60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Totalitarianism and Slavery
43
Then in 1774 Abbé Raynal published a monumental work on the history
of European colonialism in the East Indies and West Indies, in which
Diderot, one of the main contributors, was highly critical of slavery and predicted
that the Blacks would find a person from their ranks to lead them to
freedom:
Nature speaks louder than philosophy or self-interest. Already two colonies of
fugitive negroes have been established, whose treaties and power protect them
from assault. Those flashes announce the lightning, and what the negroes need
now is a courageous leader to wreak vengeance and slaughter. Where is he, that
great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children
Where is he He will appear, do not doubt it. He will come forth and raise the
sacred standard of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him the companions
of his misfortune. More impetuous than torrents, they will everywhere
leave indelible traces of their just resentment. All their tyrants – Spanish,
Portuguese, English, French, Dutch – will become prey to iron and flame. The
fields of America will become drunk with the blood for which they have been
waiting for such a long time. And the bones of countless unfortunate victims,
heaped up for three centuries, will rattle with joy. The Old world will applaud
with the New. Everywhere people will bless the name of the hero who shall have
re-established the rights of the human race; everywhere they will raise monuments
in his honour. (Raynal 1780, 3:204–5) 7
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) proved a landmark in Black freedom
struggles in the Americas. The insurgents did not wait for a promise of freedom
from their overlords; they took it by force, and ended both colonial slavery
and colonialism itself in the country. Out of the seeming chaos of the
conflict, an entire society of Blacks had been freed in principle, though they
had to undergo the troubling cosequences of giving meaning to that freedom.
Their success was deeply constrained by the continuing internal contradictions
of class and colour, and external embargoes that kept them out of
the comity of newly independent nations within the hemisphere for several
decades.
While the various writings and revolutions encouraged Blacks in several
parts of the Americas to revolt, enslaved persons did not depend upon these
writings or revolutions to give legitimacy or rationality to their struggles for
freedom. The life force came from an innate sense that freedom rather than
bondage was the natural condition of human beings. One contemporary