Episode 130 – Beyond The Black Jacobins: The Haitian Revolution with Pascal Robert

Macro N Cheese – Episode 130
Beyond The Black Jacobins: The Haitian Revolution with Pascal Robert
July 24, 2021

 

[00:00:04.230] – Pascal Robert [intro/music]

I understand the concept of white supremacy and what it means, what it is. I don’t use that term. I don’t like that term because there is nothing that is supreme about white people. I come from a country where slaves destroyed the three greatest European empires at their peak of their power.

[00:00:24.660] – Pascal Robert [intro/music]

People always talk about the yellow fever. All of the countries, France, Spain, and Britain always doctored the numbers of death by yellow fever to hide the amount of brutality, the casualty figures. Look, I always ask this question:  if yellow fever was killing all these white people, how come they weren’t dying before the revolution?

[00:01:35.220] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.080] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese folks. We’re going to take a trip in the time machine. We’re going to go back to Haiti when France was going through its revolution and we had Toussaint L’Ouverture , who has been lionized in the historical context. Everybody has put him up on a pedestal.

And we’re going to find out the real story about what happened in Haiti and maybe even take a look at some of the current events that have happened here recently in Haiti. My guest is somebody who I have admired from afar, the guy that I’ve listened to on many podcasts, in particular, one from the Dead Pundits Society, where he talked about Haiti in a way that made me extremely interested in learning more.

And so I’m thrilled to death to be able to have Pascal Robert join me today. He is an essayist and a political commentator whose work covers black politics, global affairs, and Haitian politics. His work has appeared in The Washington Spectator, Black Commentator, AlterNet, allhiphop.com, and the Huffington Post.

He is a regular contributor to the online publication Black Agenda Report and is the current co-host of the awesome podcast This Is Revolution, which is live streamed via YouTube and relevant social media on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and Saturdays at noon. Pascal is a graduate of Hofstra University and Boston University School of Law. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:23.790] – Pascal Robert 

Thank you for having me, Steve. I appreciate the invitation. I did not know that you were such an admirer of my work. And I’m very humbled by all the adulation that you laid upon me, my friend.

[00:03:35.160] – Grumbine

Well, I got to tell you. I am friends with Ajamu. I’ve had Glen on. We’ve had Margaret Kimberley come on and do our national outreach call, and we’ve had Danny Haiphong on. So we’ve had the whole gang over there. I wish I could have gotten to Bruce before he passed.

[00:03:52.080] – Robert

Bruce was my very close mentor. Yes.

[00:03:54.240] – Grumbine

Yes. Just a great guy. Great writing. Big, big voice, man. But you’re a great voice, too. And I really appreciate your no-nonsense approach to things. And we’re getting ready to do another podcast, which I told you about offline, called the S Word. And so much of the struggle and the concept of revolution and the arc of revolution, as I say, is so misunderstood. And I think Haiti is an incredibly important case study in a revolutionary’s mind, in the mind of people that are thinking something’s wrong with this country and they’re looking for inspiration.

And I think sometimes the stories of old can be misleading. And as we talked about offline as well, the Haitian story is oftentimes quite misleading. So I guess let’s start off with tell us a little bit about what the Haitian revolution was all about, the history of the Haitian revolution, the relationship with France.

[00:04:56.250] – Robert 

Well, what I’m going to try to do is give a synopsis, maybe in less than a half an hour of the Haitian revolution to make it as comprehensive as possible for your audience to understand. To understand the Haitian revolution, as I’ve said before on my appearance on The Majority Report Friday, we have to understand its proximity to American history. The Haitian Revolution starts in 1791.

And what is fascinating about that year is that if you ask the average person what that means in terms of American history, even scholars of Haitian History, you ask them what that means and they won’t immediately come about. And I’ll be very honest with you. It wasn’t until I read a book by Gerald Horne entitled “Confronting Black Jacobins” by Gerald Horne, which I think is his first book on Haitian History, wonderful book.

And he has some information in the book about George Washington, and that was the first time, literally, that it came together in my mind that George Washington was president of the United States when the Haitian revolution starts. So realize that all of this romanticized notion we have about the intellectual security and stability of the founding fathers and the founding of the United States as a republic.

Understand that immediately after they developed this country, France, which was one of the major nations that helped them in the American Revolution is being savagely brutalized by its African slaves on an island. Meanwhile, one of the founding fathers of the United States still has slavery. The point I’m trying to convey to you is that the events of the Haitian Revolution were supremely in the consciousness of the founding fathers as they were transpiring.

Literally, it could not have been because the importance of France and what it meant to the future of America was quite, quite significant. So all of the major empires of the world were watching what was going on at that time. And what makes that fascinating is that before the Haitian earthquake in 2010, I can assure you that for most people, even many Haitians born in the diaspora, the Haitian Revolution and its significance probably have been erased from the consciousness of most of the global society.

[00:07:32.120] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:07:34.360] – Robert

Ok. And that’s not an accident. So let’s begin there.

[00:07:39.710] – Grumbine

Sounds good to me.

[00:07:40.970] – Robert

Understand that in the way in which we look at America because of this notion of American exceptionalism, everything is bigger, better, stronger here. So when you talk about slavery, everyone, including many African-Americans, have this notion that America was just the biggest, worst, the most horrible.

First of all, of all of the African slaves that were brought over to the Western Hemisphere, less than five percent were brought to North America. The single majority were brought to Brazil, and a significant large portion were sent to the British and French Caribbean. So in terms of raw numbers, the smallest percent of African slaves were brought to the United States.

