What does it augur when kidnappings are part of the primal scene of postcolonial nation-building? In this chapter, I explore the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the African diasporan colonial encounter with the conditions of literary culture. I argue that the Middle Passage, as a founding history of forced migration, was strikingly revisited in the liminal and urgent representations of kidnappings in the families of Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe during the Haitian Revolution and independence. The chapter begins with a text that is perhaps the closest thing to a French slave narrative in the Haitian revolutionary tradition: the narrative by a former slave named Praxelles representing the kidnapping and death of the eldest son, Ferdinand, of Henry Christophe. It is an eyewitness missive from “black Paris” documenting the downfall of a privileged son of the Haitian Revolution under the defeat of the French in Saint-Domingue. I then move on to the complex narratives of the kidnappings and semi-captive exile of Toussaint Louverture and his immediate familial entourage, which span a period from the Directory to the middle of the nineteenth century. Invoking the work of Benedict Anderson to broach the intrusion of layers of African diasporan and Haitian revolutionary kidnappings into the relationship between novel and nation in the imagining of New World communities, I argue that the history of kidnapping points to a different model of narratives in Haitian revolutionary and early independence history: kidnapped narratives.

Kidnapping le petit Christophe

It tells us something about the “brigand” sovereignty of Haiti that Dessalines's successor, Henry Christophe, served as president and king of a nation in the western hemisphere without ever breathing a public word about the abduction and death of his firstborn son while under the tutelage of another Western government.

Ferdinand Christophe was sent to France by Henry Christophe in September of 1802 to be educated as a guest of the French government. The politics behind this arrangement are not easy to trace; there is little direct correspondence in which Henry Christophe discusses Ferdinand. As was evident in the case of Toussaint Louverture's bequeathing of his sons Placide and Isaac to France for their education, parental willingness to convey a child to France could mask complex negotiations with the French over autonomy on the part of black leaders in the colony.