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In early childhood he had taught himself to read and was familiar with Caesar's military writings as well as the polemics of the French abolitionist Abbé Reynal. A slave until he was 45, he rode his horse so well, he was known as the centaur of the savannahs. But these tributes pale beside the work of the great Trinidad-born cricket commentator and historian CLR James, whose pioneering account of L'Ouverture and his rebel armies, The Black Jacobins (1938), showed how the struggle among European powers to dominate the new world was mirrored in L'Ouverture's Saint Domingue.Īccording to James, L'Ouverture was born in northern Haiti in 1743 as the grandson of a captured African chieftain. And in the 1970s the rock band Santana dedicated half a triple album to L'Ouverture. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, in his dazzling novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949), celebrated him as the father of African emancipation. In 1935, in Harlem, Orson Welles staged an African version of Macbeth in which Macduff was portrayed as a princely L'Ouverture. For the Romantics, L'Ouverture was the morning star of a new era for the Americas and an emblem of slavery's hoped-for abolition. Yet he was the subject of many books and poems from his death in 1803 until the 19th century's end. Today, despite his historical legacy, he is barely recognised in the west. No portraits of L'Ouverture were drawn from life, so we have little idea of what he looked like. Patrick Leigh Fermor hailed L'Ouverture as the "black Spartacus" after the slave who challenged Rome for others he is a herald of Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King. This was half a century before the American civil war liberated the slaves of the United States. The main airport has been renamed "Toussaint L'Ouverture" after the Haitian slave leader and national hero.Ī gifted military strategist, Toussaint L'Ouverture fought and defeated the three mighty empires of France, Britain and Spain to transform Haiti into a cradle of liberty for enslaved Africans everywhere. The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, attended government festivities in the Haitian capital and Fidel Castro sent a congratulatory telegram. In spite of widespread political violence, buildings across the republic were daubed in patriotic reds and blues. This new year marked the bicentennial of Haiti's independence. Following the revolt, the name Saint Domingue was replaced by the aboriginal Indian word Haiti (meaning "mountainous land") and the Haitian flag created when the white band was ripped from the French tricolour. The African slaves toiling on the sugar plantations overthrew their French masters and declared independence. In January 1804, 200 years ago, the West Indian island of Saint Domingue became the world's first black republic.