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Welcome to the History Extra podcast fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
From armed uprisings to the hidden power of ritual song and solidarity.
The story of enslaved people's resistance is far richer and more radical than has often been told.
In this episode, Sudhir Hazari Singh speaks to Danny Bird about his new book Daring to be Free, which draws on fragmentary archives and oral traditions to highlight the forgotten people who resisted their enslavers, explore the global reverberations of the Haitian Revolution and reveal the central role of women in shaping struggles for freedom.
Sudhir, your book begins with the story of Solitude in Guadeloupe.
Why did you choose to start with her and what does she represent about the wider history of resistance among enslaved people?
Thanks, Danny.
So Solitude inaugurates the book, as it were, for a number of reasons.
One is that hers is the first statue of a black woman to be put up in Paris.
And relatively recently, it's just a few years ago.
But I think I also chose her because her role in the struggle in the anti-slavery struggle in general and even in the anti-slavery struggle in Guadeloupe, in her native island, was long ignored.
So she was a very good symbol of the story that I was trying to tell namely, slave resistance was something that was long, that was ongoing, and that it had many anonymous, unsung heroes and heroines.
And she's a very symbolic figure because, like many of the people that I write about in the book, We don't know very much about her.
We don't know her exact date of birth.
We know that her mother was raped by a sailor during the Middle Passage.
So she was born in Guadeloupe sometime in the second half of the 18th century.
She then became emancipated.
Guadeloupe, I should say, was a French colony.
So in 1794...
All French colonies abolished slavery, so Solitude became a free woman.
We know a little bit about her life during the decade or so during which she enjoyed her freedom.
She lived with another group of recently emancipated people.
But then sadly, in the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the ruler of France at the time, send an army to basically restore slavery in Guadeloupe.
So many people resisted and some of them took up arms.
And Solitude was one of the people who joined the resistors and actually fought the French.
She actually fought with arms against them.
And she was captured by the French troops, tried and executed.
And I talk about that story in the early 19th century.
She was pregnant at the time she was captured, and so she had her child, and then, literally the day afterwards, she was executed.
So that is the short, tragic, but ultimately, I think, heroic story of Solitude.
And I should also add that for a long time, even in her native Guadeloupe, her story was forgotten.
So for much of the 19th century, and 20th centuries, people just didn't talk about her.
And it's only since the late 20th century, from the moment when historians have started to become interested again in the history of resistance to enslavement, that her own story and the stories of tens of thousands of people like her have re-emerged.
A fascinating and tantalising life.
You've written that resistance was integral to the practice of Atlantic slavery.
How did you go about researching these acts of resistance, given how often they've been erased from the archive?
Well, it was complicated because one of the things that I immediately confronted was the uneven nature of the slavery archive.
We have a lot of documents in that archive, but I'd say 95, 96 documents.
Of those documents are documents produced by the slavers, by the oppressors, by the people who were on the other side of the fence, so to speak.
Now, the people who were enslaved, very often you don't even have a record of their names.
So to go back to Solitude, the reason we don't know very much about her life is that it just wasn't recorded.
Slaves were treated as property rather than as human beings.
So it's only when people were involved in acts of rebellion or if they left some kind of written trace, that you're able to access those events and those actions through the archives.
Fortunately, there are some other ways in which you can capture the voices of the enslaved, particularly in the 18th, later 18th and early 19th centuries.
Some people gave interviews, wrote memoirs about their enslavement, during which they talked about resistance in those writings.
And the other enormous source that I discovered and this is something that took me right back to Africa.
The enormous source I discovered was oral history.
Because The overwhelming majority of these enslaved men and women were not literate, but that didn't mean that they weren't full of culture and had a lot of memories about their experiences, which they passed on to their children.
And so, from generation to generation, there is a collective memory that enslaved people pass on to each other.
And you see that those memories are still very much alive, even in contemporary Africa.
So there were all those different sources that I was able to pull together.
It was a bit like having a jigsaw puzzle.
You know, initially, it's just lots of different pieces scattered together.
And what I tried to do in the book is to piece all the different bits of the puzzle together so that we would have a unified picture.
You're also very careful about terminology when it comes to this subject.
You use the word enslave rather than slave and avoid terms like slave owner.
Why do you think the language we use about slavery matters so much and how has it shifted over time?
Thank you.
I really think it's an important question and thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk a bit about that.
The language about slavery has always been very political, because enslavement was, of course, a political act.
It was an act in which one group of people basically took away the freedom of another group of people and erased their humanity.
So when you look at all the main terms that are used by slavers to describe the people that they are enslaving, these terms are extremely derogatory.
And I think one of the problems with the word slave is that it can lead you to think that this is just like an occupation or a job, you know.
It's like being a carpenter or being a mason.
But actually, slaves didn't choose to be slaves, right?
It was something that was forced upon them.
And I think that reality is something that we capture when we use the word enslave.
And I think it's a much better and a much more accurate way of describing the phenomenon enslavement, rather than using the word slave.
And you see it also in some of the other main terms that are used like, for example, fugitive right.
When enslaved people ran away, they were called fugitives.
And that is because they had run away and in a sense not in a sense, literally they had broken the law.
So they were treated as people who were criminal.
But of course, the real problem, the real issue was that the law was unjust, right?
Because it was the legal system of the time that justified slavery.
So I'm very careful.
I think we need to be very careful when we use that sort of linguistic terminology, that we are mindful of the political purposes to which the language was used.
And those political purposes were to justify and to legitimize enslavement.
And of course, when we live in the 21st century, that's not something we want to do.
So I try to use slightly different terms.
However, what I also say in the book is that the book also needs to be historically accurate.
So whenever there's terminology that in a sense helps to underline the oppressive and coercive nature of enslavement, then those terms I keep.
So slave driver, for example, that captures the role of that particular person.
Slave ship, I think that's That's a good description of what that vessel's purpose were.
So I tried to strike a balance in the book between remaining historically accurate and authentic on the one hand, but also not falling into the trap of the slavers when using some of the terminology.
And you begin your book in Africa tracing what you call the foundations of resistance.
How do you think African cultural, spiritual and martial traditions shaped the determination of the enslaved to resist once they crossed the Atlantic?
Well, I think this was an enormous influence and something that personally I knew very little about.
And indeed it's one of the features of the literature in general about slavery that it sort of leaves aside or sets aside what enslaved people's histories in Africa were even people who write about resistance.
Until recently they didn't really pay that much attention to what had happened or how enslaved people were brought up, what sort of experiences they had in africa and how those experiences shaped their subsequent political and cultural identities.
But this influence was huge and one of the things that i do in the opening chapter in the book is to document all the different ways in which people who were captured by slave raiders on the coasts of West Africa, how they resisted.
They resisted by fighting back, by forming militia in their local villages.
They resisted by running away from the settlements that were built on the coasts to house these captives before they were put on board the vessels that carried them across the Atlantic.
And indeed they formed runaway settlements already in different parts of Africa, and some of those settlements lasted for a very long time.
The two biggest sources of, if you like, resistance that one can trace back to Africa are, on the one hand, religious and spiritual ideas, because African peoples had hugely rich and diverse religious and spiritual traditions.
You know, you have Catholicism.
You have Islam.
You have traditional African religions.
And all of these eventually are shaped by the struggle against slavery.
I should say not all of them are uniformly opposed to slavery, because of course there are Christian traditions in Africa that are justifying slavery.
But what is interesting with all these religions is that they develop within them traditions of dissent and traditions of opposition to enslavement.
And you see that in particular in the traditional African religions.
So religion, religious spirituality, plays a very important role in shaping people's propensity to resist.
And you see it in particular.
This is the one example I know most about in Vodou, which is the traditional African religion that begins in West Africa and then travels across to Haiti, where it becomes basically the spiritual basis for the revolutionaries who fight against slavery in Saint-Domingue in the later 18th century.
So that's one big source.
The other big source is military training.
A lot of the captives who are sent over the Atlantic are are people who've been involved in fighting.
They've been fighting in a number of different ways.
They've either been fighting to resist enslavement or they've been fighting intra-African wars, many of which were taking place in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
So these are people who already have acquired quite considerable martial skills.
And once they are captured and taken over to the Caribbean and the Americas, they mobilize these skills in order to wage war against the slavers.
So Africa is an enormous influence.
African culture in general, you know, be it political military spiritual, is a huge influence in shaping these traditions of resistance.
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You mentioned the Haitian Revolution in your answer there.