Slavery was brutal everywhere, but because of the tortured racial history of this country, we kind of metastasize the nature of the brutality here. The particularly grotesque nature of the situation in Haiti is that the French, because of the demands of the plantation economy in terms of manufacturing rum and producing sugar combined with the climate, were literally sadistic in terms of the types of torture that they would put upon slaves on the island in the plantation.

If you’ve read “Jacobin,” which is a book I have a bit of a problem with and we’ll go into that later. There are some descriptions of some of the punishments that they, for example, would bury a slave alive in sand and then put molasses on his head and have maggots and ants upon his face. Sometimes women, African slaves who are pregnant would self-abort through various herbs because they didn’t want their children to be born to the system and in order to terrorize some of them to give birth, they would take others in front of female slaves and slice their bellies open to have the child fall on the ground and take the baby.

[00:09:45.330] – Grumbine

Ahh. Oh, my God. One of the things that my team often gets angry at me about when I talk about this is the thing that compelled me to read the C.L.R. James book after I got through this particular section you’re describing was the fact that they blew people up from the inside out.

[00:10:05.500] – Robert

They would actually put gunpowder in the anal orifice of slaves and light them up and explode them up to pacify them.

[00:10:14.340] – Grumbine

Insane and biting them and gnawing on them. Horrible stuff.

[00:10:19.720] – Robert

The French plantation system in prerevolutionary Haiti, which was called San Domingue, was so brutal that the average African brought from the continent to the island lasted no more than five to seven years. So what that means is that you bring an 18-year-old African to work on the plantation, they’ll be dead by 25 or 26 years.

The French in their writings would say things like the shores of Africa are always generous because they believe that there was such an unending quantity of Africans to bring over if they died like flies on the plantation and didn’t make a difference because they never thought the system was going to end.

[00:11:01.860] – Grumbine

Wow. When this is all going on, clearly this is in the lens of history, but as an African-American or Haitian-American or a person of color who has seen the horrors in this country, when you read this stuff, how does someone process that? I know for me it’s just pure horror.

[00:11:22.410] – Robert

Well, the thing is, I’ll be very frank with you. A large part of how I view the history of slavery and race and racism comes from the fact that I am Haitian. I’ll give you an example. I understand the concept of white supremacy and what it means, what it is. I don’t use that term. I don’t like that term. I don’t use that term, I don’t like the term because there’s nothing that is supreme about white people. I come from a country where slaves destroyed the three greatest European empires at their peak of their power.

[00:12:01.060] – Grumbine

Humm.

[00:12:02.240] – Robert

I don’t see why people are supreme at all. I’m not mystified by white power in any way. So we have 1791. Understand something. Now with good dialectical materialists here. Let’s talk about the money. The 13 colonies of the British Empire combined did not have the value of San Domingue, prerevolutionary Haiti to France.

That means Haiti as a colony, San Domingue, was more valuable to France than all 13 colonies were to the British. In terms of the sheer trade of the sugar, rum, coffee, tobacco, prerevolutionary Haiti was one of, if not the most profitable colony in the Western Hemisphere for the French. So we have to understand the trade to this colony. That’s why prerevolutionary Haiti was called the Pearl of the Antilles.

The Antilles are a series of islands in the Caribbean. Haiti was called at one time, the pearl of the Antilles. It was the sheer value of what it produced. This explains why the plantation system was so brutal. And by the way, there are many people who like to put the Haitian Revolution in the context of the French Revolution. I do not. And I will tell you why. Yes, they are interrelated, but there were rebellions on the island decades before the French Revolution began that portended to the prediction of the Haitian Revolution.

For example, in 1758, there was Mackandal’s Rebellion. Mackandal was an African slave. Many reports that he was a Muslim and he could read in Arabic and he was considered to be the ability to have prophetic wisdom or visionary powers like he was almost clairvoyant. Mackandal was so vicious that he created a poison to kill the European white plantation owners that at one point it was said that he killed 6000 people with this poison they would put it in the drinking water.

His rebellion terrified the island. This is in the 1750s. It was so bad that when they finally found him, they tied him to a tree and burned him alive and the tree cracked in half, and the Africans who watched believed that he actually created some kind of metaphysical mystique and turned himself into a tsetse fly and flew away. So there’s a certain kind of mysticism about him as a figure.

Before he died he made a speech in front of the Africans on the plantation. He took up one yellow handkerchief and held it up. He said, “This is the color of the people who once populated this land. They are gone now.”  And then he dropped it. He took a white handkerchief. He said, “This is the color of the people who now dominate this land. They will be gone, too.” Then he dropped it.

Then he picked up a black handkerchief. He said, “This will be the color of the people who will dominate this land in perpetuity and this will be us.” He did that before he died in 1758. So, for me, Mackandal is actually the father of the Haitian Revolution and I don’t think we have to tie its beginnings to the French Revolution to understand its importance.

[00:15:56.600] – Grumbine

That is fantastic, because what you said to begin with, the history had been erased, and I assure you that as much of a student as I like to claim to be, I never heard of this, and so this is amazing. This is great.

[00:16:12.490] – Robert

Right. So let me continue. So about 30 some odd years after Mackandal in 1791, we have African slaves, now understand the Africans are coming from various tribes. I have a piece that I wrote in the Huffington Post called ‘What is Haitian Voodou’ to explain about this phenomenon of . . . Now, people don’t know how to pronounce it because you spell it in English.

So, like Ceremony Bois Caïman,  Ceremony Bois Cayeman became Ceremony Bois Cayeman. Is pronounced ceremony bois cayeman. What happens in 1791? An African Muslim calls together and the night in August, a large group of slaves up in the hills in a spot in Haiti, on the island in prerevolutionary Haiti. And they come together.

