No Loyal Slaves

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About the Campaign

Dear Citizens,

We take this opportunity to address you on behalf of the Cross Rhodes Freedom Project (CRFP) a civil-society organisation whose mission is “Confronting the Past to Free the Future,” as a way to revitalize the Caribbean Civilization Project started at independence.

Our immediate concern in addressing you, is to solicit your support in correcting shamefully misleading, unhistorical and psychologically damaging information on the signpost to the La Reconnaissance plantation complex at Lopinot Village a popular destination for schools on educational outings, as well as many other local and foreign visitors.

The Village is named after Joseph Charles Compte de Lopinot, a Commissioned Officer in the French imperial army who became a wealthy sugar planter and government official in the colony of Saint Domingue, Haiti before the revolution. Lopinot migrated to Trinidad in 1800, established a cocoa plantation and became the chief “slave- catcher” on the island by virtue of his position as Brigadier-General of the local Militia, which utilized man-eating bloodhounds imported from Cuba to hunt Maroons.

The most egregious errors on the signpost at the complex today are the descriptions of Lopinot as “this illustrious Compte” and the people whom he worked to death as “loyal slaves.” The first expression, which engenders reverence for the enslaver, presumes that a white aristocratic military officer must naturally be highly distinguished; the second, which heaps contempt on those he trafficked and enslaved presumes that Africans were sub-human, naturally servile and steadfastly loyal to their “masters”. Both of these descriptions are based on racist presumptions consistent with nineteenth-century Scientific Racism and contemporary white supremacy, which are wholly inconsistent with the espoused values of our post-colonial state.  They are also inconsistent with the truth that the historical evidence supports.

The author of the Lopinot signpost was obviously unaware also that when the Compte arrived in Trinidad in 1800, the Africans in his entourage had already been twice legally freed in Saint Domingue: first by the colonial government in September 1793, and subsequently by the metropolitan French Convention [Parliament] in February 1794. (For original documents on these facts, I refer you to the book, Revolutionary Emancipation by Claudius Fergus, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2013.) To be clear, these Africans did not leave Haiti as slaves, because slavery was abolished throughout the French empire. This means that Compte de Lopinot had criminally trafficked those 100 Africans to Trinidad, where he re-enslaved them in the rapidly expanding slave economy under newly established British rule here.

The “humane” portrait of Compte de Lopinot was carefully crafted in the colonial period, starting with the work of Richard Bridgens, an English artist resident in Trinidad in the last decade of slavery. In 1865, popular American writer, Charlotte Mary Younge, embraced this false humanity in A Book of Golden Deeds. Later, local French Creole historian, P.G.L. Borde, extended this myth to all French enslavers, claiming, “French Planters treated their slaves like children entrusted to their care and that the slaves reciprocated with a lifelong attachment to their masters and their families.”

Today, Bridgens’ book, West India Scenery, is viewed as “an apologia for the institution of slavery” (Art historian, Gillian Forrester). Likewise, Borde’s condescending depiction does not stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, internationally renowned scholar, C.L.R. James, paints a hellish picture of the life of the enslaved population in Lopinot’s Saint Domingue where he says they, “received the whip with more certainty and regularity than food.”  Professor Emerita Bridget Brereton ends any speculation about a possible change of conduct upon arrival in Trinidad informing us in her book, History of Modern Trinidad 1783 to 1962, that Governor Picton allowed these French slave owners and she mentions Lopinot specifically to introduce into Trinidad all their “savage customs and rituals.” Highlighting gross overwork, malnutrition, primitive conditions, diseases, the absence of any medical care along with tortures, mutilations and barbaric executions, Brereton says, “We know that the Trinidad slaves were literally worked until death in this period.” To further describe the men women and children who lived under these conditions as loyal or happy slaves is an unbearable restatement of pro-slavery propaganda. In its historical context this rhetoric was meant to blunt the attack of British abolitionists’ demands for the amelioration of slavery in the early 19th century. How sad it is, that after more than half a century of political independence, and all the writings of the most eminent national and regional scholars that the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago has become the custodian and propagator of such infinitely damaging and patently false colonial narratives.

 

The CRFP has had a number of meetings with key stakeholders including, most importantly, members of the Lopinot community and the Local Government Councillor for the village. Out of this we have arrived at complete consensus on the need to correct the signpost which not only misleads visitors and embarrasses the country but distorts the history and corrupts the identity of the community.  Even one of Lopinot’s purported descendants has chimed in on the side of change.

 

It is our hope that these facts and the above analysis convinces you of the need to support our efforts to urgently expedite the removal of the current signpost at the Lopinot Heritage Site and to ensure its replacement with something that does justice to the history of the community, the country and the Region.