You're Dead to Me - The Haitian Revolution (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Marlene Daut and comedian Athena Kugblenu to examine the events and aftermath of the 18th century revolution in Haiti, the first nation to abolish slavery. They look at the life of revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, confront the atrocities committed against the people of Haiti and the literal price they were forced to pay for their freedom.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Hello, Greg here. Just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories and I do another podcast called Homeschool History, but that

one's mostly for kids. This podcast is a bit different. Here we bring together historical hotshots and clever comedians so we can chat and you can learn some stuff. And today we are jumping back over 200 years and jetting off to the Caribbean to learn all about the Haitian Revolution and how Haiti was the first modern nation to abolish slavery.

And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she's Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia and Associate Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She's a specialist in colonial literature, specifically about the Caribbean. It's Professor Marlena Daut. Hi, Marlena. How are you? Hello. Thank you for having me today. I'm doing very well. Lovely to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning comedian and writer. You'll have heard her loads of times on Radio 4 and on the Guilty Feminist podcast. She's got her own podcast, Keeping Athena Company. It's Athena Kiblenu. Athena, how are you? I'm fine, thank you. How are you? I'm very well. How are you with the story of Haiti? Have you got name recognition here?

Do you know any of the story or are you thinking, oh, no, this is new to me? I know a little bit of the story. British people would love to say that they were the first nation to abolish slavery and it's not true. No, obviously Haiti, Denmark abolished the slave trade. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, but not the abolition of slavery itself until 1833, which comes into force in 1834, but actually doesn't really come into force in Jamaica until 1838. So we're 30 years behind. We do abolish it eventually, but not the first. So what do you know? We start, as ever, with a So what do you know? And this is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. My guess is you don't know much.

It's not something we do very much in the UK in the history curriculum. And in terms of recent pop culture, the Haitian Revolution hasn't had much of a glamorous showing. There was a French film called Toussaint Louverture in 2012. It got mixed reviews. There was a film that was meant to be made. Danny Glover wanted to make it. And Hollywood said, but there are no white people in this. So no. Two words, lads. Black Panther. Come on. And if you're a gamer, you might know Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the

revolution from Assassin's Creed. He pops up in there. But Haiti doesn't really get into our headlines. So we're going to try and fix that now. Professor Marlena, this is a really, really complicated story. So can we start with the absolute Professor Marlena, this is a really, really complicated story. So can we start with the absolute basics? Modern Haiti is a nation of about 11 million people. They are on the west side of the island that I suppose you might call Hispaniola. And on the east side is the Dominican Republic. But how does it end up as Hispaniola?

How does it end up being Spanish, I suppose, and then French? All great questions. So Christopher Columbus, he lands on the island in 1492 in the eastern part of the island. He's going to rename it Little Spain, which eventually turns into Hispaniola. The western part of Santo Domingo, as the island would come to be called later, is ceded to France by Spain in 1697 at the Treaty of Ryswick. After that, it becomes the French colony of Saint-Domingue. So this is an island that has changed names multiple times. Okay, so it's got quite a complicated linguistic heritage. There are indigenous people, but I'm assuming they do not get upgraded to a five-star

luxury resort, do they? It's a sad story very quickly, I'm sure. Absolutely. So almost immediately, the indigenous population of the island raises up in rebellion against Spanish conquistadors, ultimately not successful. And then you had the scourge of smallpox with the increasing numbers of Spaniards coming over. The Spanish are also busy forcibly transporting captive Africans to the island to force them to work as slaves. And this process will essentially be complete by the end of the 17th century. And by that, I mean that the indigenous population will be 90% eliminated by that time. Wow. I mean, that's a genocide, basically. Yes. It's been called by historians the greatest genocide in human history, the conquest of

the Americas, including Mexico and South America and North America. And then, of course, people from Africa are enslaved, captured, brought across by ship, transplanted to this island, and then given a horrific life of brutal, backbreaking labor, growing crops, presumably. This is a plantation economy, isn't it? Their main crop was sugar, but they also grew coffee and indigo and exported those staples in large numbers back to Europe in the triangular slave trade. The fact that they were transporting so much back to Europe that had to be refined also created this dependency. And so

it really created a kind of hostile environment for the many different types of people who lived in the colony. And we talk about the Haitian Revolution as a singular thing, but actually, there had been previous uprisings, rebellions, resistance in the 1730s, 40s, 50s. So do these ones fail for any specific reason? I wouldn't codify it in language of success or failure, because the goals were constantly shifting. For example, once the Haitian Revolution breaks out, the goal is not necessarily to become independent from France. The goal is to disrupt the slave system and to break free from being slaves themselves. And so in the earlier periods, in the 1730s and 40s, enslaved

people would devastate crops, poison the crops, raid plantations, and they would run away. And in fact, there were whole sections of newspapers dedicated to fugitive slave, quote unquote, advertisements. And so then in the 1750s, you have one of the most famous episodes of enslaved resistance before the Haitian Revolution with a man named Macandal, who is thought to have been African-born. He was poisoning planters and he was using this network of enslaved people to do so. He eventually ends up being captured and he's burned at the stake in 1758 in front of a church

in Cap-Conse, which was the capital of the colony. But just as they're kind of trying to set him on fire, local legend has it that he transformed himself into a mosquito and flew away. And so Haitian people have used this idea of Macandal as, you know, you can kill our bodies, but you can't really kill the kind of revolutionary spirit. It's out there in the air. And then it will be interesting because mosquitoes will be the vector of disease that ends up, in a sense, killing the French later. White people hate mosquitoes. That's the perfect animal to turn yourself into. There's nothing more frustrating to a white explorer in an equatorial country than a mosquito. It's artful.

I love it. It represents how you have to use mythology and symbolism when you don't have structural power. And that's how you inspire a generation of and symbolism when you don't have structural power. And that's how you inspire a generation of people. You hear that story. Yeah. Athena, have you heard of Toussaint Louverture? We mentioned at the top of the show. Is it a name that rings a bell? I know that he was a leader and he's somebody that we should celebrate the same way we celebrate people like Malcolm X. Milena, can we hear a bit more about the stuff we don't sort of talk about so much,

mix. Mylena, can we hear a bit more about the stuff we don't talk about so much, which is his youth? He's born enslaved on the island. His father is probably from Senegal and had been captured. And he has a sort of interesting story because he doesn't spend his whole life enslaved, does he? No, he doesn't. He very early on in his life becomes very important to his quote-unquote master. And so he finds himself in these positions of relative privilege, if you will. And by the 1770s, we know that he's actually been emancipated, which is very interesting because here he is, a free man, and is married to somebody who remains enslaved. As this free man, who then has a wife, who is still in this position of subservience on the very plantation where he grew up and where they all live, will go on to purchase a couple of farms

of his own and end up leasing the enslaved labor as well. And so it adds this kind of very strange paradox to his history, where the same system that had once enslaved him, he participates in. But once the Haitian revolution begins, he is on the side of abolishing slavery forever. This makes me feel better for shopping at Amazon. You know, that complexity. You know, if he could own people, then I can order bits and pieces that I need out of convenience. So I feel like, oh, you know, if he can blur the lines a little bit. Hello. Toussaint L'Ouverture is interesting in several ways.

He's literate. He can read and write. He's Catholic. His wife is still enslaved. So it doesn't necessarily correspond to what we expect of someone born into slavery in that he has perhaps education and the faith that the French overseers have. He was Catholic, I would say, in quotation marks, because you had to be. We know that also Toussaint Lou'Ouverture speaks Arada.

