Ex-slaves rarely gained land after emancipation, even under black leadership

Evidence

Some ex-slaves garnered enough money to purchase land outside their plantations, or else headed into the hills and simply claimed it for themselves. But many—probably the majority—toiled away as laborers on the plantations where they had once been slaves. In the 1950s the ethnographer Odette Menesson-Rigaud recorded a Vodou song, a lament that seems to date from the period of the Haitian Revolution, probably from 1800. At the time Saint-Domingue was in the midst of a civil war, and Louverture’s general Dessalines was leading troops against André Rigaud in the south. The two enemies had something in common: both were leaders of militarized labor regimes in the areas they controlled. Indeed, Dessalines himself, a former slave, controlled several large plantations. If, in much of Saint-Domingue, the old white masters had gone, the vast majority of ex-slaves still had no claim to the land that they, and often their ancestors, had worked. The Vodou song recorded in the 1950s perhaps provides us with a trace of the irony the ex-slaves registered about the situation, and the sorrow they felt as they came to see that the land they worked was not to be theirs. “Mister Rigaud, Mister Dessalines,” the song announced, “this land is not for us. Understand? It’s for the whites.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 666

Categorization

• XREF: Dangerous historiography — the trap of the militarized labor regime under ex-slaves prefigures the same pattern later in the book and connects to the fate of Haitian peasants described in Maps by Nuruddin Farah on landlessness.
• SEED: The Vodou song as peasant testimony against its own revolutionary leaders makes a sharp essay angle: how songs embed subaltern critique of revolutionary outcomes.