relative equality by putting cultural obstacles in the way of individual accumulation, and it was these that were inspired by African customs, according to Fick (1990: 181) and Barthélemy (1990, 2000). What was African, then, was not the land tenure system as such, but the cultural restrictions on peasant class differentiation. This suggests a strong political commitment to egalitarianism. Second, to maintain that Toussaint opposed this set-up and insisted on a plantation system because he was Creole and had not experienced Africa, ultimately depoliticises Toussaint’s decisions in favour of a psychological account of his politics and by reference to his social location, although we have been told that his principled fidelity to a politics of humanity contradicted his social location (e.g. as an ex-slave-owner himself) (see Césaire, 1981: 243). Toussaint, we are told, was African enough to speak his father’s African language, to be a knowledgeable herbalist and to run a palaver. So why would he not be African on the question of land? The account should rather begin from his subjective politics. Toussaint was an assimilé – he could not envisage independence from France and he was enough of a modernist to be a Freemason, which suggests a fetishism of technical progress. Of course, a plantation system at the time would seem technically more ‘advanced’ than a peasant parcel. After all, this is what all states (probably without exception) have maintained ever since. And this is the point: Toussaint’s politics at this time were state politics. James (2001: 200) notes that ‘Toussaint knew the backwardness of the labourers, he made them work, but he wanted to see them civilised and advanced in culture’. Toussaint had clearly lost confidence in the masses, but it was also clear that his fidelity to morality and the law made him unable to listen to the people, let alone to be convinced by them. Given his position of power in the state and his desire to maintain an ‘efficient economy’ in the conceptions of the time, it is not surprising that he should insist on (and violently impose) his view of the superiority of the plantation system, however exploitative it may have been. This had less to do with his identity and more with the limited nature of his politics. He became hopelessly out of touch with the democratic aspirations of the masses. This is arguably a general problem with charismatic leadership, which largely conforms to a form of state leadership. As a political figure, Toussaint is very reminiscent of Mandela in many respects.
15.In so far as independent leaders who were close to the masses are concerned, of particular importance is the figure of Colonel Sans-Souci, on whom see Trouillot (1995). Trouillot notes that such rebel leaders were primarily African-born bossales as opposed to locally born créoles. Sans-Souci was from Congo; he was assassinated by Henri (later King) Christophe.
16.A point, incidentally, with which Césaire agreed (1981: 269ff).
17.See Kautsky (1899). This argument was vehemently opposed by Lenin in his analyses of the ‘agrarian question’ in Russia, as he argued that the large estates had to be broken up and redistributed to peasants, since the estates, if left unchecked, would reproduce the dominance of repressive – feudal-based – social relations and maintain the political power of landlords intact. He called this the ‘Junker’, ‘Prussian’ or ‘landlord’ road to capitalist development; in opposition to this, he supported the formation of a class of rich peasants from among the ranks of the peasantry to whom the large estates had been distributed, a process he referred to as the ‘peasant’ or ‘American’ road to capitalist development, as he held that this would lead to more democratic and open capitalist relations in the Russian countryside (see Lenin, 1905). I return to this point in chapter 7. In the post-independence period in Africa, the politics of ‘technical development’ and the necessity of the so-called ‘capture’ of the peasantry for ‘development’ were hotly debated in the critical literature, particularly in Tanzania; see Shivji (1985), Hyden (1983), Mamdani (1985), Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985), and Bernstein (1987).
18.The opposition between state and society seems to be the central motif of radical analyses of Haiti. Trouillot (1995) sees state and nation as opposed in Haiti, Barthélemy (1990, 2000) sees rural equality as being opposed to Creole hierarchy, and Lundhal (1979) sees the ‘government’ as exploiting the peasantry. Nesbitt (2008a: 170–6) largely follows Barthélemy’s argument. Barthélemy is himself heavily influenced by the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1974), who researched the purposeful opposition of society to the state.
19.The first part of the statement tout moun se moun was resurrected politically by Aristide as a guide to action for the Lavalas Party in the 1980s and 1990s (see Hallward, 2007). The term moun is clearly derived etymologically from the Bantu word (u) muntu for ‘a person’. It is interesting to note the origins of this prescription in African traditions, such as the idea of ubuntu, for example, although ubuntu has lost much of its egalitarian content and is considered today as a more or less lived ‘culture’ rather than a political practice (see e.g. Praeg and Magadla, 2014). Much more important as a guide to action is the related statement (in Zulu) by Abahlali baseMjondolo (2014), ‘unyawo alunampumulo’ (a person is a person wherever they may come from).
20.This point seems universally applicable, because knowledges, and particularly those of political change, could rarely foresee the forms emancipatory struggles would take. If the opposite were true, revolutions could be planned with precision or effectuated by a simple act of will. Unfortunately, this is never so. For example, few radical theoretical positions could believe in 1871 that the workers of Paris could run a state, or in 1917 that a Marxist-inspired revolution could take place in a backward agrarian country, or in the 1960s that a communist cultural revolution could take place against the Communist Party in power in China, or that the poor Vietnamese peasants could defeat the armies of France and the US in succession, or, in the 1980s, that apartheid could be overthrown by non-violent struggle in South Africa, and so on.
21.Following the logic of ‘radicalising (state) democracy’, as in Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
22.See also Gauthier (1998, 2004 and 2009). What should be evident is the reactive (in Badiou’s sense) character of the subjectivity prevalent within the discipline of sociology and other social sciences from their inception – emanating as these social sciences did from the ‘conservative reaction’ to the Enlightenment – in sustaining such a notion of human rights by insisting on the individual’s place ‘in society’. In addition, it should perhaps be noted that the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s insistence on the social, most notably in Edmund Burke’s criticisms of Locke’s egalitarian natural right, is at the origin of the liberal colonial conception of trusteeship, which itself is central to 19th-century liberalism and to the South African state’s justification for segregation and apartheid through the influential work of Jan Smuts. See Pitts (2005) and Losurdo (2014) on liberalism and empire, and Allsobrook (2014) on South Africa.
23.This is shown quite clearly by the simple fact that pamphlets on the rights of man and the citizen, which were obviously standard fare in the French metropolis, had to circulate clandestinely in Saint-Domingue, as they were considered subversive of the colonial system; see Fick (1990: 111 and elsewhere).
Chapter 3
Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
Insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness ... The [peasant] rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion.
– Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, 1992 (emphasis in original)
THE IDEA OF MODERNITY AND POPULAR POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY
It is important to note that in the academic study of anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa, not only has political consciousness rarely been central, but when it has indeed been the object of study it has been regularly reduced
