DARING TO BE FREE

Wide-ranging survey of the many ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants resisted their captors.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian war of independence against France, is well known. A young Black servant from Guadeloupe named Solitude is not, though she fought against French colonial forces there. Executed in 1802, Solitude now has a statue in Paris, “the first-ever dedicated to a black woman in the French capital,” as Mauritian historian Hazareesingh writes. Ironically, the French also imposed economic sanctions on free Haiti soon after, demanding indemnities that have crippled the country ever since; as Hazareesingh notes, “the economist Thomas Piketty calculated in 2020 that the Haitians are owed $28 billion by the French government as restitution for the debts incurred for their independence payments.” Rebellions against enslavement took many forms. By the author’s reckoning, hundreds of mutinies occurred on ships in the Middle Passage, among the first known of them a 1532 revolt on a Portuguese ship where 80 captives seized control and sailed back to the coast of Benin. Another form of rebellion took place in Brazil, Panama, and elsewhere, in which enslaved people escaped, formed multiethnic communities that included “Amerindians and poor whites fleeing from the violence of colonial society, destitutes, family outcasts, and those—such as Jews and African priestesses—persecuted for their spiritual beliefs.” And then, most worrisome to slaveholders, there were outright revolts such as that mounted by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, as well as armed bands that helped free recaptured slaves fleeing to Canada on the Underground Railroad—one of them led by Harriet Tubman. Ironically, Hazareesingh notes, most of these acts of rebellion and resistance, while “integral to the practice of Atlantic slavery, and an inescapable part of it,” have often been forgotten, history having tended to congratulate white abolitionists as the sole liberators, a condescending error that this book corrects.

A much-needed and sure-to-be-influential addition to the literature of African enslavement.