This publication was launched on 22 August 2022, the two-hundred-thirty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. In an article for our launch of the Red Clarion, we covered the history of that revolution in some detail. Since the day the revolution broke out across the island, Haiti has been the subject of vicious imperialist attack. From Napoleon to Jefferson, and from Jefferson to Biden, the Western powers have tried to bring the rich lands of Saint-Domingue back under the direct political control or indirect financial control of Western, Euro-American capital.

Haiti was forced to pay enormous war indemnities by the international capitalist order for the “theft” of property from France — the “theft” of the bodies of freed Black slaves and the land stolen from the Taino people by the European invaders. The U.S. Empire has considered Haiti a U.S. protectorate since its early days as a settler-republic, dictating terms to the Haitian government and repeatedly invading the island-nation whenever it takes a step toward independence.

From 1915 to 1934, the United States Empire ruled Haiti directly through an invasion force of U.S. Marines that seized the island by order of then-president Woodrow Wilson. The invasion of 1915 was engineered by U.S. capital. The National City Bank of New York, for instance,  funded rebels to destabilize the government on the island. After invading, the U.S. installed pliant puppet regimes and created a police force, called the gendarmerie, to protect the property and interests of American capital on the island. With U.S. direction, the gendarmerie and Marines put down rebellions, tortured thousands, murdered thousands more in summary executions, and built infrastructure on the island through forced slave-labor.

In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti. He was a former priest and a liberation theologist, and he worked to normalize Afro-Caribbean culture in Haiti. He took office in February of that year and by September he was removed by a right wing coup regime that immediately began a campaign of terror against Aristide’s supporters. We now have evidence that one of the junta’s members and the leader of the right-wing death squads, Emmanual Constant, was paid by the CIA.

Nevertheless, opinion turned against the counter-revolutionary regime both on the world stage and in the U.S. After all, the USSR had been forcibly dissolved and the specter of Communism was supposedly on the wane. Enthusiasm for Cold War-era policies was at a low ebb. Aristide had strong support among the Congressional Black Caucus and the emigree communities of the U.S. and, as a former priest and liberation theologian, also had the implicit blessing of Pope John Paul II. On September 19, 1994, 25,000 U.S. military personnel were once again on the island and marching into Haiti. President Aristide was restored to his democratically-elected office. 

In 2004, fed up with Aristide’s pro-Caribbean policies and leftward leanings, the U.S. once again intervened and funded right-wing paramilitaries, removing Aristide from his position for a second time. Aristide’s replacement, René Garcia Préval, launched a series of privatizations of the Haitian public sector. One of the coup plotters, Michael Joseph Martelly, would go on to sit as Haiti’s president from 2011 to 2016 with the support of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Martelly reconstituted the most dangerous elements of the Haitian military and created a government council of businessmen and bankers (which counted Bill Clinton among its members) to “manage” the Haitian economy. Haiti’s most recent president, Jovenel Moïse, presided over further instability; he was assassinated in 2021 by gunmen who have been publicly associated by the New York Times with the CIA — for trying to curb narcotics trafficking on the island.

Today, the United States Empire once again stands poised to launch an invasion with the blessing of the United Nations and warmongering liberals the world over. Acting president Ariel Henry, suspected of “masterminding” the assassination of his predecessor Moïse, has refused to step down in compliance with the many and various Haitian government organs and agencies that have declared his retention of power long after the assassination illegal. He has been in power since 20 July 2021, but no vote has ever been held to confirm him in office, despite his promise that “his administration will be a brief stage in a series of transitions to genuine democracy.”

Current Haitian Political Economy

In 1957 François Duvalier (known in Western culture as “Papa Doc”) became President of Haiti and would remain President for the rest of his life. The U.S. Empire viewed him as a counterbalance to Cuba and Castro, and thus helped him suppress the traditional Haitian mercantile elite through the creation of a paramilitary police force (the Tonton Makout). Under the presidency of his son Jean-Claude, clergy and local leaders began to organize the country’s poor communities into self-help organizations and peasant organizations. As the power of the repressed classes grew through organization, Jean-Claude slowly lost control of the country and, in 1986, he fled.

President Aristide was elected on 7 February 1991 as a result of this growing peasant power. Although the U.S. had acquiesced to his presidency as a matter of fact, Aristide’s attempts to reform the corrupt Haitian army and suppress the power of traditional Haitian business and mercantile elites in the led to the coup of September 1991. Aristide said of the coup, “The bourgeoisie should have been able to understand that its own interest demanded some concessions. We had recreated 1789. Did they want, by their passive resistance, to push the hungry to demand more radical measures? Pep la wonfle jodi-a li kapab gwonde demen! [‘the people who are snoring today may roar tomorrow!’]” .

By 2018, the ruling class in Haiti had consolidated its power and established a new, loyal, Haitian army. A handful of extremely rich and powerful families and individuals have a monopoly on the distribution of staple commodities. Gregory Brandt, president of the French-Haitian Chamber of Commerce controls soap and oil production. Clifford Apaid owns textile factories employing nearly 10,000 Haitians and subcontracts for U.S. garment production — his family controls 1/3rd of all Haitian the textile industry. Marc-Antoine Acra and his family are Haiti’s biggest importers or rice and sugar, and control the sheet metal, paper, and plastics industries of Haiti. Rueven Bigio runs GB Group, which is the dominant financier of the country.

Before the murder of President Moïse, Haiti operated as a semi-presidential republic, with a President, who is head of state, elected by popular vote to a five-year term and a Prime Minister, who is head of government, appointed by the president and selected from the members of the majority party in the National Assembly.

As one might expect from an imperialized colony, the Haitian state is essentially absent. Ordinary Haitians refer to the apparatus as the “phantom state.” NGOs provide around 50% of all health services and 80% of primary and secondary schools. Since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, parasitic capitalist enterprises in the guise of NGOs and “aid” have spread through the Haitian economy. The World Bank runs the Haitian Reconstruction Fund and other NGOs and capitalist aid programs essentially run their “services” directly.

Mass Outrage and Imperialist Interference

In an economy dominated by foreign capital leeching resources to the U.S. and Europe, and in a political environment in which the last elected president was assassinated and usurped by his own Prime Minister — who now sits in his dead predecessors office, refusing to hold elections or submit to the authority of popular assemblies, a stand-off between the poorest segments of the population and the military terror-regime supporting the ruling class is threatening to descend into open civil war. The capitalist media, of course, casts the poor and laboring classes as “gangs” and the unrest as “political instability,” but knowing the history of Haiti and its current political crisis, we can see through this flimsy claim.

After decades of illegitimate government by the ruling classes, plundering of the public wealth, and the installation of U.S.-backed terror regimes, the criminal un-elected “Interim” President Henry has called for U.S. intervention. Rising energy prices (fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war), an outbreak of cholera, acute famine conditions, and the failure of the Haitian government to take any steps toward alleviating the multiple crises, have devastated the country. Opposition groups, many with substantial bases in the peasantry and poor working classes, are demanding that President Henry step down. Rather than relinquishing his grip on the country’s political system, President Henry announced the end of all fuel subsidies from the government in September.

Overnight, petroleum fuel prices doubled. The already-soaring cost of living threatened the lives of many of the country’s impoverished working class. Protests broke out in Port-au-Prince on 11 September, 2022, the day Henry announced the end of the subsidies. On 12 September, the so-called “G9 Family and Allies,” a paramilitary organization led by an ex-police officer that worked to keep the peace for President Moïse, dug a trench around the largest oil terminal in Haiti. This trench now encircles a critical depot of Port-au-Prince, in which 70% of the country’s oil reserve is held.

