The Mobility of the Haitian Revolution

An abolitionist pamphlet published in Britain in 1816 in the wake of Barbados’ Easter Rebellion attacked the follies of the Barbadian plantocracy, referring to “a ridiculous account which appeared in the newspapers, that a Haytian fleet had been seen steering towards Barbadoes at the time the insurrection broke out.” While the Barbadian plantocracy feared the idea of humanity that a newly independent Haiti represented, both planters and abolitionists discounted rebel agency by blaming each other for the rebellion. In contrast, Barbadian rebels, writes Hilary Beckles, saw themselves as the “final catalyst” inaugurating the new social order and embraced the freedom that ushered in the new nation of Haiti in 1804. Apprehended and interrogated following the rebellion, Cuffee Ned stated that Mingo was the name by which he knew the island of “Saint Domingo” (Saint-Domingue), the one island in the West Indies where enslaved Africans were free because, in his words, “they had fought for it and got it.” There are few references to the cultural and religious activities of the rebels in the Barbados House of Assembly’s Report on the rebellion from which Cuffee Ned’s statement is taken. However, two decades after the rebellion pseudonymous English author Theodore Easel wrote a short story about the rebellion depicting a rebel leader named Mingo as an Obeahman. In “The ObiahMan, or a Tale of St. Phillip’s,” one of various scattered portraits in the book Desultory Sketches and Tales of Barbados, Easel places Mingo at the center of the rebellion, portraying him as a cunning, yet deluded spiritual leader. Interestingly, Mingo was also the name of one of the leaders of the rebellion, as identified in the so-called confession of Robert, of Simmons Plantation, in the Assembly’s Report. Although Easel does not mention Haiti or Saint-Domingue directly, by identifying Obeah with the demonic he locates the term in a discursive relationship with Vodou (or so called “voodoo”), that supposed force of evil invented by the colonial imaginary and constantly identified by the West with the “black peril” that was Haiti. As Edward Brathwaite has argued, however, the Obeahman was “doctor, philosopher, and priest.” Tracing the etymology and usage of the term “Obeah” back to African linguistic sources, Handler and Bilby demonstrate that the term is best understood in the context of slave society in a positive rather than a negative sense: