Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
same person’.19 Barthélemy (2000: 293–4) explains this as a statement governing the world view of the Haitian rural people, for it is more than a simple proverb and reflects a fought-for rule of social and political practice. The point is that equality cannot exist without difference and that, correspondingly, difference makes no sense without equality. ‘In order to be different, not to be memn moun, each man must begin by identifying what he has in common with others; what is the basic identity from which variations can be felt, interpreted and used’ (p. 293, my translation). While these variations obviously exist, they are restricted from becoming hierarchical through group reactions that limit the entrenchment of these forms of behaviour; these reactions include ‘the attribution to one person of various statuses in different contexts’ (p. 302, my translation). ‘A good reputation, [social] behaviour, personal relations, all contribute to balancing out the purely quantitative [differences]’, and consequently identification is sought with the ideal of a ‘middle peasant’ (moun mouayen) (p. 303, my translation).
Barthélemy insists that, while Haitian rural society is generally understood as a failure, as wedded to traditions and poverty, it is in fact a highly organised social system that is self-regulating without an institutionalised state structure. In order to achieve this, it had to keep hierarchical Creole society and the formal state at a distance, to block all attempts at individual enrichment and power-seeking, and to harmonise the group through a kind of automatic regulation of individual behaviour; ‘all this outside any “political” dimension’ of state control’ (Barthélemy, 1990: 29, my translation). In this way the Haitian nation (if by ‘nation’ we mean the subjectively constituted unity of the people) constituted itself in a manner that distanced it from the state. Nesbitt (2008: 171) notes that this egalitarian system, ‘a legacy of the Haitian revolution, functioned in such a state of dynamic equilibrium from the late 1790s to the 1960s until the destruction of the Haitian (natural and social) environment under the regime of Papa Doc (Duvalier) undermined its viability’, through, interalia, the systematic use of terror. This suggests the existence of an egalitarian political sequence, which we can (very provisionally) date between approximately 1809 and 1960.
While fidelity to the Human Freedom mode led the African bossales to establish an egalitarian rural society, and while the reactive subjectivity of the state and military leaders attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to control and limit the truth of freedom and equality post-independence, an uneasy truce was established between the two. It was, however, the obscure subjectivity born of colonial and neo-colonial power that has been able ever since to destroy and occlude the liberatory power of the politics of humanity so remarkably initiated by the slaves of Haiti. In what Peter Hallward has called ‘an endless counter-revolution’, the outside world, initially slave-owning, closed ranks and ‘locked the country in a state of economic isolation from which it has never recovered’ (2007: 12). The country was forced to pay ‘compensation’ to the French for the loss of its slave economy of 150 million francs, which it had to repay by borrowing from French banks at extortionate rates of interest; although the sum was cut eventually to 90 million francs, ‘by the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80% of the national budget. France received the last instalment in 1947’ (p. 12). The imperial ambitions of the Western states were actualised by the US invasion of Haiti in 1915, which lasted until 1934.
By the time they pulled out ... US troops had gone a long way towards discouraging peasant resistance to what was only the first of such repeated doses of imported ‘modernization’, killing anything between 15,000 and 30,000 people in the process. In suggestive anticipation of their future commitments to Haitian democracy, the US validated their occupation through a plebiscite that apparently won 99.2% of the vote (2007: 14).
Ever since this time, the Western powers, particularly the US, have supported criminal regimes that have gone out of their way to rule the country by terror, the most notorious of which have been those of Papa Doc Duvalier (1957–71) and his son, Baby Doc (1971–86), thus affirming the continued prevalence of a monarchical-type state in the country until 1990. In other words, the obscure subject had practically succeeded in obliterating all traces of the universal truth of humanity established by the African slaves of Haiti. It was only with the coming to power of Aristide in 1990 that for the first time the people of Haiti were again able to recover some say in their political affairs and the subjectivity of humanity was revived (Hallward, 2007). Similarly, in intellectual discourse, the achievements of the Africans of Haiti have been systematically occluded by what Depelchin (2005) called the ‘syndromes of discovery and abolition’: popular (emancipatory) achievements have been systematically written out of history by neo-colonial and frankly racist ‘syndromes’ whereby only certain sections of humanity arrogate to themselves the right to knowledge and to transform the world. The objectivism of the reactive and obscure subjects has been able to occlude the singularity of Haiti’s experience, under a general assertion of ‘poverty’ attributed to the incapacity and inanity of the ‘underdeveloped’ Black world as a whole, in a way that reminds one how the slave rebellion of 1791 was totally incomprehensible to intellectual thought in Europe at the time (Trouillot, 1995). Finally, it has been extremely difficult to resurrect the achievements of the Haitian people and to save them from the oblivion to which they were condemned until the election of Aristide, itself a direct result of the return of the people into the field of politics (Depelchin, n.d.). This simply reconfirms the political conditions of existence for the resurrection of the evental truth.
CONCLUSION
It must be reiterated that the discipline of history is purely imaginary, as it is only a more or less valid narrative after the fact. As Badiou puts it (2009d: 190), ‘there is no real of history’. History is therefore best understood as a ‘thought-relation-of-the-state’, as Lazarus expresses the point, as a discipline that in its fundamental modus operandi is only able to fuse the objective and the subjective. I will develop this question at length in chapter 3. What I have done in this present chapter is to introduce, with regard to the analysis of African emancipatory subjectivities in the 18th century, the methodology and theoretical justification for an analysis of sequences and of historical modes of politics limited in time and located in specific sites. In this context, I have also illustrated the point that each mode of politics must be understood internally in terms of the deployment of its own categories. No two sequences are oriented by exactly the same combination of categories of thought. What this suggests is that, in order to avoid a collapse into historicism, politics in history must be understood as discontinuous. This idea has been theorised by Lazarus, as we have seen, and I shall continue to illustrate it in following chapters in greater detail; it is also held by Badiou, who insists in his more phenomenological work that ‘the discontinuity of worlds is the law of appearance and hence that of existence’ (Badiou, 2009d: 190). If what we are faced with is the discontinuity of worlds – i.e. of situations – the apparent continuity of history can be understood as a state-inspired narrative.
If sequences are discontinuous, then so are their categories. Some may be revived, but their emancipatory content would have to be developed at a distance from reactive and obscure subjects represented in state and colonial subjectivities. Trouillot has argued convincingly that the truth of the universality of humanity affirmed by the Haitian Revolution was simply incomprehensible at the time (it named the ‘void of the situation’, to use Badiou’s terminology) and that it challenged ‘the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment. The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were “unthinkable facts” in the framework of Western thought’ (Trouillot, 1995: 82, emphasis in original).
But this is arguably always the case for political truths, as they cut through existing knowledges and overthrow the intellectual theories of emancipation of the time.20 In Zibechi’s (2010: 83) very apt formulation, ‘a kind of epistemological earthquake occurs when those who have occupied the depth of society for centuries ... emerge as subjects, which calls into question the subject/object relationship, one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism’. And, of course, the systematic dehumanisation of