Of all of the countries of the Americas, the people of Haiti have to go the furthest back in time to access collectively the ‘souvenirs amers’ [‘bitter memories’] of colonial slavery. The beginning of the end of plantation slavery in the Americas occurred there, in August 1791, when a mass revolt broke out across the northern plain of what was then the French colony of Saint Domingue. Hundreds of sugar and coffee plantations were razed to the ground, and the de facto end of slavery began, as the former slaves-turnedrevolutionaries deserted the ruins, forming rebel camps in the hills. By October 1793, the end of slavery had been officially proclaimed throughout Saint Domingue by the French commissioners Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel, who were desperately trying to maintain French control over what had, prior to the outbreak of revolution, been the most valuable sugar plantation colony in the world. The proclamations constituted the first legal abolition of slavery by representatives of a European colonial power. The colonial universe of sugar plantations, overseers, Creoles and African slaves, which persisted elsewhere in the Americas for nearly a century, thus largely ceased to exist in Saint Domingue from the early 1790s. After a further ten years of revolutionary politics, civil war and conflict with the British, Spanish and French armies, the independence of the renamed Republic of Haiti was proclaimed on 1 January 1804 by former slaves Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and their leading generals. With this gesture, a population of predominantly African-born former slaves ‘stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity’ (Césaire, 1995: 24).

Whether because of or despite the lasting impact of this transformational revolutionary history, the memorial traces of colonial slavery among the Haitian people have been largely obscured.