#Cecile Fatiman

[theorahsart]

Incorruptible pt 33

From left to right we have:

Cecile Fatiman, a Vodou priestess who helped in sparking the Haitian Revolution.

Jean-Jacques-Regis de Cambaceres, a gay politician who was active during the Revolution.

Sophie de Condorcet, a writer and translator who hosted The Cercle Social, which aimed to promote women's rights.

Just a few examples of the wonderful progress that was made from 'this equality nonsense'. The revolution created a dizzying amount of progress in an incredibly short amount of time.

[kemetic-dreams]

A manbo (also written as mambo) is a priestess (as opposed to a oungan, a male priest) in the Haitian Vodou religion. Haitian Vodou's conceptions of priesthood stem from the religious traditions of enslaved people from Dahomey, in what is today Benin. For instance, the term manbo derives from the Fon word nanbo ("mother of magic"). Like their West African counterparts, Haitian manbos are female leaders in Vodou temples who perform healing work and guide others during complex rituals.

This form of female leadership is prevalent in urban centers such as Port-au-Prince (the capital of Haiti). Typically, there is no hierarchy among manbos and oungans. These priestesses and priests serve as the heads of autonomous religious groups and exert their authority over the devotees or spiritual servants in their hounfo (temples).

Manbos and oungans are called into power via spirit possession or the revelations in a dream. They become qualified after completing several initiation rituals and technical training exercises where they learn the Vodou spirits by their names, attributes, and symbols. 

The first step in initiation is lave tèt (head washing), which is aimed at the spirits housed in an individual's head. The second step is known as kouche (to lie down), which is when the initiate enters a period of seclusion. Typically, the final step is the possession of the ason (sacred rattle), which enables the manbos or oungans to begin their work. One of the main goals of Vodou initiation ceremonies is to strengthen the manbo's konesans (knowledge), which determines priestly power.

The specific skills and knowledge gained by manbos enable them to mediate between the physical and spiritual realms. They use this information to call upon the spirits through song, dance, prayer, offerings, and/or the drawing of vèvès (spiritual symbols). During these rituals, manbos may either be possessed by a loa (also spelled lwa, Vodou spirits) themselves, or may oversee the possession of other devotees. Spirit possession plays an important role in Vodou because it establishes a connection between human beings and the Vodou deities or spirits. Although loas can "mount" whomever they choose, those outside the Vodou priesthood do not have the skills to communicate directly with the spirits or gods. This is because the human body is merely flesh, which the spirits can borrow to reveal themselves via possession. manbos, however, can speak to and hear from the Vodou spirits. As a result, they can interpret the advice or warnings sent by a spirit to specific individuals or communities.

Cécile Fatiman is a Haitian manbo famously known for sacrificing a black pig in the August 1791 Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman—an act that is said to have ignited the Haitian Revolution. There are also notable manbos within the United States. Marie Laveau (1801-1888), for example, gained fame in New Orleans, Louisiana, for her personal charm and Louisiana Voodoo practices.

Renowned as Louisiana's "voodoo queen", Laveau's legacy is kept alive in American popular culture (e.g., the television series America Horror Story: Coven).ne Mama Lola is another prominent manbo and Vodou spiritual leader in the United States. She rose to fame after the publication of Karen McCarthy Brown's ethnographic account Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Mama Lola's success provided her with a platform to challenge Western misconceptions of Haitian Vodou and make television appearances

[xshingie]

Yay! I'm so glad you finally got your copyrighted video back! Another woefully underrated video. I had a lot of criticisms about Nocturne writing-wise, but at the same time, even though I think the original Castlevania show is better-written, something about the characters/themes/messages resonated with more deeply that I found myself far more attached to. I really liked how you brought up the parallels between the societal reason why these monsters were created -- they are, after all a reflection of humanity. I really liked how Nocturne attempted to setup vampires in the context of allegorical themes of class oppression, the enduring scar that colonialism leaves on its people, and slavery. It really set up more meaningful commentary on society. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is also an thematic element of vampires being vehicles for suppression/indulgence of sexuality -- there's a reason why vampire attacks are setup as sexual attacks (i.e., biting in the neck, the sensation being described as erotic, their hypnotic powers). These are themes common in Bram Stoker's Dracula. I think that could also tie into Nocturne as well, since there was commentary on the Abbott not being exempt from celibacy.

I also appreciated the additional historical insight you brought into your analysis and I agree that understanding more of the history elevates the viewing experience. I found myself researching more about Haitian Vodou and realized there were so many subtle blink-and-you'll-miss-it-moments in Annette's flashback and displays of powers that aren't even explained to you (i.e., all the veve symbols, Papa Legba, Edouard acknowleding his privilege as part of the gens de couleur, the vodou ceremonial rituals that Cecile Fatiman who was a IRL revolutionist that were actually gathering points to organize revolutions) -- all these things I'm mentioning I didn't know anything about and it wasn't until I read further I could appreciate more of the story. I don't know much about the French revolution besides the very basics (the class issues, ideals of democracy, etc), so I will definitely be doing more research there! :)

I agreed on a lot of your points and takes on the characters. I also thought Erzabeth Bathory, while a really bad villain character wise (good god, her character was really cringe for me), I can see what they're trying to do thematically. Drolta was super enjoyable and dynamic to watch on screen. I know people were upset that Richter wasn't the front-and-center of the show, but I think what works really well for the Belmont formula is that oftentimes the Belmont is the straight-man main character, that enables the supporting characters to come to life. Trevor Belmont is also an example where he is kind of boring by himself, but the show's characters really only came alive with the entertaining interactions of the titular trio.

My favorite character is Annette! :D I love the drive, dimension of her character. I know everybody loves Olrox, but I am just so in love with Annette, with her flaws and everything. I really like the parallel arcs between Richter and Annette (can you tell I'm a shipper, heh).

On a off-topic note, your voice is very soothing and calm to listen to :D

I was finally able to get the video put back up! Please, give it a look and tell me what you think!

[creolecelestial]

Cecile Fatiman

[ancestralvoices]

Giving thanks to all the ancestors who fought for freedom and liberation!! May your memory and contribution never be forgotten.  The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was a revolt from enslaved Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Republic of Haiti.  Jean-Jacques Dessalines (20 September 1758 – 17 October 1806) was a lieutenant to Toussaint Louverture who led the revolution, after Louverture was captured the Haitian revolution continued under Dessalines who defeated the French becoming the first ruler of a independent Haiti under the 1801 constitution. He is considered the founder of Haiti.  The Haitian Revolution was the only revolt of enslaved Africans, which led to the founding of a state. Furthermore, it is generally considered the most successful slave rebellion ever to have occurred and as a defining moment in the histories of both Europe and the Americas. The rebellion began in August 1791 in a secret Vodou ceremony led by Dutty Boukman and Cecile Fatiman. It ended in November 1803 with the French defeat at the battle of Vertières. Haiti became an independent country on January 1, 1804. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6yUHVoHHjq/?igshid=u9ojgwn9whxw

[ladyspeechsankofa]

On this day 5 years ago I was called to Ferguson by my ancestors to do the work. On this days 5 years ago I understood from my bones what spiritual activism is and how we have always used this for our liberation. On this day 5 years ago I was operating on spirit. On this day 5 years ago someone took a picture of me while I was healing, helping and protecting the people while hexing the police. On this day 5 years ago something died so my most fierce self could be born. On this day 5 years ago I choose to fight back as healer, as a Priestess, as a Conjurer. On this day 5 years ago I set myself on a course that changed my life. On this day 5 years ago the Spirits of Harriet Tubman and Cecile Fatiman guided my every step and my every movement. This moment changed my life. For this I am grateful. #Ferguson #LadySpeech https://www.instagram.com/p/B5dKZvGAgUP/?igshid=x16x388602ly

[essayists-collective]

Black August 💜

[ara-la]

Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies

Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies

Conceived, compiled and coordinated by Quincy Saul, illustrated by Songe Riddle, Mac McGill, Seth Tobocman, Hannah Allen, Emmy Kepler and Mikaela Gonzalez, with selections primarily from the writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. ISBN: 978-1-62963-571-2; $15.95 from PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland CA 94623, www.pmpress.org. wwww.ecosocialisthorizons.com; prefiguration@gmail.com

Reviewed by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action LA

    This fascinating book, based primarily on the writings of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoats (#AF-3855, SCI Dallas, 1000 Follies Rd. Drawer K, Dallas PA 18612-0286), examines the history of slavery and liberation, particularly the form of resistance known as "maroons" -- escapees from slavery, or territories liberated from slavery by rebellion, such as Haiti -- in the US, the Caribbean and South America by applying the techniques of graphic novels to sometimes dense political tracts and analysis, increasing their appeal, accessibility and imbuing them with the spirit of a new Black arts movement as well as the cultural creativity and many-sidedness of the maroons themselves.

