Part 3

It is hard to gage women’s role in the military struggle for freedom. There is evidence of a West African tradition of women participating in battle, yet as stated earlier, the uprising was started by Creole slaves, and the majority of recent African arrivals were men. There is evidence of maroon women bearing arms in Surinam in 1728, in Jamaica in 1739, and in West Cayenne and French Guianna in 1748 (Bush 70, 71). All of this points to the possibility of enslaved or formerly enslaved women, especially those who were part of the maroon community, raising arms during the slave rebellion in Haiti. Nevertheless, the rebellion was not a primarily maroon rebellion, and Haiti lacked a strong maroon tradition similar to that of Jamaica, but was marked more by acts of “petit marronage”, where slaves would escape for a while only to return, without forming lasting maroon communities. Furthermore, in the cases of Jamaica and French Guianna, the names of the fighting women – Nanny and Claire, respectively - are on the record. In the case of West Cayenne, there is testimony from a captured maroon, while in Surinam, there were witnesses to the capture and execution of the rebel women. (Bush 70, 71) The Haitian Revolution, however, is classified by its lack of names of fighting women, or records of captured women warriors, but perhaps this speaks to the fact that, unlike in the other cases, the slaves in Haiti won, as much as it may speak to an absence of women warriors. There are cases of captured women, yet usually it is not specified whether those women were punished for taking up arms, or merely for being in the insurgent camp. Due to the French habit of massacring non-combatants left behind by slave troops, many women, children and other traditionally non-combatant groups were forced to join insurgent camps, thus making it harder to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant. (Dubois 115) There are some reports of women shooting at French troops from afar, as well as directing insurgent troops to the French camps, but it is impossible to know how widespread this phenomena was. (Geggus 69) Although there are not many first-hand accounts women warriors as such, testimonies do reveal that the presence of women in insurgent camps was not merely a passive one: M. Gros, who recorded his experiences as the insurgents’ prisoner of war in 1791, regarding being molested by the “Negro” inhabitants of the insurgent camp of Dondon, wrote that “The Negro women were infinitely worse, more hardened, and less inclined to return to work than the men.” (Gros 132) This passage implies that the women took a more active role than the men in making life unpleasant for the white prisoners of war. Given that women arguably faced harder situations than slave-men, their motivations to resist return to slavery were stronger, and may have influenced the tone of the camp culture. Gros’s assertion that black women were more vehement in taunting the prisoners than black men fits in with a report on the treatment of white women prisoners by insurgents in the Limbe province that states, “the negresses more than anyone else manifested an anger towards them to which the fury…of the men could not compare” (Popkin 95). This anger can perhaps be explained by maltreatment of women slaves, especially domestics, by white mistresses - a maltreatment that was heightened by white women's fear of sexual competition from black women. White women were often noted to be "more… racist than their men"in the treatment of house-slaves". (Robertson 22) This maltreatment is perhaps best summed up in a story related by May Hassal, the wife of a St. Domingue merchant: A white mistress noticed her husband looking at a black slave-girl with longing, so she had the girl's head chopped off. Later that evening, when her husband complained he was not hungry, the wife said she had something which "would excite" his appetite, as it had done so before. She then proceeded to show her husband the slave's severed head. (Dayan 182) This unwarranted violence may help explain a recorded incident in which insurgent women forced a dying white man to sniff their private parts. For a woman to bare her genitals was a traditional African way of protesting the actions of men. (Robertson 10) In this case however, baring one's genitals was also a way of specifically protesting the sexual abuse of enslaved women, through the body-part that had been abused.

The power of female genitals in African culture demonstrated by this event speaks to another form of empowerment available to slave women, both before and during the insurrection: That of various African cultures, preserved most saliently through religion, with the help of continual new arrivals from Africa. These African religious traditions are still preserved today in the form of voodoo, though they have been combined with elements of Catholicism. The main difference between the voodoo of today and the religion of slaves in the 1790s, is that the latter was closer to its original ancestral African religions then than it is now. (Metraux 39,40) Voodoo is a religion that both shaped and was shaped by the Haitian Revolution. In order to understand the role of voodoo during the Haitian Revolution however, it is first necessary to understand the role of voodoo before the revolution: The presence of African religious ceremonies marked by dancing and spirit possession in Haiti in the 1790s was documented by white observers, as was the presence of white people at African dances, though those dances seem to have been more secular in nature. Those white chroniclers of voodoo however, admit that most meetings took place away from white eyes, meaning the majority of them remain undocumented. It seems however, that voodoo gatherings were relatively widespread.(Metraux 35, 36) Though some of the dances attended by whites were said to be secular, in reality, the lines between secular and religious in voodoo are not clearly defined: Ceremonies serve social functions, while dances can easily become religious, and possession can happen spontaneously.