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

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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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