https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-black-spartacus-by-sudhir-hazareesingh/story-Ol3CDuJpiDCOkgIqGbqgQJ.html
Einstein famously said about Gandhi that “generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked the earth.” That assessment rings equally true from virtually every page of Sudhir Hazareesingh’s stellar, deeply engrossing *Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30). The founding father of Haiti – winningly described here as “the first black superhero” – skyrocketed from slave to general, led the anti-colonial revolution that established just the second nation in the Americas (after the US), and left an outsized impact that has continued to reverberate impactfully throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and still thrums with great potential for our contemporary moment. It is true this “Black Napoleon” never exactly fell out of history, although his life and legacy came under concerted attack from the fateful moment when he helped to liberate the slaves of the French-ruled Caribbean territory of Saint-Domingue (it shares the island of Hispaniola with what is now the Dominican Republic) in the last decade of the 18th century. Still, it’s fair to say that Louverture has been mostly ignored by generations of post-colonial historians, though part of the reason is undoubtedly the imposing presence of the great Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James’s 1938 classic, *The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and The San Domingo Revolution.* In his preface to that book, James puts it characteristically straight, “In 1789, the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves.” Then everything changed, after this giant (almost entirely Africa-derived) captive population revolted in 1791. James recounts that, “the slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte’s brother-in-law.” Their fight for freedom stands out as “the only successful slave revolt in history” and “one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.” What is more, “the individual leadership largely responsible for this unique achievement was almost entirely the work of a single man.” That man shines incandescent in Hazareesingh’s tour de force, which has brought an immense amount of new material into the general public domain. The distinguished author, who is a fellow at Oxford’s Balliol College, previously specialized in French intellectual and cultural history, and admits in his acknowledgements that he had “never ventured into the history of French colonialism in the Caribbean.” But there’s also an intriguing biographical element– his roots in the Indian ocean island of Mauritius – that has worked rather serendipitously. As far as this reader is concerned, it’s that perspective which has wound up yielding the most original and penetrating insights in *Black Spartacus.* “I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man,” wrote Toussaint à Bréda, who grew up bonded property of the sugar estate that gave him (and its other slaves) his last name. His remarkable capacities became apparent early. Eye-witnesses attest “by the age of twelve he had become the fastest runner, the most agile climber and the best swimmer of all the young slave children of the surrounding estates.” He was an exceptionally skilful rider known as “the Centaur of the Savannah” and simultaneously profoundly engaged with his African roots (his father was a kind of nobleman-captive) as well as Catholicism, about which Hazareesingh notes his variant “was tinged with a specifically creole egalitarianism which challenged the colony’s existing racial hierarchy.” This is a crucial point, which *Black Spartacus* parses with creditable sensitivity, “Toussaint did not suffer from an inferiority complex about his blackness, and his contempt for the white slave system of ancient-regime Saint-Domingue was profound. He had first-hand experience of its brutality, inhumanity and racism, as well as its immorality [but] his view of human nature was not racialized. His encounters with Jesuit missionaries, and later with Bayon de Libertat [an early, trusting boss] nourished his enduring belief that there was a capacity for goodness in all human beings. This is perhaps one of the areas where Toussaint formed spiritual links – mediated through voudou and Catholic traditions – with the culture of the indigenous Taino Indians, who were renowned for their gentleness and their love of nature.” >From a rebel base in 1797 came this statement, “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance, and that I want freedom and equality to reign. I have been working since the beginning to bring it into existence so as to establish the happiness of us all.” That bold declaration was the public debut of the 50-year-old revolutionary who, writes Hazareesingh, had made himself into “the epitome of the charismatic military leader: a model of sobriety, he slept only a few hours every night, drank no alcohol, and his capacity for physical endurance was greater than even the hardiest of his men.” Louverture’s carefully honed – often in secret - skills from decades in slavery now came to the fore. He “rode so fast that he frequently left his own guards trailing a long way behind him – even though they were chosen for their exceptional equestrian abilities. His ubiquitousness was such that he was able to give his military forces the comforting impressing that he was always nearby – a sense which was reinforced by his remarkable memory for places and names; he often had better topographical knowledge of specific sites than the scouts who had been sent there, and he could almost always call out his soldiers and officers by name, even if he had only met them fleetingly years ago. These qualities gave him a quasi-mystical aura among his men, many of whom regarded their commander as a divinity.” The contours of what Louverture went on to achieve are frankly amazing. Hazareesingh summarizes it as “the age’s most comprehensive example of radical change, combining democratic and republican goals with an emphasis racial equality, and became a just war of national liberation that foreshadowed the anti-colonial struggles of the modern era.” His revolution forced the abolition of slavery in France in 1794, and shook the Enlightenment’s belief in the inherent superiority of all things European – “its primary agents drew on native American forms of spirituality and African political cultures, and embodied the mutinous spirit of the African American rebels who disrupted colonial authority across the black Atlantic in the late eighteenth-century.” Predictably, it was too severe a threat, and – as painfully detailed in *Black Spartacus* – the Haitian revolution was buried by the cynical calculation of slave-owning societies that birthed contemporary capitalism. From 1825 to 1947, for example, the people of Haiti were forced to pay France the equivalent of $21 billion for “the theft” of their own lives from slavery (as well as the plantations they had worked on). From the richest territory in the New World, it became the poorest – and remains there today.