law: the parents of the girl we failed to have and the speech we deliver without any constraint. We have to hold them in respect and consideration.
20.Do not ill-treat slaves. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries.
21.Do not follow up with your constant attentions the wives of the chief, of the neighbour, of the marabout, of the priest, of the friend and of the partner.
22.Vanity is the sign of weakness and humility is the sign of nobility.
23.Never betray one another. Respect your word of honour.
24.In Mandé never wrong foreigners.
25.The ambassador does not risk anything in Mandé.
26.The bull confided to your care should not lead the cattle-pen.
27.The young lady can get married early when she is pubescent.
28.The young man can get married from 20 years old.
29.The amount of brideprice is three head of cattle: one for the girl, two for her father and mother.
30.In Mandé, divorce is tolerated for one of the following reasons: the impotence of the husband, the madness of one of the spouses, the husband’s incapability of assuming the obligations of the marriage. The divorce should occur out of the village.
31.We should help those who are in need.
32.There are five ways to acquire property: buying, donation, exchange, work and inheriting. Any other form without convincing testimony is doubtful.
33.Any object found without a known owner becomes common property only after four years.
34.The fourth offspring of a heifer is the property of the guardian. One egg out of four is the property of the guardian of the laying hen.
35.One head of cattle should be exchanged for four sheep or four goats.
36.To satisfy one’s hunger is not robbery if you don’t take away anything in your bag or your pocket.
37.Fakombé is nominated chief of hunters.
38.Before setting fire to the bush, don’t look at the ground, raise your head in the direction of the top of the trees to see if they don’t bear fruits or flowers.
39.Domestic animals should be tied during times of cultivation and freed after the harvest. The dog, the cat, the duck and the poultry are not bound by the measure.
40.Respect kinship, marriage and the neighbourhood.
41.You can kill the enemy, but not humiliate him.
42.In big assemblies, be satisfied with your lawful representatives.
43.Balla Fasséké Kouyaté is nominated supreme chief of ceremonies and main mediator in Mandé. He is allowed to joke with all groups, first of all with the royal family.
44.All those who transgress these rules will be punished. Everyone is bound to make effective their implementation.
NOTES
1.See the appendix to this chapter for the full text in English. The charter was orally transmitted within the hunters’ guild. For a useful account of the transmission of knowledge by the hunters of Mali, see Sedibé (2001).
2.This second document is known as the Kurukan Fuga Charter. It has recently been revived as an authentic expression of African culture, which is said to provide the basis for locating in tradition such current concerns as conflict resolution, decentralisation, environmental sustainability, and so on, in contemporary Africa, and has been promoted by various West African states and multi-state agencies. In fact, UNESCO has inscribed it on the ‘Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. See the appendix for translations of both texts.
3.Ifi Amadiume (1995: 42) refers to West African acephalous societies as ‘anti-state decentralised political systems’, an expression which has the merit of stressing their explicit opposition to state power and not simply the absence of a state. From the evidence regarding the extent to which they went in order to secure their autonomy, it seems indeed that Amadiume’s term is applicable to these BaKongo societies.
4.‘It is more than therapeutic techniques; it is rebuilding society to make human dignity meaningful again. Lessons drawn from this process of social healing should be important for any politics of peace. Lemba was conceptualized as “mukisi wa mfunisina kanda” – “a knowledge and practice of re-peopling the clan”’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2013: 15).
5.Janzen sees Lemba as gradually succumbing to the coastal slave trade in the late 19th century and to colonisation following on from it in the 20th century. Lemba survived for three centuries in this form, according to Janzen (1982: 6).
6.By ‘Kongolese’, Thornton means only those BaKongo who were subjects of the king of Kongo (1993: 185 n.17).
7.For Hallward (2004): ‘Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.’ See also Nesbitt (2008a, 2008b, 2009).
8.Law (2000: 131) insists: ‘In 1791, the insurrection of Haitian slaves was principally an African affair’ (my translation).
9.As in the work of C.L.R. James (2001), for example, which in this respect conforms to the conception of history of the time in which it was written. For an important discussion of James’s visions of emancipation and modernity, see Scott (2004).
