In 1791, on a verdant Caribbean island, long-running Black resistance to its colonial masters’ brutal system of slavery broke into open war and the decade-plus Haitian Revolution began. Many historians have focused on the men who led that Revolution, and on its beginnings in the legendary vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman in the far north. Long—but no longer—disparaged or disregarded was the charismatic couple who led the rebellion in the south: Marie-Roze Adam, a woman who had used her guts and guile to free people before on a smaller scale from the servitude she was once sentenced to herself, and her spouse and co-parent of three children, Romaine Rivière la Prophétesse, a free-born Black coffee planter and trader turned perhaps-transgender prophetess and troop commander. The two would ultimately liberate thousands of enslaved people and govern for a time a vast area of southern Haiti, including two major cities.
Marie-Roze Adam was born around 1742 on the western half of the island, in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue—which she and Romaine would later, in small part, help make the free nation of Haiti.T,R:46-47,236 Romaine Rivière was born roughly a decade later, around 1750 or '51, on the opposite side of the isle, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo that is today the Dominican Republic.a,R:27-28,47-48,50-51,232,M,P
From the moment Christopher Columbus had arrived there and began a genocide of its native Taíno people, driven by racism and gold-greed, vying colonizers had made the island a site of vicious inequality to their own benefit.Ko Their callous capitalism then took only another form as the Spanish began to re-populate the plantations they had worked so many Taino to death on with enslaved Africans, and the French then expanded that system with even greater ruthlessness and rapacity.Ko,W
