Hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of Trinidadians today descend from Haitians both black and white who fled the
bloody revolution in Haiti in the late 18th century.
The popular refrain goes: “Haiti,
I’m sorry.” To try to grasp the heroism and the calamity of Haity in the 1780s
is difficult in terms of personal heroism, the defining of one’s humanity
despite other people’s realities, the willingness to fight for it while paying
the price for it. This revolutionary period left several hundred thousand
people dead in Haiti in a twenty-year period. Those who experienced human
trauma on such a scale could only survive with the creation of profound new
realities in truth.
Haiti’s trauma is universal,
particularly in terms of calamities. The calamity of slavery on the whole from
the 16th to the 19th century, the calamity of Adolf Hitler’s holocaust of the
1940s, of Joseph Stalin’s mass murder on an even greater scale than Hitler’s in
the same period on the same continent - those took place in the living memory
of a large percentage of the population of the world today.
Historian Philip Roshford once
said to me: “Experience is not what happens to a person, it’s what a person
does with what happens to him or her.” So before we feel sorry for Haiti, let
us try and understand what happened when and to whom.
Charles Dickens’ ‘Tale of Two
Cities’ commences with the words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst
of times,”, referring to the French Revolution of 1789, an event that changed
the order of things in Europe and the western world forever. The divine right
of kings, both as idea and ideal, lost its meaning the moment a Corsican
gentleman soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte, declared himself emperor in 1804 and
nominated his immediate family to European thrones, thrones that had previously
traced their pedigrees back more than 2000 years to antique chieftains who were
called names like Thorbald the Clatterer and Eystein the Fart. The world order
in the western world had changed.
In the 18th century, France’s
best money produced was the island of St. Domingue, Haiti. It was also where
France lived out its most macabre ‘alter ego’. Millions of people from the
African continent, varieties of tribes, peoples, religions and cultures, arrived
at a place after a horrendous journey and proceeded to experience conditions so
terrifying that to attempt to describe them would be distracting. The Africans
took what happened to them and out of those experiences they produced their own
cultural syncretisms, parodies of the dominant European culture in conjunction
with their own common African past. Because of the importation of new slaves,
this syncretism was always added to - Haiti was the first real melting pot in
the Caribbean.
Life’s parameters in Haiti in
those days were determined by skin colour, the command of wealth and the
displays of barbarity and debauchery. To make it in Haiti you had to be rich,
white and very weird in an 18th century style. As a slave island, it operated
on a large scale: hundreds of thousands of acres were under sugar cultivation.
To make sugar viable, this required a workforce of slaves shipped from Africa
at the rate of thousands every decade. This system was bound to collapse; it could
not be maintained forever.
The situation, driven by greed,
produced a variety of racial types the world had never seen before. Laws were
made to stop African slave women from being given property by French men in
love with them. The thus deprived offspring of such relationships was excluded
from both worlds, despising their mothers and wanting to be a part of their father’s
society.
The Haitian plantocracy lived in
fear in the midst of sumptuous wealth. The slaves, on the other hand, lived in
fear, anger and hope of revenge.
In Europe’s rigid society, Haiti
began as an oddity. In the 17th century, low-class adventurers left France for
Haiti to be planters, pirates, opportunists and slavemasters. They soom became
rich with big sugar estates. Their descendants at the time of the French Revolution
were the rich and affected ‘petit blancs’. Elements of the provincial nobility
also came to Haiti, bourgeois businessmen, administrators, soldiers, a whole
system to organise and produce sugar. Three main classes emerged in the colony,
each rigidly segregated, producing bitter divisions and laying down the
conditions of what was to come. By the 1780s, the classes consisted of at the
top the senior government and army from France, the planters and wealthy
merchants; in the middle, the ‘petits blancs’, the non-whites, mulattoes,
quadroons and freed blacks; and at the bottom, the great number os slaves. The
first looked down upon the second, who in turn envied and resented the former,
while both classes of European descendants considered themselves a world apart
from all non-whites, not to mention the slaves.
