“What the goddamn hell is this?” Cyril Lionel Robert James, lanky cricketer and budding journalist in colonial Trinidad, was unhappy as he scoured libraries in Port of Spain for a decent book on France’s former colony Saint-Domingue. The young writer could find only the likes of Percy Waxman’s The Black Napoleon. In those pages, he learned the rebel general Toussaint Louverture’s

face was decidedly homely. He possessed a forbidding prognathous jaw. His lips were thick, his nose broad and flat, with nostrils wide and open. His voice was high-pitched, nasal, and none too pleasant.

Though sympathetic to Toussaint’s struggle against the French colonial ruling class, the Australian writer Waxman couldn’t look past race. His book proved a radicalizing moment for the young Trinidadian. “I was tired of hearing that the West Indians were oppressed,” James recalled decades later, “that we were black and miserable, that we had been brought from Africa, and that we were living there and that we were being exploited” — hence his “goddamn hell.”