The demands published by the G9 and its ex-cop leader are that Henry immediately resign and that the government take steps to reduce prices of fuel and basic staple goods required to survive. On 11 October, Henry begged the U.S. capitalists to prop up his government. On 15 October, the U.S. Empire and its junior partner, Canada, sent the first armored cars and military equipment while their puppet-secretary in the U.N. called for “armed action” to remove the fuel blockade. On 17 October, the U.S. Empire and Mexico called for a non-UN force to occupy the island. On 21 October, the UN Security Council froze Haiti’s assets, instated travel bans, and imposed an arms embargo. Most foreign embassies in Haiti have closed.

As the people battle their corrupt government for economic relief, the imperialists prepare their invasion forces as they have so many times in the past. Despite the words of the Haitian anti-corruption organization Nou Pap Domi (“Historically, no U.S. or U.N. intervention has really addressed Haiti’s problem,” which is the “social and economic apartheid”), the U.S. capitalists continue to drum up energy for a direct attack. In Washington, the Biden government salivates over the potential this crisis will have on the November midterm elections in the U.S. and stalwart “progressives” like Elizabeth Warren have been sounding the trumpet for invasion. 

No to Intervention!

It is the duty of Communists within the imperialist West — the U.S. Empire and its junior partners — to oppose intervention in Haiti either through direct means or through a client state like Brazil. The problems of Haiti’s economy and politics come from the U.S. and Europe; its internal structure has been rearranged and reorganized for the benefit of international capital and the local Haitian ruling class since Jean-Jacques Dessalines helped free the island.

To the extent that the ruling powers of the U.S. Empire sit up and take note, we must make it politically untenable for them to launch their invasion. If they do launch it, we must combat it at home by increasing war friction and fatigue, through ceaseless agitation, and through the support of the Haitians and their self-determination in international solidarity.

The “crimes” against property committed in the Port-au-Prince uprising of 11 September and the unrest across the country are merely the crimes of the empire coming to fruition; they were grown from the seed of U.S. deposition or acquiescence to the deposition of the popular President Aristide, from CIA intervention and drug-smuggling, and from the support of the U.S. Empire for the comprador ruling class of Haiti, which ruthlessly exploits its people on behalf of the World Bank and U.S. monopoly capital.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Monthly Review at https://mronline.org/2019/09/07/down-with-the-rebels-against-the-bill-of-sale/ . It has been updated by the author for this publication.

Over one hundred years ago, on the morning of October 7, 1919, a group of two hundred to three hundred armed Haitian rebels launched an attack on U.S. occupation forces in Port-au-Prince. Wielding “swords, machetes, and pikes,” these cacos (as they were called) entered the city with hopes of national liberation, driven to insurrection by a brutal, racist U.S. occupation.1  This occupation had subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewritten the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country.

Though well-armed with grievances, the rebels were outgunned. American troops and their Haitian gendarmerie decimated them with rifles and automatic weapons. Rebel leader Charlemagne Peralte was able to escape (for the moment), but dozens of rebels were slaughtered, their base camp overrun, their one field cannon seized.2

By November 1919, Peralte himself would be betrayed and assassinated, his lifeless body strung up and photographed by his killers as so-called proof that resistance was futile. The American occupiers deliberately spread the photo of Peralte’s corpse across Haiti, attempting to demoralize supporters of the uprising. But standing stripped to the waist, strapped to a door with his arms flung wide, the slain Peralte resembled nothing so much as a victim of crucifixion, martyred by the American Rome. The propaganda image boomeranged on its makers, creating an unintended consequence: Charlemagne Peralte became hailed as a national hero.3

As many as three thousand Haitian people would be killed in what has been called the Second Cacos War (1917–20). Yet despite such repression, Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation would continue for the next decade among students, peasants, and workers alike, until the exit of U.S. troops in 1934. As Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat put it in a 2015 New Yorker article:

During the nineteen years of the U.S. occupation, fifteen thousand Haitians were killed. Any resistance to the centralized, U.S.-installed puppet governments was crushed, and a gendarmerie—a combination of army and police, modelled after an occupation force—was created to replace the Marines after they left. Although U.S. troops officially pulled out of Haiti in 1934, the United States exerted some control over Haiti’s finances until 1947.4

The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since. As scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot have shown, the restructuring of the Haitian state during this period—from its financial institutions to its dreaded military police—created an enduring and corrupt governmental entity that answered less to the Haitian people than to local elites and foreign interests.5

The American occupation of Haiti (1915–34) had unintended consequence in the United States itself as well, where it spurred anti-imperialist consciousness and organizing. As Steve Striffler reviews in his critical history, Solidarity: Latin America and the U.S. Left in the Era of Human Rights, resistance in the 1920s was first centered in the African American and Haitian émigré communities, with figures such as James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) playing a critical role. The focus on U.S. abuses in Haiti encouraged greater internationalism within the existing “Negro” rights movement, while drawing together a broad anti-imperialist tendency that included magazines like the Nation as well as elements of the radical socialist/communist left. “Such efforts,” Striffler writes, “made the occupation increasingly unpopular in the United States by the mid-1920s, and created space for expanded opposition in Haiti,” ultimately making the formal military occupation untenable.6

One legacy of this oppositional movement can be found in the work left behind by politically engaged authors, who, in their creative and critical writings of this period, foreground Haiti and the burning issues its history raises. Across the 1930s, U.S. radical writers looked to Haiti not just to dramatize Black victimization or American brutality, but for insight and inspiration that could empower progressive labor, antiracist and antifascist struggles in the United States and worldwide. As Benjamin Balthaser has shown in his recent book Anti-Imperialist Modernism, left-wing writings from the period of the U.S. occupation of Haiti often emphasized the historical, revolutionary agency of this long-oppressed people.7 Against the grain of dominant North American discourses that routinely depict the Haitian people as helpless victims, unruly mobs, postapocalyptic zombies, exotic-erotic tourist attractions, or raw human material ripe for exploitation, anti-imperialist literary representations of Haiti from the 1930s treat Haitians as potential revolutionary subjects. The now-well-known work of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938) was not alone in its insight, but rather emerged from the crucible of a broader radical movement that sought to put Haiti front and center—both as capitalist profit center and as site of revolutionary ferment.8

Among the all-but forgotten figures in this underappreciated anti-imperialist movement was the writer Guy Endore (1900–70). Turning to study the history of Haiti just as the formal U.S. military occupation was coming to its end in 1933–34, Endore was inspired to create one of the great neglected, anti-imperialist works in twentieth century U.S. literature, his historical novel of slavery and revolution, Babouk—a book that is still in print, thanks to socialist Monthly Review Press. Born in Brooklyn, raised partly in Europe, partly in an Ohio orphanage, fluent in French as well as German from youth, Endore lacked a sense of a stable social position. He would state later that he had “never been able to discover exactly where I fit in…everything sort of cancels out in me. I’m neither European, nor American; neither Jew nor Christian; neither of the country nor the city; neither of this century nor the last; neither rich nor poor; and even in my studies, I was always divided, always torn between the sciences and the arts.”9 By the mid–1930s, Endore was, like many young writers of his generation, turning to the left. He would spend two decades as a committed member of the Communist Party (CPUSA)—finding there a kind of home for his homelessness. However, though his political awakening was shaped by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, “it was when I studied that Haiti business,” Endore recalled, “that I really began to take a side and began to see that there were exploiters and exploited.”10 In Babouk, “my intention,” he wrote, “was to make the reader feel and smell and taste the crime of slavery, until he abominated it; and not only historical slavery, but all those too-numerous characteristics of it that have survived into our own day.”11

Such comments make clear that while eighteenth century Saint Domingue was Endore’s immediate focus, his aims extended beyond that singular situation. He sought to intervene not only in the historiography around Haiti, but also in contemporary 1930s struggles for social justice. To pursue this split purpose—addressing not just “historical slavery” but its present surviving aspects—Babouk deploys a self-conscious narrative voice that frequently “interrupts” the action of past events to comment directly to the modern reader, drawing parallels to more contemporary injustices and pointing out the failures of traditional history or literature when it comes to representing such issues. While working closely from primary historical documents—thanks to his fluency in French—Endore crafted a meta-historical form that could simultaneously do justice to the historical reality of Haiti, while also allowing the fires of exploitation and revolution there to illuminate a broader contemporary web of capitalism, racism, and empire. Babouk thus deserves attention today not only as a historical document of the “Hands off Haiti” movement, but also as a provocation to revolutionary thought and practice more generally.12

To be sure, this radical book emerged from an unlikely quarter.

