‘BETWEEN 1789 & 1815 WITH THE SINGLE EXCEPTION OF BONAPARTE HIMSELF, NO SINGLE FIGURE APPEARED ON THE HISTORICAL STAGE MORE GREATLY GIFTED THAN THIS MAN, A SLAVE UNTIL HE WAS 45’. So reads Lubaina Himid’s quotation from C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins, a pioneering work of radical African Caribbean history, which she includes in the exhibition catalogue Depicting History Today. A few years earlier she had reproduced the same quotation as the caption accompanying her life-size cut-out of Toussaint Louverture. According to Himid's no less than James's reimagining, Louverture’s heroism as a social liberator and political revolutionary remains a source of inspiration due to the fact that he lived the majority of his life as an enslaved man. Working to extrapolate further from James's focus on Louverture's legendary status as an iconic liberator, Himid observes that ‘[i]t is no coincidence that more is known of Bonaparte than L’Ouverture/ Toussaint/ Napoleon Egypt/ Napoleon/ Toussaint/ Egypt/ Toussaint led the only successful slave revolution,/ it took twelve years./ The defeat of Bonaparte's expedition in 1803/ resulted in the establishment of/ the Black State of Haiti’. As an artist who is under no illusion regarding the stranglehold exerted by the widespread whitewashing of western social and political histories that deny and distort the presence of African diasporic peoples, Himid communicates no surprise that the memory of this Black man's heroism is all but invisibilised while that of Bonaparte as the white, male, iconic leader continues to be celebrated.

Across her decades-apart series, Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture I (1987) and Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture II (2002), Himid excavates and examines Louverture's mythical status as the leader of the ‘only successful slave revolution’. ‘History is painted/documented to glorify the living’, she declares, only to conclude at the end of this same page: ‘They who document/paint the History hold the Power’. In this multi-part and multi-layered series, Himid assumes the role not only of the artist but also of the historian, political commentator and social radical in order to ‘paint the History’ and ‘hold the Power’ over retelling, recreating and reimagining the life and works of this African Caribbean freedom fighter. No lone legend, exceptional icon or ‘single figure’, however, Himid's Louverture is newly rooted in missing genealogies of African diasporic collective and collaborative militancy.