They have a ceremony, drums, it gets very heated and they engage in certain ritual practices that would have been some of them as Muslims would not have participated, some of animus would have. They slaughter a pig and they engage in a kind of spiritual pact. And the spiritual pact takes these people who might have been rival tribes and rival religions and puts them together to come together as a force to fight against the plantation to come.

One week after Ceremony Bois Caïman, August 1791, the African slaves go on a rampage and they start slaughtering European and white plantation owners and whites on the island by the hundreds. At one point in a week, they kill 2,000 people. It was like a massive, savage guerrilla warfare against the whole plantation. Now, understand Toussaint L’Ouverture  and Dessalines were both attendees at Ceremony Bois Caiman. It was a massive affair.

Now, you have to understand that this caused major fear on the plantation. The French are sending soldiers and they have people on the island trying to combat these Africans because at that time it was the Africans who were brought from the island who were controlling the revolution. This is a very important point. And this is something that very few documentarians of Haitian history effectively explain.

There are three different types and classes of black people in Haiti at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, and those types and classes persistently compete with each other as a force in Haitian history in perpetuity until today. The first are the African Bosal. What is a Bosal? Bosal is kind of a pejorative word. Any slave who was born in Africa that was brought to the island of prerevolutionary Haiti, San Domingue, was called a Bosal, an African Bosal.

So they tended to be more acculturated to the African religion, whether it be Muslim or voodou or animist, they were more rebellious. They were more assertive because they were born free and they were less attuned to be docile acceptance of the plantation system, but they died the fastest. The next level of Blacks were the Creole Blacks, some people call them Avalanche. There are Avalanche Blacks, there are Avalanche Mulattos.

There are Creole Blacks and Avalanche Mulattos, similar to the Creole black and Creole Mulattos. Creole Blacks are Blacks who were born on the island. Because they were born on the island, they were more attuned to French culture. They spoke French better than the Bosal Africans and they had more of a cultural affinity to the French system. Some of them were free, bought their freedom, or worked to get their freedom, and many of them owned slaves. Guess what? Before the Haitian Revolution in 1791, Toussaint L’Ouverture  owned boku black slaves.

[00:21:04.960] – Grumbine

Wow!

[00:21:04.960] – Robert

A lot of people don’t know that.

[00:21:08.380] – Grumbine

No, they don’t.

[00:21:11.490] – Robert

The biracial, call the mulatto, I know that term has a certain perjorative, but for the sake of this conversation, we use that term. The biracial mulatto slaves, Creole Blacks in Haiti, own 25 percent of the African slaves. So we have a situation where it’s not just whites who are plantation owners with slaves, you have mulatto Creoles born on the island who own 25 percent of the slaves and you have Creole Blacks, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, who own a fair share of the slaves on the island as well, all of them being African.

So, understand something. The Creole Mulattos, because they were fair complexion and wanted to be white and wanted to be French, hated the Creole Blacks even though they were close in class. The Creole Blacks hated the Creole Mulattos because the Creole Mulattos thought they were better than them and wanted to be white.

The Creole Blacks and the Creole Mulattos hated the African Bosal because they were the lowest on the level of the social standing in the totem pole, and they were considered savages and uncivilized Africans who cannot be trusted. And the Bosal Africans hated both categories of Creole. This class dynamic plagues Haitian society to this day.

[00:22:42.990] – Grumbine

That is insane, the idea of not being able to unite based on slight shade differences. That’s very sad.

[00:22:55.000] – Robert

This is reality.

[00:22:56.410] – Grumbine

Yeah, but it’s still sad, man. You’d like to see people unite. You’d like to see them be able to find a way to rise up together.

[00:23:04.390] – Robert

Well, eventually they do. That’s how they win the revolution, but we haven’t got to that point yet.

[00:23:08.740] – Grumbine

That’s it.

[00:23:09.100] – Robert

So you have to understand, the Bosal at this time are in charge of the revolution. They’re going crazy. They’re going buck wild, massacring whites left and right. Toussaint L’Ouverture , the supposed great general is so scared, he’s already at the beginning of the revolution sending letters to the French on how he can calm the revolution down if he’s given a better position by the French.

Laurent Dubois exposes this in his book on the Haitian Revolution. Laurent Dubois was a historian, think he teaches French, but he wrote a book on Haitian history. He’s out of Duke. Toussaint is already trying to sell out the revolution to protect his status because he owned slaves.

[00:24:02.390] – Grumbine

The first gatekeeper, huh?

[00:24:04.470] – Robert

Exactly.

[00:24:05.180] – Grumbine

Misleadership class.

[00:24:07.430] – Robert

So understand, and this is a thing. Even among the Creole Blacks born on the island, there is a class rift because there are two types of Creole Blacks, there is anciens libres, which is what Toussaint L’Ouverture is, and there is nouveaux libres, which is what Jean-Jacques Dessalines is. An ancien libre is a slave who was freed several years before the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. 

Toussaint L’Ouverture had been free for maybe, like almost 20 years before the revolution began and had slaves, was trading with the British, with the French making money. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a nouveau libre. He was a slave up until the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, and he was a brutally beaten and abused slave.

That means he had a different worldview when it came to whites, to the French, to the plantation system. And even though he was not an African Bosal, he identified more closely with them because he had been abused like them the majority of his life up until that point. This is the main reason why Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines have a completely different world view on the plantation economy. You know, C.L.R. James doesn’t explain any of this in “The Black Jacobins.”

[00:25:31.610] – Grumbine

No.  I was going to say not at all.

[00:25:33.720] – Robert

Has any book you’ve read on Haitian history explain this this way.

