A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library)

by C. L. R. James

  43. “The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, 35461; C.L.R. James, “Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana” in At the Rendezvous of Victory, 180.

  44. Letter of March 20, 1957, in The C.L.R. James Reader, 270.

  45. See Leopold Senghor, Nation et Voie Africaine du Socialisme (Paris: Editions Presence Africaine, 1961); Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Julius K. Nyerere, “African Socialism: Ujamaa in Practice,” in Pan-Africanism, eds. Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974), 107–13. That James was enthusiastic about Nyerere and had nothing to say about Senghor is telling. While Senghor engaged the great philosophers—Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin—and developed a very sophisticated argument for the synthesis of modern socialism and traditional culture, he had not done much in the way of implementation. Talk and no action never impressed James. Perhaps he was thinking of Senghor, among others, when he dismissed most efforts at building “African socialism” as “bureaucratic balderdash” (132).

  46. Three excellent critiques of “Ujamaa” and Nyerere’s romantic notion of African Communalism are Issa Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); A.M. Babu, African Socialism or Socialist Africa? (London: Zed Press, 1981); Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London: Zed Press, 1983).

  47. In addition to the Epilogue, see Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 140–41.

  48. A similar critique of James is made by South African Trotskyist Baruch Hirson, who is also a historian of the South African Left. See his “Communalism and Socialism in Africa: The Misdirection of C.L.R. James,” Searchlight South Africa 4 (February 1990): 64–73.

  49. Nevertheless, the fact that James says nothing about Portugal’s African colonies (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands) in the Epilogue and only occasionally discussed them in the 1970s and 1980s was somewhat surprising. The anti-colonial movements there not only took up arms against the Portuguese and adopted Marxism-Leninism in some form or another, but they created liberated zones where revolutionaries and villagers attempted to build socialist-oriented communities in the midst of war. See, for example, Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s People (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973); Thomas Henriksen, “People’s War in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau,” The Journal of Modem African Studies 14, no. 3 (1976): 377–99; Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Jack McCulloch, In the Twilight of Revolution: The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral (London: Zed Books, 1983).

  50. A History of Negro Revolt (London: Race Today Publications, 1985), 5. Why the Race Today Collective chose to revert back to the term “negro” is unclear.

  51. C.L.R. James, “Colonialism and National Liberation in Africa: The Gold Coast Revolution,” in National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World, eds. Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 136.

  A History of Pan-African Revolt

  1

  San Domingo

  The history of the Negro in his relation to European civilization falls into two divisions, the Negro in Africa and the Negro in America and the West Indies. Up to the ’eighties of the last century, only one-tenth of Africa was in the hands of Europeans. Until that time, therefore, it is the attempt of the Negro in the Western World to free himself from his burdens which has political significance in Western history. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century European civilization turned again to Africa, this time not for slaves to work the plantations of America but for actual control of territory and population. Today (1938) the position of Africans in Africa is one of the major problems of contemporary politics. An attempt is made here to give some account and analysis of Negro revolts through the centuries; in the days of slavery; in Africa during the last halfcentury; and in America and the West Indies today.

  It is impossible in this space to deal with the slave-trade and slavery; the same consideration has made it necessary to omit accounts of the early revolts in the West Indies and the incessant guerrilla warfare carried on in all the islands by the maroons (or runaway slaves) against their former masters. Negroes have continually revolted and once in Dutch Guiana the revolting slaves held almost the entire colony for months. But in the eighteenth century the greatest colony in the West Indies was French San Domingo (now Haiti) and there took place the most famous of all Negro revolts. It forms a useful starting point.

  1789 is a landmark in the history of Negro revolt in the West Indies. The only successful Negro revolt, the only successful slave revolt in history, had its roots in the French Revolution, and without the French Revolution its success would have been impossible.

  During the eighteenth century French San Domingo developed a fabulous prosperity and by 1789 was taking 40,000 slaves a year. In 1789 the total foreign trade of Britain was twenty-seven million pounds, of which the colonial trade accounted for only five million pounds. The total foreign trade of France was seventeen million pounds, of which San Domingo alone was responsible for eleven millions. “Sad irony of human history,” comments Jaures, “the fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.” But the colonial system of the eighteenth century ordained that whatever manufactured goods the colonists needed could be bought only in France. They could sell their produce only to France. The goods were to be transported only in French ships. Colonial planters and the Home Government were thus in bitter and constant conflict, the very conflict which had resulted in the American War of Independence. The American colonists gained their freedom in 1783, and in less than five years the British attitude to the slave-trade changed.

