Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution by Crystal Nicole Eddins

Abstract

Eddins’ interdisciplinary study about the African slave rebellion on Saint Domingue (later to become Haiti) employs a wide variety of sources: more than 10,000 fugitive slave advertisements; historical sociological theories about social movements, colonialism, and revolution; archival materials from the Archivo General de las Indias, as well as historical and political-science literature about the African/Black diaspora. She uses this material to explore how the various relationships between African slaves of diverse ethnicities, creole slaves, fugitive runaways, and freed Blacks resulted in a collective consciousness that enabled the only successful national slave rebellion in the Americas. By examining these relationships and networks, Eddins seeks to correct the literature that makes “erroneous presumptions about the nature” of the differences between Ladinos, bozales, and cimarrones that supposedly discouraged their solidarity (3). She proves that “the web of networks between enslaved Africans, bozal and creole runaways, and a small number of free people of color built through rituals and marronage were key to building a sense of racial solidarity that helped to make the revolution successful (2).Eddins divides her study into three parts. The first two chapters of Part I, “Homelands, Diaspora and Slave Society,” examine the early European colonization of Hispaniola (later to become in part Saint Domingue) and Africans’ repudiation of the Spanish, and later the French, belief in white racial superiority. Based on Spanish archival sources and the scholarship of African historians, Eddins argues that before crossing the Atlantic, West and West Central Africans opposed their captivity by waging war against the Africans and Europeans involved in the slave trade. Some of the Africans managed to evade captivity by fleeing to Angola, the Kongo, and Senegambia. The captives forced onto ships often resisted by committing suicide or engaging in outright insurrection. The African and Black Ladino slaves brought to Hispaniola often collaborated with the Taino to continue their resistance to the Spanish. The opposition to slavery continued after the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697 officially established Saint Domingue. The slaves who labored in the production of indigo, coffee, and sugar cane endured a dramatic mortality rate, but the survivors’ mortuary beliefs and rituals encouraged the creation of a complex set of social relations among different African ethnic groups, freed slaves, and members of the maroons. A collective consciousness rooted in their sacred, spiritual world became the basis “for their insurrectional activities” (115).The second part of the book contains the most important chapters. Chapter 3 explores the sacred spaces that allowed Africans to retain their humanity by establishing social networks; sharing oppositional strategies; and developing collective identities, cultural expressions, and political agendas. Chapter 4 examines the nature of the maroon societies and their evolution into sources of opposition. Chapter 6 covers the importance of the slaves’ knowledge about the island’s mountains, plains, and water systems. Eddins argues that the Africans’ understanding of ecology and environment became part of the collective consciousness that aided them in their pursuit of freedom.Eddins leans on her theoretical framework in these chapters—sociological theories of social movements and protest-event content analysis—to interpret the runaway-slave advertisements posted in the colonial newspapers of Cap Français and Port-au-Prince between 1766 and 1791. These announcements allow Eddins to show how both female and male leaders among the maroons mobilized their followers and recruited plantation slaves to poison the individuals responsible for the racialized capitalist plantation system. Eddins also applies quantitative analysis from the digital humanities to the Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique data base to aggregate and cross-reference information from archival documents and to generate several insightful tables, graphs, and maps. Her qualitative information identifies the African ethnic groups represented within the maroons, the gender and age of those who frequently ran away, and the length of time that they were gone. Her quantitative data reveals the frequency of group or individual escapes and the geographical location of the maroons involved.The last section of the books consists of two chapters that discuss the arms, acts of sabotage, and networks with which the maroons countered the effects of the repressive policies of the government. The colonial authorities’ policy of allowing slave owners to re-incorporate re-captured rebels and runaways back into their workforces enabled former fugitives to share their radical outlook with recently arrived bozales. Such was the context in which the slave rebellion of August 1791 ignited.Eddins’ research methodology alleviates some of the problems that researchers have typically encountered when trying to reconstruct the undocumented experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas. It contributes new insights to studies by James, Geggus, and Dubois, and especially by Fick and Blackburn, who investigated the role that maroons played prior to the slave rebellion on Saint Domingue.1 Her study, however, might have benefited from some attention to the plantation studies of Foubert, whose work details the nature and composition of a number of fugitive slave communities.2 She might also have compared the dynamics of marronage on the French colonies Guadeloupe and Martinique with that on Saint Dominque to complete her picture. Nonetheless, Eddins’ important study will greatly benefit students and scholars of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora.