contradictions are played out. On this point, all of these scholars reference the seminal work by
C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins in which he not only argues that the African slaves were part
of a modern life when forced to enter into the international plantation sugar economy, but also as
Dash and Fischer have demonstrated, the Haitian Revolution became the point at which slave
resistance enters modern history and engages it on a global scale through the Haitian
Revolution.^45 James had himself dramatically written: “Men make their own history, and the
black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of
men and shift the economic currents of three continents.”^46
One of the most famous anecdotes relating writing in French to Caribbean modernity isalso found in James’ text and concerns the figure of Toussaint Louverture, the former slave,
military leader, and governor-general of Saint-Domingue whose genius was such a threat to
Napoleon that he captured Toussaint and sent him to a prison in France in 1802. Toussaint,
literate and educated through the permission of his master, had read many eighteenth-century
French works, including the Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and
Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies by the Abbé Raynal. It was while reading
Raynal’s call for a leader among the slaves to launch a revolution which would liberate Africans
that Toussaint reportedly recognized himself: “Over and over again Toussaint read [Raynal’s]
passage: ‘A courageous chief is only wanted. Where is he?’ A courageous chief is only
wanted.”^47 In this early watershed moment, he envisioned the end of slavery in Saint-
Domingue. The Creole/French and oral/written split is also evident in the declaration of Haitian
independence, commanded to be written by the illiterate and Creole-speaking Dessalines who led
(^45) Dash, The Other America 15 and Fischer 14.
(^46) James 25.
(^47) This is recounted in various sources, notably in C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the
San Domingo Revolution (1938. New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 25.