The Legacy of Haitian Women’s Resistance, Gender Justice, and the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparations
May 31, 2025
The Repair Campaign interviewed Professor Bayyinah Bello, Haitian “Ourstorian”, Author and Co-Founder of Fondasyon Félicité; and Professor Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Director of The CRR, about historical memory, systemic gender-based violence, and the path to reparatory justice.
Special thanks to Four Pillars of Culture and Fondasyon Félicité for facilitating this online conversation.
Welcome and thank you again to Professor Bayyinah Bello (BB), Professor Sonjah Stanley Niaah (SSN), for being a part of this impactful conversation.
Professor Bello, given your work studying the “Sheroes of the Haitian Revolution”, can you tell us a story of one or more of these significant moments of woman-led resistance in Haiti?
Haitian Women’s Resistance: Erased but Unbroken
BB: Women, especially elder women, were essential in organising revolution. In Vodoun, when you say ‘Gran Ibolele’, or ‘Gran Alumanja’ – ‘Gran’ means grandmother. From our own culture, Gran means the one with the most experience and who teaches and prepares the younger ones to go do what has to be done. When we say Gran, we mean the one who’s preparing the next generation for what must be.
Marie Claire Félicité Bonheur Dessalines
If we take from somebody like Marie Claire Félicité Bonheur Dessalines, the wife of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and empress of Ayiti who lived to be 110 years old and through all her life survived Dessalines by 52 years and continued to write to each government when they would do something that said, ‘that’s not why we created this nation’. She helped to keep us sovereign and self-sufficient the first 100 years of independence and taught us a lot about natural health. And when the time came, she was prepared to walk into death with no fear, no hassle, no sickness. She had done what she came here to do and she was ready to go when she knew her time was up.
Adbaraya ‘Gran’ Toya
The women also took care of education and training. Jean-Jacques Dessalines himself was trained by a woman from Africa, from Dahomey, Adbaraya ‘Gran’ Toya, who was a military woman in Dahomey. At the time, Dahomey had a male army and a female army – she was one of those generals who was captured from the female army and trafficked to Ayiti.
Adbaraya once met a pregnant woman who delivered a child but felt death coming after giving birth. So she turned her son over to Adbaraya and asked her to make sure the child knows freedom.
To sit within a ferocious, atrocious, Euro-Christian slavery system and take a few children and train them as liberators and to give us a Jean-Jacques Dessalines – I say, Adbaraya Toya is the greatest teacher in the world. We need to understand what women have brought to us in education and in every field.
Marie-Jeanne
The sharpest spy in Haiti’s history is Marie-Jeanne, who during the revolution, had more than 2,000 spies working for her across the world. She was the one feeding the generals information and what France, Britain, Spain were planning and how they would respond.
Small King
In King Henry’s military, the head of the army was a general called Small King – that is how they nicknamed her. She was the general, the head of the army, a female heading the entire army. Yet there is not a word about her in the history we teach our children.
So in terms of the work of our women, we haven’t even scratched the surface.
Your work makes it clear that the role of women extended beyond participating in armed resistance, into other important but often overlooked roles like teaching, healthcare, seeking justice. Do you think that has been systematically erased? And if so, why?
How can we reclaim or repair that as we talk about reparation?
BB: If we take for example, a country like Dahomey, who in the first century already had a female and a male army. By the fifth century, only the women military could be around the king in the capital city. The male army could not carry weapons in the capital city or in the presence of the king. Only the female could. Although there was no women presence in parliament, all decision-making in Dahomey was female. If the king did something wrong, it was up to his mother, aunt, and other women folks to decide what to do with that king.
So it’s striking to go from this and come to what Benin is today, after of course colonisation and a lot of structured forgetfulness. But you know what? You can never destroy the truth. It is alive in me, in my DNA. in Vodoun, we have Gran Aloma, Gran Ibolele. Ibolele is the spirit of the memory of humanity. So we have plenty of recipes to reclaim every piece of truth that have been, that they have attempted to destroy and hide from us. Without the right memory, you can’t talk about reparation.
Honouring women in community memory
SSN: In the context of reparation, we’ve been talking about justice, health, (which I talk about as wellness in that sort of overall agenda), but the word that you just gave us, Professor Bello, is community. The community is a community of memory. That memory is so critical.
I wanted to frame our conversation on reparation within the context of community memory. Because if you go back to the communal life that we had before the interruption of colonialism, it was natural to have the bodies that were representative of that memory present for the unfolding and the evolution of that community. For example, when I was born, my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were all present, and it’s not often that this happens today. There’s a certain way in which it’s the absence of the women who are the ordinary women in our lives that is also absent from our memories and our histories.
We also have to talk about women in the context of celebration – the women who were resisting just in the fashion they chose to wear beyond the Osnaburg linen that they were given in the context of plantation life. The ones who decided to adorn themselves in the way they knew with jewellery they made of materials such as seashells, to have their dignity, and to connect with themselves through style.
I also want to remember the women at the heart of these sacred practices like Vodoun who have kept for us the knowledge that we need to be able to understand ourselves as African people through the respect and understanding of this African sacred practice. There is understanding in the blood in the veins of women who have suffered, who have remained to tell the stories of time. We want to be able to honour them and to recognise that they were in all kinds of spheres.
I want to highlight that our maroon women are special. This is the lineage of Nanny of the Maroons, Jamaica’s national heroine. They are the ones that have occupied the hills, the land, and have been the keepers of the memory of that earth.
Gender-Based Violence: Updates to CARICOM’s Reparations Plan
How do you both connect gender justice and reparatory justice in this conversation for repair, bearing in mind that the upcoming review of the 10-point plan seeks to include a specific gendered element?
SSN: We know that there is a long trajectory taking us from the plantation and that kind of oppression where women’s bodies – and I’m not saying that men’s bodies were not as oppressed. I’m talking now about gender-based violence. Jamaica has a gender-based violence problem. Jamaica has a rape culture, which up to today, the social scientists have not appropriately acknowledged through research.
This is part of the question of internal repair. We have heard it from our griots, this question of mental reparation, this mental slavery. So mental reparation is key. It is the internal repair that we need most in the Caribbean, even as we are advocating through our diplomatic channels for the apologies, for the restitution.
The revision of the Ten-Point Plan is ongoing and we’re expecting to see that very shortly, which has to be approved by the Prime Ministerial Subcommittee of CARICOM. Historians have long told us that not only is there a racial gap left by chattel slavery, but there is also a gender gap. We must understand that women have been very much disenfranchised, within a prolonged era of violence against women.
The Ten-Point Plan is seeking to acknowledge this, as well as the sort of gendered patterns of resistance. It seeks to acknowledge the moral obligation for justice in terms of the value of women’s resistance and revolutionary experiences, demanding justice for Nanny of the Maroons of Jamaica, Quasheba of Barbados, Kitty of St. Vincent, and so on. All of these women must be acknowledged as their stories inform the ways in which as a Caribbean we are moving in terms of a reparatory justice movement. No one should be left out.
That’s why I am an advocate also of this internal repair, because it’s not just about the kind of diplomatic work that we’re doing externally. The Ten-Point Plan is a guide as to how it is we conceptualise and can execute a movement in terms of repair.
Thank you both for taking the time to connect and share your insights with our audience in this very important conversation.
You can watch the full conversation between Professor Bello and Professor Stanley Niaah below:
