BLACK SPARTACUS THE EPIC LIFE OF TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH Allen Lane, 464pp, £25
‘One of the greatest stories in modern history has been under-reported,’ wrote Ben Horowitz in the Financial Times. ‘Why do we know so little about the legendary Toussaint Louverture leading the only successful slave revolt in human history that resulted in the creation of an independent state?’
Louverture was born a slave in 1840 in the French colony of Saint-domingue, in the West Indies, now Haiti. Former biographers have argued that Louverture betrayed his race as well as his revolutionary calling by treating with the Europeans. ‘Drawing on first-hand accounts,’ however, Hazareesingh, an Oxford historian, ‘explains how Louverture combined European-style drills and African fighting techniques to build an army that would defeat a variety of opponents from Spain, Britain and France between 1791 and 1801.’ He also deployed both black and white diplomats, and ordered plantation owners to pay their slaves a wage.
‘ Black Spartacus is a triumph,’ Horowitz concluded. ‘It takes a nearly impossibly complex history and weaves it into a compelling and accurate narrative that reads like fiction.’ It was General Etienne Laveaux, the colony’s governor between 1793 and 1796, who dubbed Louverture the Black Spartacus.
‘Louverture intermingled royalist gestures with brash assertions of republican virtue,’ wrote Nathan Perl-rosenthal in the Wall Street
Journal. Hazareesingh has ‘a voracious appetite for original sources and a discerning ear for those which have the ring of truth. He also has a gift for tracing those threads that reveal a previously unrecognised pattern in the fabric of a life.’ The principal achievement of the book is ‘to show how Louverture’s political creed emerged from a compound of the Catholic, Enlightenment and African influences that surrounded the young Toussaint’.
For the Guardian’s David A Bell, Hazareesingh’s admiration for his subject has led him ‘to skate lightly over the most troubling aspects of Toussaint’s career’, namely his increasing ‘authoritarianism’ which ‘arguably prefigured the dictatorships that have plagued Haiti throughout so much of its history’, although ‘his creole republicanism have remained powerful sources of hope, both in Haiti and beyond’.