The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the daughter of a Jamaica-born sugar baron. Everything that her father Edward Barrett owned came from his Caribbean cane plantations. The underside of the chattel slavery that brought him huge wealth was the mixed blood of the Barrett family line. Edward’s great fear was that sexual relations between his slaver antecedents and the enslaved Africans would show up in future generations. So he forbade all 11 of his children from marrying: the shame of what Victorian race scientists called “blood desertion” weighed on him.
Scholars have long debated whether Elizabeth thought she had African ancestry. During her honeymoon in Italy in 1846 – kept a secret from her controlling father – she completed the poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point”, where a fugitive African woman decides to murder her child, whose father was white, to save her from a life of slavery. Her child was the result of rape by an overseer. “I am not mad: I am black”, cries her mother. The poem (published in a Boston anti-slavery journal) called for an end to plantation servitude across the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds. Even when slavery was abolished everywhere (last of all in Brazil, in 1888), the Barretts owned 31,000 acres of Jamaican land as well as an imposing townhouse in Marylebone, London. Until his death in 1857 Edward went to the City to arrange for cargoes of Jamaican sugar and rum to be transported to London on the two slaver ships still in his name. (Later, the Barrett great house in Jamaica was bought by the singer Johnny Cash.)
The glittering prosperity of ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived in large part from the “Africa trade”. In the trade’s heyday under King George III, West Indians (as Caribbean sugar impresarios were known) were often boorish, limited men: a popular melodrama from 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, satirised planters as ostentatious layabouts. Behind their conspicuous luxury lay the “triangle merchants” who motivated the trade between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. A triangle voyage carried trading goods from England to Africa, then captives from Africa to the Caribbean (the feared Middle Passage), and finally sugar, coffee, cotton and rum to England. It was the most nearly perfect commercial system in modern times, a loop of supply and demand that involved (in the words of the historian Robin Blackburn) a “predatory exploitation of labour”.
In January 1804 in Saint-Domingue in the French Caribbean, the enslaved people declared independence after they overthrew their French oppressors. The name Saint-Domingue was replaced by the aboriginal Taino Indian word Haiti (meaning “mountainous land”) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was ripped from the French tricolour. The uprising was led by Toussaint Louverture, a former plantation field hand. The Haitian constitution, declaimed in 1805 by Louverture’s successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines, outlawed slavery and stated that all Haitian citizens were “legally black”, even if they happened to be white. Conceivably, this was the first time in history that the term “black” had been used in an ideological sense. “We have dared to be free,” Dessalines said (before he was murdered by his own allies).
Haiti’s anti-slavery insurgency is central to Daring to Be Free, Sudhir Hazareesingh’s absorbing and often revelatory history of black resistance to the transatlantic trade over the four centuries of its dismal existence. The Louverturean revolt was fired by the egalitarian ideals of the 1789-91 French Revolution: racial slavery was an intolerable injury to human nature. However, Hazareesingh argues that Haiti’s 13-year struggle for emancipation owed less to the salons of the Enlightenment than to African-influenced guerilla tactics and the conjure lore and spirit practice of New World religions such as Vodou (voodoo, in the old orthography). Most historians agree that the enslaved combatants of Saint-Domingue first rose up under a Jamaican Vodou priest or houngan named Dutty “Zamba” Boukman. One August night in 1791, Boukman called on the spirits of ancestral Africa to avenge the French plantocracy. Louverture was reportedly present at the animist ceremony, and within six weeks his rebel armies had burned down enemy plantations. Dessalines, himself a houngan, worshipped the warrior spirit of Ogou Ferraille from the Bight of Benin.
Hazareesingh is a Mauritius-born historian and author of Black Spartacus, a superb life of Louverture. In this new book he maintains that Enlightenment ideals alone did not abolish slavery, and shifts the focus away from Christian abolitionists who often derided African culture to the agency of Afro-Atlantic insurgents and conspirators. Runaway resistance, known in the New World as marronage, had its roots in the slave-driving Islamic caliphates and kingdoms of Africa. The African side of the triangle trade – sometimes called the “black” trade because it was controlled by non-Europeans – was exemplified by the slave castles the British operated along the Gold Coast which served as holding centres for Africans sold into servitude by fellow Africans. Men and women who escaped the slave-raiding parties of West Africa and the Arab Peninsula were able to pass on some knowledge of marronage to Africans ferried across the Atlantic. In Jamaica today the Maroons (from the Spanish cimarrón, “wild”) are exalted as the world’s first black freedom fighters. The Jamaican apostle of black liberation Marcus Garvey claimed Maroon ancestry for himself.
Hazareesingh barely touches on the uncomfortable truth that the Maroons fought for their own liberty only, not the overall liberty of captive fellow Africans. Infamously, Maroons sided with the British in putting down the 1865 Morant Bay uprising in post-emancipation Jamaica, when half-starving “freed” bonded men and women rose up to protest against their lack of paid work. The governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, fearing the Haiti-like spectre of black rule, suppressed the “rebellion” with the utmost severity, executing up to 439 of the participants, and publicly flogging at least 600 others. The Maroons of Jamaica are thus left with the ambivalent legacy as both heroes of, and traitors to, black freedom.
In his scholarly survey of African emancipatory influences in Cuba, Haiti, Mauritius, Jamaica, Brazil and the United States, Hazareesingh emphasises the role played by women as disruptors and warrior figures in the cause of freedom. In sugar-rich Dominica in the 18th century, female Maroon chiefs conducted guerilla sorties on the British from their jungle hideouts. In eastern Jamaica the Maroons were led by a Gold Coast tribeswoman known as Queen Nanny, who reputedly fended off the Redcoats by catching their bullets in the cleft of her buttocks. (It is more likely that she lifted her skirts to moon at the troops – a gesture of extreme contempt in Jamaica.) Nanny is now a National Hero of Jamaica whose likeness appears on the J$500 banknote. As an adept of Afro-Caribbean Obeah sorcery she went into battle against the British after summoning the ghosts of her Ashanti warrior ancestors in today’s Ghana. Maroon communities still exist in Jamaica; they have preserved a unique subculture of African languages, music and spirit animism.
Haiti, the world’s first black republic, provided the basis for the Pan-African and post-colonial independence movements of the 20th century. The prospect of a black state founded on the expulsion of its white community horrified the West, but to African-American abolitionists such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass (known as “black Toussaints”), Louverture was the morning star of a new era for the Atlantic world. For Garvey, Louverture was “the greatest Negro” and symbol of what black people could achieve through collective strength. Garvey’s messianic notion of blackness and African redemption was nevertheless problematic at times for his fellow black activists. In 1934 he proclaimed Adolf Hitler a “wonderful personality” who demanded “respect” for his insistence on racial purity for the German volk. He thought mixed marriages to be a social misfortune. He rejected the liberal ideal of integration and, bizarrely, praised the Ku Klux Klan for wishing to “preserve their race from suicide through miscegenation”. White extremists have tried to show Garvey up as a crypto-racist; in 1960s and 1970s Britain, not uncommonly, conservative-minded politicians depicted Garveyite Back-to-Africa movements as an equivalent, anti-white racism – “Enoch Powellism in reverse”. Daring to Be Free, a marvel of historical analysis and research, is the beginning of wisdom in these matters.
Daring to Be Free
Sudhir Hazareesingh
Allen Lane, 464pp, £30
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[Further reading: Kamala Harris cares too much about being nice]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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