The Revolution of Tè Minè: The Right to Land in the Aftermath of the Haitian Rev

• In Event: Histories and Possibilities of “Instituent Power”

Abstract

The usual (that is to say Western) take on the Haitian Revolution is that after its brilliant success, the revolutionary spirit was snuffed out by the corruption of Haiti's post revolutionary leadership, forced reparations imposed by France, US imperialism and other related issues stemming from global capitalism and hegemony. In this paper I will argue that in some sense, after the formal end of the revolution in Haiti, the revolution continued and deepened only in a way that is largely invisible to a Western liberal audience. The core of the Haitian revolution was never its leadership regardless of how brilliant Toussaint Louverture was. It was in the self-organizing masses of Bossales, those slaves who had been born in Africa. The Bossales constituted the heart of the revolution and after it was won, they refused to return to a Plantation economy even though all of their political leaders wanted exactly that. In their resistance to the Latifundia system and, in the way they established small plot farming in a highly collective and organized way represents the realization, not of liberal notions of freedom as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen but rather of their own conceptions of freedom, having roots both in the practice of marronage during the period of slavery and also reaching back to indigenous practices in Africa. The resilience of this movement, which lasted more or less intact through the 19th century and into the earliest part of the 20th century and still has remnants today amounts to a revolution within a revolution, one that reveals the true power of what I like to call deep anarchism.

Author

• James R. Martel, San Francisco State University