Another spin was put on it by the
ongoing marriages of impecunious nobility with rich petit blancs and the
great-granddaughters of slaves who now looked like European women and lived in
palatial plantation houses. During the years of the French Revolution from 1789
and the triumph of the slave population in 1803, several factions fought each
other with unbelievable ferocity. There were horrific massacres of Europeans,
30,000 in Cap Francis alone, in revenge of the sad depredations of the Africans
with medieval tortures hatched in a barbaric time.
At least three men gave
themselves the name or Macandal Daaga. He was a poisoner, a science man, a loup
garou. A wild man, he lived alone and perfected poisons. Wenda Parkinson in her
book ‘This gilded African’ remarks that nobody will ever know how many people
he killed, both black and white. The sheer name of Daaga spread terror into the
hearts of Haitians. Eventually, the man was caught, tied to a stake and burnt
alive. Miraculously, he escaped
the flames, his body on fire. For a long time after, people said that Daaga
could not die.
In 1789, a sailor boy jumped onto
the jetty from a merchant ship and went into the town shouting: ‘Liberté,
liberté! The bastide has fallen!” With the French Revolution having begun, Haiti
fell into total anarchy. Similar to the situation in France, everybody who had
hated everybody now started killing everybody.
In Paris, Maximiliene Marie
Isidore de Robespierre (1758 - 1794), the man who was running the revolution in
France, was told of the destruction of property and of the colonists. Advised
that he should intervene, Robespierre declared: “Perish the colonies rather
than sacrifice on tenth of our principles”.
Out of the chaos and destruction
of the whites, of their plantations and their economy, a strong man began to
emerge. He fought the royalists, the mulattoes and even the blacks. He imposed
order ... as best he could. Toussaint L’Ouverture, an African of princely
descent, grew up on a huge estate owned by a count who had recognised in
Toussaint’s father a remarkable intellect and strength of character. They could
not become friends under the circumstances. Toussaint’s father was a slave,
however, he had his house on the estate, was his master’s driver and traveling
companion and most importantly of all, possessed a treasure beyond imagination:
he was able to read. The boy Toussaint grew like a cobweb broom: reedy,
bright-eyed, quick in both French and Patois. His manners were elegant. Years
later, he surprised the bigots who had been sent to his country by his style,
generosity and charm, and most of all the principles of the Englightenment and
the rights of man he had ingrained. The count and his father had done a good
job.
L’Ouverture, soldier, statesman,
revolutionary, was a significant man of his times. To get the big picture, he
has to be placed alongside George Washington and Simon Bolivar.
In Haiti, blood flowed and plantations
burned. There are fantastic stories of heroism and of love by black people for
the people who once owned them. Some people who live in Trinidad today, were
saved by former Haitian slaves during the revolution. They have this story:
The house was on fire, blazing in
the night, bright yellow behind the lace courtains. The old man was dead, his
sons too. Their wives were already burning upstairs. The slaves are rioting
outside. Down the frontsteps comes the Da, the black nanny. She has madam’s
jewel box tight against her chest. A man, blood streaming down the arm that is
holding a cutlass, rushes past, snatches the jewel case and runs screaming into
the night. She walks fast into the ruined garden. The planter’s little boy and
his sister are running too, stooping under their nanny’s wide skirts. She saves
the children she has taken care of
and breast-fed herself, puts them on a boat bound for Trinidad.
Similarly, the Count of Loppinot
escaped inside of a wooden barrel into which some loyal slaves of his had put
him, and many others who came to Trinidad. Many came with gold and jewellery,
emeralds and rubies - they were once very rich. This is how they started back
again in Trinidad.
Toussaint L’Ouverture himself
knew that the Haitian economy was ultimately linked to France. The vested
interest in France, the merchants, importers and exporters, sought inspite of
Robespierre’s sentiment an accommodation between the two revolutions, one
European and one Caribbean.
Philip Rose Roume de St.
Laurent
During this period, a Grenada-born
man named Philipe Rose Roume de St. Laurent had been appointed ordinator
(judge) in Tobago under the administration of Arthur Count Dillon. Because of
his experience in the West Indies, Roume de St. Laurent was one of three men
chosen to be France’s commissioners to Haiti to facilitate affairs with all the
parties concerned.