Originally, Endore had been commissioned in 1933 by a commercial publisher to write a “Caribbean romance” set against the horrifying “backdrop of tom-toms.” Exoticizing travel narratives of Haitian “voodoo” had been in vogue since the U.S. occupation 13 and Endore was at this time best-known as a horror writer, especially for his New York Times bestseller Werewolf of Paris (1933). But Endore’s research, which included an extended trip to Haiti, led him to produce a very different kind of book, one that not only brings the horrifying “backdrop” of Haiti into the foreground, but inverts the nature of the “horror” we encounter. The horror here is not on the side of ‘native savagery,’ but of so-called ‘civilization’.

From its first page to its last, Babouk confronts us with the callous strategies and often monstrous technologies of physical and ideological repression that were building blocks of colonization and slavery. Readers turning to Babouk for a glimpse of the ‘monstrous Other’ are likely to be surprised, for the book compels us to recognize how the true monstrosity afflicting Haiti were the products of capitalist ‘reason’ in the service of profit and empire.

And so, sent to Haiti to write a romantic/horrific page-turner, Endore wrote instead a masterpiece to overthrow masters with, a horror tale in which the three-headed monster is capitalism, racism, and empire, and the heroes are slaves in revolt. His commissioned employer, Century Press, seeking a different kind of horror, refused to publish the book and other major commercial publishers followed suit. Clifton Fadiman, then editor at Simon and Schuster and lead book reviewer for the New Yorker, wrote Endore privately to compliment him, “Babouk is a powerful, moving piece of work,” but he added that “it won’t sell because it’s just too horrible. The reviews would warn people away from it. We would be afraid to handle it.”14

Fadiman was not far off in his commercial estimates—though considering his position of influence, his lament was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brought out by the small radical press Vanguard, Endore soon found his novel denounced by the New York Times as an attempt to inspire a “race riot,” and criticized in the New Republic by reviewer Martha Gruening, who charged Endore with producing not a novel at all, but a mere “calendar of horrors.”15

Make no mistake: there is plenty in Babouk that could be seen as “horrible,” beginning with the history itself—enslavement, resistance, and ruling-class repression. Moreover, the writing in the text often retains an element of the sensationalist horror style that put Endore on the map. The very first page of the book contains a detailed discussion of the “work” done by a “genius,” a so-called professional “nigger taster” whose trained tongue helps tell which of the enslaved are healthy enough to be purchased, and which not. (The slave traders after all, are interested in cheating one another as well, hiding the illness of their captives with perfumes and make-up and even fake teeth.) Later chapters detail grotesque diseases and conditions aboard the slave ship, the torture techniques used to punish rebel slaves, and even the brutal pike-impaling of a white infant at the height of the slave rebellion. The book at times seems to sarcastically revel in revealing the historical monstrosities that enslavers and colonizers devise to manage and rationalize their vicious regime.

Endore’s wager seems to have been that his talent for the graphic and gothic could be leveraged to bring a broader popular readership to confront uncomfortable social and historical truths. He had clear political motivations for Babouk , but, as he put it, he also “wrote the book to sell.”16 In 1934, somehow, it had not seemed impossible for a book to be both an anti-capitalist horror and a commercial hit. After all, hadn’t his 1933 horror novel Werewolf of Paris topped the best-seller lists, despite (or perhaps because of) its class-conscious account of the Paris Commune?17

But it would be a mistake to write off Endore’s vivid depictions of violence as mere sensationalism, or as a left-wing replication of the “exotic discourses” that predominated in U.S. depictions of Haiti at the time.18 Similarly, it would be a mistake to see Endore’s representation of the repressive effects of imperialism and slavery as a gratuitous objectification of black bodies, aimed at stirring the sentimental emotions of (predominantly white) readers. Rather, Endore’s goal in so vividly depicting historical horror is to bring to consciousness the ways that the most seemingly extreme and “monstrous” acts of the slave system—for instance, the public burning of slave rebels, the clipping of ears from runaways, elaborate regime of torture, and so on—were in fact ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ outgrowths of the capitalistic logic of profit-maximization and social control. At the same time, Endore draws out the ways that such extreme measures of repression testify to the pervasive resistance of the enslaved; had the enslaved ‘accepted’ their dehumanized lot, such brutal techniques would not have been deemed ‘necessary.’

As an exploration of history, Babouk remains remarkable for the way it explores the dialectic of oppression and resistance, foregrounding how contradictions among the ruling classes themselves (such as the contradiction between maximizing short-term profit and sustaining long-term social control, or the contradiction between different blocs of rival property owners), opened space for resistance from below. Even such a totalitarian system as racialized chattel slavery had its cracks and weak links. At the same time, Endore zooms in on slave resistance, emphasizing the importance of cultural practices—and especially practices of collective story-telling—as a crucial site of mass resistance and revolutionary preparation.

Through the story-telling gifts of his eponymous character Babouk, Endore suggests the ways in which the verbal arts can be used strategically, raising the consciousness and sustaining the spirit of the oppressed, while puncturing the myths of racial or class superiority that seek to naturalize ruling power. Thus, at the same time as it confronts us with the stark limits of traditional Western historiography, Babouk—as imaginative fiction—explores the importance of creative culture for preparing the path to revolution. Babouk himself might be read as a figure for the radical artist that Endore may have aspired to become, working with complex inherited cultural materials—African trickster stories and European Bible tales alike—to forge unity among the oppressed and to clarify the need for a general revolt.

Thus, while Endore constantly exposes the background apparatus of exploitation, the main story of Babouk reimagines the leadup to the Haitian Revolution, through the coming-of-age story of a character based loosely on the historical figure of Boukman Dutty. Remembered as a crucial catalyst of the early uprisings of 1791, known for his key role at the ceremony of Bois Caiman, Boukman’s early death left subsequent leadership to other, now better-known figures, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. It also left Boukman himself something of a historical mystery, creating room for much subsequent historical debate, while providing Endore with the space for reimagining the unrecorded pre-history of the revolution.19

Endore presents Babouk as a field slave, emphasizing his talents as an unconventional, yet popular story-teller. In stark contrast to those nationalist writers of the 1920s and ’30s who sought to champion Haiti in the face of imperialist degradation by celebrating its long line of strong black military men, from Toussaint and Dessalines to Henry Christophe, Endore chose instead to foreground a lowly field worker, whose only power among the Haitian masses comes through his well-chosen words. Though Toussaint and Dessalines are never mentioned by name in the book, Endore implies a sharp distinction between Babouk and those leaders who were “as astute as the whites” and would come to dominate the Haitian state after the revolution. Emphasizing the “gold bedizened uniforms” of leaders who seek to imitate their former masters, Endore reminds us that some of these figures were all too eager to compromise with colonial powers, some even proposing the reintroduction of slavery. “Babouk,” Endore writes, “had nothing to do with these.”20

Babouk thus attempts a tense balance: conjuring the emancipatory spirit of slave insurrection and emphasizing the revolutionary importance of storytelling, but without romanticizing the contradictory aftermath of a revolution that—despite its historic achievements—would leave in place new forms of egregious exploitation and inequality. Recalling Peralte’s attack on Port-au-Prince, Endore chooses to focus Babouk’s climax not on a heroic moment of victory, but on an insurgent attack that fails…but that (like this historical uprising led by Boukman in 1791) helps usher in a broader mass upsurge. As we finish Endore’s novel, we are still in 1791, the Haitian Revolution represented not as monumental accomplishment of the past, but as an insurgent necessity of the present. He leaves us looking at the burning sugar cane fields beyond the walls of the city; the horizon of emancipation remains a future to be fought for: What side will we be on?

