“Europe has erased the Haitian revolution from the history books,” says one of the actors in Emily Aboud’s broadside for Lagahoo Productions, a lively patchwork of a play that claims not to be about slavery, but kind of is. The playwright contends that Haiti, having become the first black republic in 1804, has been conveniently forgotten about by the slave-trading nations.
Britain, for example, took another 40 years to phase out the trade in human beings, while France was accepting reparations from Haiti as recently as 1947 – the country paid the equivalent of £17.4bn in today’s money for its own freedom.