[00:25:37.910] – Grumbine

No, not at all.

[00:25:39.740] – Robert

Because the class color complex which is the most important factor is the factor that they erased because they just wanted to make it seem like it’s a war against Blacks and whites. It’s much more complicated.

[00:25:52.610] – Grumbine

I will say this. C.L.R. James did go through the process of explaining 128 shades that they . . .

[00:26:00.170] – Robert

Yeah.

[00:26:00.170] – Grumbine

. . . said something to that effect. And he did go into the different groups.

[00:26:04.580] – Robert

Riggo

[00:26:06.080] – Robert

Riggo (Legal) was the Mulatto who basically fought against Toussaint L’Ouverture.

[00:26:10.010] – Grumbine

Yes. And then you also had Moise . . .

[00:26:14.030] – Robert

Moise

[00:26:15.290] – Grumbine

That’s it.

[00:26:15.290] – Robert

A Black Creole. Yes.

[00:26:16.520] – Grumbine

Yes, he did touch on this. I don’t want to sell it too short, but not like what you’re saying. And this is important to keep going, man.

[00:26:25.170] – Robert

OK, so let’s continue. So we get the class dynamics. We have it, and the Mulattos, oftentimes they studied in France, they had plantations. They wanted to be white. So they were the most white adjacent and they owned more of the slaves than even the Black Creole, alright? A lot of people don’t know how much the Mulattos despised the Blacks on the island.

They hated them because they wanted to be part of the French system. So we’re still in 1791. Shit is burning down. France is terrified. They can’t control these African slaves. They don’t know what’s going on. France is still embroiled in its own revolution. The Americans are looking on and saying what’s going on.  And the Americans at that time because they’re having problems with France, they’re like, “this might be good for us.”

We might be able to either A, take this island ourself or B, be able to do trade. So let’s do trade. Let’s see how this plays out. So some are worried. The ones who are French-adjacent like Thomas Jefferson are worried. The ones who are more like this might clear us of our problems with the French. Don’t forget, France and the United States had some beefs after the American Revolutionary War. Right?

[00:27:46.120] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:27:46.120] – Robert

So the United States are watching what the hell’s going on here. At a certain point, it’s getting so hot. Spain, which owns the Dominican Republic, the island right to the right is like, “Listen. Let’s check this out here, man. These Africans are really taking it to the French. We actually might be able to come in here and take this opportunity to take this island, but we just can’t come over here and try to put these guys in shackles.

Let’s cut a deal with the big man on top and see if we can cut a deal.” The Spanish sent military emissaries. They meet with certain high level generals like to tell L’Ouverture, a few others, and I say, “How would you guys like to work under the Spanish army? We train you and you guys fight the French.

And we’ll give at least a high ranking generals and a few others freedom. And we keep the system going and we get the frick out of here. And you guys join the Dominican Republic and become a colony of Spain.” The Black Creoles are like, “Hold on. We can get free? Be soldiers of the Spanish army and we get to officially be able to kick these Frenchmen’s ass even more?”

Then the Spanish, “Like you got it, baby.” The black Creole generals, that’s when they become generals because the Spanish have really trained them. And at this point, they take over the revolution from the Africans. The Africans saying, “OK, fine. The white boys are giving us weapons.

OK, we can do this officially.” So they train the Blacks. And they train the Creole Blacks and the Mulatto, some of them are trained, but some of them are like, “Whoa! What’s going on here?” They join as well and they start to whip the French’s ass . . .

[00:29:40.010] – Grumbine

Laughter.

[00:29:40.010] – Robert

Because now you guys have military training. Now, all these Blacks have military training. French are getting savagely beat. Now, understand something. As brutal as the French were to these Blacks, particularly the Creole, they were still more culturally attuned to the French. They spoke French. They spoke Creole. They had French cuisine.

They were all culturally attuned to be French. They still would have preferred to be French, right? Now, the Spanish army, which is now the Blacks on the island, are kicking the French’s ass. The French are like, “This island is too valuable to us. We cannot lose this to the Spanish. We cannot.”

The French send an emissary to Toussaint L’Ouverture and the other Creole Black general, and they say, “Listen. We will give you your freedom. We’ll make you French soldiers. Please do everything you can. We will promise you to make you our equal. Please help us rid the island of the Spanish.” All of these Negroes like Toussaint.

Dessalines at this stage is just like. “You know, listen, man. I just want to be free. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t want to do these crackers, whatever.” They’re all like, “No! We can be French? We can be real? We can be French and get treated like our own plantation masters. All we gotta do is whip these Spaniards. And we get to be free?”

And of course, the Bosals are always going to be slaves either way, but most of the Creole generals don’t care cause like, “We’ll be free, and we can still keep this plantation system going. And they say, “You know what? Bam!” They turn their back on the Spanish and now they’re fighting as French soldiers, more training and then they savagely massacred the Spanish and the Spanish got off the island and the French even take over the Dominican Republic.

[00:31:47.050] – Grumbine

Wow, that’s amazing.

[00:31:58.600] – Intermission

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[00:32:47.570] – Grumbine

But it’s all in the name. Anybody that dangles freedom, that’s all they have to say is you ain’t going to be a slave and you instantly have their attention. That’s how bad it was.

[00:32:57.550] – Robert

Right. So now, Toussaint L’Ouverture is like the man. He’s like this big-time general. He’s got his epaulets on his shoulder. He’s like Dessalines is his second in command because Dessalines is like a brutal fighter. Dessalines just massacres anybody in his way. Brutal. So they’re negotiating their freedom. They’re trying to figure out what’s happening, OK, OK.

At some time, the Mulattoes and the actual Blacks, because the Mulattoes hate the Blacks and the Blacks hate the Mulattos, they have a civil war among themselves for a year until the Blacks kick the Mulattoes ass and a lot of the Mulatto generals go back and run to France. A lot of people don’t know. It’s called The War of the Knives. There was an internal war between the Blacks and Mulattoes during the Haitian Revolution. A lot of people don’t even know . . .

[00:33:54.690] – Grumbine

C.L.R. James did speak to that a little.

[00:33:57.150] – Robert

Yeah he did.

[00:33:57.330] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:33:57.330] – Robert

He did.

[00:33:58.210] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:34:00.600] – Robert

So Toussaint L’Ouverture is really feeling himself now. He’s like, “Yes, I’m a General.” Because he wants to be a Frenchman.

[00:34:08.690] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:34:09.080] – Robert

This is wonderful. The little 800 pound gorilla in the room. 800 pound gorilla in the room is like the British are like you. The Spanish are punks. They’re not nothing. If we dispatch the French, we’re always going to whack them. We’re going to send squadrons – dragoons.

We’re going to send the biggest embarkment of British military in the history of British civilization to this island to massacre these Negroes and put them in shackles. We will put the French underground. This is going to be a cakewalk. The British sent over 50,000 troops. They come in and they’re ready to slaughter people. Toussaint L’Ouverture is like, “Oh, word?” The British come in. In two months, 10,000 British soldiers die like flies. They get slaughtered.

[00:35:15.860] – Grumbine

Is this all just warfare or is this also the slick thinking of realizing the diseases . . .

[00:35:22.430] – Robert

Well, there are diseases as well. But first of all, there’s a good historian who comes out of Martinique who document this. People always talk about the yellow fever. He documents all of the people, the general, all of the countries, France, Spain, and Britain always doctored the numbers of death by yellow fever to hide the amount of brutality and casualties they took. I always ask this question, “If yellow fever was killing all these white people, how come they weren’t dying before the revolution?

[00:35:54.080] – Grumbine

Dang. There you go, another one of the whitewashings, right?

[00:35:58.360] – Robert

Yeah. So I’m not saying it wasn’t a factor, but it’s heavily exaggerated. You think yellow fever was going to kill 10,000 soldiers in two months? Come on, man. David Degis was a British historian says that in British journals at the time newspapers, it was said that there was not a single person in London who was British who did not know someone who died in the Haitian campaign.

I wrote a whole piece in The Black Agenda Report when Brexit started taking off when Haiti defeated the British Empire. I tell Haitians all the time. I was like, we should stop talking about the fact that we kicked out the French. We live in an Anglo-American empire. We should be proud of the fact we massacred the British. Very few people know that Haitians defeated the British Empire in the Haitian Revolution.

[00:36:49.530] – Grumbine

I would agree.

[00:36:51.940] – Robert

But so the British are out. Now Toussaint L’Ouverture is really smelling himself. The French say, “You know what? We’re going to make you governor-general of the island.” So he is now the headman of the island for the French. He writes his own constitution, but guess what? Even though they get freedom, the island is free, what does freedom mean?

It means the Creole Blacks born on the island are free. But all the Bosal get a system called the corvée, which is what? It’s basically slavery lite, but indentured servitude. But it’s still getting their asses beat like slaves. And if you read the “Black Jacobins,” you know this is the reason why Toussaint L’Ouverture has Moise killed because Moise is like, “We can’t do this to these men that have been fighting with us.” Toussaint L’Ouverture was like, “Fuck you, we need money.”

[00:37:47.830] – Grumbine

Yeah. The one thing C.L.R. James really put out there, I think. I’m interested in your take on this, but he really put it out there was while Toussaint was playing the role of diplomat and placating the white, French and British, even…

[00:38:05.670] – Robert

He invited whites who fled the island to come back and take their land.

[00:38:10.080] – Grumbine

He made the point that he had forgotten who had his back, who was fighting for him. And ignored them, which set the stage for his own downfall.

[00:38:20.670] – Robert

Because Toussaint L’Ouverture never had the idea of freeing a black country. He wanted Creole Blacks in blackface exhibiting black capitalism with poor African servants as slaves to them.

[00:38:36.390] – Grumbine

Sounds like Clyburn today, huh?

[00:38:39.420] – Robert

Pretty much, or Obama or whatever else, the black misleadership class. But, again, so he’s governor-general. He writes his Constitution, makes it Catholicism is the religion of the state. Cutting deals. Wants the French to come back. Dessalines is looking at this like, what the fuck is with this guy? But Dessalines is loyal. He’s like, “OK. This mother fucker.”  But everywhere around, a lot of people around particularly, I think, like Moise are like. “This Negro found his goddamn money.”

[00:39:11.760] – Grumbine

Yeah, that was the turning point, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:39:14.520] – Robert

Yeah. So the next 800-pound gorilla in the room that changes the whole tune of the Shangri-La for the Creole Blacks and the Mulattos are accepting the status quo, is Napoleon takes over France. Napoleon takes over France and he’s like “Issue number one. We are going to either take every one of these Negroes and put them back in shackles or we will genocide them all and start from scratch with a whole new island of blacks.

I don’t want to see an epaulet on any of these Negro soldiers. I don’t want to hear a goddamn thing about no Toussaint L’Ouverture. I don’t want no black governor-general. I don’t want to hear any black nothing. I want these Negroes buried. Game over.” So now Toussaint is really crapping in his pants.

Because Toussaint L’Ouverture has never really fought seriously against French soldiers. He’s fought Spanish and British, but he ain’t never really gone hardcore. In the beginning, they were fighting the French, but this thing is, don’t forget, Toussaint L’Ouverture never fought a French Napoleon army himself.