In this way, Endore distinguishes his narrative from accounts that portray the human aspirations of the Haitian Revolution as fulfilled with the achievement of national independence alone, as if the formal rejection of foreign rule had thereby ended economic exploitation and extreme social inequality in the formal colony.

In his critical report from Haiti in 1934, “Haiti and U.S.A. Occupation,” published concurrently with Babouk, Endore specifically targets the ruse of bourgeois nationalism as a main danger to the cause of liberation. In this (nonfiction) piece, published in the antifascist magazine Fight, Endore offers a sharp class critique of Haitian nationalism (and the U.S. liberalism that embraces it), taking aim at the notion that rule by the local elite represents genuine progress as far as the working Haitian masses are concerned. This local elite is a class of exploiters, he underscores, just as much as U.S. financiers and occupiers, notwithstanding their claims to the contrary.

At the same time, Endore’s essay makes an effort to understand why well-intentioned liberal or African American intellectual observers feel the impulse to rally to a nationalist defense of Haiti, as “the last refuge” of “Negro pride” in a world dominated by European colonialism. But to identify Haitian elite rule with a refuge from racism or class domination, Endore argues, would be not only “erroneous” but “vicious.” “A Negro bourgeoisie can and has in some places replaced a white bourgeoisie with no improvement in the lot of the majority,” as he points out. “Such are the fruits of Haitian nationalism acquired so painfully at the price of the lives of a hundred thousand Negroes.”21

Nor is Endore’s problem only with the nationalism of the Haitian elite. Rather, he generalizes the point, arguing that “national prejudice is only a different form of the class system by which the ruling class is assured of always having someone to remove its garbage or do its unskilled factory work, someone whom the ruling class will despise and keep in his ‘place.’” Whether in the United States or elsewhere, Endore writes, race prejudice is “fostered by capitalism to disrupt the strength of the proletariat by preventing the oppressed white worker from acting in concert with the Negroes.” (We can hypothesize that Babouk was aimed in part at helping those oppressed white workers to see why they should act in concert with their black brethren and reject the racist bait of their own ruling class.)

Endore closes his Fight article by asking readers to “strip the bright paint of patriotic idealism off the Haitian upper classes and reveal what is beneath,” while at the same time forging a “Hands off Haiti” movement that sides not with the “gros negre kulaks,” (that is, the wealthy Haitian landowners), but with the “cacos spirit” for the “realization of full social justice.”

Clearly, Peralte’s Cacos insurgency of 1919 was not far from Endore’s mind as he attempted to articulate a class-conscious anti-imperialism.

While Endore abstains from commenting directly on the U.S. occupation in Babouk itself, there can be no doubt that what he learned from Haitians themselves had a major effect on his novel.

For instance, during his trip to Haiti, Endore learned of how the U.S. military occupation facilitated massive land theft, turning literacy itself into a weapon against the Haitian masses. It was “easy” to steal local peasants’ land, Endore recalled:

You just go up to a man and you say, “Who owns this land?” He’ll say, “I do.” Then you go to the land records office and you record your name for that land, and then you go to him and you say, “I’ve got a record for this land. I own it. Where’s your record? Let’s see which one is the real one.” Of course, he hasn’t got a record.… If the man refused to leave [the land] the American would threaten him with a gun, and if he was halfway decent, he’d give him a job. So, in this way, a number of plantations were built up.22

Acutely conscious of the power of written “records” backed by guns, it is surely no coincidence that, near the climax of Babouk, as the Haitian masses set fire to the sugar fields outside the capital, Endore champions the insurgents, not merely as race rebels or as black workers, but as “rebels against the bill of sale.” Employing his ironic narrator to ventriloquize a self-righteous ruling class, he sarcastically declares:

           Here is our bill of sale! Flag of the unmapped land that covers the earth!
           Revolt against that if you dare and you will be broken on the wheel!…
Millionaires! you true internationalists who regiment your workers into countries, hoist aloft your flag: the bill of sale!
           You wretches out in the burning plain before Le Cap, where is your bill of sale? 
           What! Have you [slaves] taken your liberty and you have no bill of sale?
           Then beat the general alarm!… Down with the rebels against the bill of sale!23

Reframing the historic slave revolt this way, Endore distills from the rebellion of 1791 a universal meaning that can resonate with readers in other places and times, beyond the immediate context of the fight to end chattel slavery or colonialism. To be sure, as is now widely known, generations of Haitians have been burdened with a massive and odious “bill of sale” forced on them by French gunboats and U.S. banks after 1804, as penance for its costly “theft” of property in flesh, (a debt the equivalent of $21 billion today).24 But Endore’s “bill of sale” frame resonates even more broadly, allowing us to see a kinship to other struggles as well, wherever the militant movement of the people comes up against the sacred “property rights” of their would-be masters—whether that be in the form of an eviction blockade, a workplace occupation, or the expropriation of the expropriators of Marxist prophecy.

In such a way, Endore implies that the mass of humanity—across the illusory lines of race and nation—is still in a sense enslaved to the domination of “the bill of sale.” At the same time, he suggests that the kinds of brutal repression brought down on eighteenth century Haitian rebel slaves may lie in wait for all those who are serious about depriving the ruling class of their most precious property. Babouk thus asks readers to see in the revolt of Haitian slaves the vanguard of a more general and global revolution, while confronting us all with the sobering fact that, if the goal is revolution, righteous grievances alone will not be enough.

The second to last chapter of the novel ends with a description of how Babouk’s slain body is decapitated, dismembered, and publicly displayed—not unlike Peralte’s own—as a warning to those who would challenge the masters’ power. But like the photo of the martyred Peralte, the displaying of Babouk’s corpse does more to incite rebellion than to quell it. In this way, Endore pays closing honor to the cacos martyrs whose brave attack on imperialist occupation—however ill-fated—nonetheless helped raise the consciousness of people who came after them, including North American writers and activists such as himself. Perhaps Endore wagered that, like the death photos of Peralte, the depicted brutalities of his own book would help inspire new waves of revolt.

