A black liberation leader stands holding out his hand, staring into an as-yet-unrealised future, as a formerly enslaved woman rises. The Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow (1935–2016) created Toussaint Louverture et la vieille esclave (Toussaint Louverture and the elderly enslaved woman, shown right) in 1989 as part of a series of sculptures commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Unlike the other sculptures, however, Sow’s depicts a figure who actually struggled against the French state, taking on the mantle of the original revolutionary principles (Egalité, Fraternité and, above all, Liberté).
Louverture (1743–1803), military leader of the Haitian Revolution, successfully channelled an uprising of free people of colour and, later, enslaved people into an armed movement that, by 1800, had ended both slavery and French rule on the island of Hispaniola. Louverture…