[00:40:31.340] – Grumbine

Who was the white guy that had been sent home . . .

[00:40:34.250] – Robert

Sonthonax, Sonthonax

[00:40:35.240] – Grumbine

Yes, he did him wrong too.

[00:40:37.910] – Robert

Sonthonax was like, “Why can’t we free all the Blacks, man? This is insane!” So Napoleon sends Leclerc, his brother-in-law, and he’s like, “I’m sending Dragoons.” Napoleon is like, “50,000, send them 50,000 troops.” And then Napoleon also sends another 20,000, 25,000 troops to New Orleans for a specific reason, as a matter of fact, because Napoleon’s plan is that after he defeats the Africans and the Blacks of Haiti, he’s going to take the soldiers of 20,000 in New Orleans because he’s just executed the Louisiana Receivership from Spain. He owns the Louisiana territory. He’s going to take his 20,000 soldiers, which are bigger than the US Army and conquer North America.

[00:41:24.460] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:41:26.820] – Robert

Napoleon’s like, “I can take it all.” So at this stage, because these guys have been fighting with the French and they know that these guys can fight. All of the Creole generals are like, “Yo, man! What the fuck?” Because what happened is the Africans are the more vicious fighters. Why? Because they were free. They’re like “Yo, kill these crackers dead, man. Like flies already.”

So Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, even the Mulattos were like, they’re all shitting in their pants. “He sent Leclerc. Oh my God. What are we going to do? What’s going to happen here?” And the Africans are like, “Yo, listen, we can beat . . .” Cause the Africans are fighting, massacring French. And Toussaint L’Ouverture was like, “Listen. You guys do . . .”

At one point, Dessalines, Christophe, even a Mulatto, they go work for the French, to calm down the Africans, because we don’t want to get killed when we go back on the plantation. Run to the French, man. “Let’s see if we can cut a deal with Napoleon or something and just get these Africans into the job because in their mind, the only slaves that are going to be slaves are the African Bosal, not the Creole.

So at one point, right, Toussaint L’Ouverture is playing games. And Dessalines realizes these games. And because Dessalines was a nouveau libre, he actually was a slave until the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. He’s like, “Man, this guy L’Ouverture is going to cut a deal to try to save his skin with Napoleon. And he’s going to dime us out because we’re all pissed about this in more ways about that.

[00:43:11.530] – Grumbine

Mmhm.

[00:43:13.090] – Robert

And he’s going to dime us out and we’re going to be dead men. At that point, Dessalines says, “You know what? Now fuck that. He’s going to try to break that because it’s a treaty between Leclerc’s army, which is France, and the Haitians told us that we got to have a break here. So Dessalines tells the French general, “My man over there they was going to break the treaty.” “Oh, word?”

They capture Toussaint. They take him in shackles and they take him off to France. Most people who didn’t know that Dessalines was the one who greenlighted that like, “Oh, my God, they’re taking Toussaint.” Dessalines who is second command is like, “Yeah, they took Toussaint. What are you going to do?” Because the Africans trust Dessalines more than Toussaint, more than Christophe because he’s the one who is least like really feeling this corvee system.

[00:44:01.670] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:44:02.930] – Robert

So they take Toussaint. Toussaint goes and gets shipped off to France. Dessalines at the Treaty of Archaia, he’s got the Mulattoes. He’s got the African Bosal and the Black Creoles, and he’s like, “Listen, these Frenchmen are going to destroy us unless we man up and we take it to them. Are we going to put our bullshit aside and take it to them?

Are we going to have them come here and either put us all in shackles or genocide?” Everyone’s getting hot. They’re like, “Yes, we’re going to take it to these demons.” Dessalines is a very aggressive, very brutal cat, and he comes out with a war cry, “Koupe tet boule kay. Koupe tet boule kay.” Cut their heads, burn their houses, cut their heads, burn their houses.

Everyone, “Koupe tet boule kay. Koupe tet boule kay.”  They start massacring the French soldiers. Leclerc died of yellow fever, so they say, and Rochambeau wanted to genocide all the Black . . . Rochambeau did sick shit like a one time created gas chambers to exterminate patients on the island.

[00:45:24.340] – Grumbine

Oh, my.

[00:45:25.300] – Robert

Yeah. Let me tell you how savage Dessalines was. Rochambeau took 500 Haitian officers and shot them in the head – 500 one at the time, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Rochambeau was a vicious, brutal, sadistic bastard. Dessalines, “That’s what you want to play?” Dessalines takes 500 French officers. Gets a noose and hangs 500 in a row and leaves them hanging dead in front of the French soldiers. Says, “Fuck with me. Come see me.

[00:46:04.540] – Grumbine

He wasn’t messing around. I got to ask you a question within this. One of the things that jumped out at me was the mountain people, how they would go into the mountains.

[00:46:13.570] – Robert

Yes, those are Maroons.

[00:46:15.790] – Grumbine

Yes. This seemed to be a really important part of this through this revolution.

[00:46:21.250] – Robert

The Maroons were the Bosal, that’s why they were good soldiers. They had their own bases. They were up in the mountains, in the hills. And they would take it to the French soldiers. They would take it to the plantation.

[00:46:32.460] – Grumbine

Strike and then get back in the mountains, you couldn’t find them.

[00:46:36.480] – Robert

So Dessalines is massacring the French and eventually destroys all the soldiers that Napoleon sent to Haiti. Napoleon sees how bad he’s losing and he’s like, forget New Orleans, get the soldiers from New Orleans and send them back to San Domingue to save this island. Those 25,000 soldiers come back in. They get whacked and destroyed.

