Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
from Part 1 - Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man.
– Toussaint Louverture, 1796 (my translation)A free man prefers poverty to humiliation.
– Antoine-Louis de Saint-Just, 1791THE HUMAN FREEDOM MODE OF POLITICS, 1791–1796
Popular struggles against slavery by Africans have a long history. One of the earliest statements against slavery on the continent itself dates (as far as can be established) from 1222 and is known as The Hunters’ Oath of the Manden or the Mandé Charter. This affirmation is based on the oral traditions of the Mandinka hunters in the area covering parts of modern Mali, Senegal and Guinea and is said to date back to the reign of King Sunjata of the Mandinka. Statements from the charter read like an 18th-century European human rights document and are replete with the recognition of the truth of the universal nature of humanity. For example:
The hunters declare that … war will no longer destroy villages for the capture of slaves … from now on no one will place the bit in the mouth of his fellow man in order to sell him … The hunters declare that the essence of slavery is abolished from this day forth from one wall to the other, from one frontier to the other of the Mandé … The hunters declare that each person is free to use his own person as he sees fit, each person is free and responsible for his own actions, each person is free to dispose of the fruits of his own labour (Cissé and Kamissoko, 1991: 39, my translation).
Interestingly, this is not a statement emanating from a state and it seems to have inaugurated an event for a world in which slavery was then an accepted practice. The political subjectivity of this document is framed as a pure affirmation and, although firmly located within culture, its language is not that of power but operates around a central category of ‘life’. Life is universal, it maintains; all lives are of equal value. Life here is stressed in opposition to hunger and famine, which lead both to death and to the selling of people into slavery.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 69 - 93Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016