After reading Daut's fascinating essay on the early life and poetry of Vastey, I decided to read some of Vastey's political tracts and writings on Haiti. First of all, of his early life, not much is known, but his mother was a mixed-race woman and relative of Marie-Cesette Dumas, the same African grandmother of Alexandre Dumas (Daut 36). According to Daut, Vastey's work was known in Europe, too. The publishing of "Le système colonial dévoilé, Vastey’s damning exposé of the inhumanity of the “colonial system,” was so well known across the nineteenth-century atlantic World that upon its publication it was immediately reviewed in French, US, German, and British journals and newspapers" (35). However, according to Daut, “Of a few things we can be absolutely certain: someone using the name Pompée Valentin Vastey was living in Paris and publishing poetry in the leading French journals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (37). Daut claims that there is some ambivalence regarding Vastey leaving France and a French identity behind in some of his poetry, but also suggests that the worsening conditions for people of color in France may have been another push for him to return to what would be known as Haiti (39).
According to Gordon K. Lewis's
Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society In Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900, Vastey's pamphlets and books dealt with 2 things: defense of the Haitian Revolution and defense of the Black race in world history (Lewis 255). This defense argues that Haitian Revolution more important than the American Revolution since the latter was a political revolution and the former a social revolution that reshaped property ownership and property relations in the Haitian economic structure (255). Moreover, he goes back into history to show Africa as crade of civilizations: Carthage, Egypt, Ethiopia (256).
Gerarde Magloire-Danton suggests that Vastey may have claimed Egypt as proof of black civilization and capacity due to a notion that Upper Egypt had been a colony of black Ethiopians, based on travel literature and writings of James Bruce and Constantin-Francois Volney, which could have been an influence (Magloire-Danton 157).
Furthermore, David Nicholl's insightful
analysis of Vastey's royalist and revolutionary tendencies (though the two are not mutually exclusive) demonstrates how political actions and loyalties in revolutionary Saint Domingue and early Haiti were shaped often more by region than race, since Vastey, from the north, supported Christophe while someone like Goman supported Rigaud's regime (Nicholls 132). Moreover, Vastey saw it as fit for a majority black country to be ruled by a black, and criticized Petion's republic to the south for excluding blacks from official positions, except as cosmetic effect to pretend color prejudice did not dominate the highest posts in the republic (134). Intriguingly, despite becoming a kingdom by 1811 with feudal titles, visitors to Christophe's kingdom remarked upon the egalitarianism of the society, where workman and government minister could chat on a bench and servants would invite themselves into conversations at the dinnertable, which would support Vastey's ideals of a limited monarchy as a more stable government with a monarch ruling by consent of the people (135). According to Nicholls, Vastey, like Christophe, was enraged how the southern republic would entertain talks with France of reestablishing some form of colonial rule or even slavery, although he is quick to note how unlikely it was for Petion to accept a form of colonial rule from France, although he was open to compensation for dispossessed slaveholders (137). Recognizing the integral role of racial slavery and racial theory to cruel and barbaric European colonialism, Vastey declared all humanity equal, asserted the African origins of civilization, and argued that the color prejudice of whites caused their own downfall (138). He also saw to the need for self-sufficiency to ensure Haitian independence would last while taking issue with Dessalines's prohibition of white foreigners from owning property in Haiti (139-140).
Surprisingly, Vastey took issue with the southern republic's upholding of an article in the constitution allowing Africans, Indians and their descendants to settle in Haiti and earn citizenship in 12 months, which he saw as enticing people from other parts of the Americas to settle in Haiti and therefore constitutive of an interference in the affairs of other states (140). That said, he saw Haiti as proof of the capability of African independence and civilization, and revealed some understanding of recent travels into the interior of Africa, from the likes of Mungo Park and others, which proved Africa was not as barbarous or uncivilized as commonly believed in Europe (141). Yet he approved of British colonial policy in Africa and the creation of Sierra Leone, revealing the complexities of his conception of Africa and colonialism's so-called positive aspects (142). To make things even more paradoxical, Vastey foresaw the union of former colonized peoples around the world rising up against European imperialism.
