Revolutionary leaders who absorb colonial enlightenment ideals fail where untutored leaders succeed

Evidence

Toussaint’s failure had been the result of events beyond his control: “If he failed, it is for the same reason that the Russian socialist revolution failed, even after all its achievements—the defeat of the revolution in Europe” (p. 283). … Yet Toussaint’s error sprang from the very qualities that made him what he was. It is easy to see to-day, as his generals saw after he was dead, where he had erred. It does not mean that they or any of us would have done better in his place. If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilisation were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further. Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness, (pp. 286, 287, 288) Alas, from no less an authority than James himself, we know this last defense of Toussaint was not without its element of rationalization. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1295

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that enlightenment-based Westernization made Toussaint a less effective revolutionary than the uneducated Dessalines — and its extension to James’s own class critique of the revolutionary petit bourgeoisie — is a dense, paradigm-producing idea.
• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s argument that the colonized intellectual’s assimilation to the metropole’s culture blunts revolutionary consciousness, and to the broader Black radical tradition critique of Westernized leadership.