On November 17, 1803, the Battle of Vertières, which is the final battle of the Haitian Revolution. Rochambeau was there himself with Capoix la Mort and the slaves are going up a hill. Capoix la Mort is the general charging the army. They send one cannon – pow! It knocks off his hat. He gets up and he gets on the horse. He charges again. They send another and pow.

It knocks him off the horse. The horse goes down. He gets up, he tells the army, “Charge!” They keep charging. Rochambeau, this racist terrorist, is so impressed with the bravery of the soldiers at the Battle of Vertière, he stops the war. He says, “Stop. I’ve never seen such bravery from soldiers in my life. And he gives Capoix la Mort a white horse as a gift. He goes back.

The battle continues. Capoix la Mort means capoix the death. They call him that because he just refused to die. The French are defeated. They surrender and they go back in November of 1803. And in January of 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declares Haiti an independent republic. And he eventually becomes emperor.

In 1802, Toussaint L’Ouverture dies in a French prison cell, begging Napoleon to send him back to be a governor-general again. Toussaint L’Ouverture is not the hero of the Haitian Revolution. It’s Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

[00:48:49.630] – Grumbine

Indeed. I think that all Toussaint L’Ouverture was ever going to do at best was create a more bougie Black experience while leaving many, many, many in the exact same conditions they would have been in, maybe marginally better.

[00:49:08.410] – Robert

You realize the British stopped the transatlantic slave trade within three years of the Haitian Revolution, largely because of the degree of bloodshed and the fear of this island. Had Toussaint L’Ouverture continued with the program, the slave plantation system would have continued in perpetuity. He’s going to need more Africans to come in.

[00:49:27.730] – Grumbine

Indeed. Now, did this not precipitate Napoleon selling off Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase?

[00:49:36.340] – Robert

Because Napoleon’s plan to conquer North America is foiled, he sells all of the Louisiana territories west of the Mississippi to Thomas Jefferson for less than eight cents an acre. Not only did the Haitian Revolution protect the United States from becoming a French colony, but it literally caused the transaction to allow the U.S. to double its size and become the powerhouse that it is. How many people tell you that?

[00:50:03.890] – Grumbine

None.

[00:50:06.190] – Robert

That’s why I wrote an article on the forces of, I think, America’s real founding father, Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

[00:50:13.080] – Grumbine

That’s very well stated, because as I was thinking about this, the slaves creating the clothing in North America through the Louisiana Purchase areas were being sent down to clothe the slaves down in Haiti and vice versa. So they were doing this as much for commerce and for reinforcements and providing real resources down there to Haiti and back and forth.

And when they were kicked off the island, what’s the point in being that far apart? Because he was also getting his ass handed to him with Russia and the rest of his ill-advised pursuits that eventually brought Napoleon to his knees to begin with?

[00:50:54.370] – Robert

One of the last words Napoleon Bonaparte said before he died is that the biggest mistake he ever made was not allowing Toussaint L’Ouverture to go back and be governor-general of San Domingue.

[00:51:02.680] – Grumbine

Buyer’s remorse. No question about it. Let me ask you with the obvious hat tip to Dessalines, what has happened to Haiti since then?

[00:51:17.730] – Robert

Well, what happened? How did it get that bad? I’ll tell you, I’m going to answer your question. I know that you want to get there. What happened? You guys won. What happened? Dessalines makes himself emperor. He’s running the country, and there is a conspiracy among the Mulattos, Alexandre Pétion, and the Black Creoles, including Henre Christophe.

In 1806, in October, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the man who led the Republic of Haiti, the emperor who led his army to freedom, was assassinated and killed. Do you know why Jean-Jacques Dessalines was assassinated and killed by the Mulattos and even the Black Creoles?

[00:52:02.310] – Grumbine

I have no idea.

[00:52:03.430] – Robert

Because he wanted to abandon the corvee system and do land reform and give the poor black soldiers who were Africans their own land so they could be independent. He wanted to do land reform like a good socialist. And the Black and Mulatto Creoles conspired and they killed him.

[00:52:20.980] – Grumbine

Ahh!

[00:52:20.980] – Robert

And all of the class division that plagues Haiti to this day is a consequence of that assassination because they brought back the corvee and kept the Bosal peasants. And those Bosal peasants are the 70 percent of poor Haitians that make up the majority of that poor country that’s called the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere to this day because there was never any economic agenda to empower the peasant class. It was always that economic competition between the Creole Blacks and the Creole Mulatto.

[00:52:53.020] – Grumbine

This is an important macro discussion because it’s bigger than Haiti. Every time you see a revolution occur and we can look at the Bolsheviks. Whenever a revolution occurs, a revolution is very much a series of events that finally come to a head. It’s hard to tell when they begin. It’s often hard to tell when they end, but there’s always a counter-revolutionary force in wait that has a different agenda.

And the minute people take their eyes off the prize, that counter-revolutionary force starts reinstalling the things that they had lost. And it sounds to me like Dessalines was bringing a new agenda for the island of Haiti.

[00:53:41.040] – Robert

There’s one woman who studied at Duke. She loves Dessalines. She’s a white woman. She’s trying to work on his biography. You will never find a European scholar of Haitian history who will write anything positive. There is no biography of Dessalines. There’s nothing positive about Dessalines. You know why? Because they realize that he put the whole plantation economy in jeopardy.

And also, he created the first black republic. He’s still a symbol to the world of what black people can accomplish that inspired Africans and black people to this day. And by the way, after he got his independence because he was aware that Rochambeau and the French had a plan to possibly come back and genocide all the Blacks on the island, he pre-emptively said, “You know what? All the white men on this island, massacre them.”

