"Africa exerted a profound influence on cultures of resistance to slavery, yet its role is often overlooked"

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH speaks to Danny Bird about how enslaved people, who needed no lessons in freedom from white abolitionists, organised themselves to fight their oppressors

- By Danny Bird

Danny Bird Your book opens with the story of a woman named Solitude on Guadeloupe. Why did you choose to start with her and what can she tell us about the wider history of resistance among enslaved people?

Sudhir Hazareesingh Solitude was the first black woman to be commemorated with a statue in Paris – an honour granted only recently [the statue was unveiled in 2022]. I chose her because her vital role in the antislavery struggle, both in Guadeloupe and more widely, had largely been ignored. She represents the countless anonymous heroes of ongoing resistance to slavery.

Little is known of her life. Born in Guadeloupe in the late 18th century, her mother had been raped during the Middle Passage. Solitude gained her freedom in 1794 when France abolished slavery in its colonies and lived among other newly emancipated people for about a decade.

In the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte sent forces to reinstate slavery in Guadeloupe. Solitude resisted, took up arms, was captured and executed. Pregnant at the time, she gave birth and was put to death the following day. Her story is tragic yet heroic. She was forgotten for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her legacy, and that of thousands of others who resisted enslavement, was recovered only in the late 20th century by historians seeking to honour these unsung fighters.

You have written that resistance was integral to the practice of Atlantic slavery. How did you go about researching these acts of resistance given how often they've been erased from the archive?