Pompée Valentin Vastey was born Jean-Louis Vastey in 1781 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. He was a “mulatto,” having a white French father and a black Haitian mother. He is said to have been the second cousin of the French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas on his mother’s side. Vastey claimed to have fought beside Toussaint Louverture in the Haitian Revolution, though, there is no real documentation of that being true.
In 1804, when Haiti declared independence, Vastey was office manager of the Minister of Finance. He was awarded the title of baron in 1814 after he was promoted to private secretary of the king and when he became tutor to the prince. On August 20, 1819, he was knighted in the Royal and Military Order of St. Henry and was appointed Field Marshal and Chancellor. On October 8, 1820, the people had an uprising against the king and the insurgents attacked the Sans Souci Palace. King Henry Christophe committed suicide. The next day, the crowd stopped Vastey, the two royal princes and other notables so that they could be executed a few days later. Witnesses reported Vastey as having a heroic attitude facing death.
Vastey, while his works may not have the mainstream attention they so rightfully deserve, nevertheless is the forerunner for the start of Africana studies.
Some have described Vastey as “the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution.” Vastey wrote a multitude of books and pamphlets between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most provocative 1814 work, "Le système colonial dévoilé" (in English, "The Colonial System Unveiled") provides a moving appeal of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a 100 years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of his successors.
Vastey’s second most provocative work is titled "Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites Remarks" in a letter addressed by M. Mazères, a French Ex-colonist, to J. C. L. Sismonde De Sismondi. It was originally published in 1816 but was translated into English in 1817. Vastey offers a comprehensive critique of colonialism as a system, one based on "violence, theft, pillage, treachery-in short, the foulest, vilest of depravities." There can be no distinguishing between good and bad Frenchmen, good and bad masters, the systematic nature of colonial exploitation in Saint-Domingue negates this possibility. The colonists were all monsters, "more or less; they all committed, participated in, and contributed to those horrors; besides, the number of colonists who acted decently and humanly is so small that it is not worth making them an exception to the general rule."
Many people in today’s time have not heard anything at all about Baron P.V. Vastey, even though some consider him the greatest Haitian writer of the 19th-century. The translator of the English version of "Reflexions sur une lettre de Mazeres" said that it “is perhaps the first work by a Negro, in which the energies of the mind have been powerfully excited ... and where in fact this long-oppressed race have been suffered to say a word in their own defense.” Then how is it that in today’s day and age, a man given such high praise as Vastey has gone virtually unrecognized in American society?
It is suggested that this is simply a modern thing, seeing as how there has been a direct link between early Haitian political writers and the northern U.S. newspaper press in the first two decades of Haitian independence. Based on literary reviews and advertisements in 19th-century American newspapers, as well as the holdings of American libraries during that time, American readers living in the northern states were well acquainted with Haitian authors generally and with the works of P.V. Vastey in particular. American newspapers in the north that printed or reviewed Vastey's works tended to view Haiti favorably and argued for formal recognition of Haitian independence, as well as continued trade with the country. Vastey's ideas were thus crucial to the development of northern American attitudes towards Haitian independence in the early 19th-century, and one reviewer of his works called him “the Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian intellect and literature.”
Vastey got plenty of recognition during the 19th-century and amongst abolitionists, but that has not translated over into our time. Vastey’s text has a direct interaction with abolitionist literature. Vastey's critique of colonial discourse demanded the production of a counter-discourse, a new practice of history-telling founded on the formerly colonized people's right to "write a few pages for our just and legitimate defense.” Vastey believed that if black people went against the social norm and wrote things from their perspective, it would greatly improve their standing in society. Designed to be read by European and Haitian audiences alike, it is a direct intervention from the black state into international debates on slavery. This directly correlates with the idea of Africana studies.