And many listeners will be familiar with your work in respect of that revolution.
And I'd like to zone in a little bit on it because it looms large in your most recent book.
Beyond its military success, what do you see as its lasting intellectual and political legacy for the Atlantic world?
So this was also something that I sort of had an intuition that the Haitian Revolution was significant, but I had no idea how significant it was.
I touched about it a little bit in my previous book, Black Spartacus, the biography of Toussaint Louverture, who is the main hero of the Haitian Revolution.
But actually what I wanted to do in this book was to also to explore how the success of the Haitian Revolution you know, the Haitians are able to fight and gain their independence in 1804.
And once Haiti is born, this is the world's first black, independent, post-colonial state.
And it has emerged out of slavery.
So, from the moment Haiti emerges, it stands as a beacon for enslaved peoples all across the Atlantic world, to a beacon for their own struggles for freedom and for independence and for justice.
And you see it in all different parts of the Atlantic world.
You see it in the Caribbean.
You see it in the United States.
From the early 1790s onwards, the stories about the Haitian Revolution are carried over, carried across the seas by travelers, by refugees, also by sailors.
Sailors play a very important role in the dissemination of the sort of heroic myths of the Haitian Revolution.
So Haiti plays an enormous role in, if you like, boosting the self-confidence of enslaved people.
And you see that it nurtures their own aspirations, help consolidate their aspirations for freedom and for self-determination.
I should say people are not looking to copy the Haitian Revolution necessarily, right?
It's not as if Haiti provides a sort of fixed blueprint for what enslaved people want, because people want a number of different things.
And that's one of the other things that emerged very strongly from my research that we shouldn't assume that the political views of enslaved people are homogenous.
They weren't, right?
They had different views. about what kind of political arrangements they wanted.
They had different views about the kinds of freedoms that they were looking for.
But Haiti provides just a sort of general inspiration for those political struggles.
And it shapes in a number of ways all the big revolutions of enslaved peoples from that moment on.
And it also shapes the fight for emancipation in the British and the French colonies.
And you see the influence of all the way up to the American struggle against slavery which leads on to emancipation in 1865.
When you look at the political thought of the leading African American anti-slavery campaigners, people like Frederick Douglass, for example, you see that their thought is completely captivated by what had happened in Haiti.
If you take the example of Frederick Douglass, he was fascinated by Toussaint.
Louverture talked about him very often in the speeches that he gave.
So Haiti really gives a boost to the struggle for the captive self-determination.
Women also feature prominently in your account, from priestesses in Africa to fighters like Sanaté Belair in Haiti.
How did women shape these struggles and why have their contributions so often been overlooked by history?
I really wanted to draw out this theme because one of the striking things that you find when you look at the archives is that very often women are play very prominent roles during slave revolts.
And you see them being mentioned in military or police reports.
So that takes us back to Africa, to begin with, because many of the militias in which people were training to defend themselves against slave raiders were militias in which there were men and women fighters.
So the tradition of military combat in which women play a role is one that comes in part, from Africa.
But that wasn't their only or perhaps even their principal role.
I think women are a very important source of intelligence gathering, because when you think of what it takes to organize either an escape from a plantation or an insurrection on a plantation, these things don't happen spontaneously, right.
They require a huge amount of planning, collection of information research, finding out not only what you wanted to do as a group of enslaved people, but finding out what you're up against in terms of the resources that are available to your oppressors, to the slavers.
And women were in a very essential strategic position because more often than not, they were in the plantation house.
They were quite close physically to the slavers.
So they would be able to gather people and the right sort of intelligence, which could then be used by those who were planning either escapes or insurrections.
And we now know from more recent scholarship, just in the last few decades, when you look at the history of plantations, for example in the United States, Many of the major revolts that we know about like, for example, Nat Turner's planned revolt in Virginia in 1831, that happened in part through a very extensive network of people who were working together for months, sometimes years ahead.
And women played absolutely vital roles in this process.
And this also brought home to me a slightly more general point which I try to underline in the book, which is that slave resistance, one of the major features of it is the solidarity that you find amongst the enslaved.
One of the big aims of the slavers, of the people who were capturing these men and women, was to break down their spirit, was to basically erase all forms of humanity that they might have had and to in a sense, prevent them from relating to each other as human beings, as people who might form friendships.