  Previous to 1783 they had been the most successful practitioners of the slave-trade in the world. But now not only was America gone, but it was British ships which were supplying a large proportion of the 40,000 slaves a year which were the basis of San Domingo’s prosperity. The trade of San Domingo almost doubled between 1783 and 1789. The British West Indian colonies were in comparison poor, and with the loss of America, were of diminishing importance. The monopoly of the West Indian sugar planters galled the rising industrial bourgeoisie, potential free-traders. Adam Smith and Arthur Young, economists of the coming industrial age, condemned the expensiveness of slave labor. India offered the example of a country where the laborer cost only a penny a day, did not have to be bought, and did not brand his master as a slave-owner. In 1787 the Abolitionist Society was formed and the British Government, which only a few years before had threatened to sack a Governor of Jamaica if he tampered with the slave-trade in any shape or form, now changed its mind. If the slave-trade was brought to a sudden close, San Domingo would be ruined. The British islands would lose nothing, for they had as many slaves as they seemed likely to need. The abolitionists it is true worked very hard, and Clarkson, for instance, was a very honest and sincere man. Many people were moved by their propaganda. But that a considerable and influential section of British men of business thought that the slave-trade was not only a blot on the national name but a growing hole in the national pocket, was the point that mattered. The evidence for this is given in detail in the writer’s Black Jacobins published in 1938 with a revised edition in 1963.

  The Abolition Society was formed in 1787. France at that time was stirring with the revolution, and the French humanitarians formed a parallel society, “The Friends of the Negro.” They preached the abolition not only of the slave-trade but of slavery as well, and Brissot, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Robespierre, many of the great names of the revolution, were among the members. They ignored or minimized the fact that, unlike Britain, two-thirds of France’s overseas trade was bound up with the traffic. Wilberforce and Clarkson encouraged them, gave the society money, and did active propaganda in France. This was the position in Europe when the French Revolutio
n began.

  San Domingo possessed at that time 500,000 slaves, and only 30,000 Mulattoes and about the same number of whites. But the slave-owners of San Domingo at once embraced the revolution, and as each section interpreted liberty, equality and fraternity to suit itself, civil war was soon raging between them. Some of the rich whites, especially those who owed debts to French merchants, wanted to follow the example of America and virtually rule themselves. The Mulattoes wanted to be rid of their disabilities, the poor whites wanted to become masters and officials like the rich whites. These classes fought fiercely with one another. The white colonists lynched and murdered Mulattoes for daring to claim equality. But the whites themselves were divided into royalists and revolutionaries. The French revolutionary legislatures first of all evaded the question of Mulatto rights, then gave some of the Mulattoes rights, then took the rights away again. Mulattoes and whites fought, and under the stress of necessity began to arm their slaves. The news from France, the slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity, the political excitement in San Domingo, the civil war between rich whites, poor whites and Mulattoes, it was these things which after two years awoke the sleeping slaves to revolution. By July, 1791, in the thickly populated North they were planning a rising.

  The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their masters. But, working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at that time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement.

  On a night in August a tropical storm raged, with lightning and gusts of wind and heavy showers of rain. Carrying torches to light their way, the leaders of the revolt met in an open space in the thick forests of the Morne Rouge, a mountain overlooking Cap François, the largest town. There Boukman, the leader, after Voodoo incantations and the sucking of the blood of a stuck pig, gave the last instructions.

  That very night they began. Each slave-gang murdered its masters and burnt the plantation to the ground. The slaves destroyed tirelessly. They knew that as long as those plantations stood, their lot would be to labor on them until they dropped. They violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. But they did not maintain this vengeful spirit for long. As the revolution gained territory they spared many of the men, women and children whom they surprised on plantations. To prisoners of war alone they remained merciless. They tore out their flesh with red-hot pincers, they roasted them on slow fires, they sawed a carpenter between his boards. Yet on the whole, they never approached in their tortures the savageries to which they themselves had been subjected.

  The white planters refused to take the slave revolt seriously. They continued to intrigue against the Mulattoes and to threaten the French Government. But as the chaos grew, the rich royalists swallowed their color prejudice and united with the Mulattoes against the revolutionary planters. Meanwhile the insurrection prospered, until a few weeks after it began there were about a hundred thousand revolting slaves divided into large bands. The leaders were Jean-Francois and Biassou, and Toussaint L’Ouverture joined them a month after the revolt began. He was forty-six, first his master’s coachman and afterward, owing to his intelligence, placed in charge of the livestock on the estate, a post usually held by a white man. He had a smattering of education, but he could not write correct French, and usually spoke Creole i.e. the local French patois.

  Baffled in their first spring at the city, these leaders did not know what to do, and when the French Government sent Commissioners who boasted of the armed forces (quite imaginary) which were on their way, the Negro leaders sought to betray their followers. They wrote to the Commissioners promising that in return for the freedom of a few hundred they would cooperate in leading the others back into slavery and would join in hunting down the recalcitrant. Toussaint, in charge of the negotiations, reduced the offer from 400 to 60. The French Commissioners gladly accepted, but the white planters with great scorn refused. Toussaint therefore gave up hopes of even a treacherous solution and began to train a small band of soldiers from among the hordes.

