Letter from Sudhir Hazareesingh

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A recent report suggests that the slave trade and its abolition are widely taught across the school curriculum. However, there is still a tendency to view abolition as the product of interventions by enlightened western leaders such as Wilberforce and Lincoln, rather than a product of resistance by the enslaved themselves. Daring To Be Free focuses on this resistance and shows that it proved critical in ending slavery. This opposition was present right from the 16th century, when the Spaniards brought the first group of captives from Africa to the Americas, all the way through to the abolition eras in the early to mid 19th.

Across these four centuries, these men and women stood up to their oppression, rejecting their status as inferior beings, and asserting their belief in their self-worth, dignity, and entitlement to liberty. Toussaint Louverture spoke for them all when he wrote: “I was born a slave but nature gave me the soul of a free man”.

Resistance defined how the captives saw themselves, their thoughts and values, their actions, and their imaginings. It was expressed in different forms: escape and flight (marronage); verbal dissent, linguistic manipulations, and myth-making; cultural and religious beliefs and practices; acts of self-harm, poison, and sabotage.

There were also overt acts of military rebellion, and such uprisings were frequent: in the United States alone, there were between 250 and 300 revolts from the early 17th c to 1865. The most famous of these Atlantic uprisings was the Haitian revolution, which took down Napoleon’s army and created the world’s first independent black postcolonial state in 1804.

As the Haitian leader Dessalines put it: “we have dared to be free”. This is where the book’s title comes from.

The book’s originality lies in its sweeping coverage of the history of slavery, and its reconstruction of the world from the perspective of the enslaved. It shows their creativity, and how they were able – despite the grinding oppression they faced – to create spaces of mental and physical autonomy for themselves. This story is also about Africa, and the multi-faceted connections between the cultures, skills, and ways of life of the enslaved in their native continent and the forms of resistance they developed in the New World. Resistance was a collective phenomenon, based on group solidarity.

I dwell here particularly on the role of women, and have chosen a female warrior to symbolise the book, with Patricia Brintle’s arresting portrait of the Haitian antislavery fighter Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere. Above all, this book is a celebration of the ideals of self-determination and freedom which are at the heart of our democracy, to which the enslaved made enormous contributions through their actions, writings, and abolitionist campaigns. Although it is a book about slavery, its ultimate message is positive and uplifting, and one which will resonate with teachers and students.