Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
addition, Toussaint’s constitution of 1801, which banned slavery but simultaneously set him up as the unquestioned ruler of the island – a king, in so many words – was drafted without the participation of any ex-slave. By 1801 the rural masses had broken out in open rebellion against Toussaint’s rule; this included an organised insurrection of farm workers in the north. According to James (2001: 216), Moïse, who was Toussaint’s adopted nephew, apparently reacted very badly to Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, calling Toussaint an ‘old fool ... he thinks he is King of San Domingo!’ ‘It was Moïse ... who embodied the aspirations and needs of the rural masses. More than that he also believed in their economic and social legitimacy, and, if he did not ostensibly organise the insurrection, he nevertheless wholly supported it in opposition to Toussaint’ (Fick, 1990: 209).
Toussaint had Moïse arrested and, according to James (2001: 225), ‘would not allow the military tribunal even to hear him’; not surprisingly, Moïse was executed. After 1800, Toussaint and the other generals gradually lost confidence in the masses and defected to the French; it was only under popular pressure and in the course of popular resistance against the French that some of them returned to positions of leadership. By then, it was no longer humanity and libeté that dominated the thinking of politics, but forms of militarism and monarchy, despite the fact that the leaders ostensibly remained committed to a principled notion of emancipation. Thus Toussaint declared in December 1801:
It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man. We are free today because we are the stronger. The consul [Bonaparte] maintains slavery in Martinique and in Bourbon [Réunion]; we shall therefore be slaves when he is the stronger (cit. Césaire, 1981: 278, my translation).
Independence in 1804 marked the end of the militaristic sequence begun in 1797. It was independence that in this sequence had formed the category around which politics was thought and people were mobilised, especially in 1803 under Dessalines, and organised (guerrilla) warfare was deployed to defeat the French and stop the reintroduction of slavery. Concurrently small bands of independently organised maroons and Vodun leaders were viciously eliminated, yet Barthélemy (2000: 216–18) shows that these maroons were in fact organised and led in a much more collective and less hierarchical manner. As Fick writes, ‘It was because he [Dessalines] could see no further that he resorted to a crude policy and military strategy of outright liquidation of those independent leaders refusing his authority, but yet who had initially sustained the war against Bonaparte’s army and had made his own defection [back to the side of Haiti] effectually possible and meaningful’ (Fick, 1990: 233). Perhaps Fick is mistaken here, and Dessalines realised quite clearly the threat that this alternative provided to the rule of the new Creole elite whom he represented. In fact, it was this vicious opposition of the state to popular concerns that was to characterise Haiti for many more years to come.15
What truths, then, did the two singular events of 1791 and 1804 propose? The first opened up the universality of humanity, the truth of universal freedom (as opposed to freedom for some and not for others). In politics there is no superior universal truth to this. The second proposed the universal of nationhood among African peoples (‘the national question’ or the ‘right to self-determination’, as it became known in the 20th century). This truth has been much more controversial because nationhood has tended to be equated with statehood, although the equation is invalid, as it is possible to consider a nation distinct from a state, as we shall see. In any case, ‘nation’ can denote a pure subjectivity and not only a community of citizens. Indeed, this problem came to constitute the central contradiction of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. I shall discuss some of the dimensions of this truth in Africa through the medium of Fanon’s work in the next chapter. In the meantime, we can gain insight into some of the problems arising from the notion of a politics of freedom through a brief discussion of the struggles over landownership following upon Haiti’s independence.
RETHINKING FREEDOM AS RURAL EQUALITY, 1804–1960
Independence opened a new sequence in Haiti, that of the struggle for the formation of a peasantry through what is known in the development literature as ‘agrarian reform’. In the literature this issue is treated as a problem of political economy and the state. Here, however, it must be understood fundamentally as a question of politics. The politics of the supposed necessity of maintaining the plantation system was proposed on the basis of its technical superiority, its ‘obviousness’.16 This probably constituted the first appearance of this kind of argument, which was to become the core of a predominant statist approach to ‘development’ in post-independence countries and a constantly recurring theme in 20th-century politics. In its 19th-century version it was perhaps proposed most clearly within the Marxist tradition by Karl Kautsky in his book The Agrarian Question, in which an argument regarding the economic superiority of large-scale enterprises was made on the grounds of their technical efficiency. In the 20th century it regularly took the form of an argument for the primacy of ‘economic growth’, ‘technical progress’ or the ‘development of the productive forces’.17 Yet, central to this debate in newly independent Haiti was the actualisation of freedom and its consequent extension into equality:
Permanent freedom had been won through independence. But the masses had not yet won the freedom to till their own soil. And this, perhaps more than anything else, sums up what the peasant masses expected out of freedom. A personal claim to the land upon which one laboured and from which to derive and express one’s individuality was, for the black labourers, a necessary and an essential element in their vision of freedom. For without this concrete economic and social reality, freedom for the ex-slaves was little more than a legal abstraction. To continue to be forced into labouring for others, bound by property relations that afforded few benefits and no real alternatives for themselves, meant that they were not entirely free (Fick, 1990: 249).
According to Barthélemy (1990: 28), it is precisely the exceptional character of a society of freed ex-slaves that explains the ‘egalitarian system without a state’ which gradually emerged in rural Haiti. The African-born bossales managed to acquire ownership of peasant parcels and the plantation estate system was largely destroyed. The process began in 1809 and was initiated by Pétion, who ruled the south of the country while (King) Christophe ruled the north. The forced-labour system was abandoned and large private estates were broken up and leased to peasant sharecroppers (Lundhal, 1979: 262). As a result, no latifundia developed in Haiti, unlike in most of post-independence Latin America and the Caribbean. The masses of Haitians insisted on establishing a parcel-owning peasantry to anchor their political independence in economic independence – successfully as it turns out – so that the new bourgeoisie was deprived of direct access to surplus labour. A merchant bourgeoisie then developed that extracted surplus from beyond the peasant system, and it is on this class that the state was founded (Trouillot, 1980). Within peasant society itself, a number of methods of self-regulation – largely of African origin – enabled the restriction of differentiation and the dominance of a system of equality that remained at an objective distance from state power. These methods included unpaid collective forms of work, witchcraft and secret societies, a common religious ideology, and family socialisation (Barthélemy, 1990: 30–44). In fact Barthélemy makes the point that, from 1804 onwards, it gradually became understood by the masses of the bossales that ‘the only alternative to the colonial hierarchical system is that of equality, more so than that of liberty, as while the latter enables freedom from external oppression, it is not able to take on board the ideological content of the system. Only equality is able to put into place an anti-system’ (1990: 84, my translation).
A society and nation developed which placed itself in opposition to the postcolonial state.18 Barthélemy refers to this kind of politics as a new form of ‘marronage, a counter-culture, a structural and collective reaction of escape’ (2000: 379, my translation). We can also understand it as a singular form of politics which attempted to distance its thinking from that of the state and which was simultaneously rooted in local traditions of resistance to oppression. Commonly, this subjectivity was expressed in proverbs or sayings, the most important of which was ‘Tout