Coming off Babouk, in 1935, Endore seemed to be full of the sense of radical possibility, publishing a vision for what he called a “new school of Marxian historical fiction,” whose principal aim would be “the revelation of the hidden but unending class struggle of the ages.” His enthusiasm for the work to be done is palpable as he lists what might have been his next series of books: “Gracchus [Babeuf], Spartacus, the Crusades, the Peasant Wars, colonial expansion—history is replete with magnificent untouched material that the old novelist bent on portraying love triumphant, picturesque adventures or some trivial plot, could not use.”25

But, sadly, Endore would not complete—indeed, would hardly even begin—the avowedly revolutionary literary project he outlined. Quickly, he fell from this vista of enthusiasm; Babouk sold only a few hundred copies, met mixed reviews, and soon went out of print. Even sympathetic comrades failed to grasp the richness of his radical work. African-American Marxist literary critic Eugene Gordon praised the book in The New Masses as the “best of its kind” and yet, notwithstanding Endore’s comments to the contrary, criticized Babouk as “too nationalistic,” suggesting that it implied a modern world driven by racial resentments, rather than the systemic forces of capitalism.26

Having his forgotten masterpiece fail to connect was a profoundly deflating experience. By 1941, while still publicly identifying as a communist, Endore wrote not to herald a new revolutionary genre, but to lament a radical conundrum:

The writer’s task is to amuse, to interpret, to exhort. It is my aim to do all three together, whenever possible.… The predicament of the writer is that the average person wishes to be amused and not instructed in his short leisure; he does not wish to be made aware of his misfortunes; he wants something to help him forget; while the upper classes threaten to tear the social structure down with them, if, by interpretation or exhortation, their privileges are attacked.27

Still later, Endore lamented: “I wrote [Babouk] to sell, but I misjudged the people, I misjudged the time, everything. So, I turned away from that kind of writing and worked on motion pictures.” (Soon after he would be blacklisted from Hollywood for his communist political affiliations.) Chastened by Babouk’s failure, Endore would later refer to himself as a “hack writer” who wrote only “for money to support myself and my family, and that’s it.” It is important to underscore that Endore would remain active for decades, as a writer of Hollywood screenplays and popular novels, and as a communist activist, authoring pamphlets against racism and teaching writing in CPUSA-run schools near Los Angeles. But the revolutionary fusion of literary and political intervention that Babouk represented was no longer on his agenda. Yet decades later Endore would still refer to Babouk as his “forgotten masterpiece.”28

But though it failed commercially in Endore’s own time, Babouk deserves renewed consideration in ours, from those interested in reimaginings of slavery and the Haitian Revolution, and more broadly. For by closely studying the singular history of Haiti, Endore presents us with broader insights about the ongoing class struggles that continue to drive world history, while offering a radical critique of the ways that inherited literature and dominant history tend to hide those struggles from view. At the same time, Endore points us towards the need for a different kind of historical imagining—and a different kind of story-telling—that might become a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. At one point in the novel, Endore apostrophizes his own main character, confronting the paradox of recovering voices of resistance that all too often have been lost to written history:

Babouk, we have gone beyond your century. Your voice is lost in the past. Your wavering voice is lost in the steaming field of Saint-Domingue. It is lost both in time and space. And yet it cannot be lost altogether, Babouk. It cannot die in a void. Oh, no. All the wavering voices of the complaining Negro, be they of the dead or of the living, of Africa or America, yet they will someday be woven into a great net and they will pull that deaf master out of his flowery garden and down into the muddy stinking field.29

If studying Haitian history helped inspire Endore to take the side of the exploited and oppressed, Babouk weaves together stories of struggle, arming readers for the battle to come. Whatever we ultimately make of the literary weapon he forged, Endore’s own story reminds us that, by confronting the horror and hope of history, it is possible for people (even from ostensibly ‘privileged’ groups) to transform themselves and their work in solidarity with the oppressed.

1.
The Earth has kept on traveling round the Sun
Since the day it shook and pulled them down.
Down
Down
Down
Everything fell:
Shacks and church pews smashed through sewers
Palace collapsed – an empty shell.
Three hundred thousand 
(counted, fewer;
Thousands buried, never found).

The whole world ruptured. 
Catacombs
Unleashing walled-up winds of hell.

La Terre Tremblé. 

2.
Will we forget what that shaking ground
Revealed for all to see, who cared to look?
The way the streets filled up with bloated bodies?
The way the troops drove on, and let them cook?
The “Aid” delayed, as if for fear of zombies
rising from their rubble graves to run –
White eyes blazing bloody memories
of how white masters came and took by gun?

And yet, and yet, 
poor Haitians did not riot;            
worked to pull each other from the ruins.
Carried those who died, 
and those who wouldn’t,
for a while,
And those who lived.
Gave until they had no more to give.

(Meanwhile,
“Security,” guns in hand;
Stand in for gates that no longer can,
Protecting property of those in command.) 

3.
A sudden eruption
of broken heart blisters
oozing dry on Live TV
far flung news anchors aim 
for the ripe wound,
peeling it back, 
letting us see
seeking the perfect angle to capture that 
“inexplicable-horror-of-it-all,”
(just a dash of sugared hope thrown in for the folks at home)
that sweet spot 
where the latex glove meets the bandage meets the hand meets the ballot box
meets the sky--
Where it hurts to look. 
And makes you cry           
(But never lets you find out How or Why).

From such fastened hooks
America hangs
Prepared to unleash its charity thang.
Solemn celebrities claim center stage:
And all who are seated are moved.

Millions shut their eyes in prayer
(secretly thankful that they’re not there)
Ready to do what good people should: 
for a minute, an hour, or even a week.                

         But never letting the Haitians speak.

What do the people there have to say?
When looking at US, what do they see?    

Who will dare to take a peek today?

         Caught in the sun, the pocked eye turns away.
         How much can the blinded stand to see?

         Band-aids slap where barricades should be.

4.
Worldwide
They say there are a dozen cities
With at least a million people each
Lying, waiting, sleeping on a fault line
(Slum-dweller flesh to feed the breach).
For each year, the Earth, it shivers
In the endless cold of space,
Quakes and quivers, 
like an ox
whose skin 
must knock flies from its face.

The fault is not the moving Earth’s– 
We know that quakes will come, and even where –

At fault:
a world-wide class affliction
Razing mounds of contradiction:
Bubbling boils that bust through skin,
Seeping hot pus, sweat and blood – and liquid gold
That trickles up to rulers’ lips ice cold.
Parasites suck membranes thin:
Vulture claws cleave crater-trails,
Until all precious flesh 
is drawn in scabs and scars 
to fit the scales.

(Heed the bankers’ dark command:                      
Plow the farmers off the land.                       
Build estates on bone and sand.                      
Spill the poor in pavement cracks.               
Stitch the workers into seams                
Of rulers’ cloaks– Breaking their backs –letting them choke   --gasping for air –
stripping them down to their dreams,                                   
then bare.)

The earth, we know, 
will quiver.
The brittled surface, 
tear.

5.
This predator plague has no plan
for poor people,
except for the juice to be squeezed 
from their veins
             To quench its viral thirst.
             Markets pressure 
                         and hearts burst.

So long as endless profit reigns.

(The heads of state remain aloof:
              Crisis = opportunity, after all.
Helicopter blades give the world a roof.
             And there’s plenty of sweat to catch, 
                         as they 
                         fall.) 

6.

Outside Port au Prince:
Refugee Cities –
             Rain-soaked sheets
             Flap on and on,
                          But only the bugs and bats can
                          fly.

The people, gathering: 
                          Grasp at Why.

        Peering eyes out fraying holes;
        Fingers point:  
                                   jetliners tearing the sky.

Aboard corporate planes:
              Thirsty agents
              Ties loosened,
                           Clinking drinks in hand,
              Toast to a future 
                                       for which they’ve signed.

              Traveling home,
                          to milder climes:
If they look down                 
            through parting clouds–
                                     see only some
dirty laundry lines.


(Originally written in January, 2011.  Updated August. 2022)

“PEOPLE HERE ARE DRUNK WITH LIBERTY…. The peril is great and it is imminent…. ARREST SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. SEIZE WRITINGS IN WHICH EVEN THE WORD FREEDOM APPEARS. Redouble your guard over your plantations, towns, and villages. Everywhere win over the free people of color. BE SUSPICIOUS OF THOSE WHO ARRIVE FROM EUROPE.”