  The French legislature was by this time under the leadership of Brissot and the Girondins. These managed to persuade the colonial interests that it was to their advantage to give all rights to the Mulattoes, and in April 1792, this became law. But Brissot, doughty propagandist for abolition before he came to power, now would not go a step further than rights for Mulattoes. Far from abolishing slavery, he and his government dispatched a force to crush the slave revolt. These troops landed in San Domingo, but before they could begin the attack, events had occurred in Paris which altered the whole course of the French Revolution, and with it, the black revolution in San Domingo.

  On August 10, 1792, the Paris masses, tired of the equivocations and indecision of the Parliamentarians, stormed the Tuileries and dragged the Bourbons off the throne. A wave of enthusiasm for liberty swept over France and from indifference to slavery at the beginning of the revolution, revolutionary France now hated no section of the aristocracy so much as the colonial whites, “the aristocrats of the skin.” In San Domingo the news of August 10 so split the slave-owners that the civil war between them which had ended began again. Every conflict among the slave-owners was a source of added strength to the slaves.

  By February 1793 war had broken out between revolutionary France and England and Spain. The Spaniards in Spanish San Domingo from the start had helped the slaves against the French. Now they offered them a formal alliance and the slaves trooped over to join Spain. Whether France was a republic or reactionary monarchy, made no difference to the colonial slave if each was prepared to keep him in slavery. Toussaint L’Ouverture went with the others but he secretly offered to the French the services of his trained band if they would abolish slavery. They refused. He made a similar offer to the Spanish commander who likewise refused. Toussaint decided to stay where he was and watch developments. Sonthonax, the French Commissioner, at his wits’ end, threatened by Britain and Spain and increasingly deserted by the French blacks, abolished slavery as his last chance of gaining some support. His maneuver failed. Toussaint remained with the Spaniards and won most of the North Province for them. For the planters, abolition was the last straw and they offered the colony to Pitt, who dispatched an expedition from Europe to capture the French colonies in the West Indies. The British carried all before them, and by June 1794 over two-thirds of San Domingo and almost every French island of importance were in the hands of the British. The rest seemed only a matter of days.

  But meanwhile the revolution had been rising in France. Before the end of 1793 Brissot had been swept out of power. Robespierre and the Mountain ruled and led the revolution against its enemies at home and abroad. By this time all revolutionary France had embraced the cause of the slaves, many refusing even to touch coffee as being drenched with the blood of their own human kind. On February 4, 1794, the Convention abolished slavery without a debate. “The English are beaten,” shouted Danton. “Pitt and his plots are riddled.” The great master of revolutionary tactics had seen far. The British fleet prevented assistance going to the hard pressed colored revolution but the decree of abolition would throw the blacks wholeheartedly on the side of the French. Toussaint joined the French at once, and slaughtered his Spanish allies, white and black, of yesterday; while in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the other French colonies, the black slaves, singing the Ça Ira and the Marseillaise and dressed in the colors of the Republic, began to drive the British out of the French islands, and then carried the war into British territory.

  Spain made peace, in 1795, and by 1799 the British had been driven out of San Domingo and most of the French colonies by Negro slaves and Mulattoes. Fortescue, the Tory historian of the British army, gives a vivid account of this colossal disaster. Britain lost 100,000 men in the We
st Indies in these four years, two and a half times as many as Wellington lost in the whole of the Peninsular War. Fever took a heavy toll, but Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Rigaud, a Mulatto, in San Domingo; and Victor Hugues, a Mulatto, in Martinique and the smaller islands, won one of the most important victories in the French revolutionary wars. Aided by the fever, they, in Fortescue’s phrase, “practically destroyed the British army.” For six years Britain was tied up in the West Indies, and to quote Fortescue once more, if Britain played so insignificant a part in the attack on revolutionary France in Europe during the first six years of the war, the answer is to be found in “the two fatal words, San Domingo.” The part played by the blacks in the success of the great French Revolution has never received adequate recognition. The revolution in Europe will neglect colored workers at its peril.

  With the British driven out, L’Ouverture occupied a powerful position. He was Commander-in-Chief, appointed by the French Government, of a French army, with white officers under him. But as soon as the British were driven out, the French started to intrigue against him. They engineered a quarrel between himself and Rigaud, the Mulatto, whence was fought a bitter civil war. Toussaint was victorious, then brought Spanish San Domingo under his control. He established a strong government over the whole island, drew up a constitution which made him First Consul for life, and gave San Domingo “dominion status”; concentrating all the power in his own hands, he governed. In eighteen months he had restored a colony, devastated by years of civil war, to two-thirds of its former prosperity. He was a despot, confining his laborers to the plantations and brooking no interference with his will under harsh penalties. But he protected the laborers from the injustice of their former owners. He saw that they were paid their wages. He established free trade and religious toleration, abolished racial discrimination, tried to lay the foundations of an educational system, sent young Mulattoes and Negroes to France to be educated so as to return and be able to govern. He treated the whites with exceptional consideration and courtesy, so much so that the black laborers began to lose confidence in him. Too confident of his influence over the blacks, he sacrificed his popularity to please the French.