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Showing posts from December, 2021

The Haitian Revolution: January 1, 1804

The Haitian Revolution, the largest and most successful rebellion of enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere, constitutes a landmark in the history of abolition of slavery. It precipitated the end of slavery not only in Saint-Domingue but in all French colonies.  These trailblazers of freedom, who were forcibly and violently transported from West Africa and Central Africa and enslaved, rose up as pioneers in the defense of human rights. They initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1804 they had succeeded in defeating Napoleon’s armies, thus ending not just slavery but French control over the colony.   On Jan. 1, 1804, after over a decade of fighting against French enslavement and colonisation, the French colony of Saint-Domingue became the Independent Republic of Haiti.   More than 300 years after Christopher Columbus landed in Hispaniola, destroyed its native population and introduced the barbaric and horrendous practice of the legal trafficking in human cargo, the island wit