Glimpses of Haiti in West Africa, 1890–1920

Abstract

Abstract Recent scholarship has traced the impacts of the Haitian Revolution around the Atlantic world, yet there has been almost no scholarly attention to the legacies of the Haitian Revolution in Africa. This article examines circulations of the history of the Haitian Revolution in the newspapers of Sierra Leone and Nigeria between 1890 and 1920. Influenced heavily by the narrative and poetic styles of the nineteenth century, West African intellectuals usually adhered to a Romantic emplotment of the revolution. They also drew on this history to inform their own nationalist and Pan-Africanist politics. I argue that the particular form of the newspaper allowed West African intellectuals to weave together a unique range of materials as they crafted their narratives. By combining their political ideas with works by prominent nineteenth-century writers, they reframed their pasts and imagined their futures anew.