Insurgent commander Jeannot tortured whites in ritual mirror-image of slave punishments

Evidence

Michaud, however, was outranked by a leader notorious for his brutality: Jeannot. He kept the white prisoners chained, giving them only a glass of water and three bananas per day, supplemented only rarely by a piece of “beef’s ear.” The residents of the camp surrounded them, and although a few “seemed pained” by their situation, most jeered and “rejoiced.” At night, remembered Gros, “our terror worsened because of the speeches that we heard; and their sad songs, accompanied by instruments, seemed to be a prelude to new tortures.” Then Jeannot announced to the prisoners that two of them would be killed every twenty-four hours, “to prolong his enjoyment.” One white prisoner received “over 400” strikes of a whip, and gunpowder was rubbed into his bleeding wounds. Other prisoners, escorted out of their prison to the sound of a drum, were chopped to pieces or strung up and bled to death. One was executed by his own domestic slave. The whippings and executions described by Gros were a terrifying mirror image of the tortures long inflicted by white masters upon slaves. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in violence as mirrored colonial punishment and to themes in Things Fall Apart about how subjugated peoples adopt the methods of their oppressors.