In Trinidad, he is remembered as
the originator of the French Creole presence here. This memory was of no use to
the British who took the island in 1797. He was written out of colonial
history. At Trinidad’s independence, under the banner ‘Massa Day Done’ the
French Creoles were put into approbrium by the political party that had come
into power in Trinidad. Roume de St. Laurent was forgotten for a second time.
In fact, however, he was a very significant Caribbean man. He is not obscure,
and his descendants and perhaps hundreds of his immediate relatives live here
in Trinidad.
Roume de St. Laurent was born on
the 13th October, 1743. His mother was a de Gannes. Educated in Grenada, Philip
was brought up as a gentleman. He was one of those people who had the ‘common
touch’, but he was also able to talk to kings without being in awe. Slim, of
medium height, a little too good-looking perhaps, he turned out to be possessed
of vision. He understood the revolution and worked to serve the interestof
French people in the Caribbean, which did not exclude mulattoes and free
blacks.
Roume de St. Laurent arranged for
these same people to come to Trinidad before the French Revolution. His
foresight created the precedent of the Cedula of Population that was the legal
framework for the French to keep coming even during the revolutions in Haiti, Guadeloupe,
Martinique, St. Lucia, Dominica and Grenada. Black, white and coloured, free
and enslaved, they came, were allotted the land and worked on their plantations:
their descendants in their hundreds of thousands are Trinidadians now.
This is why both the British
colonial and the post-independence educators swept him under the carpet: he
might have stolen the thunder of British administrators and nation-building
politicians. As a national figure, to evoke his memory would have put a stop to
divisive politics by providing a hero in whom so many of us would have a vested
interest, a common origin. And this is why history is so important: it informs
choice.
Roume de St. Laurent made
Caribbean politics his career. He brokered with the King of Spain for
French-speaking people from all over the Caribbean to come here. He and his
mother owned estates in Maraval, Ariapita and Diego Martin. He himself never
lived here, however, his relatives did.
Serving the Bourbon kings both in
France and in Spain, he made money from revolutionary politics. At that time, he added the aristocratic
‘de St. Laurent’ to his name. Michael Pocock in his authoritative essay on
Roume did not think he was a nobleman, although his lineage was ancient. Pierre
Gustave Louis Borde described him as a chevalier.
In Haiti, after his posting as
judge in Tobago, he was once more just ‘Citizen Roume’. HIs tasks became more
complicated with Napoleon becoming emperor. Roume’s role changed, evolving from
monarchist to revolutionary to imperial commissioner. His situation was
precarious in terms of life and teath. Both his bosses, Napoleon and Toussaint L’Ouverture,
were dangerous men. By this time, various life crises had overtaken him and he
divorced his English wife. She was the daughter of a general, and he was now
looking for other alliances.
The revolution in the Caribbean
was about slaves and people of African descent. Simon Bolivar in South America
had the blod of slaves in his veins; Fedon in Grenada was a free coloured;
Victor Hugues, the terror of the revolution in the Caribbean, was a mulatto;
Toussaint L’Ouverture a ‘gilded African’.
Miriam Rochard is remembered by
those of her sister’s descendants who still had the story and sho lived in
Woodbrook up to a few years ago as a very goodlooking woman with red auburn
hair and green eyes. She was the natural daughter of Thmas Danier Rochard Lepine
and Genevieve ..., a free woman of colour. They lived both in Tobago and
Grenada, and they had money. Roume de St. Laurent also lived with her in
Tobago. He married Miriam in Port Republicain, now Port-au-Prince, in 1799 in
the presence of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Louis Beauvais and Paul L’Ouverture. He
was 56, she 38. They had a daughter. Citizen Roume put his European place in society
where his mouth was - where he said his heart was. It was to cost him, however.
Roume worked with Toussaint.
Other commissioners came and went; battles were fought, won and lost; treachery
existed on every level and of course the inevitable ‘tropical rot’ that affects
all imports, human or otherwise, set in.
In the end, they were compromised
and lost everything. Toussaint died in the gaol; Roume died in poverty.
Napoleon grudgingly gave Miriam a pittance of a pension - she was black, he
said. And even the emperor himself died in obscurity on the island of St.
Helena in the Atlantic.
Haiti became the first republic in
the Caribbean. The country continued to experience terrible times and has never
recovered to this day.
