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30094: Saint-Vil (publish) Napoleon-Toussaint comparison is an insult (fwd)





From: Jean Saint-Vil <jafrikayiti@hotmail.com>

Mr. ADAM HOCHSCHILD - New York Times

Your February 25, 2007 text titled, "The Black Napoleon", attracted my attention because, as a son of Haiti, I find that comparing Toussaint to Napoleon, beyond the fact that it is misleading, is in fact a grave insult. Shall one dub a leader of Nazi resistance: "The Jewish Hitler"?

In his book "Le Crime de Napoléon", French author Claude Ribbe provides ample detail describing how Napoleon tried to accomplish a total genocide of the Africans who revolted against the lucrative system of racial slavery in the Caribbean. The very cover of Ribbe's book shows an actual photograph of Hitler paying hommage to Napoleon at his musoleum in Paris. Hitler was fascinated with the man from whom he had learned many tricks of eugenics, including the use of chemicals (sulfure dioxide) to conduct mass murder. No, Toussaint, the Grandson of the Gaou Ginou, King of the Aladas People of West Africa, was no Black Napoleon. Neither was Napoleon a white Toussaint.

I am also puzzled by this claim in your article that Toussaint "welded the rebel slaves into disciplined units, got French deserters to train them, incorporated revolution-minded whites and gens de couleur into his army...". The French army which Toussaint led at various times did have white, mulatto and black soldiers but there is no historical support for this exclusive characterization of whites in the French army led by Toussaint as being "revolution-minded". These whites were serving France, not the Haitian revolution. How many of them stood up by the side of the Africans and their revolution after Napoleon had betrayed, kidnaped, exiled and eventually murdered Toussaint?

Perhaps you were refering to the Polish soldiers who ended up leaving the french army that brought them to Haiti, after the French dictator Napoleon had invaded their own homeland? If so, I would agree that indeed some of the Polishmen found common interest with the Africans and they joined them in the struggle against tyranny.

However, to credit the French deserters (Polish or otherwise) for the training received by the rebel slaves is to be completely oblivious to the nature of the African maroons and the fact that many of them were quite knowledgeable in the art of warfare from their very own African homeland (see Jean Fouchard's Les Marrons de la liberté and Les Marrons du Syllabaire). Toussaint joined the maroons before joining the Spanish and then the French- not the other way around. As a General he provided training to everyone under his command - black white or mulatto. So, I don't quite get this reference to French Deserters providing training to people fighting against their own interest. There have always been desperate efforts to find white heroes that never existed in the Haitian revolution. Some have even suggested that it is the French Revolution that inspired the Haitian revolution. As if Africans were too stupid to realize on their own the unacceptability of their condition. Likewise, I remember going to the theatre to watch a film about Steven Biko, only to find out Cry Freedom was really yet another deppiction of Tarzan saving the natives - this time in Apartheid South Africa...Biko's life was merely a backdrop. Perhaps, it is the difficulty of playing up such a theme that makes it take so long before the Haitian Revolution make it to the big Screen (right Danny?).

Also, the Africans of Haiti, who are still being punished for their bold resistance to white supremacy, did not win those victories of 1803 agaisnt the British, the Spanish and French armies, because of the work of ONE single man named Toussaint Louverture. This tendancy to isolate a successful African from the people that gave birth to his genius is too often seen in eurocentric writings. The reality is that African women and men were fighting from the shores of Africa and never stopped fighting. Among the earlier geniuses that led to the eventual abolition of racial slavery on the island, there are men like Makandal. Plimout, Makaya, Boukman, women like Sesil Fatiman, Sanit Belè, Marijann Lamatinyè, Toya Mantou etc... And, after the french betrayed General Toussaint Louverture who obviously credited them with much more humanity than they deserved, it was JEAN-JACQUES DESSALINES who led the Africans to victory. Dessalines who ?

For those who ask why have they never heard much about Dessalines, if it is he who is the ultimate liberator of Haiti, here is how one of Dessalines' natural enemies presented the situation of the whites in Haiti right after the declaration of independence:

"Former experience of the mildness and humanity of the blacks, inspired a hope of forgiveness and good treatment, notwithstanding the remembrance of recent circumstances, which might seem to preclude all expectation of mercy from that insulted and injured people.

The astonishing forbearance Toussaint, and of all who had served under him, encouraged a persuasion that their humanity, was not to be wearied out by any provocation. All the white inhabitants who had been carried off as hostages by Christophe, on his retreat from Cape Francois, had returned in safety, when the peace was made with Leclerc: and it was known that, during the whole time of their absence, they had been well treated by Toussaint and his followers; though the French, during that period, were refusing quarter to the negroes in the field, and murdering in cold blood all whom they took prisoners. But Toussaint was now no more and Dessalines was of a very different disposition".

So, Toussaint having ultimately fallen "victim" of the white supremacist clan, is being showcased as a model of virtue. But Dessalines who fought the beast (white supremacist racism) with 1/10th of the savagery that it had shown towards his people, is to be burried as long as possible. This tactic is not so different from the fake admiration we see often shown towards Martin Luther King Jr. by those who make it a duty to diminsh Malcom X, or towards a weakened and trembling Nelson Mandela, in order to dimish Winnie, the Warrior, Mandela.

Let me take this opportunity to also mention that when Miranda went to Jacmel, Haiti, in February 1806, it was the Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who gave strict orders to General Magloire Ambroise to receive him well and offer him munitions and men in order to liberate Latin America. We know that since then, the Africans of Haiti have been betrayed over and over again by Latin Americans with the notable exceptions of Fidel and Chavez... but that's another story, right comrade Lula ?

Men like Dessalines and Toussaint do not have equals in U.S. of French history where so-called revolutions took place only to further entrench racial slavery and denial of its consequences to this day. For, unlike Napoleon, Dessalines and Toussaint weren't fighting to steal other people's resources. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, these illiterate men actually beleived it to be self-evident that all men were created equal. They did not enslave their own offspring born of rape. Dessalines and Toussaint fought to free a people that had been kidnapped, humiliated, TERRORIZED for over 300 years. If they still are not getting their right place in history books, it is because the lions are still being chased - so the hunters may continue to tell their tales while wigging their tails to erase all trails. But, as sure as Osiris is dancing today because the usurpers of the story of his son Heru by Auset (Isis) have been "discovered", I know Dessalines and his people will eventually recieve due reparations (material, mental and spiritual), here on earth.

Ayibobo !

Jean Saint-Vil (Jafrikayiti)
Ottawa, Canada
www.jafrikayiti.com
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The Black Napoleon
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Biography.
By Madison Smartt Bell.

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD - New York Times
Published: February 25, 2007

Quick, what was the second country in the New World to win full independence from its colonial masters in the Old? Mexico? Brazil? Some place liberated by Bolívar? The answer, Madison Smartt Bell reminds us, is Haiti — which actually gave Bolívar some help.

The years of horrendous warfare that culminated in Haiti’s birth in 1804 is one of the most inspiring and tragic chapters in the story of the Americas. For one thing, it was history’s only successful large-scale slave revolt. The roughly half a million slaves who labored on the plantations of what was then the French territory of St. Domingue had made it the most lucrative colony anywhere in the world. Its rich, well irrigated soil, not yet overworked and eroded, produced more than 30 percent of the world’s sugar, more than half its coffee and a cornucopia of other crops.

When the slaves there rose up in 1791, they sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic world. But the rebels did more than win. In five years of fighting, they also inflicted a humiliating defeat on a large invasion force from Britain, which, at war with France, wanted to seize this profitable territory for itself. And later they did the same to a vast military expedition sent by Napoleon, who vainly tried to recapture the colony and restore slavery. The long years of race-based mass murder (which included a civil war between blacks and gens de couleur, as those of mixed race were known) left more than half the population dead or exiled, and Haiti lives with that legacy of violence still. Seldom have people anywhere fought so hard for their freedom. THE REAL TERM IS ATTEMPTED GENOCIDE

Seldom, too, have they so much owed success to one extraordinary man. Toussaint Louverture, a short, wiry coachman skilled in veterinary medicine, had been freed some years before the upheaval. About 50 when the revolt began, he was one of those rare figures — Trotsky is the only other who comes to mind — who in midlife suddenly became a self-taught military genius. He welded the rebel slaves into disciplined units, got French deserters to train them, incorporated revolution-minded whites and gens de couleur into his army and used his legendary horsemanship to rush from one corner of the colony to another, cajoling, threatening, making and breaking alliances with a bewildering array of factions and warlords, and commanding his troops in one brilliant assault, feint or ambush after another. Finally lured into negotiations with one of Napoleon’s generals in 1802, he was captured and swiftly whisked off to France. Deliberately kept alone, cold and underfed deep inside a fortress in the Jura mountains, he died in April 1803.

Toussaint’s is an epic story, and it lies at the heart of a much praised trilogy by Bell, the prolific American novelist. Bell’s new biography, “Toussaint Louverture,” is resolutely nonfiction, however. And welcome it is, for the existing biographies, from Ralph Korngold’s 1944 effort (dated, uncritical and unsourced) to Pierre Pluchon’s 1989 book (quirky, negative and only in French) are mostly unsatisfactory. Bell knows the primary and scholarly literature well, carefully sifts fact from myth and generally maintains a sober and responsible understated tone.

Maybe a little too sober and understated. I can’t help wondering whether Bell, so well known for his novels of Haiti, is bending over backward to show that as a biographer he is not making anything up. I wish he had given more rein to his novelist’s skills — not by inventing things, but by making more narrative use of the wealth of detail there is about this time and place. Part of the problem is that almost none of that detail has to do with the life of Toussaint himself, about whose first 50 years we know next to nothing. Bell points this out, and so the sources he quotes are almost entirely from after Toussaint’s sudden emergence as a leader: his letters and proclamations, and the relatively few eyewitness accounts of him.

But this largely leaves out the rich array of documentary testimony we have about life in brutal, high-living colonial St. Domingue, (CLR JAMES QUOTE) about people ranging from the planter Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux, who entertained his guests by seeing who could knock an orange off a slave’s head with a pistol shot at 30 paces, to the French prostitute who came to the colony looking for wealthy white clients and then complained to a newspaper that she found too much competition. And both British and French officers left diaries and memoirs about fighting the unexpectedly skilled rebel slaves — accounts as searing and vivid in their frustration as those by American soldiers blogging from Iraq.

Such things are not precisely about Toussaint, but they flesh out the world in which he lived and fought, and American readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Haitian history need all the help they can get.

Still, this is the best biography of Toussaint yet, in large part because Bell does not shy away from the man’s contradictions. Although a former slave, he had owned slaves himself. Although he led a great slave revolt, he was desperate to trade export crops for defense supplies and so imposed a militarized forced labor system that was slavery in all but name. He was simultaneously a devout Catholic, a Freemason and a secret practitioner of voodoo. And although the monarchs of Europe regarded him with unalloyed horror, he in effect turned himself into one of them by fashioning a constitution making himself his country’s dictator for life, with the right to name his successor.

“Within Haitian culture,” Bell writes, “there are no such contradictions, but simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one’s being under different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent” ones. Of such contradictions are great figures made; just think of our own Thomas Jefferson — who, incidentally, ordered money and muskets sent to his fellow slave owners to suppress Toussaint’s drive for freedom, saying of it, “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man.”

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.”

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