We think also he at least had some notions of Spanish. So here was a person who could converse in multiple languages. So he was dangerous from a perspective of the kind of worldviews that he was able to glean from being able to talk to French priests, the Ungan or the Vodou priests, and to really kind of bring people together. or the Vodou priests, and to really kind of bring people together. When people talk about the French Revolution, they talk about the radical intellectualism, the philosophy. Does Haiti receive that 18th century philosophy from France? Or is this just simply people desperately trying to get their freedom? I would say both of those things are true to a certain extent. Certainly, French revolutionary rhetoric trickles into the colony, the free people of color travel back and forth, planters travel back and forth.

But at the same time, enslaved people were rebelling in their way. Julien Raymond, a free man of color said, if you think that enslaved people need the Société des Amis des Noirs, the Society of the Friends of the Black, to rebel, then you've never been on a plantation, right? At this point, we probably need to introduce a man called Bookman Dutty. I'm guessing you haven't heard of him, Athena. I'd not heard of him. Is this a name that rings?

He sounds like a reggaeton star or reggae artist, like Dutty Rhymes. He's an orator. He's a leader of people. He gives great speeches. Is he religious? Yeah, so he is thought to be an ungon, or I guess in our parlance, a voodoo priest. And he definitely inspires people with his ceremonies. Buchmann leads this meeting along with another enslaved woman named Cécile Fatimant.

And he gives this speech. And I'm actually going to read you his words because I want you to get a sense of what he told them and what inspired them to rebel. He said, I'm convinced. Literally, I almost got out of my chair just there. who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty. I'm convinced. Literally, I almost got out of my chair just there. I don't know what I was going to do. That was really moving. Yeah, I mean, it's quite a speech, as you say, it works because in August 1791, we get the burning of plantations, the sabotaging of the economic system, isn't it? People rising up and saying, well, we're going to break the fields, the system that keeps us enslaved. rising up and saying, well, we're going to break the fields, the system that keeps us enslaved. But of course, plantations are also homes. And this is the paradox of plantation economies and plantation life. And there are women and children and families living there, enslaved families, white families, and the violence is kind of wholesale. And so even though it looks like

black people engaging in violence against white people, of course, the white colonists also protect themselves. So you are engaged in warfare and hand-to-hand combat. A lot of the white families flee into the mountains. And in fact, you know, you had a kind of paradox happening as well, because you had formerly enslaved people like Louverture, who believed 100% in the revolution, but who helps his master to safety and in fact, to leave the island. You also had enslaved women who would help the families they lived with to get to safety and the children. And then enslaved women acted as healers, both for white people, white soldiers,

and for the Haitian revolutionaries themselves. Boukman Dutty, he is killed in the violence because the French, they punish this rebellion. And so this now brings Toussaint Louverture to the fore. And he's joined by a couple of others. We've got Jean Francais and Georges Biasseau. And Athena, so far, you've liked what you've heard of Toussaint Louverture. What kind of guy do you think he is when it comes to the negotiating table? If he can negotiate having a wife and enslavement and him being free, I'd say he was a very effective negotiator. I wouldn't put up with that if he was my man.

I'd be like, get back in here or take me with you. He's a person who's complex, right? Because he is a very sober negotiator who is not given over to hyperbole. So some of his lieutenants and some of his comrades would say things like, kill all the whites, right? Of course, that's what gets reported back home in France. And Toussaint Lutertre is like, no moderation. We're going to negotiate.

He believes in treaties. And he believes that because he has ascended to this leadership position and is an amazing warrior, that he's able to effectively negotiate on his own with constituted authority and was rebuffed and pushed back almost at every turn. And the complexity continues with Toussaint Louverture because in some ways he was happy to continue the plantation economy. And his two sort of co-leaders, they were selling people into slavery, selling them to the Spanish.

