=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?R=E9f?=. : Re: Re: [governance] Just for fun Question

Sat May 5 03:32:19 EDT 2007

Interesting book on Louverture here:
Rui
____________________________________________________________

Toussaint Louverture, "simultaneously a devout Catholic, a Freemason
and a secret practitioner of voodoo."  Now, that's my kind of man.  In
another place, another time, he might have been simultaneously a
devout Muslim, a feminist, and a secret practioner of historical
materialism -- with that combination, a man would know better than to
take a perfidious empire's offer of negotiations.  :->  -- Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/books/review/Hochschild.t.html>
February 25, 2007
The Black Napoleon
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Biography.
By Madison Smartt Bell.
Illustrated. 333 pp. Pantheon Books. $27.

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.

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, 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."

On 03/05/07, Guyverson Vernous <guyversonv at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>    Not for fun, I would add Haiti the first independent black country with
> Toussaint Louverture.
>
> Guyverson Vernous
>
> *-------Message original-------*
>
>  *De :* yehudakatz at mailinator.com
> *Date :* 5/3/2007 11:44:44 AM
> *A :* governance at lists.cpsr.org
> *Sujet :* Re: Re: [governance] Just for fun Question
>
> > we must be living in different just-for-fun worlds
>
> My apologies. Your right,
>
> For me, I choose Chicago because it is the home of American Civil Rights
> Movement.
> But you are right, absolutely!
> There are plenty of other significant places where Justice found a home.
>
> South Africa (in his way Mandelas / Anti-Apartheid Movement), South
> America
> (in his way Che), Caribbean (in his way Fidel), India (in his way Ghandi),
> Poland (The Solidarity Movement)  etcetc 
>
> Enlighten me , where would You put the home of Justice?
>
> --
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>

-- 
________________________________________________

Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
2 Cutten St
Horison
Roodepoort-Johannesburg,
South Africa
Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336
Cell (+27) (0) 84-498-6838
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