Toussaint Louverture et la vieille esclave

Ousmane Sowe
1935–2016, b. Dakar, Senegal
Worked in Dakar, Senegal
Toussaint Louverture et la vielle esclave
1989
Mixed media (iron, earth, jute, straw, other organic materials)
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; museum purchase, through exchange from Emil Eisenberg, and Mr. and Mrs. Norman Robbins, and with funds from Stuart Bohart and Barbara Portman, 2009-8-1

This work rises in the center of Heroes as the museum’s own Statue of Liberty.


A Black liberation leader stands holding out his hand, staring into an as-yet-unrealized future, as a formerly enslaved woman rises. The Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow created this work as part of a series of sculptures commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Unlike those sculptures, however, Sow’s Toussaint Louverture depicts a figure who actually struggled directly against the French state, taking on the mantle of the original revolutionary principles (egalité, fraternité, and, above all, liberté) surrendered at the dawn of the 19th century in Paris to the authoritarian rule of Napoleon.