—Letter of 12 August 1789 from Paris, by Saint-Domingue’s deputies

“[T]hey are inexcusable in my eyes for having wanted to set themselves up as despotic masters of the mulattoes, and as tyrannical masters of the blacks…. To shake off the cruel and shameful yoke under which they groan, they are authorized to employ all possible means, even death, even if they are reduced to slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

—Jean-Paul Marat, L’Amis du peuple, No. 624 (12 Dec. 1791)

On the 22 of August in 1791, after months of planning and secret Sunday meetings, a slave named Boukman led a revolt through the North Province of Saint-Domingue. The rebels, armed with torches, guns, sabers, and makeshift weapons, set fire to the plantations and burned the fields. They freed slaves as they marched. Their army grew with ready-made revolutionaries. Black slaves flocked to their cause. Although Boukman would not survive the revolution, what he and others had begun would be the first and only successful slave-revolution of the new world.

“Your houses, Monsieur le Marquis, are nothing but ashes, your belongings have disappeared, your administrator is no more. The insurrection has spread its devastation and carnage onto your properties,” wrote the plantation owner Millot in a letter to his neighbor, the absentee landlord the marquis de Gallifet.

The bourgeoisie of newly-revolutionary France had won political rights from the ancien regime. The free colored men of the French colony tried to enforce a law passed in France that would grant them the same. Despite the fact that the National Assembly of France had issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789—and despite powerful progressive forces in France who championed them—the rights it guaranteed were not extended to women or free Black men. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was stillborn in the National Assembly and a 1790 uprising of “free colored persons” (gens de couleur) to secure their rights  in the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been crushed. Its leader, Vincent Ogé, executed by the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Domingue.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the planters of Saint-Domingue allied with their one-time foes, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux in France. Though the planters typically found themselves at the mercy of the merchants (due to the royal licenses, called the exclusif, which gave the merchants and merchant-houses monopolies on the importation of goods from the French colonies), they suddenly shared a common interest: the protection of the slave trade. The colonial production of coffee, indigo, and above all else sugar was reliant on the importation of Afrikan slaves. Slaves were worked to death on Saint-Domingue, and they made both planters and merchants rich. With the outbreak of the Revolution, that trade was suddenly threatened by French “radical Republicanism” which promised freedom and equality for all men. The planters and merchants formed the Club Massaic, a political club with the express purpose of  maintaining the racialized class system of Saint-Domingue.

Opposing the Club Massaic in France was the Société de amis des Noirs, a group of radical abolitionists, who demanded the immediate freedom of all the kingdom’s slaves. Radical republicanism was the enemy of the King, of the nobility, of the colonial planters, and of the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle.

In August of 1791, Black slaves held secret meetings near Gallifet plantation and swore to fight “a war to the death against the whites.” On August 22nd, rumors of a revolution terrorized the planters. They summoned a judge from the biggest city on the island, Le Cap Française, and when he arrived, the slaves rose up. Boukman, one of the early leaders of the rebellion, led nearly 2,000 slaves across the province.

On one plantation the rebels took “the refiner’s apprentice, dragged him to the front of the dwelling-house, and there hewed him into pieces with their cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly shot. The rebels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner and massacred him in his bed.” They then began attacking surrounding plantations. 

The slaves burned the hated cane fields. They torched the despised refineries and the sugar machinery that often crushed, mutilated, and mangled their arms. The conspiracy of revolt stretched across the entire northern plain of Saint-Domingue. Once the revolt was underway, the rebels destroyed “not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins, and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation.”

By August 27, the insurgents were “reckoned 10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies, of whom 700 or 800 are on horseback, and tolerably well armed.” As in France, Saint-Domingue burned in the fire of revolution.

Class Composition of Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue had few members of the noble class; the French colonial nobility were absentee landlords who relied on agents and managers. Standing above the pre-revolutionary class hierarchy were the colonial secretaries, governors who were appointed by the king himself to oversee the island. The colonial secretaries had their seat in Le Cap Française, at Le Gouvernement, the house of the administration. Behind this was the military barracks, housing a thousand or more soldiers. The city was home to a large prison and several hospitals, twenty-five bakeries, and a slaughterhouse. It had its own municipal water system, fountains, and public squares. Le Cap’s 1,400 houses were built of stone and some had gardens. The city was called “the Paris of our island.”

The highest-ranked class on Saint-Domingue was that of the “grand blancs,” the big French planters who owned the majority of the land and the plantations. In 1700 there were 18 plantations in the whole colony, but by 1790 there were about 8,000 and Saint-Domingue produced roughly one half of all sugar consumed in Europe. Most of these plantations had been started by Frenchmen who took out loans from one of the merchant houses back in France. Those planters who prospered became members of the wealthy planter class, the grand blancs; those who failed turned over their plantations to the merchant houses in Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochell.

The plantation system was developed primarily for the export of sugar. Sugar production is labor-intensive. The mills were expensive and often deadly to their operators. When Saint-Domingue came into French hands in the 17th century, the plantations were worked by Afrikan slaves alongside white indentured laborers. In 1687, whites outnumbered Afrikan slaves on the island, 4,411 to 3,358. By 1700, the slave population was 9,082 and the white population had decreased by a few hundred. By the middle of the 18th century there were 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites. In 1789 the official figures counted 465,000 slaves, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free colored persons. At the end of the 18th century, more than 35,000 Afrikan slaves were brought to the island each year on the Middle Passage.

Later, the French built plantations for both indigo and coffee. Three-quarters of sugar and coffee sent to France was re-exported to other countries in Europe, with the difference in the price as it came into Bordeaux and Nantes and the price sold to Europe pocketed by the great merchant concerns in those cities. As many as 25 million French people depended on the Saint-Domingue trade. Nantes and Bordeaux flourished off of this trade. They became important centers of revolutionary activity and many of the bourgeoisie who fought for greater freedom for their class, for a political voice in the Kingdom of France, were only able to do so because they had grown fat on the trade of sugar and coffee.

On plantations with absentee landlords like those held by nobles or the merchant-houses, the chief agent was the procureur, who had power of attorney. These agents hired gérants, managers, but rarely visited the plantations themselves. The managers often exploited the slaves for their own gain, skimming commodities or money for themselves. The biggest plantations had économes, overseers, hired by managers and owners, who monitored the slaves in the fields and tracked the plantation’s slave population. These were all white or free colored men.

There was also a population of white urban craftsmen, and, increasingly as the 18th century went on, a growing class of poor or unemployed white persons who migrated into the colony with the hope that they might make themselves wealthy planters and plantation owners. Poor whites (petit blancs) were directed by the white planter class to vent much of their class-anger at the free colored people, many of whom were moderately wealthy or who owned slaves and small plantations of their own. This helped alleviate generalized class struggle in the colony.

Free colored persons (gens de couleur), were a legally recognized racial caste. Membership in this caste was initially small; in the early 18th century, many people of mixed Afrikan descent were legally classified as white, By the 1760s, new racial laws and measurements recategorized many of these persons and determined them to be “colored” — by blood quantum. In 1764, a royal decree forbade persons categorized in this fashion from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year, another decree excluded them from working as lawyers or in the offices of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their masters or white relatives. A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to “affect the dress, hairstyles, styles, or bearing of whites.” By the time of the Revolution, free colored people were subject to many laws discriminating against them on the basis of “race.” (There were many legal categories of “color” based on blood quantum.)

Still, wealthy free colored persons sent their children to be educated in France. White men married free colored women — however, in the 1750s and ‘60s some of those who had done so were removed as administrators and military officers. Poor whites or those arriving in the colony seeking to make their fortune were confronted with well-established free colored persons; in a naked maneuver designed to secure a cross-class alliance, the wealthy white planters assisted these poor whites by agitating for that legislation which deprived free colored persons of political, social, and economic rights.

Below the free colored people were the ranks of the Black slaves. The top of the slave hierarchy was marked by the slave driver. Drivers (or overseers) were in charge of the field slaves and often tasked with whipping those who where chosen for punishment. They had better food, clothes, and housing than field hands, and sometimes acted as collaborators with the masters and managers. Yet, a French manual for plantation masters advised them to watch their drivers carefully, as they were the most rebellious slaves on the plantation — and not without good reason. They had the most freedom out of all the slaves, and often gathered on Sundays to discuss matters with drivers from neighboring plantations. These men were the organizers of the revolt in 1791, doing most of the planning work at these Sunday meetings.

