By whom? Sudhir Hazareesingh.

When? 2020.

About what? The subtitle -- The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture -- gives us the bones. And this review by David A. Bell offers an admirably succinct summary: "No figure from the 18th-century 'age of revolution' had as extraordinary a life as Toussaint Louverture. He was born a slave in the 1740s, in one of the cruellest and deadliest environments humans have ever created: the French Caribbean colony then called Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where rapacious white planters worked hundreds of thousands of captive people to death to feed Europe’s growing taste for sugar and coffee. In the early 1790s, Toussaint helped start the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history and then moulded the rebels into a remarkably effective army. In 1794 he agreed to join forces with France’s radical first republic, which had proclaimed the abolition of slavery in its overseas empire. As a French army general and the colony’s lieutenant governor he defeated a series of enemies, including British invaders, and saved Saint-Domingue for France. By the end of the decade he had outmanoeuvred a series of French officials, overcome black rivals, emerged as the colony’s uncontested strongman, and brought it to the brink of independence. In response, France’s new leader Napoleon Bonaparte sent a massive military expedition to reassert full French control. It ultimately failed, leading to Haitian independence at the start of 1804, but it did manage to defeat Toussaint and take him prisoner. He died in the cold, lonely Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains of France in 1803."

And why this now? Well, somehow, that part of the world has come up quite a bit in my reading over the last year or so. Most recently, we had The Comedians by Graham Greene (focusing on Haiti, which was known in Toussaint's time as Saint-Domingue) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (focusing on the other two thirds of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, whose capital is Santo Domingo -- all these Saint Dominics get very confusing).

I was just starting to think that it was definitely time to investigate Haiti a bit more formally, when Hazareesingh's biography featured in a sale on Kindle. Ah, the serendipity of the reading life...



***

I'm not really qualified to judge the history here (the book won the Wolfson History Prize in 2021; Bell is impressed, judging it "by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time"; but Jeremy Black is underwhelmed, arguing that it "offers little of originality").

What is immediately clear is that Black Spartacus is well written (if a little repetitive at times); and the scholarly appendages (including notes, chronology, glossary, index, and illustrations) are extensive and thorough.

You do wonder whether the author, while not uncritical, was just a little too in love with his subject...

But then Toussaint is nothing if not a charismatic figure. You absolutely do find yourself cheering him on, and booing the colonial powers -- French, British, Spanish -- whenever they tried to do him down.

Ultimately, it's the usual tragedy. Archetypal, even. Toussaint is courageous, indefatigable, self-sacrificing, broad-minded, and generous -- right up until the time he comes into power. At that point, sugar-coat as you will, he turns distinctly dictatorial. But then there's another crisis. Another enemy to fend off (Napoleon's attempt to bring this upstart island to its senses with a good old-fashioned invasion). And suddenly Toussaint's back to his best. He's here, there, and everywhere, inspiring his followers to defend their hard-earned liberty against forces they couldn't trust not to enslave them all over again. By the end you're really hating the French for dragging this extraordinary man off to that dark, dank castle.


This is good sugar... But late-colonial Saint-Domingue's vast production of sugar and coffee was powered by slavery

***

Here's what I found particularly striking about Hazareesingh's account:

-- Toussaint was shaped by a variety of influences: His love of physical activity, sense of a bond with nature, Catholic faith, republican values, and African heritage (including vodou, a spiritual system and way of life which centred around the worship of spirits, and drew on West African traditions and indigenous Taino practices). He gained an almost magical reputation as a healer and a warrior. Adaptable, and adept at strategic deception, he was generally several steps ahead of his adversaries. By nature both a peace-maker and a rousing orator, it wasn't long before he had developed his own political style: "He preferred small steps to bold or ostentatious moves; to seek common ground where possible, and to bring people of all races together; and to limit the use of violence, if necessary by relying on ruse."

-- It was fascinating, after reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, to read about the French Revolution from a vastly different perspective. Given the ideological cross-currents Mantel illuminated, it's no surprise to find that the revolutionaries were not necessarily that progressive when it came to others' rights: "Slaves would have needed no reminding that revolutionary authorities in Paris had failed utterly to further the cause of emancipation between 1789 and 1791, and that the most ardent defenders of slavery in Saint-Domingue had appropriated revolutionary language for their own ends... When news of the rebellion reached France in October 1791 a dismayed [Jacques Pierre] Brissot asserted that it had to be a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, as black slaves did not possess the moral, intellectual and material capacities to launch an insurrection on such a scale... The political situation in France was evolving. The pro-colonial Constituent Assembly was replaced by a more progressive legislature, which in April 1792 promulgated a decree abolishing all racial discrimination in the colonies: it had taken the French Revolution nearly three years to arrive at this basic point."


By Jacob Lawrence, who was captivated by the Toussaint story, and dedicated his first major work to him. His 41 narrative paintings were first exhibited in Baltimore in 1939, and his aim was to draw on the experience of the Haitian Revolution to challenge ongoing "economic and racial slavery"...