They were still engaging in the slave trade. These aren't people with all the power. So they're having to still negotiate with whoever has the whip hand, so to speak, which is the French and the Spanish. Jean-François and Biasu, they want to negotiate peace and freedom for themselves. Once the Spanish and the British have invaded, this makes things very difficult because the enslaved population now has to fight three world powers. That's obviously going to be very difficult, the sheer numbers that they are up against. And so Jean-François and Biasu, they go to the side of Spain, as does Louverture initially, and they are sort of willing to say, hey, you know, if you let us escape and

you give us amnesty, we'll go away. And if you let us have our freedom and Toussaint Diverture is no. And this is how ardent you see the sort of racism of the time period, because even though Toussaint Diverture said, I will make sure that people continue to work on the plantations, but you can't whip them and you can't force them and you have to give them days off. You have to compensate them in some way and give them small plots of land. The planters were so determined to enslave other people, they said no, and effectively sealed their own fate. The colony could have been Spanish if only the Spanish would have given into Toussaint Louverture's demands. And in fact, the French commissioners that will be sent, three men, they will realize when they go up against Toussaint Louverture

that they are no match, that he's not going to compromise, that he really is willing to die for the cause of freedom. And it forces them to abolish slavery in 1793 before the French National Assembly can do so back home in France. In 1793, Britain and Spain are at war with France. And so they are turning up on Haiti in order to try and cause chaos there and extend the war and steal this property. So Toussaint is able to essentially play off these global enemies against each other. But he's also struggling with the regional politics, the planters who own the land on the island. So it's a very complicated geopolitical story that's about the small

and the big and the epic. One of the sort of fascinating things is that Louverture ends up as a French general with French troops, with white troops under him, and he is marching around fighting against the Spanish who he's just been allies with. he is marching around fighting against the Spanish who he's just been allies with. So how does that happen? And also, is he thinking himself as a Frenchman? Do other people think of him as a Frenchman? Do his fellow leaders think, hang on a minute, you've betrayed the cause. He's literally wearing a French uniform suddenly. He definitely believes himself to be French. He makes a constitution in 1801 in which he says, slavery is permanently ended in this colony, but we are going to die free and French. This becomes something that will be

poked fun of on stage. They will sort of say, oh, the Haitian revolutionary generals with kind of two Saint-Mubertures at the center. Oh, one day they're wearing, you know, Spanish epaulettes, and then the next day they're wearing French. Since everybody felt French or Spanish, did anyone ever make an argument for feeling African at the time? There were definitely enslaved people who identified as, for example, Congo, from the Congo region. And one of the reasons they did that was not necessarily because they were always from that region, but because the travel writers had written that the enslaved

people that they had kidnapped from the Congo area were the most barbaric and savage. And so there were enslaved people who were like, oh, like you think us fighting for our freedom and the fact that you can't whip us to break us and that we'll fight you is like savage? Like, well, let us be savages then. So they kind of like reappropriate a terminology that was really meant to actually create fear around them. And that fear would lead to extra violence against them. Toussaint Louverture has problems with people in the mountains who don't want to be under his occupation, under his rule. And then in the south of Haiti, there's a separate rival in André Rigaud, who used to be an ally, but Rigaud has a slightly different background. His mother was

enslaved, but his father is French, he's a planter, he's wealthy, he's white. And he and Toussaint Louverture have a war, and it's called the War of the Knives. What happens is that he and Toussaint Louverture essentially wrestle for control over who is going to be in charge. So it is a conflict that is not that original, right? Because here you have two men who both want to be in charge. They fight, but Toussaint Leverture rallies two very important people to his side, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, who will rule in succession over independent Haiti. And they essentially help him to drive Rigaud out out to reduce his forces and force him

to sail away to France. Fair play. But Toussaint then falls foul of Europe's new hot-headed megalomaniac, Emperor Napoleon. Not yet emperor, in fact. First consul Napoleon. And that goes badly. Napoleon is not playing ball here. Napoleon reintroduces slavery. France had abolished slavery, but he brings it back. Yes. So he actually does that after he's gotten rid of Toussaint-Lautrec. But what he does before that is genocide is another word that we can use in this scenario because he sends his brother-in-law, Leclerc, who is married to Napoleon's sister. So the two of them sailed with the Leclerc expedition. And they use all manner of tactics to reduce the entire formerly enslaved population of the island. And in fact, when you read their missives back and forth to

