These stirring words are uttered by the eponymous protagonist of Aimé Césaire’s La Tragédie du Roi Christophe. The late Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) declared : “I am on the side of those who are oppressed.” As one of the founders of negritude, he championed black solidarity and sought to “decolonise the mind”, combatting the “cancerous” legacy of colonialism through both politics and art. “In Haiti,” said Aimé Césaire, “negritude stood up for the first time and proclaimed its faith in its humanity” (1956, 44). He hailed the liberating revolution of the “black jacobins” in Saint Domingue (as Haiti was then known) who created the first independent black state in the modern era. The redoubtable Henri Christophe was one of Toussaint-Louverture’s generals. An army of former slaves had won not only their freedom, but they also defeated Napoleon’s Grande Armée and an expedition of 20,000 British troops.La Tragédie du Roi Christophe covers a fourteen-year period, from Christophe’s accession to power in 1806 and his proclaiming himself king, through an ensuing civil war and resultant partition of the country, to his death by suicide in 1820. It focuses upon the aftermath of the successful liberation of Haiti and Christophe’s descent into tyranny. He seeks to simultaneously unify, protect and ennoble the formerly enslaved people by brutally forcing them to build the largest citadel in the western hemisphere on top of a mountain with treacherous slopes. “Le charmant paradoxe! En somme, le roi Christophe servirait la liberté par les moyens de la servitude…