The horrors of the middle passage are well-documented. Over 100,000 slaves died during transport. 685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue from 1700-1793. Saint-Domingue accounted for between 8 and 11 million slaves overall, perhaps 10 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Each year, 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, an enormous fatality rate. Without a constant stream of new slaves from Afrika, the colony would exhaust its exploited Black workforce by literally working them to death in a matter of years.

The slaves on the sugar plantations were subject to the worst conditions on the entire island. Sugar refining was brutal and dangerous, and consumed the lives of the slaves on the plantations. Thus, the slave population was divided between the sugar slaves and the coffee and indigo slaves; these groups were further divided into drivers, artisans (barrel makers, sugarboilers, and so on), and field hands. Enslaved women were excluded from the high-status work. They worked as domestics or field-hands, and were also used as “breeding stock” — subject to rape, assault, and sexual exploitation by masters, managers, and overseers. Slaves were permitted to maintain personal garden plots, the produce of which they ate or sought permission to go to market on Sundays to sell.

Class Forces at Work

The tensions in the colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution ran thusly: 

1. White planters, “grand blancs”. By and large supporting the bourgeois Revolution in France, the planters generally joined with Club Massaic and the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, etc. They were opposed to the expansion of rights for free people of color, and violently opposed to any degree of liberation for the slaves. However, once the Revolution was underway, the planters would increasingly struggle against the current of radical republicanism that began to threaten the privileges of the big merchant houses.
2. White artisans and “petit blancs”. White artisans were positioned to become allies of the planters through their shared desire to maintain slavery, but they were less independence-minded and tended to be more loyal to France. Poor whites were non-revolutionary, but more or less allied with the white planters through a combined hatred of the racialized people of color, particularly those who had a higher class-status.
3. The free people of color. Opposed to the freeing of Black slaves, the free people of color also supported the Revolution in France and saw the position of Club Massaic as hypocritical while distancing themselves from the more radical abolitionist positions. Essentially, the free people of color on the island were agitating for expanded political rights and the right to assimilate into white French society. The free people of color were mostly concentrated in the west and the south; there they were armed and well-organized.
4. Black slaves. The enslaved population was divided into strata of its own: urban slaves, domestic slaves, drivers, and field slaves.
   1. Urban and domestic slaves. About 100,000 of the 500,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue were cooks, personal servants, artisans, etc. As a class, they were not inclined to join any movement, relying on the status of their masters to protect them.
   2. Drivers and field slaves. The 400,000 slaves who worked the fields or who directly administered the plantations were subject to the most brutal and inhumane treatment; these were the slaves that would become the engine of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, led by the drivers who organized the uprising.
5. The Maroons. There were a not-insignificant number of Afrikan slaves who escaped into the central mountains or the surrounding territories and became outlaws, raiders, and so forth. These so-called Maroons were often hardened warriors. There were also, among the slaves, those who had just recently been transported (stolen) from Afrika, many of whom had been taken in warfare. Regardless of their station or class as slaves, these slaves, “most of whom can barely say two words of French but in their country where accustomed to fighting wars,” taught the Saint-Domingue revolution tactics the French regulars were unable to match.

Setting the Stage for the Revolution

The initial conflict in Saint-Domingue was between the free people of color and the white population. As Revolution swept through France and the National Assembly became more radical, opening a split between the bourgeoisie and the French aristocracy, the upper strata of the free people of color in Saint-Domingue began to agitate for commensurate political rights as those that were being extended to the citizens of France.

Vincent Ogé, a free colored man who was in France when the Revolution broke out, appeared before the National Assembly with Julien Raimond to represent the free men of color on Saint-Domingue. They presented a petition which warned that “there still exists in one province of this Empire a race of men debased and degraded; a class of citizens consigned to contempt, to all the humiliation of slavery… [Though] born citizens and free” they were “slaves in the land of liberty.”

They tried to win over the planters at Club Massiac. They presented a plan for rights to be granted to “quadroons” (someone with one quarter Afrikan or Indigenous descent) born of legitimate parents with at least two generations of freedom. Ogé privately gave the club a separate plan — one which started by granting rights to free colored persons, but which would abolish slavery little by little. Club Massaic listened, but promised them nothing. As a result, they allied themselves with the Société des amis des Noirs. They presented a cahier des doléances to the National Assembly calling for “equality for all non-whites and freedom for mulatto slaves.”

Although many of the planters and merchants supported limited political rights for the free colored people, the call for full equality roused Club Massaic. The club took action against the delegates to protect the institution of slavery. The planter Tanguy de la Boissière published a pamphlet in 1789 arguing that the “pivot” of the “constitution, legislation, and regime of Saint-Domingue” must be “everything for the planter… There can be in Saint-Domingue only slaves and masters.” In March of 1790, the National Assembly proposed a law that the constitution of France would not be applied to the colonies. The law that was passed by the National Assembly stated that “all people” who were property owners over twenty-five would participate in the elections for the colonial assembly. The abolitionists in the National Assembly knew what was happening: the ambiguous language meant the French National Assembly at home was leaving the question for the colonial assembly of Saint-Domingue abroad — an assembly in which every representative was a planter and slave-owner.

That July, Ogé left France with a shipload of guns. In October of 1790, he landed in Saint-Domingue and armed hundreds of free colored men in the hope that he could enforce the law. He marched on and seized the town of Grande-Rivière, then sent letters to the Revolutionary Provincial Assembly in Le Cap demanding it apply the National Assembly decree granting all free citizens political rights. His uprising, however, was crushed by troops dispatched from Le Cap. He was tortured and executed.

By the following August, the North Province was in flames — not for the political rights of the free colored people, but for the freedom of the Black slaves. A rebel who was caught and executed was found to have “in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest pocket was a large packet of tinder and phosphate and lime. On his chest he had a sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.” The objective and subjective conditions for revolution had combined; the Black slaves of Saint-Domingue had developed a revolutionary consciousness.

In early August of 1791, before Boukman and the revolt marched through the cane, the free colored people organized a mass political assembly at Mirebalais. They selected delegates to the National Assembly of France, but were ordered by the governor to disband when the revolt broke out in the North Province. The angry free colored people took up arms. 

In the Western Province, the free colored people sought allies and took in a contingent of rebel slaves and dubbed them the Swiss — like the Swiss mercenaries in service to the King of France. The free colored rebels promised the Swiss they would be granted freedom for their service. By September 1791, the so-called Confederation of free colored people and Black slaves burned out and destroyed a contingent of troops from Port-au-Prince. A wealthy white planter proposed a solution: make peace with the free colored people. This betrayed the white class-alliance between planters and “petits blancs,” but it brought the free colored persons within the Confederate alliance to the table.

The Black “Swiss” rebels marched with their allies into Port-au-Prince. Behind closed doors, the white planters and free colored leadership agreed to deport the slaves rather than free them. An attempt was made to sell them in Belize, but when that failed they were simply abandoned on Jamaica. The British took them back to Saint-Domingue where they were executed by the French soldiery for their loyalty.

The attempted peace treaty also broke down. When a free colored soldier was insulted by a white soldier they began to fight. An angry white crowd lynched the Confederate, Scapin, and the free-colored soldiers opened fire on the white “patriots.” The outnumbered free-colored soldiers retreated from the town, but the whites followed them, murdering free-colored citizens in their homes or the street, and inadvertently setting fire to Port-au-Prince and reducing it to ashes.

