“Ireland has its glory,” Daniel O’Connell once declared. “No slave ship was ever launched from any of its numerous ports.” The Liberator’s own anti-slavery record may have been second to none, but sadly this suggestion that his country had completely clean hands on the issue was mistaken.
When Britain finally abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1833, more than 100 of the traders who received financial compensation were Irish – including Dublin’s famous La Touche banking family whose Jamaican sugar farm had once recorded a captive’s death from “eating dirt”.
Judging by the Mauritian historian Sudhir Hazareesingh’s quietly devastating study of how enslaved people fought their oppressors over four centuries, self-congratulatory myths about this subject are nothing new. Everyone now agrees the Atlantic slave trade was barbaric, he notes, but all too often its demise is represented as heroic American and European politicians liberating passive African victims. One egregious example is the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, DC, which depicts a benign Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling man with broken shackles.
Daring to Be Free is a powerful corrective to this “white saviour” myth. Drawing on previously neglected memoirs, interviews and oral traditions, its central argument is that enslaved people did not need western Enlightenment ideals to understand their predicament. Instead Hazareesingh details how resistance began in Africa itself with village militias, continued via slave ship mutinies and remained a constant threat on plantations from Barbados to Guadeloupe.
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Expanding on his award-winning 2020 biography of Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus, he claims the Haitian revolutionary’s struggle against Napoleon gave slave traders across the Atlantic world sleepless nights. Most uncomfortably of all, he cites a wealth of evidence that suggests this moral atrocity ended for mainly economic and security reasons rather than humanitarian ones.
Hazareesingh’s painstakingly researched, soberly written narrative takes a broadly thematic approach. He explains the significance of African religious systems such as obeah, which gave prisoners spiritual comfort and assured them that justice would eventually prevail. He also highlights the roles played by women, whose relative freedom of movement allowed them to gather vital intelligence before an insurrection or escape attempt.
“Slavery lives and feeds in darkness,” the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass told a Cork audience during his joyous 1845 tour of Ireland. Hazareesingh’s grim but important book drags it out into a harsh, unforgiving light.