Not all the whites, all the French, excuse me. He let the white British and the Americans stay. The French. He hated the French. If you read the Haitian Declaration of Independence, he curses the French. They massacred thousands of particularly white men. The white women, he allowed them to live on the occasion, and they said they agreed to take an African or black husband.

If not, you die. And he did this because he realized that Rochambeau and all of them had potential existential plans to genocide all the Africans on the island. And he did a preemptive strike. And he also knew that as long as we have these people in power, we’ll never be free because they’re always going to try to make an agreement with France to come back and invade the island.

So he had to do something extreme to exert control. Tucker Carlson had a show about Dessalines when the Haitians in Brooklyn tried to name a street after him. Was like, “He was a mercenary. He was horrible.” That’s why Dessalines gets a bad rap because they make him seem like he had a French holocaust. Well, he did.

He did what was tactically necessary to protect the interests of the island. He didn’t kill all the whites, killed basically the French. He also didn’t kill doctors. Anyone who would be a benefit to the country he left alive. But the majority of them who were still loyal to France – dead.

[00:55:45.320] – Grumbine

This is the history of all revolutionary leaders, though. Every one of them are labeled as a brutal, murderous. I’m not going to sing Stalin’s praises, but he has been very wrongly maligned. Same with Lenin. And you can keep going throughout history.

[00:56:04.310] – Robert

But Andrew Jackson was massacring Native Americans as a hero, right?

[00:56:08.090] – Grumbine

Yeah, right. But Andrew Jackson’s a piece of shit. Let’s just be fair, because he was coming at it from the point of genocide. He was a disgusting man. In fact, you could say that he single handedly destroyed any chance of fixing society just by simply the way he turned his back on all the little bits of good that were coming out of the U.S. from any of the slightly enlightened people.

He basically undercut every bit of it. Let me ask you this one final question, because this is to me where I know everybody’s seen the assassination of the former Haitian president and there was a lot of discussion one way or the other about whether he was a good guy, a tyrant. What is the story with the assassination?

[00:57:00.790] – Robert

I’m not going to get into the debate. He was a guy who was governing a country that was in austerity, that was trying to neutralize the oligarchs of the country who are not even Haitian. Most of them are Syrians, Lebanese, and Europeans who control 90 percent of the economy in Haiti, for a large part of the 20th century. They are racist as hell. Even the Mulatto and Creole Blacks hate them.

He was trying to neutralize them by basically trying to cut deals with foreign competitors like Turkey, which was the last trip he made in June. And it was getting so hot on the island that someone had to whack, my opinion is, with the green light of the United States because things were getting so turbulent that some of the oligarchs and the Blacks or Mulattos they had on their side, with the agreement of the US, had him taken out. That’s my theory.

[00:57:47.620] – Grumbine

The only thing that I heard was that there was a doctor.

[00:57:50.860] – Robert

Yeah, I think he might be a patsy. We’ll have to see. We’re going to be hearing a lot of crap. We may never find out who really did. This might be just like other assassinations of Haitian presidents. This was the fifth actually.

[00:58:01.900] – Grumbine

Well, I’ll tell you what when more is revealed, I hope that maybe I can have you come back and tell us all about it, because you’ve been absolutely an amazing guest. I’ve been looking so forward to doing this interview with you. And this is fantastic because you read what you read. And unless you’ve got someone that has that real boots-on-the-ground experience, has come from there, understands the culture, et cetera, it’s hard sometimes to decipher what is propaganda and what is the truth.

And I’ve always been impressed with you. You have never once pulled any punches. You’ve always told it straight. And I love your passion for the story and leave us with this. If you had a word of wisdom to people who are looking at this country and trying to find some inspiration from what Dessalines did or from what any of the arcs of these revolutions were able to achieve, what might you tell people in the United States that are struggling under this oligarchy and feel powerless?

[00:59:02.470] – Robert

The Haitian Revolution is a perfect example of the mythology that greed and exploitation is simply the province of white people, and that capital, concentrated in power, will always corrupt. And that all wealth must be democratized so that lesser of all of us get treated on equal footing and have the opportunity to achieve like everyone else. Or else there will always be a need for a Haitian Revolution 2.0.

[00:59:31.920] – Grumbine

That was well said, thank you so much and I know we said at the beginning, but go ahead and tell us where can everybody find your work and how can we follow you?

[00:59:41.150] – Robert

You can find my work at Black Agenda Report, just type my name. Huffington Post. You can listen to our podcast- This is Revolution podcast. I’m also working on a book project about American politics. This is Revolution podcast on your relevant Apple podcast, podcast on YouTube. You can see us live stream on Tuesday night at 9 pm, Thursday night at 9 pm, Saturdays at noon.

This is Revolution podcast with my wonderful co-host David Miles. My work at Black Agenda Report that’s usable. Most of it is I’ve been writing it since 2010. I’ve got pieces in Huffington Post, Ultranet. But, you know, I’ve been out there. So check out our podcast. On our Twitter @probert06.

[01:00:31.040] – Grumbine

Very good. I want to put this plug in. I’ve never talked to the folks at Dead Pundits Society, but probably one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard is with Pascal on Dead Pundits.

[01:00:44.090] – Robert

[inaudible] Dead Pundits Society interview on black nationalism. That’s right. My name and type black nationalism and you’ll find that podcast.

[01:00:51.350] – Grumbine

And I recommend it highly. So with that, I want to thank you once again for joining me. Have a great day, everybody. This is Steve Grumbine, Pascal Robert. We’re out of here.

[01:01:08.470] End Credits

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