-- For someone like me, born on the Isle of Man and resident in Sarawak, it's always interesting to watch the tug-of-war over power between the centre and what the centre sees as the periphery. Toussaint, having gained control of Santo Domingo, the eastern part of Hispaniola (the Spanish had agreed to hand this territory over to the French, but the process had been delayed), then went on to draft a constitution for the whole island, partly as a backstop against potential conservative change in France. Those provisions that not only made Toussaint governor for life, but also gave him the power to appoint his successor, were rightly subject to criticism. But the real problem was twofold: Firstly, the constitution-drafting process, the outcome of which gave the island considerable autonomy, went ahead without the say-so of the French; and secondly, it was happening against a background of out-and-out racism (Charles Vincent, a French military engineer who served as an emissary for Toussaint, felt that this constitution painted a target on the colony, arguing that "a black republic would be regarded as a threat by the imperial powers: not just the British, but also the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Dutch, who were all known for being 'cruel masters' in their dealings with black populations"). Vincent urged Napoleon not to send an expeditionary force to discipline the island. But he was not heeded: "In fact, Vincent predicted the sequence of events which would follow: the resistance of the majority of the black citizens; the strategic and logistical disadvantages the French army would face through lack of familiarity with the terrain, and the problems of resupply; the ravaging effects of the climate, and the onset of disease -- all culminating in the loss of the colony itself." Sure enough, by the time Toussaint was dying in the Fort de Joux, the occupiers were losing their advantage in Saint-Domingue. There was a general insurrection, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the new state of Haiti on 1 January 1804.

-- This next bit reads like a Greek tragedy: "What has become known as the Haitian War of Independence is sometimes portrayed as the second death of Toussaint Louverture. He did not want to break free from France, and until the very end he held on to the belief that the French would realize that their objectives could not be achieved by military force, and that a mutually beneficial arrangement with Saint-Domingue’s revolutionary leaders could be reached. This was not entirely unrealistic: Bonaparte himself later acknowledged at Saint Helena that the Saint-Domingue expedition had been a catastrophic mistake, one of the greatest he ever committed, and that he should have 'struck a deal with Toussaint, and made him viceroy'. However, the War of Independence saw the comprehensive mobilization of the rural masses, which Toussaint had been unable to achieve during his spring campaign and was seen through in the end by the very generals who had betrayed him, after owing him everything. When it was done, Dessalines systematically eliminated Toussaint’s supporters and allies, both white and black. The regime which emerged after independence, which explicitly rejected the colony’s European heritage, appeared to be the antithesis of Toussaint’s dream of a multiracial republic. It was as if, even though he had failed in every other respect, Bonaparte had at least achieved his goal of making Toussaint 'no longer exist'."



-- And things never really came right again. Dessalines was assassinated two years later, and the territory was divided into north and south. "In the early 1820s, Haiti was still widely regarded as a pariah state -- still unrecognized by the major powers and threatened militarily by them. Following exactly in Toussaint’s footsteps, in 1822 [Jean-Pierre] Boyer reinvaded Santo Domingo, which had reverted to Spanish rule, where he again abolished slavery. As the price of recognition by France, Boyer was eventually forced to agree to pay a ruinous indemnity of 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of her colony." In 1915 US President Woodrow Wilson ordered an invasion of Haiti, which remained occupied for nearly two decades. Then there was the Duvalier era. And today? Well, the gangs are still in charge...

-- Perhaps most intriguing of all is the way Toussaint's legacy has fired people down through the ages: "By the end of the nineteenth century, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution had become powerful symbols of collective emancipation, inspiring men and women far and wide, from the Atlantic right across to Māori communities in New Zealand: in 1863 one of their newspapers likened the Maori struggle to reclaim their rights from European settlers to that of the Haitian revolutionaries during their War of Independence... Slaves and freedmen, artists and statesmen, dock workers and public intellectuals, black nationalists and pan-Africans, devout Christians and uncompromising materialists, utopian rebels and order-loving conservatives, feisty Cuban labourers and misty-eyed Irish poets: Toussaint Louverture’s legend played to a dizzyingly broad gallery, reverberating throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, and prompted new ways of political thinking, while interacting in myriad ways with local struggles for emancipation."


William H. Johnson (1945)

***

All of which gives you lots of fascinating stuff to follow up on... To date, I've pursued just one lead. It's a short story by Ralph Ellison (1913-94). It's called Mister Toussan, and it appeared in 1996 in a posthumous collection called Flying Home and Other Stories.

Riley and Buster, two black kids, are discussing whether Africans are lazy or not (having been assured they are). Buster remembers a story his teacher told them, about "one of the African guys named Toussan what she said whipped Napoleon". He remembers that she said he came "from a place named Hayti." The boys act out the story, embroidering as they go, because "you know how grown folks is, they caint tell a story right". So they make it good and dramatic, concluding: "Toussan musta scared them white folks almost to death!"

And then they think:

"Ain't none of them stories in the books. Wonder why?"
"Hell, you know why, Old Toussan was too hard on them white folks, thass why."
"Oh, he was a hard man!"
"He was mean..."
"But a good mean!"
"Toussan was clean..."
"...He was a good, clean mean," said Riley.
"Aw, man, he was soooo-preme," said Buster.

At this point, Riley's Mum intervenes, telling them to go round the back and play: "You keeping up too much fuss out there. White folks says we tear up a neighbourhood when we move in it and you all out there jus provin' them out true."

They carry on talking about "Toussan" as they move on round to play in the alley -- and plot how they can steal some cherries from the old white guy across the road. As Darryl Pinckney says: "They don't know how dangerous it is for them to grow up with dreams of heroism. Because of their own experience the grandmothers and mothers are fearful for boys who are too bold and loud and too blatant about their wanting to be something, even if it's just a game."

Seeds sown, though... Carry on with the inspiration, Toussaint...


Jacob Lawrence