    Sections include a short "Initiation" to the concept of the maroons, and pieces on "Slavery and Liberation", Modern Maroons, and most challenging perhaps, Shoats's manifesto "The Dragon or the Hydra?" counterposing centralized and hierarchical liberation movements or struggles, --the dragon -- too often sold out by their own leadership, with the more decentralized, horizontal and variegated "maroon" struggles -- the hydra, which grows many new heads when decapitated.

    This is of course an issue in contention not only in the Black liberation movement, and among former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members like Shoats or their latter-day successors, but in many movements and contexts. Consider the contrast between the recent essentially anti-electoral presidential campaign of the Zapatista-influenced Marichuy and the more more traditional, and finally successful, of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who will take office as president of Mexico in December with a strong legislative and gubernatorial cadre of MORENA partisans who ran with him.

    As the piece acknowledges, it may be faulty to identify all virtue with the autonomous communities of the Maroons. "In Jamaica, the British tried to make treaties with the maroons, to get them to stop welcoming escapees into their towns. Some maroons were even recruited to hunt down escaped slaves." While Shoats see the decentralized structure of the maroons as an asset, so that "if one [leader] was bought off, others continued the struggle," it seems clear that autonomy or decentralization in itself is not a safeguard against cooptation, nor do maroon zones or liberated areas necessarily threaten the entire edifice of empire and slavery.

    A stronger element of the same piece, however, is definition of a "mosaic" -- a Movement of Oppressed Sectors Acting In Concert. Each group (women, New Afrikan and Pan-Afrikan peoples, Puerto Ricans, anarchists, Chicanos and Mexicans, Asians, LGBTQ people, etc) "retains its integrity, has its own culture and autonomy, but we are united because we share one economy, one ecology, and one planet. we must work together for our survival and our freedom." This segues naturally into two final sections, "Modern Maroons" and an extensive bibliography of suggested additional readings of more traditional texts about maroons historically and currently and analyses of the system and of approaches to overturning and replacing it. The book has some of the appeal of "Addicted to War," but is much more variegated in artistic styles and types of content, including a series of biographies and full page portraits of a large number of exemplars of the maroon spirit the book promotes, such as Haitians Ezili Dantor, Cecile Fatiman and Dutty Boukman, Queen Mother Moore, and the Black Liberation Army. Those introduced to the material thereby will find a wealth additional reading and study, as mentioned, in Saul's bibliographic "Maroon Library," (with thanks expressed to Matt Meyer and Richard Price).

[jonescrysstal]

Lupine Publishers | Antidialectics: Vodou and The Haitian Revolution in Opposition to The African American Civil Rights Movement

Lupine Publishers | Journal of Anthropological and Archaeological Sciences

Introduction

The dialectical integration of black Americans into the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the West via slavery, the African American civil rights movement, and globalization marks the end of black American history as a distinct African worldview manifesting itself onto the world. A black/African practical consciousness as represented in Haitian Vodou and Kreyol, for example, manifesting itself in praxis and the annals of history via the nation-state of Ayiti/ Haiti is slowly being supplanted by a universal Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism phenotypically dressed in multiethnic, multiracial, and multisexual skins speaking for the world. This latter worldview has not only erased a distinct African practical consciousness among black Americans, but via the African- Americanization of the black diaspora in globalization through the hip-hop culture of the black American underclass, on the one hand, and the prosperity gospel of the black American church and bourgeoisie on the other is seeking to do the same among blacks globally in the diaspora while simultaneously destroying all life on earth [1]. This work focuses on how and why the purposiverationality, antidialectics, of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou diametrically opposes that of the African American Civil Rights movement. The author concludes that the intent of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the African American civil rights movement under the purposive-rationality of liberal bourgeois black Protestant men, but for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure (libertarian communism) “enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community, Vodou and kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its dialectical economic growth and accumulative logic within the finite space and resources of the earth.

Background of the problem

Traditional interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and the black American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s attempt to understand the two sociohistorical phenomena within the dialectical logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic [2-4]. Concluding that both events represent a dialectical struggle by the enslaved Africans, who have internalized the rules of their masters, for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within and using the metaphysical discourse of their former white masters to convict them of not identifying with their norms, rules, and values as recursively organized and reproduced by blacks. This traditional liberal bourgeois interpretation of the Haitian revolution attempts to understand its denouement through the sociopolitical effects of the French Revolution when the National Constituent Assembly (Assemblée Nationale Constituante) of France passed la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August of 1789. The understanding from this perspective is that the slaves, many of whom could not read or write French, understood the principles, philosophical and political principles of the Age of Enlightenment, set forth in the declaration and therefore yearned to be like their white masters, i.e., freemen seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity, the rallying cry of the French Revolution [4-16].

Although, historically this understanding holds true for the mulattoes and free petit-bourgeois blacks or Affranchis who used the language of the declaration to push forth their efforts to gain liberty, equality, fraternity with their white counterparts as slaveholders and masters as brilliantly highlighted by Laurent Du Bois [3]. This position, I posit here, is not an accurate representation for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution. The Affranchis, embodied in the person of Toussaint Louverture, for example, like their black American middle class counterparts, dialectically pushed for liberty, equality, and fraternity with their white counterparts at the expense of the Vodou discourse and Kreyol language of the pep, the majority of the enslaved Africans who were not only discriminated against by whites but by the mulattoes and free blacks as well who sought to reproduce the French language, culture, religion, and laws of their former slavemasters on the island [5]. Toussaint believed that the technical and governing skills of the Blancs (whites) and Affranchis would be sorely needed to rebuild the country, along the lines of white civilization, after the revolution and the end of white rule on the island. In fact, Toussaint was not seeking to make Haiti an independent country; but sought to have the island remain a French plantation colony, like Martinique and Guadeloupe, without slavery [3]. Although Dessalines’s nationalistic position, which was similar to Toussaint’s, would become dominant after the capture of Toussaint in 1802, his (Dessalines’s) assassination by a plot between the mulatto, Alexandre Pétion, and Henri Christophe, would see to it that the Affranchis’s purposive-rationality would come to historically represent the ideals of the Haitian quest for independence. This purposive-rationality of the Affranchis, to adopt the ontological and epistemological positions of whites by recursively organizing and reproducing their language and ways of being-in-the-world is, however, a Western liberal dialectical understanding of the events and their desire to be like their white counterparts, which stands against the anti-dialectical purposive rationality, which emerged out of the African/Haitian Epistemology, Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, of Boukman Dutty, Cecile Fatiman, the rest of the maroon Africans who congregated for the Petwo Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman/ Bwa Kayiman. The difference between what the Africans at Bois Caïman wanted and the aspirations of the mulattoes or Affranchis can be summed up through a parallel or complimentary analysis of the dialectical master/slave relationship of the black American experience with their white masters in America [17-31].

Using a structurationist approach to practical consciousness constitution, what Paul C Mocombe [6] calls phenomenological structuralism, this work compares and contrasts the purposive rationality of the black American civil rights movement with that of the originating moments of the ceremony of Bois Caiman. In keeping with the tenets of phenomenological structuralism, the emphasis is on the ideals of structures that social actors internalize and recursively organize and reproduce as their praxis in the material world. In this case, the argument is that two distinct forms of system and social integration would characterize black American and Haitian life, which made their approaches to slavery and colonialism totally distinct: dialectical on the one hand; and antidialectical on the other [31-48].

Theory and Method

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Africans were introduced into the emerging global Protestant capitalist world social structure as slaves. Given their economic material conditions, their African practical consciousnesses, i.e., bodies, languages, ideologies, etc., were dialectically represented by European whites as primitive forms of being-in-the-world to that of the dominant white Protestant bourgeois social order with the ever-declining significance of Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation [7]. From this sociohistorical perspective, under the “contradictory principles of marginality and integration” [7] the majority of African consciousness in America especially was reshaped as a “racial classin- itself” (blacks), a “caste in class,” forced to embody the structural terms (bourgeois ideals in the guise of the protestant ethic) of the dominant global (capitalist) social relations of production, over all other “alternative” African adaptive responses to its then organizational form, slavery [48-64].

This embodiment or internalization of bourgeois ideals, in the guise of the Protestant Ethic, by the majority of Africans in America amidst their poor material conditions created by the social relations of Protestant capitalist organization, in keeping with traditional readings of the black American struggle for freedom, eventually made the struggle to obtain equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their white Protestant bourgeois counterparts amidst racial and class discrimination their goal. This goal, brilliantly captured by W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk, progressively crept into their African based spiritualism, which dialectically subsequently became synthesized with the Protestant Ethic of the global capitalist Protestant social structure leading to the ever-increasing materialization of black American faiths and practical consciousness along the lines of their former white slave masters. Hence, the subsequent aim of the majority of black Americans, as embodied in the black American civil rights movement, became a movement for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition led by liberal black Protestant bourgeois male preachers (hybrid simulacrum of their white colonizers) like Martin Luther King Jr. against alternative responses to enslavement by convicting the society of not identifying with their norms and values, which black Americans embodied and recursively organized and reproduced in their practices [8].

Conversely, the Haitian Revolution as initiated on August 14th, 1791 at Bois Caïman by Boukman Dutty and Mambo Cecile Fatiman was led by various representatives of African nations seeking to recursively reorganize and reproduce their African practicalconsciousness/ thesis, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, which emerges out of their African ontology and epistemology, Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, in the world against the bourgeois liberalism of whites and the mulatto or Affranchis class of Haiti, who would subsequently, with the assassination of the houngan, Vodou priest, Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, undermine that attempt for a more liberal purposive-rationale, similar to that of the black American civil-rights movement, that would reintroduce wage-slavery and peonage on the island [64-70].

Haitians celebrate Bois Caïman as the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in August of 1791. At Bois Caïman/Bwa Kay Iman (near Boukman’s house), the Jamaican-born houngan, Vodou priest, Boukman Dutty, initiated the Haitian Revolution on August 14, 1791 when he presided over a Petwo Vodou ceremony in Kreyol in the area, which is located in the mountainous Northern corridors of the island. Accompanied by a woman, the mambo Vodou priestess Cecile Fatiman, taken by the spirits of the lwa/loas, Ezili Danto/ Erzulie Danthor, they cut the throat of a black pig and had all the participants in attendance drink the blood. According to Haitian traditions, Boukman and the participants, via Boukman’s prayer, swore two things to the lwa Ezili Danto, the Goddess of the Haitian nation, present in Fatiman if she would grant them success in their quest for liberty against the French. First, they would never allow for inequality on the island; second, they would serve bondye/ Gran-Met (their good god) and its 401 manifestations, lwaes of Vodou and not the white man’s god “which inspires him with crime:”

Bon Dje ki fè la tè. Ki fè soley ki klere nou enro. Bon Dje ki soulve lanmè. Ki fè gronde loray. Bon Dje nou ki gen zorey pou tande. Ou ki kache nan niaj. Kap gade nou kote ou ye la. Ou we tout sa blan fè nou sibi. Dje blan yo mande krim. Bon Dje ki nan nou an vle byen fè. Bon Dje nou an ki si bon, ki si jis, li ordone vanjans. Se li kap kondui branou pou nou ranpote la viktwa. Se li kap ba nou asistans. Nou tout fet pou nou jete potre dje Blan yo ki swaf dlo lan zye. Koute vwa la libète k ap chante lan kè nou.

The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all [71-75].

That night the slaves revolted first at Gallifet Plantation, then across the Northern Plains. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines would join the rebellion after Boukman was captured and beheaded by the French. And as the proverbial saying goes, the rest is history. Under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who crowned himself emperor for life, Haiti became the first free black nation-state in the world in 1804, the only successful slave rebellion in recorded history, the first democratic nation, and the second republic after the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere [75-79].

The centering of Vodou and Kreyol are the divergent paths against slavery and liberal bourgeois Protestantism that sets the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution apart, as a distinct phenomenon, from the desires and purposive-rationale of an elite liberal hybrid group, the mulatto elite and black petit-bourgeois class or Affranchis in Haiti and liberal black Protestant bourgeois male preachers of America, seeking to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the black masses in both countries by recursively (re) organizing and reproducing the agential moments of their former colonizers within the logical constraints of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To only highlight the latter, liberal bourgeois Protestant initiative, over the former, originating moments of the Haitian revolution, under the purview of a Hegelian master/slave universal dialectic, as so many theorists, including the work, Black Jacobins, of CLR James, and Susan Buck- Morss’s [4], Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, is to deny the existence of the African practical-consciousness, Haitian Idealism as expressed through the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, that has been seeking to institute its practical consciousness in the world since the beginning of the slave trade in favor of the liberal bourgeois Protestantism of whites and the mulatto and black petitbourgeois elites who have yet to be able to stamp out, as was done to the black American, the African linguistic system, Kreyol, and practical-consciousness, Vodou, of the Haitian masses, by which Haiti’s provinces have been constituted [79-90].

Discussion

As in the case of CLR James’s work, Black Jacobins, Susan Buck Morss [4] in her work, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History attempts to understand the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution metaphorically through Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Suggesting, in fact, that it is the case of Haiti that Hegel utilized to constitute the metaphor:

Given the facility with which this dialectic of lordship and bondage lends itself to such a reading, one wonders why the topic Hegel and Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past two hundred years, even to ask it (2009, p. 56).

My position here is that James’s and Morss’s conclusions do not hold true for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, and only holds true for the case of the Affranchis of Haiti-who usurped, following their assassination of Dessalines, the originating moments of the Revolution from the Africans who met at Bois Caïman-and the black Americans who, in choosing to rebel against their former masters, were not risking death to avoid subjugation, but in rebelling were choosing life in order to be like the master and subjugate.

In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as Morss explains,

Hegel understands the position of the master in both political and economic terms. In the System der Sittlichkeit (1803): “The master is in possession of an overabundance of physical necessities generally, and the other [the slave] in the lack thereof.” At first consideration the master’s situation is “independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself”; whereas “the other,” the slave’s position, “is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another.” The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as “a thing”; “thinghood” is the essence of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status under the Code Noir. But as the dialectic develops, the apparent dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he is in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize the figure of the master in order to see the descriptive pertinence of Hegel’s analysis: the slaveholding class is indeed totally dependent on the institution of slavery for the “overabundance” that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence. But then the slaves (again, collectivizing the figure) achieve selfconsciousness by demonstrating that they are not things, not objects, but subjects who transform material nature. Hegel’s text becomes obscure and falls silent at this point of realization. But given the historical events that provided the context for The Phenomenology of Mind, the inference is clear. Those who once acquiesced to slavery demonstrate their humanity when they are willing to risk death rather than remain subjugated. The law (the Code Noir!) that acknowledges them merely as “a thing” can no longer be considered binding, although before, according to Hegel, it was the slave himself who was responsible for his lack of freedom by initially choosing life over liberty, mere self-preservation. In The Phenomenology of mind, Hegel insists that freedom cannot be granted to slaves from above. The self-liberation of the slave is required through a “trial by death”: “And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained…The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person [the agenda of the abolitionists!]; but he has not attained the truth of his recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” The goal of this liberation, out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the master in turn, which would be merely to repeat the master’s “existential impasse,” but, rather, elimination of the institution of slavery altogether (53-56).

The Africans at Bois Caïman, given that they were already recursively reproducing their African practical consciousness in the maroon community of Bois Caïman away from the master/slave dialectic of whites neither cared for the master, nor his structuring metaphysics, but instead wanted to be free to exercise their African practical consciousness, which would be precarious, given the possibility of their re-enslavement if captured, by whites and the Affranchis, who also practiced slavery, remained on the island. In essence, the events at Bois Caïman represented an attempt by the Africans to exercise their already determining independent African self-consciousness against the whites and Affranchis’s dependent self-consciousness which sought to repeat the masters’ “existential impasse.” The liberal Affranchis and the black Americans, in other words, who would lead the civil rights movement, wanted, given that their very practical consciousness was determined by their relations to, and yearning to be like, their masters, rebelled in order to themselves be “free” masters and not an “independent self-consciousness.” In essence, the Affranchis, like their black American counterparts, merely rebelled in order to be like their masters, and sought neither to subjugate the master nor eliminate “the institution of slavery altogether,” since their consciousness as slaves was from the onset revealed to them only through the eyes of the master. Hence, the only other consciousness they had, outside of their slave consciousness, “thinghood,” was that of the master, whose position they desired, and that of the African masses whose practical consciousness they abhorred. But Boukman, Fatiman, and the other maroon Africans of Bois Caïman had their abhorred African Consciousness, which to revert to. The Affranchis, like their black American counterparts did not. Be that as it may, whereas the former sought to institute a new historical/universal, Absolute, order onto the material resource framework of Haiti by invoking the aid of their lwaes/loas to assist them in rooting out the whites and their gods, the latter, like their black American counterparts, wanted to maintain the status quo, the master/slave relationship by which their practical consciousness was constituted, in a national position of their own [91-116].

In other words, black Americans subjectified/objectified in the “Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism” of American society were completely subjectified and subjugated on account of race and class position [8,9]. They were subjectified objects, i.e., slaves, things, whose initial practical consciousness prior to their enslavement was used dialectically by the master, by presenting the practical consciousness of the slave as backwards and damned within the metaphysics of the master’s practical consciousness, against the slave to objectify them as a thing. W.E.B Du Bois, for example, relying on the racial and national ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theoretically, en framed by Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, conceived of the ambivalence that arose in him as a self-conscious thing, as a result of the “class racism” (Étienne Balibar’s term) of American society, as a double consciousness: “two souls,” “two thoughts,” in the Negro whose aim is to merge these two thoughts into one distinct way of being, i.e., to be whole again [117-125].

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius [3].

This double-consciousness resulting from his thingness in relation to the master’s consciousness, Du Bois alludes to, in this famous passage of his work The Souls of Black Folk, is not a metaphor for the racial duality of black American life in America [8,9]. Instead, it speaks to Du Bois’s, as a black liberal bourgeois Protestant man, ambivalence about the society because it prevents him from exercising, not his initial African practical consciousness which is “looked on in amused contempt and pity,” but his true (master) American consciousness because of the society’s antiliberal and discriminatory practices, which made him a thing, i.e., slave. Although over time his “thinghood” forced Du Bois to adopt “pan-African communism” against his early beliefs in liberal bourgeois Protestantism, i.e., his desire to be like the masters, whites. Du Bois, in this passage, like the many black Americans who would share his class position and liberal bourgeois Protestant worldview, does not want an independent self-consciousness that is not the masters since the only other consciousness he is familiar with is that of the slaves, but simply wants to be like the collective dependent masters, whites, “without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” His later pan-African communist message simply turns this desire, the attempt to be a master, into a desire to constitute the master/slave dialectic in a national position of his own. But contrary to this later “pan-African communist” message against assimilation for a nationalist position of his own, however, to make themselves whole the majority of black Americans of the civil rights movement, especially, did not yearn for or establish (by averting their gaze away from the eye of power or their white masters) a new independent object formation or totality, based on the initial “message” of their people prior to their encounter with the master, which spoke against racial and class stratification and would have produced heterogeneity into the American capitalist bourgeois world-system; instead, since there was no other “message” but that of the society which turned and represented the “original” African message of their people into inarticulate, animalistic backward gibberish, they (blacks) turned their gaze back upon the eye of power (through protest and success in their endeavors) for recognition as “speaking subjects” of the society seeking not to subjugate the master in a national position of their own but for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their white counterparts. Power hesitantly responded by allowing some of them (the hybrid modern “other” liberal bourgeois Protestant) to partake in the order of things, which gave rise to the black American identity, the liberal black bourgeoisie or hybrids, which delimits the desired agential moments of the social structure for all blacks [8-13].

Thus black American protest as a structurally differentiated “class-in-itself” (subjectified/objectified thing) led by this liberal black bourgeoisie within the American protestant bourgeois master/slave order did not reconstitute American society, but integrated the black subjects, whose ideals and practices (acquired in ideological apparatuses, i.e., schools, law, churches (black and white)), as speaking subjects, were that of the larger society, i.e., the protestant ethic, into its exploitative and oppressive order-an order which promotes a debilitating performance principle actualized through calculating rationality, which may result in economic gain for its own sake for a few predestined individuals. The black American, like the early Du Bois of the Souls prior to his conversion to pan-African communism, in a word, became like their masters within the master/slave dialectic, which constituted their historical experiences.

The same can be said for the Affranchis of Haiti, who sought for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their blanc counterparts at the expense of the agential initiatives of the Bois Caïman African participants. The Affranchis, like Toussaint, for example, who owned African slaves, rebelled not to eliminate slavery or subjugate the master, but to be a master, like their liberal black American counterparts, through their dialectical claim for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition. Their slave status only revealed to them the “other” consciousness in the dialectic, i.e., the master consciousness. Therefore, their desire was not to be slaves, who had no other consciousness to look to but that of the newly arrived Africans and the maroon Africans, but masters who enslaved the other slaves, i.e., the newly arrived Africans and the marooned Africans, who were not like themselves. This desire of Toussaint, for example, to be like the master, however, was not the aim of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Boukman, Cecile Fatiman, and the other participants at Bois Caïman. The former, Affranchis, like their black American counterpart, wanted equality of opportunity and recognition from, and with, their former white masters by recursively organizing and reproducing their (the slave masters) liberal agential moments; the latter, Boukman, Fatiman, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the Africans of Bois Caïman did not, but instead sought to anti-dialectically reify and practice their traditional African ways of life against the purposive-rationality of their former white masters. The slaves at Bois Caïman were already an independent self-consciousness in their maroon communities. They did not share in the “existential impasse” of their masters. The originating Vodou and Kreyol moments of the Revolution was an attempt to get rid of the whites and Affranchis, who desired to be whites, in order that they may recursively organize and reproduce their practical consciousness, not to be like their white masters as Toussaint and the rest of the Affranchis desired. That the Affranchis would come to direct the Revolution after the death of Dessalines October, 17th, 1806, would give rise to their purposive-rationality, their desire for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition within the global capitalist social structure, at the expense of the agential moments of Boukman, Fatiman, and the other participants of Bois Caïman who sought to anti-dialectically manifest their selfconsciousness onto the stage of history by evoking the aid of their own Gods to fight against the Gods and metaphysics of the whites and Affranchis who had adopted the purposive-rationality of their white masters [126-133].

Conclusion

Essentially, the Frankfurt school’s “Negative Dialectics” represents the means by which the Du Bois of The Souls, the majority of liberal bourgeois black Americans, and the Affranchis of Haiti confronted their historical situation. The difference between the “negative dialectics” of Du Bois of The Souls, the majority of liberal bourgeois black Americans, the Affranchis, and the discourse or purposive rationality of the enslaved Africans of Bois Caïman is subtle, but the consequences are enormously obvious. For the Frankfurt school, “[t]o proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against reality” (Adorno, 1973 [1966]: 145). This is the ongoing dialectic they call “Negative Dialectics:”

Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing against which it is conceived. It must correct itself in its critical course-a course affecting concepts which in negative dialectics are formally treated as if they came “first” for it, too (Adorno, 1973 [1966]: 147).

This position, as Adorno points out, is problematic in that the identitarian class convicting the totality of which it is apart remains the thing against which it is conceived. As in the case of black Americans and the Affranchis, their “negative dialectics,” their awareness of the contradictions of the heteronomous racial capitalist order did not foster a reconstitution of that order but a request that the order rid itself of a particular contradiction and allow their participation in the order, devoid of that particular contradiction, which prevented them from identifying with the Hegelian totality, i.e., that all men are created equal except the enslaved black American or the mulatto. The end result of this particular protest was in the reconfiguration of society (or the totality) in which those who exercised its reified consciousness, irrespective of skin-color, could partake in its order. In essence, the contradiction, as interpreted by the black Americans, and just the same the Affranchis, was not in the “pure” identity of the heteronomous order, which is reified as reality and existence as such, but in the praxis (as though praxis and structure are distinct) of the individuals, i.e., institutional regulators or power elites, who only allowed the participation of blacks within the order of things because they were “speaking subjects” (i.e., hybrids, who recursively organized and reproduced the agential moments of the social structure) as opposed to “silent natives” (i.e., the enslaved Africans of Bois Caïman). And herein rests the problem with attempting to reestablish an order simply based on what appears to be the contradictory practices of a reified consciousness. For in essence the totality is not “opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept,” but on the contrary, the particular is opposed by the constitutive subjects for not exercising its total identity. In the case of liberal black bourgeois America, the totality, American racial capitalist society, was opposed through a particularity, i.e., racism, which stood against their bourgeois identification with the whole. In such a case, the whole remains superior to its particularity, and it functions as such. The same holds true for the Affranchis of Haiti, but not for Boukman, the other participants of Bois Caïman, and Dessalines who went beyond the master/slave dialectic.

In order to go beyond this “mechanical” dichotomy, i.e., whole/part, subject/object, master/slave, universal/particular, society/individual, etc., by which society or more specifically the object formation of modernity up till this point in the human archaeological record has been constituted, so that society can be reconstituted wherein “Being” (Dasein, Martin Heidegger’s term) is nonsubjective and nonobjective, “organic” in the Habermasian sense, it is necessary, as Adorno points out, that the totality (which is not a “thing in itself”) be opposed, not however, as he sees it, “by convicting it of nonidentity with itself” as in the case of black America and the Affranchis or mulattoes, but by identifying it as a nonidentity identity that does not have the “natural right” to dictate identity in an absurd world with no inherent meaning or purpose except those which are constructed, via their bodies, language, ideology, and ideological apparatuses, by social actors operating within a reified sacred metaphysic. This is not what happened in black America or with the Affranchis or mulattoes of Haiti, but I am suggesting that this is what took place with the participants of Bois Caïman within the eighteenth century Enlightenment discourse of the whites and Affranchis.

The liberal black American and the Affranchis by identifying with the totality, which Adorno rightly argues is a result of the “universal rule of forms,” the idea that “a consciousness that feels impotent, that has lost confidence in its ability to change the institutions and their mental images, will reverse the conflict into identification with the aggressor” (Adorno, 1973 [1966], pg. 94), reconciled their double consciousness, i.e., the ambivalence that arises as a result of the conflict between subjectivity and forms (objectivity), by becoming “hybrid” Americans or mulattoes desiring to exercise the “pure” identity of the American and French totality and reject the contempt to which they were and are subject. The contradiction of slavery in the face of equality-the totality not identifying with itself-was seen as a manifestation of individual practices, since subjectively they were part of the totality, and not an absurd way of life inherent in the logic of the totality. Hence, their protest was against the practices of the totality, not the totality itself, since that would mean denouncing the consciousness that made them whole. On the contrary, Boukman, the participants at Bois Caïman, and Dessalines decentered or “convicted” the totality of French modernity not for not identifying with itself, but as an adverse “sacred-profaned” cultural possibility against their own “God-ordained” possibility (alternative object formation), Haitian/ Vilokan Idealism, which they were attempting to exercise in the world. This was the pact the participants of Bois Caïman made with their loas/lwa, Ezili Danto, when they swore to neither allow inequality on the island, nor worship the god’s of the whites “who has so often caused us to weep.” In fact, according to Haitian folklore, the lwa, Ezili Danto, who embodied Faitman, or Mambo Fatiman, descended from the heavens and joined the participants of Bois Caïman when they initially set-off to burn the plantations in 1791, but her tongue was subsequently removed by the other participants so that she would not reveal their secrets should she be captured by the whites. Haiti has never been able to live out this pact the participants of Bois Caïman made to Ezili Danto, given the liberal bourgeois Affranchis’s, backed by their former colonizers, America and France, claims to positions of economic and political power positions, which have resulted in the passage of modern rules and laws grounded in the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism that have caused the majority of the people to weep in dire poverty as wage-laborers in an American dominated Protestant postindustrial capitalist world-system wherein the African masses are constantly being forced via ideological apparatuses such as Protestant missionary churches, industrial parks, tourism, and athletics, for examples, to adopt the liberal bourgeois Protestant ethos of the Affranchis and the black Americans against the Vodou ideology and its ideological apparatuses.

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[one-blam]

Dutty Boukman was a Jamaican, self-educated slave. He is known for his inspirational speech which lead to the Haiti Revolution. He was a member of the Assassin Brotherhood in Saint-Domingue. England saw Boukman as a threat for teaching other slaves to read, so the sold him to the French(Haiti). Around August 14, 1791, Boukman presides over a ceremony at Bois Caiman with Cecile Fatiman. He prophesied Jean Francois, Biassou and Jeannot would lead a revolt which would free the slaves in Saint-Domingue. Boukman told the audience to take revenge on the French oppressors and cast away their image of God. One week later, 1800 plantations were destroyed and 1000 slave owners killed. https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rqNbtgKAS/?igshid=td8d2x76bpti

[meccaakagrimo]

🇭🇹🎤📚 • #TheBlackRevolutionaryBookTour @thorobredbooks x @meccaakagrimo • 📆 Sunday: January 27th @7pm @kasachampet @cityofmiramar 720 Pines Blvd Pembroke Pines, FL 33024 Join Us as we welcome the author of several publications, “Haiti: The First Black Republic and Makandal: The Black Messiah” - Frantz Derenoncourt, Jr. @thorobredbooks • 📚 Frantz will be presenting his newest release BOUKMAN and CECILE FATIMAN: BLACK REVOLUTION telling the story of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony and initial slave revolts of The Haitian Revolution #AyisyenRevolution • 🎤 #MeccaGrimo will be performing Spoken Word Poetry from his Long Awaited #AyitiWasBornInMe project #HaitiWasBornInMe • 🇭🇹📚 #BookSigning #Poetry #PoeticLakay #PoeticLakayPoets #ThoroBredBooks #BookTour #LittleHaiti #TiAyiti #LakaySeLakay #EritajAyisyen (at Kasa Champet Restaurant & Lounge) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtJsO80FF_b/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=hexs0xdwg8th

[my-name-is-swampfox]

WIP of some Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts Fanart I’m working on for fun.  It’s a portrait of MACUSA president Seraphina Picquery and her father, Vincent Picquery.  I sort of created a fake backstory for her family.  I’ve posted it below the cut for anyone who wants to read it.  

Although the Picquery family is most famous internationally for producing MACUSA’s first African American Female president, Seraphina Picquery, the family had risen to prominence long before the dawn of the 20th century.  The patriarch of the family, Vincent Picquery, was born c. 1848-1849 on a plantation near Savannah to a 13 year old slave called Araminta.  The identity of his father is unknown, but Vincent remembers being told as a child that his father was his master, a Mr. Charles Lovett IV.  Araminta was sold to the deep south at the insistence of Mrs. Annemarie Lovett (Charles Lovett’s wife) when Vincent was 6 years old.  The young boy discovered his magical abilities two years later, when he deflected bullets shot at him by a Mr. Ashleigh Lovett (the eldest son of the Lovett family).  Vincent was taught to use his magic by the family cook, who had attended the Uagadou School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Uganda.  When he was 12 years old, the Civil War broke out.  In 1862, the Lovett family cook died very suddenly, but not before teaching Vincent how to become an Animagus.  Vincent became an Animagus at the age of 13.  His animal form was a screech owl.  He escaped from the Lovett plantation in 1863, and immediately offered his services to the Union Army as a spy, not knowing there were abolitionist wizards living in the north.  He earned multiple accolades for his bravery, most notably from General Ulysses S. Grant and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Towards the end of the war, the secret to his success as a spy was discovered by a general’s aide who happened to be a wizard.  The Aide, A Mr. Uriah Grimsditch, confronted Vincent, and put the 15 year old boy in contact with the Grimsditch family in New York.   

[Just as an Aside: Slavery as an issue had been quite controversial among American wizards.  Most wizards living in the south believed that advocating against the practice would call too much attention to the Wizarding community.  They also believed that African Wizards were “primitive” magic users who couldn’t be integrated into the larger [Whiter] American wizarding community.  Some wizards in the north agreed with this sentiment, but the vast majority found the institution of slavery to be abhorrent.  The Grimsditch family was part of the latter group.  Their patriarch, the auror Robert Grimsditch, had been the child of a colored man and a Wampanoag woman, and had been the first student of African descent to attend Ilvermorny.  A scholarship for Ilvermorny students of color exists in his name today.]  

After the war ended, Vincent went to live with the Grimsditch family in New York City.  He began speaking publicly about his experience as a Wizard who had been enslaved.  Unlike most slaves in the antebellum south, Vincent had been taught to read by Annemarie Lovett (his stepmother), who had grown quite dependent on him as the war raged on.  As an orator and writer, Vincent quickly earned a reputation for being frank, expressive, and charismatic.  At the urging of Uriah Grimsditch, he decided to write his story down.  His autobiography, “My Soul in Flight” was published in 1867, and quickly became one of the best selling books in American Wizarding History.  Today it is regarded as one of the most famous Wizarding autobiographies ever put to print.  Vincent continued to write after he published the book, founding a newspaper for black American wizards (The Tytonic Tribune), and writing several novels, a book of short stories, 21 essays, and 15 volumes of poetry.  The royalties from all his publications soon made him one of the wealthiest wizards in North America.  In 1875, he discovered an ad in the newspaper posted by the son of his former owner, Ashleigh Lovett.  Charles Lovett had perished during the Battle of Gettysburg, leaving his family mired in debt.  His son and heir, Ashleigh Lovett, was now selling off what had once been his father’s estate in an attempt to pay off the family debts.  Wishing to return to the south and see what had become of his old home, Vincent appeared on the Lovett plantation shortly after the ad was posted.  He had only one goal in mind, to ask the Lovetts what had become of his mother.  Upon arriving at the Lovett plantation, Vincent was greeted by a drunken, gun-waving Ashleigh Lovett.  Needless to say, Ashleigh was less than pleased to see his half brother alive, and needed to be restrained by a neighbor so as to keep him from attacking Vincent.  When Vincent was finally allowed to come into the parlor, Vincent wasted no time in getting right to the point.  He pointedly asked his brother where his mother had been sold.  Ashleigh refused to tell him, but Annemarie Lovett (Charles Lovett’s widow) slipped Vincent the records of the sale without hesitation.  Vincent spent the next 6 months tracking his mother through the Deep South, only to find that she’d perished several years before and was buried in an unmarked grave. Vincent moved her remains back to Georgia, and buried them on land he’d bought from Ashleigh out of pity.  He then returned to New York, subsequently sank into a deep depression, and ceased writing for several years.  Things began to change for the better in 1878, when Vincent turned 30 and became infatuated with Marie Louisa Fatiman, a famous potioneer and a descendent of the Haitian Witch and revolutionary Cecile Fatiman.  Marie Louisa had become somewhat famous in North America for (to quote a gossip column that emerged shortly after she left Haiti) “Her stunning beauty, her noble carriage, and her biting wit.”  Vincent spent several months wooing her tirelessly, and they were married in 1880, and Marie Louisa was pregnant by their first anniversary.  In 1879, Marie Louisa and Vincent began to discuss plans to move back down South.  Marie wished to be closer to relatives in Louisiana and Haiti, while Vincent wished to be closer to his mother’s grave.   They built a huge house on the land Vincent had bought from Ashleigh, and commissioned a marvellous onyx headstone for Araminta.  They named the house ‘Hibou Court’ (literally Court of Owls).  Their first child, Seraphina Araminta Picquery, was born 2 months later.  Vincent and Marie would go on to have 6 more children, but Seraphina (or ‘Fifi’ to those who knew her well) would always be known as the first Picquery child to attend Ilvermorny.  This portrait of Seraphina and Vincent was painted in 1894, when Seraphina completed her fourth year at Ilvermorny.  The son of an enslaved teenager, had gone on to found one of the most prominent wizarding families in North America.  

Here’s Seraphina Picquery in FBAWTFT

@askseraphinapicqery

[dukuzumurenyiphd]

MAAT: BALANCE - WOMAN & MAN On August 14, 1791 Boukman Dutty and Cecile Fatiman organized the community in an area known as Bois Caïman. The masses prayed to the Iwa Diety of Ezili Dantora. Her power of being the single mother, and the protector of God’s children motivated the people spiritually. Ezili Dantora’s presnce in the people, accompanied by Boukman’s prayer rallied the people to fight for their land, and eventually drove out Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army. https://www.instagram.com/p/BreHkOhnm75/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=f2je9knyz21t

[1baddmouthcrown]

1728 September the British send more troops to Jamaica and later on in the year also send a new governor, Major General Robort Hunter.

1929 Maroon leader Jeddo leads an attack on the North East town Port Antonio.

1730 Lieutenant Soaper soldiers are ambushed by the windward maroons.

1731 Two British regiments are sent to Hunter.

1732 Hunters three parties capture the stronghold of the Windward Maroon leader Nanny overlooking stony river from a 900ft ridge in the Blue Mountains of the parish of Portland.

1733 Hunter party British seamen are ambushed by the Windward maroons ambushed.

1734 The Windward Maroons parishes of Portland and St. George, and loose the Black Shot forces. Hunter dies and John Ayscough is appointed governor in his place. Nanny Town is recaptured. Captain Shuttlewood’s party defeated, the Maroons attack an estate in Saint George including fort and barracks.

1673 200 slaves revolt in the parish of St. Ann and form the Maroons in the parish of St. George.

1739 Leeward Maroon leader Chief Cudjoe signs treaty with British colonel John Guthrie and Captain Francis Sadler troops sent by the British governor Edward Trelawny suspicious of being tricked send forth kissed Guthrie’s hand and embraced his legs and kissed his feet giving the Maroons 1500 acres in Cockpit Country between Cudjoes town of Trelawny in the mountains of the parish of St. James and Akan Maroon leader Accompong’s town in the hills of the parish of St. Elizabeth, however the town itself not included, Accompong named as Cudjoes successor, return runaway slaves for $2 each.

1690 400 slaves revolt on the Sutton plantation in the parish of Clarendon. 

Milton McFarione according to the oral Cudjoe was the son Naquan the leader of the Sutton plantation.

1740 June 23 July Quao signs treaty with Robert Bennett and Nanny signs treaty giving them 500 acres of land Nanny New Nanny Town (Moore Town) and Quao Crawford Town.

1746 Superintendents are assigned to Crawford Town and Edward Crawford, from who the town gets its name from, is made its leader. 

Lieutenant Ross and militia sent by Governor Charles Knowles to negotiate with Quao.

1751 Thomas Thistlewood Egypt plantation in the parish of Westmoreland meets Captain Cujdoe. "he had on a feather’d hat, Sword at his Side, gun upon his Shoulder...Bare foot and Bare legg’d, somewhat a Majestic look".

1751 - 1758 Saint Domingue Hougan Francois Mackandal.

1753 Phyllis Wheatley born in Africa.

1754 Quao and maroons kill Ned Crawford along with three superintendents.

1756 Accompong Town is granted 1, 000 acres of land by the Jamaican Assembly.

July 30 Thistlewood whips two slaves and “washed and rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice & bird pepper”

August 1 Thistlewood catches runaway slave Hazat “put him in the bilboes both feet; gagged him; rubbed him with molasses & exposed him naked to the flies all day & the mosquitoes all night, without fire”.

1760 May Easter Sunday July Saint Mary, Jamaica Fante chief Tacky Rebellion attack the Frontier and Trinity plantations, raid the English Garrison Fort Haldane in Port Maria gunpowder and firearms and estates Heywood Hall, Esher, Ballards Valley. Obeahman puts portection spell on, Charles Town superintendent Charles Swigle Militia Windward Maroons officers Clash and Sambo from Moore Town, Quaco and Cain from Charles Town and Cudio and Davy from Scotts Hall, the Obeahman is captured and left for to see from their lookout, Scotts Hall Maroon, marksman, Lieutenant Davy. pursues Tacky, shoots him and cuts off his head which is displayed on a pole in Spainish Town.

1761 July 11 Wheatley is sold by local chief to trader and brought on the ship Phillis to Boston, Massachusetts.

1764 Cudjoe passes away, Governor of Jamaica Roger Hope Elletson Superintendent John James Twelawny Town Maroon officer Lewis James.

1767 Wheatley at age of 14 writes her first poem “To the University of Cambridge, in New England”.

1768 Wheatley writes her poem "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty"George III repealing the stamp act.

1770 Wheatley writes her poem, a tribute to George Whitefield entitled.

February 14 Scottish explorer James Bruce of Kinnaird arrives in Gondar received by Emperor Tekle Haymanot II, Ras Michael Sehul.

November 14 Bruce reaches Gish Abay the source of the Lesser Abay.

1772 Wheatley defends the authorship of her poems in court of Boston luminaries.

1773 Superintendent appoints Maroon captains Crankey and Muncko as his officers in the Town of Accompong.

Wheatley travels to London and at the age of just 20 has her book Poems on Subjects Religious and Moral published and emancipated meets Lord Mayor.

Bruce travels to Paris where he presents Book of Enoch to King Louis XV French National Library.

“A Negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows”; background shows skulls (presumably of beheaded slaves) on posts. This illustration was based on a 1773 eyewitness description. An incision was made in the victim’s ribs and a hook placed in the hole. In this case, the victim stayed alive for 3 days until clubbed to death by the sentry guarding him who he had insulted. This and other engravings are found in the autobiographical narrative of Stedman, a young Dutchman who joined a military force against rebellions of the enslaved in the Dutch colony. The engravings are based on Stedman’s own drawings and were done by professional engravers. For the definitive modern edition of the original 1790 Stedman manuscript, which includes this and other illustrations see Richard and Sally Price, eds. Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

“1773 Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave.”Shows a female hanging from a tree with deep lacerations; in background two white men and two black men, the latter with whips. Stedman witnessed this event in 1774. The female was an eighteen-year old girl who was given 200 lashes for having refused to have intercourse with an overseer. She was “lacerated in such a shocking manner by the whips of two negro-drivers, that she was from her neck to her ancles literally dyed with blood.”

1775 Wheatley sends a copy of her poem “To His Excellency, George Washington” to him.

1776 March Wheatly accepts Washington’s invitation to visit him in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

April Wheatly’s “To His Excellency, George Washington” poem is also published by Thomas Paine in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

A young free black carpenter being beaten on the rack. Stedman witnessed this scene in 1776. The man (on the orders of white authority) had been accused of stealing a sheep and shooting an overseer who discovered the theft. This method of torture was intended to keep the victim alive long enough to endure extreme pain before his eventual death. In this case, the victim’s left hand was cut off before he died as additional punishment for theft and to serve as an example to others. the above scene is described by Stedman on pp. 546-549 of the Price edition.

Shows a woman carrying a weight chained to her ankle; in background, a man tilling ground with a hoe. The woman was judged guilty of not speaking when spoken to by a white person; for this she received 200 lashes and was forced to carry a 100 lb. weight for several months.

1781 Samuel Grant officer of Charles Town and maroon party kill Three Finger Jack.

Saint Domingue (Haiti), “Pearl of the Antilles” according to in 1787, the French imported 20, 000 slaves from Africa into Saint-Domingue while the British imported about 38, 000 slaves to all of their Caribbean colonies.

1789 August 26 National Assembly publish Declaration of the Rights of Man.

1789 Gens de couleurlibres (free man of color), Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond right to vote men of their class, approach Grandsblancs planters in Paris and attend meetings at, and become leaders of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks anti slavery society founded in the previous year in Paris by Jacques Pierre Brissot. Oge French National Assembly for representation and voting rights. 

1790 October Oge returns to St. Domingue writes a letter argues that the promulgation of the amendment passed on March 8 by the French National Assembly free men of property citizen vote colonial, refused by Colonial governor Count de Blanchelande, Oge meets with Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, American Revolution veteran,

1790 Oge and Chavannes begin insurgence defeating several militia detachments from Le Cap Francais and are forced to flee and take refuge across the border in Santo Domingo.

Bruce publishes Volume 3 of his Travels to discover the source of the Nile.

November 20 Oge and Chavannes are captured in Hispaniola.

1791 February 6 Oge is broken on the wheel and beheaded in the public square in Le Cap.

August to 1804 Saint Domingue Hougan DuttyBoukman and Mambo Cecile Fatiman begin the Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman of what becomes the Hatian revolution, lead by Jean Francois Papillon, Georges Biassou and Jeannot Bullet.

September The white militias kill 15, 000 blacks.

Revolution 100, 000 people after two months 4, 000 Whites killed inflicting property damage of a cost of 2 million francs 15, 000 Blacks killed.

Papillon and Biassou execute Jeannot.

Jean Jacques Dessalines becomes a lieutenant in Papillon’s army and with Papillon in Santo Domingo joins the Spainish against the French.

1792 Legislative Assembly dispatch 600 French soldiers under governor Léger-Félicité Sonthonax. August 29 Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel free slaves.

1793 France declare war on Britain. Jacobin Toussaint L'Ouverture is made a Knight of the Spanish order of Saint Isabela. January L'Ouverture loses the fortified post La Tannerie to French General Étienne Maynaud de Bizefranc de Lavaux. August 29 L'Ouverture makes his declaration of Camp Turel and French commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel make their proclamation of emancipation. September 20 600 British soldiers from Jamaica land at Jérémie. September 22  Mole St. Nicolas, the main French naval base in Saint Domingue surrender to the Royal Navy. November 26 General Charles Grey aka "No-flint Grey" and Admiral Sir John Jervis set sail from Portsmouth. 

1794 February 4 the National Convention, the first elected Assembly of the First Republic, under Maximilien Robespierre proclaim the abolition of slavery in all French colonies and giving civil and political rights to all Blacks. February Grey and Jervis arrive in the West Indies Martinique, Saint Lucia and Guadalupe. May 6 L'Ouverture ambushes the Spanish after mass at church at San Raphael. May 19 Troops from Greys force under commander John Whyte arrive in Saint Domingue, march to and take Port Au Prince allowing Sonthonax and the French to leave on condition that they do not burn the 45 ships of sugar in the harbour. May L'Ouverture and Sonthonax command in the North whilst André Rigaud commands in the South. L'Ouverture switches his allegiance and now fights on the side of the French, raises the republican flag over the port of Gonaïves, eradicates all Spanish supporters from Cordon de l'Ouest and joins 4, 000 of his troops with those of Lavaux’s, with his brother Paul, nephew Moise, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe being among his officers. Rigaud takes the town of Léogâne by storm and drives the British back to Port-au-Prince. December 25 Rigaud takes Tiburon in surprise attack. Soldiers of the 104th, 105th, 111th and 112th regiment in Dublin and Cork, Ireland riot.

1795 April 22 The Brigand War, The Battle of Rabot, Soufrier, Saint Lucia.

July Treaty of Baseline. Jean-François and Biassou fight against L'Ouverture. 

The second Maroon war. The Montego Bay magistrate flogging of two Trelawny Maroons over the theft of two pigs, Governor Alexander Lindsay the 6th Earl of Balcarres has Trelawny Maroons imprisoned.

August 65 British killed by the Trelawny Maroons in the first two weeks, with a total of 16 Trelawny Maroons killed.

Walpole with the 13th Light Dragoons joins the British against the Trelawny Maroons.

Governor Walpole scorched earth strategy dry season.

Balcarres imports 100 bloodhounds from Cuba.

Captain James Palmer of Trelawny shots Captain Chambers and cuts off the Accompong head.

In Trelawny Town Militia Colonel William Finch and Colonel Sanford’s two detachments are ambushed and the Colonels themselves killed.

December Walpole negotiates the terms of surrender with Montague James and his junior officer Lieutenant Major John Jarett, Walpole solemnly promises that the Maroons will not be sent off the island, Balcarres deports 600 Maroons to Nova Scotia including, Walpole resigns.

November Francois and Biassou and leave for Spain and Florida. November 16 The Great Push 30, 000 men on 200 ships under General Ralph Abercromby depart. December 9 wrecked by storm.

1796 March 17 Abercromby arrives in Barbados and despatches force under Major General Gordon Forbes to Port-au-Prince, fails to take French held city of Leogane, French Commander Alexandre Peton uses guns of his fort to sink three ships under Admiral Hyde Parker and then turning his guns to the British, Forbes retreats back to Port au Prince. March 20 Commander Jean-Louis Villatte captures and overthrows French General Lavaux as Governor as part of his plan to ally with Rigaud, L'Ouverture’s troops arrive at Cap-Français to freeing Lavaux and drive Villatte out. May Lavaux promotes L'Ouverture to commander of the West province. Sonthonax arrives with the French third commission, promotes Louverture to General and makes arrangements for L’Ouvetures sons Placide and Issac to attend a school for children of colonials in France. highest ranking officer. June 1 198 of 1, 000 from the Sixty-sixth regiment and 515 of 1, 000 men of the Sixth-ninth regiment not infected with yellow fever. September elections for colonial representatives of the French National Assembly, Louveture both Lavaux and Sonthonax also elected. October Lavaux leaves, Sonthonax stays.

1797 L'Ouverture appointed Lieutenant General second only to Lavaux himself.

5, 000 of Greys 7, 000 die from yellow fever and the Royal Navy 11, 000.

The Battle of Rabot, Soufrier, Saint Lucia recruited to 1st West India Regiment Sierra Leone.

1797 February General John Graves Simcoe replaces Forbes with orders to pull back the British to Port au Prince. April 11 British Colonel Thomas Maitland of the Sixty-second Foot regiment lands in Port-au-Prince. L’Ouverture retakes the fortress at Mirebalais. June 7 L'Ouverture attacks Fort Churchill. July Simcoe and Maitland sail to London to advise withdrawal from colony.

1798 March Maitland returns with mandate to withdraw from Port au Prince. French Commissioner, Gabriel Hédouville, arrives. April 30 L’Ouveture signs treaty with General Maitland for amnesty for French counter revolutionaries. May Port au Prince is returned to French rule. May 10 Maitland meets with Louverture to agree armistice. May 18 The British leave Port au Prince. July L’Ouveture and Rigaud meet Hedouville. August 31 Maitland and L'Ouverture lift the British blockade on the condition L’Ouverture agrees not to involve himself in any rebellion in  Jamaica. Commissioner Hédouville tries to interfere with an insurrection started by L'Ouverture’s adopted nephew Hyacinthe Moïse. October Hédouville sails for France. 

1799 June 16-18 War of Knives, Rigaud sends 4, 000 troops to take the bordering towns of Petit-Goâve and Grand-Goâve, Louverture’s officer Laplume. Petion joins Rigaud with a large contingent of veteran troops. Rigaud North Le Cap, Port de Paix and Mole Saint Nicolas and west central Artibonite plain. Christophe and Dessalines troops. August Louverture U.S. President John Adams blockade ports held by Rigaud. L’Ouverture with  45, 000 – 50, 000 troops Rigaud 15, 000. November Christophe’s army Jacmel whilst Dessalines army Petit and Grand Goave. The U.S. Navy frigate USS General Greene, commanded by Captain Christopher Perry provides Toussaint with fire support Louveture lays siege on Jacmel held by Rigauds forces.

[ancestralvoices]

#Repost @the.kraal • • • • • • August 14, 1791. Dutty Boukman alongside Cecile Fatiman, realized the feat of secretly gathering hundreds of captives from all over Haïti on a hilltop called Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman). There, Boukman, also the spiritual leader of the revolution, gave instructions to synchronize the first major revolt in the history of Haiti. . The uprising happened simultaneously everywhere on the island. Thousands of African captives set fire to the plantations, stole rifles and killed slave masters. The revolt lasted for about 10 days, after which Boukman was eventually captured, tortured, killed and beheaded. The French exposed his head for several days to destabilize the rest of the revolutionaries. . Discouraged by the loss of their leader, the insurgents ended up losing. Although the rebellion failed to free Haitians, it inspired the following generations and empowered other heroes like Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines. Bois Caiman was certainly the trigger that led to Haiti’s independence on January 1, 1804. . Haiti is the first black nation to emancipate itself by force and was probably the lighthouse that guided the end of slavery. Much respect & love for the people of Haïti 🇭🇹🖤✊🏿 #AFRICANISM101 @grandeurnoire 🙏🏿 #history #haiti #haitianvodou #independence #dessalines #toussaintlouverture #duttybookman #slavery #uprising #duttyboukman #ritual #ayiti #cecilefatiman #kayiman #boiscaiman #voodoo #blackpig #voodooritual #vodou #vodouceremony #today #14aug #1791 https://www.instagram.com/p/B1J-ePqj0Dt/?igshid=2tz5h0afid4h

[ladyspeechsankofa]

Reposting the original photo because I posted a meme that this was made into. I don't know who took this photo of me when I was at the protest in Ferguson after the murder of Mike Brown. But I can tell you a few things. 1. I choose to use the tools of my ancestors and the wisdom embedded in my blood and melanin to say FUCK ALL THAT the oppressor. 2. This moment changed my life. In this moment everything I was died. I reborn in my full glory and purpose. 3. Mother Ancestors Cecile Fatiman and Harriet Tubman walked heavy with me each day of this trip. They midwifed my entire transformation. 4. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Audre Lorde It was in THIS moment that THESE words become so real to me. #LadySpeech #AudreLorde #Tools #Ferguson #soldieroflove #SpiritualGangsta #Viral #ImNotNewToThisImTrueToThis #HoodWitch #HoodHealer #ConjureWoman #MagicAsFuck #Warrior