Toussaint L’ouverture wouldn’t have rebelled if he believed he was a “slave”
[Food For Thought]
Not “slaves” or “slavery.” The preferred terms, respectively, are “enslaved” and “enslavement.”
Whenever someone uses the word “slave,” make sure you correct that person.
“Slave,” and “slavery,” implies permanent servitude. On the other hand “enslaved” makes it clear the person is in bondage under a state of non-compliance, a state of resistance, a state of rebellion—whether this uprising is active and visible or whether it remains in a latent condition where the enslaved person is thinking about it, plotting about it, planning it.
The Africans in St. Domingue appeared in the eyes of the Europeans to be “slaves” even as they produced the sugar and coffee under the whip and lashes, and garroting, and lynchings. Yet, when that historic moment arrived, previously hunched-back Africans stood upright and slaughtered their French tormentors and declared the birth of a new nation, Haiti, the first African nation in the Western hemisphere.
They had ended their condition of enslavement. They never would have rebelled had their bought into the notion that they were slaves.