10.I only managed to have access to Neil Roberts’s important text Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as my book was being prepared for publication, and thus have not been able to take account of its many useful insights here.
11.When it came to women, the evidence is less clear. In France, Olympe de Gouges had affirmed the equality of women in the Revolution (see https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/293/); in the case of Saint-Domingue, Girard (2009) examines the role of women in the last two years of the struggle for independence.
12.Césaire (1981: 269) comments on Toussaint’s politics at this time: ‘The social situation was of concern? The economic situation serious? He believed he could solve everything by militarising everything’ (my translation).
13.Fick (2000: 83, my translation) notes: ‘if they had been allowed to define the word freedom, it would have signified the individual possession of small land parcels and subsistence agriculture along with the selling of the harvest on local markets rather than for export’. Such, in my terms, was their second prescription for freedom.
14.Toussaint’s ultimately failed opposition to the formation of a parcel-owning peasantry in Haiti is an extremely important issue, for it illustrates the political gulf which had developed between him (and the other leaders) on the one hand and the ex-slaves on the other. The latter were predominantly African-born, but this fact, along with the fact that Toussaint was a Creole, cannot account either for the insistence by the people on forming a parcel-owning peasantry or for the leaders’ resistance to it. Nesbitt (following Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint’s biographer) wants to use Toussaint’s identity to account for his politics. He asserts (p. 168) that he was not African-born and that the demand for land tenure reform was African in inspiration. First, it is important to note that the land tenure system set up in Haiti was never African; there is no parcel-owning peasantry in Africa, but land is held by the community and not individually owned; private ownership exists but is rare in African tenurial systems. Neither is the minifundia system in Latin America or the mir in Russia (both of which are used by Nesbitt) an adequate empirical analogy, as in either case peasants were bound to a landlord class. The parcel-owning system was a novelty invented in Haiti. Parcel-owning without overlords is a peasant political prescription, some would say utopia, for it tends to lead to inequalities developing, as some peasants accumulate at the expense of others. The Haitian land tenure system seems to have been a successful attempt to actualise such a system and to maintain a relative equality by putting cultural obstacles in the way of individual accumulation, and it was these that were inspired by African customs, according to Fick (1990: 181) and Barthélemy (1990, 2000). What was African, then, was not the land tenure system as such, but the cultural restrictions on peasant class differentiation. This suggests a strong political commitment to egalitarianism. Second, to maintain that Toussaint opposed this set-up and insisted on a plantation system because he was Creole and had not experienced Africa, ultimately depoliticises Toussaint’s decisions in favour of a psychological account of his politics and by reference to his social location, although we have been told that his principled fidelity to a politics of humanity contradicted his social location (e.g. as an ex-slave-owner himself) (see Césaire, 1981: 243). Toussaint, we are told, was African enough to speak his father’s African language, to be a knowledgeable herbalist and to run a palaver. So why would he not be African on the question of land? The account should rather begin from his subjective politics. Toussaint was an assimilé – he could not envisage independence from France and he was enough of a modernist to be a Freemason, which suggests a fetishism of technical progress. Of course, a plantation system at the time would seem technically more ‘advanced’ than a peasant parcel. After all, this is what all states (probably without exception) have maintained ever since. And this is the point: Toussaint’s politics at this time were state politics. James (2001: 200) notes that ‘Toussaint knew the backwardness of the labourers, he made them work, but he wanted to see them civilised and advanced in culture’. Toussaint had clearly lost confidence in the masses, but it was also clear that his fidelity to morality and the law made him unable to listen to the people, let alone to be convinced by them. Given his position of power in the state and his desire to maintain an ‘efficient economy’ in the conceptions of the time, it is not surprising that he should insist on (and violently impose) his view of the superiority of the plantation system, however exploitative it may have been. This had less to do with his identity and more with the limited nature of his politics. He became hopelessly out of touch with the democratic aspirations of the masses. This is arguably a general problem with charismatic leadership, which largely conforms to a form of state leadership. As a political figure, Toussaint is very reminiscent of Mandela in many respects.
15.In so far as independent leaders who were close to the masses are concerned, of particular importance is the figure of Colonel Sans-Souci, on whom see Trouillot (1995). Trouillot notes that such rebel leaders were primarily African-born bossales as opposed to locally born créoles. Sans-Souci was from Congo; he was assassinated by Henri (later King) Christophe.
