Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
its cultural dimensions were not limited to this area, it was here that Lemba developed to its fullest extent outside the control of centralised states, especially that of the Kongo kingdom. In fact, the Kingdom of Kongo was riven by civil wars throughout most of the 18th century, a fact which fuelled the slave trade, as kings and contenders expanded their earnings by selling prisoners in large numbers (Thornton, 1993: 184). Janzen cites the following figures: ‘By 1750 in Cabinda alone 5000 to 6000 slaves were being exported annually; by the 1780s the three ports of Malemba, Cabinda and Loango Bay were processing 15,000 slaves annually’ (1982: 34).
In the regions of the Lower Congo River where there were acephalous societies, Lemba ‘adapted conventional religious symbols to its own purpose, and developed a pervasive and unique ideology of healing relating to its concept of a stateless political order’ (p. 58). It also developed, in the areas where it controlled markets and trade, a ‘unique political system’ from which ‘the notion of the sovereign was absent’ (p. 72).3 It emerged ‘in a society with a strong egalitarian ethic’ (p. 318) and was able to regulate conflicts and restore calm through its ‘laws of the market’ (p. 72). Lemba was able to keep the area peaceful (the term lemba means ‘calm’, ‘peaceful’; p. 304) and to organise society without having recourse to hierarchies and a centralised bureaucratic authority or apparatus. It did so by regulating markets (through laws) and trade routes (which it controlled), by marriage arrangements between clans, by reconstructing the idea of the family, and hence by healing both individuals and society.4 Janzen continues:
it is significant that inhabitants of the region made a selective choice for the kind of public order that emerged, that, instead of imposing a new order to deal with the coastal trade which resembled a state, they developed a solution to the challenge of trade which emphasized the redefinition of reality in therapeutic terms ... It is important to explore ... the way a society imagined alternatives open to itself and the consequences of such alternatives if taken (1982: 324–5).
It seems, then, that Lemba was able to maintain relative peace in a region disrupted by the slave trade through its activities and perhaps also to ensure that this particular area was less affected by the slave trade than that south of the river, which was subject to internecine warfare. It could achieve this through a politics which distanced itself from state politics and which had mass support among the population, combining political, administrative, economic and spiritual features. In sum, under enormous pressure from colonial forms of domination, Africans invented non-state forms of regulation that could resist slavery for a long time.5 The view that local societies simply collapsed as a result of the impact of the slave trade and the power of Europeans is therefore not quite accurate.
Importantly, though, Lemba also travelled to the Americas and was prevalent in Brazil and particularly in Haiti (Janzen, 1982: ch. 8). In 1789, out of the 500,000 slaves living in Saint-Domingue, as Thornton remarks, ‘perhaps as many as two-thirds ... had been born, raised and socialised in Africa’ (Thornton, 1993: 183; Fick, 1990: 25). Thornton also estimates that ‘some 62,000 Kongolese were exported during the decade 1780–1790 or somewhat more than half the total of the combined French–English Angola trade’ (1993: 184 n. 12).6 He notes that ‘slaves from this region made up the majority of those imported into Saint-Domingue for the last twenty years before the revolution’ and cites evidence to the effect that BaKongo amounted to 60 per cent of the slaves in the north of the colony, where the revolution began, and a similar percentage in the south: ‘they were common enough among the rebels that Congo became a generic term for the rank and file of the slave insurgents’ (p. 185).
The Saint-Domingue revolution, which began in 1791 and ended with the independence of Haiti in 1804, shook the Western world at the time and constitutes one of the three major revolutions of the 18th century. It was truly a human emancipatory event and was not simply restricted to the legal freeing of slaves. It was probably more far-reaching in its effects than either the American or French revolutions. Although its consequences have been systematically occluded and silenced in scholarship, it has recently become again an object of discussion in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek, Hallward and Nesbitt.7 According to Nesbitt, it was ‘the first world-historical event to enact such a notion of universal human freedom not as a mere idea of the Enlightenment, not as the hypocritical, cynical compromise of a “free” nation economically and socially growing rich off slave labour (France and the United States), but as a principled human act of universal emancipation in consonance with reason’ (Nesbitt, 2008a: 126–7). For my present purposes, its interest lies in the fact that it constitutes a truly African event8 (or series of events) in which African migrants affirmed the truth of the universality of humanity by means of a specific subjective emancipatory mode of politics, which I shall call the Human Freedom mode of politics. It is not difficult to see that the slaves deployed a specific political subjectivity particular to those conditions. Their excessive politics were singularly unique and were made possible precisely by their political exclusion from what was deemed to constitute humanity. In fact, it could even be suggested that it was precisely their position of ‘non-being’ that enabled the thought of a true human universal – a theme that was pursued particularly by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks (1986). I propose at this point to specify the dates, sites, names and subjectivity of this specific political sequence. The discussion will help me to elucidate not only the character of this particular mode but also to delimit it in time in order to distinguish it from other sequences that followed.
The best and most detailed account of that epic struggle is provided by Carolyn Fick (1990). She argues that it was a revolution made primarily by the masses of slaves themselves rather than by a few well-known figures or ‘Black Jacobins’.9
Even more than by the legislative decrees of France, it was through the obtrusive intervention of their own efforts, their own popular initiative, and often spontaneously organised activities into a complex web of political and military events, that the Saint-Domingue slaves won their own freedom and finally became a politically independent state ... [Later, in 1802 after the French expeditionary force had arrived to reinstate slavery] the masses ... resisted the French from the very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership (Fick, 1990: 25, 228).
The outbreak of the revolt on 21 August 1791 was highly organised and was by no means spontaneous. A number of meetings had taken place beforehand, and the conspiracy was solemnised at a famous Vodun ceremony in Bois Caïman, a wooded area in the north. There, one of the early leaders of the uprising, Boukman, is said to have made a call to arms in which he stated, ‘Couté la libeté li palé nan coeur nou tous!’ (Listen to freedom; it speaks in all our hearts!) (p. 93). The category libeté (freedom, in Creole) along with liberté générale, droit naturel and humanité (universal freedom, natural right and humanity) will be one of the recurring political categories of this mode of politics.
Although there had been many rebellions and conspiracies on the island before, along with a tradition of marronage, where maroons (bands of runaway slaves) living in the hills led a semi-autonomous existence and executed guerrilla-type raids on plantations, the 21st August was a singular event with enormous consequences, as it set in motion a continuous series of struggles for freedom that only ended (and then only temporarily, as we shall see) with independence in 1804. It was thus truly an event in Badiou’s sense of the term; in other words, an occurrence that systematically altered subjectivities both in Haiti and throughout the Western world. In gauging the consequences of this event, it is also important to note that in rebelling against the French, the plantation slaves ‘took care to destroy ... 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’ (Fick, 1990: 97). As Fick notes, this is an important indication of the fact that slaves were concerned to destroy not simply their legal status, but also everything linked to plantation production which they associated understandably with slave work; as a result, they made a powerful claim on the land itself (p. 180). As time passed, this was to lead to conflict between ex-slaves and their leaders, as the latter were primarily concerned with retaining the plantation system and only abolishing slave labour itself in a legal