And What actually the history of slave resistance shows is that actually the slavers failed in that respect, because people created these forms of friendship and solidarity and they used these forms of solidarity that they fashioned to resist and sometimes to take the fight back directly to the slavers.
Something you explore to great extent in the book is that resistance took many different forms, from sabotage and escape to song, ritual and even storytelling.
Which examples most surprised you in revealing how culture itself became a weapon of survival and defiance?
Well, it's a great question, because one of the things that I found in the literature was that there was a slight tendency to to associate culture with a form of conservatism right.
So the idea is You know people will revolt if they have Enlightenment or Western ideas brought to them right.
So for a long time, the story of the Haitian Revolution was that the captives there were oppressed.
But until the ideas of the French Revolution were introduced to them, they weren't really able to seize the moment and carry the fight back to their oppressors.
So implicit in that view is the notion that if they had a sense of their own culture, their religion, their spirituality, that those things were not conducive to revolt.
And that's the thing that actually the evidence disproves on a massive scale, because you see again and again that people are very emphatic in the desire to maintain their languages, their cultural identities for example, having facial markings and also preserving their various cultures, technical skills, skills that they had learned in Africa, either particular trades that they were skilled in, or religious or medicinal forms of knowledge.
All of those things are things that the enslaved peoples use for their own purposes, but they also deploy them in the course of forming movements of opposition to their slavers.
So culture plays a very big role. in enabling people to oppose slavery.
And very often what you find is that and you saw this in the early moments of the Haitian Revolution, but there's so many other examples that I found is that the slavers thought that if people were allowed to have cultural rituals of their own, that that would be fine, that there was no potential trouble from them, because they would just be sort of letting off steam.
And they didn't really think that that was a particularly dangerous type of activity.
But you see again and again, and you see it in the case of Haiti in 1791, or Saint-Domingue as it was.
Then, people were allowed to meet in order to celebrate various cultural festivals or activities.
And on the surface, it looked like that was what they were doing.
But underground.
They were using those meetings and gatherings in order to plan revolutionary activities.
So culture is really at the heart of the rebellious movements that we find right across the Atlantic.
And it isn't really an opposition.
There isn't culture on one side and, if you like, enlightenment and European revolutionary ideas on the other.
Both can work together.
Sometimes people draw on one, sometimes they draw on the other.
Sometimes, as in the case of Toussaint Louverture, they combine both.
And that's really what was very striking to me when I was doing the research.
One of your core arguments is that enslaved people were the true abolitionists and not simply white reformers in Europe and the Americas.
In fact, I think a lot of listeners would be quite surprised by some of the attitudes that many white abolitionists held in regard to enslaved people.
And I wondered if you could go into that a little bit.
But also, how do you think centering the voices of the enslaved changes our understanding about the ending of slavery itself?
Well, first of all, with the white abolitionists.
It's certainly not my intention to disparage what they do, because I think they were all honorable people fighting a very difficult struggle, because one of the things we also need to realize is how deeply entrenched slavery was.
If we take the case of Britain, for example and I talk about it a little bit in the book it was a hugely powerful and influential institution that had massively powerful advocates In parliament, in the monarchy.
Every single monarch in Britain, from the beginning of slavery to abolition, was a supporter of slavery.
You had the press, you had economic interests, you had lobbyists.
So this was a hugely powerful and influential force, right?
And standing up to it was something that was very difficult and problematic.
And what abolitionists typically do is that they try and develop a strategy which won't confront the slavers head on.
So, which is why they come up with this idea that slavery has to be abolished in a number of different steps.
Right.
So the first step is to abolish the slave trade.
And this is something that the British abolitionists are able to do in 1807.
But once they do that, they basically more or less give up on the struggle.
They then say that slavery will be abolished eventually, but they're not really willing to put a date on it.
And very soon it becomes clear that they really don't have a timetable for the rapid abolition.
And so the pace for pushing that reform through is one that is taken up by the rank-and-file abolitionists who are much more radical, And this is where, for example, women like Elizabeth Hayrick, who I write about in the book, play a very important role, because they in a sense take on their own leaders, as it were, and say you know, you're being too timid.
You're being too conservative.
We need to end this thing now, rather than wait indefinitely for the slavers themselves to come to their senses.
So there's a sort of internal fight against abolition within European, well particularly British and American abolitionists.
