Celucien L. Joseph, “Prophetic Religion, Violence, and Black Freedom: Reading Makandal’s Project of Black Liberation through A Fanonian postcolonial lens of decolonization and theory of revolutionary humanism,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3:4 (August 2012):1-30. (original) (raw)

This essay analyses prophetic religious discourses of the famous maroon leader and black prophet-messiah François Makandal of Saint-Domingue-Haiti who led a devastating slave revolt in 1757 in the so-called prerevolutionary period resulting in 6,000 deaths. We shall attempt to reread imaginatively and creatively François Makandal's program of systematic violence against white oppressors in the French colony of Saint-Domingue through Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theory of decolonization and revolutionary humanism. The goal here is to underscore simultaneously the pivotal role of prophetic religion and the radical theory of "cathartic" violence in the cause of black freedom and independence from the colonial system.