16.A point, incidentally, with which Césaire agreed (1981: 269ff).
17.See Kautsky (1899). This argument was vehemently opposed by Lenin in his analyses of the ‘agrarian question’ in Russia, as he argued that the large estates had to be broken up and redistributed to peasants, since the estates, if left unchecked, would reproduce the dominance of repressive – feudal-based – social relations and maintain the political power of landlords intact. He called this the ‘Junker’, ‘Prussian’ or ‘landlord’ road to capitalist development; in opposition to this, he supported the formation of a class of rich peasants from among the ranks of the peasantry to whom the large estates had been distributed, a process he referred to as the ‘peasant’ or ‘American’ road to capitalist development, as he held that this would lead to more democratic and open capitalist relations in the Russian countryside (see Lenin, 1905). I return to this point in chapter 7. In the post-independence period in Africa, the politics of ‘technical development’ and the necessity of the so-called ‘capture’ of the peasantry for ‘development’ were hotly debated in the critical literature, particularly in Tanzania; see Shivji (1985), Hyden (1983), Mamdani (1985), Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985), and Bernstein (1987).
18.The opposition between state and society seems to be the central motif of radical analyses of Haiti. Trouillot (1995) sees state and nation as opposed in Haiti, Barthélemy (1990, 2000) sees rural equality as being opposed to Creole hierarchy, and Lundhal (1979) sees the ‘government’ as exploiting the peasantry. Nesbitt (2008a: 170–6) largely follows Barthélemy’s argument. Barthélemy is himself heavily influenced by the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1974), who researched the purposeful opposition of society to the state.
19.The first part of the statement tout moun se moun was resurrected politically by Aristide as a guide to action for the Lavalas Party in the 1980s and 1990s (see Hallward, 2007). The term moun is clearly derived etymologically from the Bantu word (u) muntu for ‘a person’. It is interesting to note the origins of this prescription in African traditions, such as the idea of ubuntu, for example, although ubuntu has lost much of its egalitarian content and is considered today as a more or less lived ‘culture’ rather than a political practice (see e.g. Praeg and Magadla, 2014). Much more important as a guide to action is the related statement (in Zulu) by Abahlali baseMjondolo (2014), ‘unyawo alunampumulo’ (a person is a person wherever they may come from).
20.This point seems universally applicable, because knowledges, and particularly those of political change, could rarely foresee the forms emancipatory struggles would take. If the opposite were true, revolutions could be planned with precision or effectuated by a simple act of will. Unfortunately, this is never so. For example, few radical theoretical positions could believe in 1871 that the workers of Paris could run a state, or in 1917 that a Marxist-inspired revolution could take place in a backward agrarian country, or in the 1960s that a communist cultural revolution could take place against the Communist Party in power in China, or that the poor Vietnamese peasants could defeat the armies of France and the US in succession, or, in the 1980s, that apartheid could be overthrown by non-violent struggle in South Africa, and so on.
21.Following the logic of ‘radicalising (state) democracy’, as in Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
22.See also Gauthier (1998, 2004 and 2009). What should be evident is the reactive (in Badiou’s sense) character of the subjectivity prevalent within the discipline of sociology and other social sciences from their inception – emanating as these social sciences did from the ‘conservative reaction’ to the Enlightenment – in sustaining such a notion of human rights by insisting on the individual’s place ‘in society’. In addition, it should perhaps be noted that the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s insistence on the social, most notably in Edmund Burke’s criticisms of Locke’s egalitarian natural right, is at the origin of the liberal colonial conception of trusteeship, which itself is central to 19th-century liberalism and to the South African state’s justification for segregation and apartheid through the influential work of Jan Smuts. See Pitts (2005) and Losurdo (2014) on liberalism and empire, and Allsobrook (2014) on South Africa.
23.This is shown quite clearly by the simple fact that pamphlets on the rights of man and the citizen, which were obviously standard fare in the French metropolis, had to circulate clandestinely in Saint-Domingue, as they were considered subversive of the colonial system; see Fick (1990: 111 and elsewhere).