But I think The other big force pushing for abolition in the late 18th and early 19th centuries are the enslaved peoples themselves.
They are the ones who recognize that if slavery is to be abolished, it should be abolished immediately.
And this is where the Haitian Revolution is actually a huge factor.
Because all the arguments that people were making against immediate abolition right, they were saying it can't work.
Black people are not yet ready to assume positions of leadership and power.
Black people are not capable of fighting.
You know, all of those false ideas that were being put out by slavers and by many of the abolitionists were disproved immediately overnight, by the Haitian Revolution.
So once the Haitian Revolution happens, that becomes a further inspiration for the push for immediate abolition.
And I think when you look at abolition in Britain, which happened in the early 1830s, I think you end up seeing it mainly not as the result of the lobbying that was done by Wilberforce and company but by the efforts on the ground, by resisting enslaved people and particularly by people who revolted in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823 and then the major revolt insurrection in Jamaica in 1831, 1832.
So abolitionists?
I think it's back to your first question.
You know what is the meaning of the words that we use.
When we use the word abolitionist today, we still typically refer to people who sure believed in abolition before as a general principle, but they actually, for the most part, were not working for immediate abolition.
The people who were working for immediate abolition and fighting for it, and sometimes being killed for it, were the enslaved themselves.
That's why I think they are the real abolitionists.
Finally, Sudhir, you write of honouring our debts in the conclusion.
What debts do you think we owe today to those who resisted slavery?
And how might acknowledging them reshape our societies now?
Yes, I think this is a book that tries to reconstruct a past that we have forgotten and erased, but it's also trying to address how we live in our societies today and what kind of principles and values we want to be adopting, moving forward.
And I think, in that respect, the importance of this story is, first of all, that we should acknowledge what happened in the past.
I think slavery had long term consequences for the communities on which it was inflicted.
And we need to recognize what those consequences were and are.
And indeed, when you listen to the rulers of post-colonial African states and post-colonial Caribbean states, They tell us very clearly that the economic and social consequences of slavery endured over time and can still be felt up to this day, for example, in terms of educational opportunities for descendants of former enslaved people and also health inequalities.
You know, the incidence of type 2 diabetes, for example, is something that is very prevalent in former slave colonies and indeed in my own native island mauritius, diabetes is a major health issue, the origins of which come out of The history of enslavement.
So that's recognizing the past.
And I think one of the second thing I think is very important is that this is a past that everyone needs to know about.
And so therefore, integrating it into the national curriculum through education is something that is very crucial.
And I mean education in a slightly broader sense as well how we commemorate, how we memorialize people.
Britain has a lot of national heroes, and that's fine.
You know, they're all fantastic people.
What I would suggest is that we add some more people to this list of people that we celebrate.
I think there should be, for example, a statue of Sam Sharp, the great Jamaican enslaved rebel leader from the 1830s.
He's somebody who was fighting for democracy because he believed that enslaved people had a right to own themselves and to determine their futures.
That's what democracy is.
So when we think of the history of democracy in this country and we think of all the great people who have fought for that democracy, we should include all these men and women who fought for freedom from enslavement.
They are part of our story too, and I think we should recognize that.
So that's the second thing.
The third thing is reparations, which is a big issue, complicated issue, controversial in some respects.
And I think it's one which the main thing is that it should be a conversation that should be had really initially between governments.
Right.
It's the British government that should talk to the governments of Africa and the Caribbean and engage in a conversation about whether reparations are owed, what form they should take.
But I think the beginning of that conversation is constituted by an acknowledgement of past wrongs.
And until...
You've made that opening step.
You can't really move forward.
So I would very much encourage the authorities here at least to start by taking that step.
And one of the things that I think is very positive is that when you look at both public and private organizations in Britain who have in the past benefited from slavery, you've started to see them taking steps, not just to apologize.
I mean, I'm much less interested in apologies.
You know, saying sorry is very easy.
What you really need to do is to show that you're sorry by taking steps. concrete action.
When you look at Glasgow University and when you look at the Church of England, institutions that have not just apologised but pledged millions of pounds for reparatory purposes.
And I think if the British government could take its lead from these institutions, I think we would end up in a much better place.
That was Dr Sudhir Hazari Singh. an academic at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
Sudhir's new book on this subject is Daring to be Free.