The New France

In France, the Revolution was growing more radical. The King had been forced to sign the short-lived 1791 constitution, making the National Assembly the chief legislative body of the Kingdom and transforming France, with a pen stroke, into a constitutional monarchy. Civil commissioners were dispatched from the Assembly to Saint-Domingue, where they arrived in November; they carried a decree from the National Assembly stating that the “laws concerning the state of unfree persons and the political status of men of color and free blacks” would be established by the colonial assembly, overturning their previous promise for political rights.

The National Assembly had also declared a general amnesty for “acts of revolution.” Those who “returned to order” would not be charged with crimes for the violence or sedition they had committed.

Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the two victorious generals of the slave rebellion in the North Province, demanded the inclusion of the slaves in the amnesty. The planters refused, even as the commissioners realized there was no military solution that could destroy the growing power of the slave rebellion. Louis de Tousard, a veteran of the American Revolution, and a French officer, warned Jean-François and Biassou “Do not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”

Jean-François and Biassou replied to the commissioners, the planters, and Tousard, that “[o]ne hundred thousand men are in arms… Eighty percent of the population” of the north was rising. The leadership of this Black revolution was “entirely dependent on the general will” of the insurgents. Still, even Jean-François and Biassou, the rebel slave-generals, did not foresee abolition, merely reformed slavery. The rebel camps made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would not disband. There was no negotiation that would bring them back to the plantation. They would have general abolition of slavery, or they would, as Marat would say in December, be reduced to “slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

After nearly a year of open rebellion, property damage, massacres of both Black slaves and white planters, on April 4, 1792, the National Assembly of France declared that “the hommes de couleur and the nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” Did this free the slaves? No. It conscripted the free persons of color to fight the slaves. It reduced the complex racial hierarchy of Saint-Domingue to a simple one: on the one hand there were the free, and on the other the enslaved, and among the free there were no racial distinctions under the law.

In October 1792, news arrived in Saint-Domingue that the king had been suspended during an August uprising in Paris. The French Revolution entered yet another phase: one of radical republicanism in which a new assembly, based on universal male suffrage, was elected: the National Convention. France was now a republic. The colonial commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel were given extraordinary powers to suppress enemies of the republic by the National Convention.

In January of 1793, Louis XVI was executed. Spain and Britain joined Austria and declared war on France. As the other European powers threatened Saint-Domingue, the republic sent a new governor, François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort, who was a Port-au-Prince property owner. He immediately got into a dispute with the colonial commissioners; Sonthonax had him imprisoned. In response, the white sailors and French soldiers attacked Le Cap and the commissioners.

Sonthonax and Polverel issued a new decree: all “black warriors” who would “fight for the Republic” would be free. Any slave who fought in their defense would be “equal to all free men” and receive “all the rights belonging to French citizens.” But so, too, did the Spanish offer to free those who would fight on their behalf and capture the colony for the crown of Spain.

It was on August 29, 1793, that Sonthonax issued a decree abolishing slavery in the Northern Province. In the west and south, Polverel followed suit. Not only did the commissioners free them, the slaves were granted citizenship by the decrees.

From late 1793 until mid-1794, the British launched their invasion of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the Spanish, from the Hispaniola side of the island, had recruited a number of free people of color, including the general Toussaint L’Ouverture. On 6 May 1794, after the Spanish crown refused to honor its promise to begin the abolition of slavery, L’Ouverture went over to the French and ambushed the Spanish as they emerged from attending mass at San Raphael. Toussaint’s Spanish-backed rebel army defected to Republican France and succeeded in pushing the Spanish out. The unifying colony now presented a threat to Britain in her rear: a slave revolt in Jamaica. L’Ouverture and the revolutionary general Rigaud together defeated the British and secured the island. An officer corps of free colored men was emerging, leading armies of liberated slaves.

Pan-Afrikanism and the Caribbean

The revolution flickered and was snuffed out in France, devolving in the Thermidorian Reaction, the execution of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the instatement of the White Terror, and ended in the creation of the Directorate, which was continually at war with all of Europe. After suffering abysmal military defeats, the Directorate was overthrown in the 18th Brumaire coup of Napoleon on 9 November 1799.

The revolutionary forces in Saint-Domingue, having secured the island and stilled the bloodletting among rival generals, declared their sovereignty from the French Consulate. In response, Napoleon dispatched an expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue to restore it to France, to profitability, and most of all, to slavery. Toussaint was defeated on 25 April 1802 and taken in chains to France. Rebel troops were executed by sulfur dioxide gas in the holds of General Rochambeau’s ships, shot en masse by firing squad, hanged, and drowned in bags.

The French troops, devastated by yellow fever and fighting, were reinforced by a Polish Legion who, seeing in the bravery of the slaves an echo of the plight of divided Poland, defected to join General Dessalines and would eventually be given citizenship and recognized as black under the Haitian constitution. The island revolted against the reimposition of slavery. The island revolts continued throughout 1802, and became a general war in October, when General Dessalines repudiated the peace and led the entire island once more against the forces of Consulate France toward independence.

Dessalines, in large part thanks to the British war on France preventing Napoleon from reinforcing the island, defeated the French armies and, on 1 January 1804, declared Saint-Domingue to be free and independent, rechristening it Haiti after its Arawak name.

In February of 1806 the young United States Congress adopted an embargo bill and continuously subject the Republic of Haiti to embargo until 1810 and did not trade with the republic until the 1820s. The U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the southern states seceded. In 1825, the Haitian Republic was forced to pay 150 million francs to ex-slaveholders. Haiti eventually paid off its debt in 1947 — which bankrupted the country and forced it to take a loan from the imperialist French banks. In 1922, the U.S. seized all of Haiti’s customs houses, institutions, banks, and the national treasury.

This theft of wealth annihilated the productive capacity of the Haitian economy throughout the 19th and 20th century and has subjected the republic to a continuous cycle of debt, poverty, and invasion. In 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed in a coup d’etat that was self-admittedly orchestrated by France because he called for reparations. The coup general who replaced him, Gerard Latortue, withdrew the demand. It remains one of the poorest countries in the Americas and nearly its entire government operating budget comes from the Venezuelan oil alliance Petrocaribe.

On 7 July 2021, the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in the wake of his effort to combat U.S.-backed drug smuggling and trafficking (with roots in the 1986 Service d’Intelligence National, a CIA cutout that moved drugs through Haiti). Since that date, Haiti has had no president.

The U.S. settler-republic refused to aid Haiti because of the slaves they harbored in their own bosom. Despite the shared Enlightenment roots of the U.S. war for independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. sided with the Kingdom of France when it came to money and the fear of a slave uprising. The strength of the colonialist states in the west is such that if any of the imperialized nations attempts to break free from the U.S.-led capitalist world-market, if it attempts to shake the chains of imperialism and neo-colonialism, it marks itself out, just as the Republic of Haiti did, as a target.

However, each of these imperialized countries contains one or more New Afrikan nations; it is these descendents of the horrors of chattel slavery who have the power to shatter the imperialist chain. By banding together and rising all at once across the west, by threatening the monopoly capitalists not only in the peripheral colonies but also in the semi-colonies of the U.S. and Canada, the thinly-spread imperialist armies will be divided, unable to concentrate, unable to crush the rising state after state. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that Haiti will be free of its debts and its status as a neocolony. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that the Black Belt, the U.S. region of New Afrika, will throw off its capitalist, vampiric, rulers.

Walter Rodney wrote that, for “the vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that black labour within America has virtually the same relation to whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to Europe and white America.”

“Imperialism,” he says, “has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and that very unity that is engendered among black people — the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression — is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.“

The lesson of Haiti is thus: we rise together when we rise, or we are cut down and crushed one by one, not only New Afrika, but the proletariat of the so-called New World.