alone, merchants from Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Le Havre and St Malo fitted out a total of 2,800 ships for the triangular trade that took European trade goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and sugar back to their home ports.27 During that century, over one million black Africans were transported to the sugar islands. The casualty rate was high: a death rate of 5 to 15 per cent was regarded as commercially acceptable and calculations of profit were made accordingly. Malaria, yellow fever, poor food and bad water could take an appalling toll on the hundreds of slaves forced into the between-decks of a ship with a length of sixty-five feet and a beam of nineteen feet.28 The memory of the slave trade has not faded. Writing of it in 1955, Glissant puts it thus: ‘They nailed a people to rated ships, sold, rented and bartered flesh. Old people for small change, men for the sugar harvests, women for the price of their children. There is no more mystery and no more daring: the Indies are a market in death; the wind proclaims it, blowing full on the prow.’29 The plantation system required continual imports of new slaves, as the mortality rate in the French colonies was always higher than the birth rate; working conditions were so harsh, and nutrition so poor, that the slave population did not reproduce itself. A form of resistance may also have had an impact on demographic rates on the plantations, and folk memory recalls that some women would rather use abortifacents than give birth to children destined for slavery.
The slave economy was tightly regulated by the so-called ‘Code noir’, which was adopted in 1685 and revised in 1724; it remained in force until 1848.30 The code was harsh and governed every aspect of daily life. The punishment for striking a master or a member of his family, assault on free men and the theft of livestock was death. A slave who ran away had his ears cropped and was branded with a fleur de lis on one shoulder; if he made another attempt to escape, his hamstrings were cut and he was branded on the other shoulder. The punishment for a third attempt to escape was death and no appeal against the sentence was possible. Slaves were commodities and did not enjoy property rights. The Code noir also gave slave-owners certain obligations. Under the terms of Article 22, every adult slave had to be given food rations including ‘two pounds of salt beef, three pounds of fish or its equivalent’. Relatively little land could be spared for stock-breeding and Martinique’s inshore fishing grounds were not rich. The island therefore began to import food. The staple of the slave’s diet was salt cod imported from Canada and New England. It was a good source of both protein and salt. The trade provided a new outlet for Martinique’s rum and molasses; fishermen in the far north were happy to accept rum in exchange for their lowest-quality cod, which they could never have sold in Europe. That this was technically illegal – the British Molasses Act of 1733 imposed heavy duties on molasses from the non-British islands – did little to prevent the flourishing trade.31 Supplemented by locally grown fruit and vegetables, this restricted diet was just enough to sustain life on the plantations. Salt cod – the ‘saltfish’ of the English-speaking Caribbean – is still an important ingredient in the Creole cuisine of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Sugar production was not a difficult process. Pieces of stalks from mature canes were placed in shallow holes, covered in earth and left to germinate in the rich volcanic soil. Within fifteen months, the new crop was ready for harvesting. The harvest involved everyone. The cane was cut by teams of men wielding machetes (the local name is coutelas, meaning cutlass, and this instrument of daily labour became a deadly weapon in times of revolt) and tied into bundles by women known as amarreuses (from the verb amarrer: ‘to tie down’, ‘to make fast’). Gangs of young children – the tibandes – cleared up anything that was left. The bundled cane was then taken to the mill to be crushed. The mills were driven by either animals, water or wind-power, and the cane was fed into rollers to extract the sweet juice. The juice was boiled a number of times to remove impurities and then left to crystallize; the final process of refining rarely took place in Martinique itself. The syrup was also distilled locally to produce an aromatic, and very strong, rum. A much cruder variety of white rum known as tafia was distributed to the slaves who produced it. All this is still part of Martinique’s collective memory and it was part of Fanon’s memory too.
For the planter, the beauty of the system was its simplicity and economy: the crushed stalks could be burned to fire the boilers, and the waste products could be fed to the animals that powered the mills. Although animals were gradually replaced by other forms of motive power, the actual production process has changed little. Small vans equipped with miniature mills (either operated manually or driven by portable generators) to crush cane and extract the sweet juice are still a common sight at the points where minibuses that serve as collective taxis (taxi-pays) congregate to wait for passengers. It is a refreshing drink and a popular one. The production of sugar posed no great technical problems, but the work in the fields was brutally hard, especially at harvest time. The fires lit to clear the undergrowth and to drive off snakes created a suffocatingly hot and dusty atmosphere. Some cane is still cut by hand. Unlike their ancestors, who worked barefoot, the modern cutters wear rubber boots, gloves and face-masks. As the shade temperature regularly reaches 30C in Fort-de-France, it is difficult to imagine what the temperature must be in a cane field that is exposed to the sun but sheltered from the wind, and where a fire is burning. It was the slave societies of the Caribbean that gave birth to the myth of the zombie, or the soulless corpse, that is revived by witchcraft and set to work in the cane fields. It is a fitting myth: working in the fields was a form of living death.
Slavery was abolished by the French Convention in 1794 (at which date Martinique was in British hands) but was re-established by Napoleon in 1802. Abolition finally came in 1848. The abolition of slavery was commemorated in somewhat muted fashion in April 1998. Philately provides a curious index of just how quiet the celebrations were. A single stamp was issued to mark the 150th anniversary of abolition; a whole set was issued to mark the World Cup that was hosted by France that summer. President Chirac described abolition as a form of ‘integration’ and went on to state that the ‘open and generous attitude’ it implied had allowed France to ‘welcome and integrate into the national community successive generations of men and women who have chosen to settle in our land. In return, those men and women, who have a rich culture, a rich history and rich traditions, have given new blood.’32 There was no mention of the equally ‘rich history’ of slave revolts, and abolition was represented as France’s gift to her old colonies. It was forgotten that slavery had already been abolished in 1794. Towards the end of Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon defiantly states: ‘I am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.’33 In 1998, his words were invoked by the French Ministry of Culture,34 which presented 1848 as a radical break with a racist past. The posters on the walls of French cities depicted a ‘rainbow coalition’ of children and young people and the legend ‘All born in 1848’.35 The whole point of Fanon’s book is that racism was not abolished in 1848. When he refused to be defined as the slave of the slavery that dehumanized his forefathers, he was not asking the white world to feel guilty about ‘the past of my race’,36 but he was refusing to be defined by that past. Peau noire, masques blancs does not end with a plea for racial equality but with a Sartrean bid for total freedom as a radicalized consciousness leaps into a future that escapes all ethnic determinations.
The commemoration also marked another anniversary that could scarcely be celebrated. It was in 1848 that Algeria was officially declared to be an integral part of France. Victor Schoelcher was the architect of the decree that abolished slavery in the name of the republican principle of assimilation; he justified the annexation of Algeria by referring to the very same principle.37 Colonization does not depend solely upon slavery; there are other ways of dehumanizing men and women. Nothing of this was mentioned – or could be mentioned – in April 1998.
The plantation system outlived the abolition of slavery, which was not accompanied by any land reform. Writing in 1843, the great liberal Aléxis de Toqueville had argued that: ‘Whilst the Negroes have the right to become free, it is undeniable that the colonials have the right not to be ruined by the Negroes’ freedom.’38 The colonials’ ‘right not to be ruined’ ensured that they were compensated for the loss of their property, and that the plantations remained intact. Whilst some freed slaves acquired land of their own – usually on higher and less fertile ground – and some drifted into the expanding towns, many were obliged to become rural wage-earners