Throughout the year, UNESCO had organized many commemorative events in close cooperation with its member states" and governmental and non-governmental organizations, such as the launching of the research and information program "the Forgotten Slaves," an exhibit at the UNESCO's headquarters in Stockholm Sweden entitled "Lest We Forget: Triumph on Slavery," the Ceremony of the Award of Toussaint Louverture Prize, the International Conference on the theme "Issues of Memory: Coming to terms with the Slave Trade and Slavery," and the International Symposium on the Slave Trade Archives Project in Havana, Cuba, and so on. The worldwide, yearlong commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Haitian Slave Revolution Victory was very important for Haitians and Blacks all over the world. The 1791 revolution, which took place during the 18th Century, beside the American Revolution of 1774 and the French Revolution of 1789, was excluded for years from the pages of world history textbooks, despite its contribution to the abolition of slavery in the world.
On January 7, the Haitian Americans United, Inc. (H.A.U.) will hold its fifth Annual Haitian Independence Day Gala in Lombado's in Randolph starting at 7 p.m. The gala will honor Haiti's Founding Fathers, especially the General-Emperor Jean Jacques Dessalines, on the occasion, this year, of the 200th anniversary of his assassination in Port-au-Prince. The gala will also commemorate 202 years of the proclamation of Haiti's independence. In Providence, Rhode Island, the Haitian Independence Day was to be celebrated at the new Haitian Bicentennial Memorial Plaza in Roger Williams Park starting at 9 a.m. H.A.U., in collaboration with several other Haitian organizations, was to lay a memorial wreath at the foot of the second Haitian memorial in the United States.
First, the two armies all but destroyed the French plantocracy on the island then they defeated a Spanish force and huge English and French armies. In Adam Hochchild's book Bury the Chains, we learn that then-U. S. President George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, sent "a thousand muskets, other military supplies, and eventually some $400,000" of U. S. aid to quell the revolt now known as "the Haitian Revolution." Randall Robinson reveals more in his book, An Unbroken Agony: "Some . . . had been brought to Haiti [St. Domingue] from other Caribbean slave colonies men like the storied Boukman from Jamaica and the legendary Makandal from Trinidad, and the great general, Henri Christophe, who was born in Grenada." Blacks who escaped plantations in the United States also joined L'Ouverture's armies. Robinson reports that L'Ouverture had been the intellectual, "the African humanist, the military strategist, the administrator and, not insignificantly, the conciliator." Robinson also writes that [Jean-Jacques Dessalines] "had been, first and last, the hard-nosed soldier who believed that an enemy as manifestly unsalvageable as the French had to be, wherever possible, obliterated."
After independence, many of the newly formed nations struggle to maintain their hard fought freedom, though there were many lingering colonial attachments; hostilities; and the difficulties that came with growing pains. Around 1789, the French Revolution was raging in France; two years later, a rebellion swept the northern part of the island like a massive tidal wave.
He was born a slave. He was called a genius of the rebellion. He was an 18th century rebel named Toussaint Breda, also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture, and he led the Haitian Revolution to abolish slavery. By the way, translated, L'Ouverture means "the opening."