one another, the different generals, they talk about eliminating all of the people of color. And they engage in mass drownings. They are engaged in this all-out warfare. And at the same time, they have signed a treaty with Britain that gave them back Martinique, where slavery had actually never been abolished. And they reinstate slavery in Guadeloupe in August of 1802. And also you have news of Toussaint Louverture's capture and arrest trickling back in. Because in May of 1802, Louverture had surrendered to the French. He'd gone home, was tricked, jailed, sailed to France and died a horrible death in France. Yeah, he dies in prison, separated from his family.

It's a very sad end to a story, to a career that had promised so much and was going so well. We then see the rise, I guess, of someone who has to be more hardline, and that's Dessalines, isn't it? He's seen what happens to Toussaint Louverture and thinks, right, okay, so it's war. There's no compromises here. So Jean-Jacques Dessalines had been friends, had been an ally, and he's the one who frees Haiti, really, rises up, launches an army, boots the French out, and again, gets rid of slavery permanently. And we get to then say Haiti is the first sovereign nation to abolish slavery. In some ways, France screws up. Things were working out all right under Toussaint Louverture,

and then they've ended up losing the island. So the violence backfires, really. Why? Because first of all, if you want to commit genocide in your colony, who's going to do the work? It's a bit like our immigration policies now right like who's going to pick the fruit guys you know think about this so they're taking all these people and they're killing them brutally but these are the people that are supposed to work and secondly like if the colony was still working and if it was still producing products and goods and it was part of this triangular economy and we know that slavery was fundamentally financial. Why bother? Was it posturing? Was it ideological? That's what I don't

understand. When you look at this history and you lay it out for precisely the reasons that you've outlined, you can only come to the conclusion that Napoleon is a megalomaniacal racist because his own wife tells him, do not send Leclerc. You need to keep Toussaint Louverture there. You have to keep the peace and freedom of the Blacks. And he is the one to do that for you. And yet, Napoleon, his pride is so wounded that Louverture has essentially signed and ratified this own constitution, naming himself governor general for life, that he loses his head over it and destroys the colony all in the name of constituting his own authority. So Jean-Jacques Dessalines has succeeded. He gets rid of the

French. He boots them out and Haiti is free. And he celebrates by giving himself a new title, Athena. Do you want to guess what it is? I think it goes to his head too, isn't it? Grand Emperor, I think it goes to his head too, isn't it? Grand Emperor, King of the Everything, Creator of all. You know, something along those lines. You know what guys are like. He's Emperor Jacques I. He'd been Governor General, first of all, but Emperor Jacques I. And he does it before Napoleon. Before Napoleon is made Emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines is Emperor. So Napoleon is a copycat, which is nice. And Dessalines, as we've said, is a little bit more hardline in terms of military policies, but he's not going to murder everyone on the island who disagrees with him.

He's perhaps a little bit more confrontational or aggressive than Toussaint Louverture in terms of policy, but he runs the island trying to make things work, ending slavery, trying to keep the system going economically. And then he is murdered. What we know for sure happens is that his own soldiers basically ambush him and turn against him. And the related question is, well, why would they do that? And this is where you get sort of all differing kinds of theories. And well, one is Desalines was a warrior and he was a fighter, but things were in disarray. Soldiers are not being

paid. There's harsh punishment for disobeying his authority. People don't really like that. They've just come out of a brutal war. They've been enslaved before. They really don't want to have corporal punishments, for example. It's murdered in 1806. And we then get the kind of experimental stage of Haitian independence where we've got the king in the north, which is very Game of Thrones, and that's Henri Christophe. And then in the south of the country, we have American democracy as the idea being imported in, and that's Pétion. So north and south have split again. There's tension there between them. And in the long and the short of it, Haiti becomes a single nation

