This piece really resonated, especially the insistence that spirit, ritual, and joy are not aesthetic extras but strategic foundations of liberation. That framing feels deeply right.

One place where I felt a quiet absence, though🫣 was in the claim that the Haitian Revolution was the first successful slave revolution. Haiti is unquestionably singular in its global impact and in the formation of a Black republic. At the same time, that framing depends on a very state centered definition of “success.”

Long before Haiti, enslaved Africans in Suriname(South America) escaped plantation slavery, defeated Dutch military campaigns, and established sovereign Maroon nations in the rainforest. By the mid-18th century, the Dutch were forced to sign treaties recognizing these communities as free, autonomous peoples. This freedom was not symbolic or temporary. It was lived, defended, and sustained across generations.

What feels especially relevant to your argument is that Maroon freedom was inseparable from spiritual ceremony, ancestor veneration, ritual law, and an African cosmology that organized governance, land, and social life. Spirit was not a moment of mobilization but an ongoing infrastructure of freedom. In that sense, marronage represents not only resistance to slavery, but a refusal of the colonial world altogether. We still have towns where white people arent allowed. Because their spirits do not align.

I don’t see this as competing with Haiti’s legacy, but as expanding our understanding of what liberation can look like when it is not oriented toward capturing the state, recognition, or Enlightenment political forms. Maroon societies show that joy, spirit, and ritual were not only revolutionary catalysts, but the basis of parallel worlds that endured.

Given how central spirit is to your analysis, I think Maroon histories, especially those of Suriname, would deepen this conversation rather than complicate it. They remind us that some of the most radical forms of Black freedom were never meant to be legible to empire in the first place🤍