Fetishes and the Rights of Man

I recently read Stephan Palmié's Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition and what stood out most to me was the example of a rebel slave during the Haitian Revolution whose fallen corpse was found to carry a copy of the Rights of Man (Droits des Hommes) as well as a 'fetish.' This is part of the author's larger argument about placing Afro-Cuban (or Afro-Atlantic religious practices in a broader perspective) as essentially "modern" (not a primordial, timeless African tradition) and as much a product of modernity as the French Revolution, Enlightenment thought, and Caribbean slavery and rationalized economies. Other examples given by the author include the Lemba cult of Central Africa, which was also a way for Central African groups to reconstruct their social and moral systems of thought in response to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and an increasingly linked Atlantic World.

Returning to the fallen soldier of the Haitian Revolution, it is important to remember how one should not try to enforce a dichotomy that makes it seem "strange" or nonsensical for this former slave to have carried on his body a "fetish" representing African/Afro-Atlantic as well as writings expressing Enlightenment thought. Because both the Enlightenment and Haitian Vodou (although that term is not the most accurate for describing the religious and moral thought of Africans in colonial Saint Domingue) are products of modernity and a broader Atlantic World, both are equally "modern" and rational, and to be expected in the highly modern, complex Caribbean of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Stephan Palmié's comments on this case are also of importance for understanding the principles and ideology behind slave insurgency in Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution, a subject Thornton's work has explored based on Central African societies, specifically, Kongolese, in Saint Domingue. But what would be more interesting to study is the confluence of European and African influences on the slave masses during the Haitian Revolution, from Afro-Atlantic social thought and religion to Enlightenment ideas.