in 1820 because we get the death of Pétion in the south, we get the suicide of Henri Christophe in the north. And so we end up with Jean-Pierre Boyer coming to power and going, right, I'm uniting Haiti. I'll bring together the north and the south. And then he marches into the east of the island, the Spanish bit, and says, I'm having this as well, 1822. And he unites the entire island. That feels like the end of the story. Is that the end of the story? I mean, it's probably not, is it? It's definitely not the end of the story. So one thing that's really important is that Haiti was an independent state, but had not gained recognition from any of the other countries in the world, because France was still saying, that's our colony. And so the French king,

Charles X, in 1825, comes up with, I guess, what he figured to be an ingenious plan, but to make the Haitians pay for their freedom, which was 150 million francs. And Boyer, with all these fleets behind him with 500 cannons, agrees for the Haitian state to pay this amount and levies draconian taxes against the Haitian people to basically pay off this debt to France. Wow. So France is brutalized, enslaved, captured, murdered, and then it's like, pay up. But what says more is that over history, at any point in time, somebody in France had the power to cancel that debt, and they didn't.

And over and over, because they don't finish paying the debt, the loans that they're forced to take out. So not only do they say, you owe us this money, it's not like just pay us as you go along. They force them to take out these very high interest loans, which reduced to 90 million in 1838. They pay it off in the 1880s, but they don't finish paying the taxes, the fees, all kinds of tariffs until 1947. The nuance window! That brings us really to the nuance window. It's where Athena and I take a little breather and we listen to our expert

who gets two minutes to tell us something we need to know. Marlena, without much further ado, the nuance window, please. Well, as you've just heard about the indemnity, I want to talk about some of the things that happened before that. Unfortunately, Haiti's fight for freedom did not end when the Haitian revolutionaries declared their independence in 1804. First of all, Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States, issued a trade embargo against Haiti that lasted until 1810. Great Britain, while trading with Haiti, and while the leaders of Haiti enjoyed the approbation of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, still refused to formally recognize

Haitian independence, which was important because it had all kinds of implications for trade, especially with other nations. Then France exacted this enormous sum. And only after that, in 1838, did England, when it had finally abolished its own slavery, acknowledge Haitian independence. The United States waited until 1862, well after the start of the U.S. Civil War. So when people ask, was the Haitian Revolution successful given the difficulties that Haiti continued to experience throughout the 20th century and up until the present day? Did the Haitian Revolution succeed? Was it successful? Did it fail? The Haitian Revolution did not fail. The world failed the Haitian Revolution with consistent threats to bring back slavery and imposing really attacks on its freedom.

Well, thank you so much for that nuanced window. Fascinating. I'm afraid that's all we have time for. So I'm gonna have to say a big thank you to my guests in History Corner. We've had the marvellous Professor Marlena Daut from the University of Virginia, and in Comedy Corner, the absolutely awesome Athena Keblenu. And to you listeners, join me next time for another rollicking rummage through the annals of history with two more tip top guests. In the meantime, I'm off to go and start a crowdfunder for Danny Glover's Toussaint Louverture movie. Bye!

Lauren Laverne here with news of a very successful Desert Island Discs rescue. They'd been missing for decades. David Hockney. I went to the art school and they asked me if I had a private income and I said I didn't know what that was. And they said, well, if you've not got one, you can't be an artist because you'll never make a living at it.

Dame Margot Fonteyn. What I've always looked forward to most in my life would be an old age on a desert island just playing gramophone records all day long. And Bing Crosby. Could you build a house? No way. A shelter? No way. I couldn't fix a safety pen. But they're all back in Radio 4's

Desert Island Discs archive, thanks to the efforts of keen vintage tape collectors. To listen to them, along with Dudley Moore, Sophie Tucker, Noel Coward and dozens of other castaways, just head to the Desert Island Discs website.