Anténor Firmin


Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin, better known as simply Anténor Firmin, was a Haitian anthropologist, journalist, and politician. Firmin is best known for his book De l'égalité des races humaines, which was published as a rebuttal to French writer Count Arthur de Gobineau's work Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines. Gobineau's book asserted the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of blacks and other people of color.
Firmin's work, first published in 1885, argued the opposite, that "all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal". He was marginalized at the time for his beliefs that all human races were equal.
Firmin pioneered the integration of race and physical anthropology and may be the first black anthropologist. His work was recognized not only in Haiti but also among African scholars as an early work of négritude. He influenced Jean Price-Mars, the founder of Haitian ethnology and on American anthropologist Melville Herskovits. He worked in teaching, politics, and diplomacy. He founded Le Messager du Nord, a political and literary publication.
As the third generation of a post-independent Haiti, Firmin grew up in a working class family in Cap-Haitien. He studied law, and in the early 1800s, the political turmoil surrounding the new government of General Salomon forced him into exile in Paris where he served as a diplomat. During this time, he was admitted to the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris where he began writing L'Egalite des Races Humaines.
Following the ideas of Auguste Comte, Firmin was a stark positivist who believed that the empiricism used to study humanity was a counter to the speculative philosophical theories about the inequalities of races. Firmin sought to redefine the science of Anthropology in his work. He critiqued certain conventionally-held aspects of anthropology, such as craniometry and racialist interpretations of human physical data. He was the first to point out how racial typologies failed to account for the successes of those of mixed race as well as one of the first to state an accurate scientific basis for skin pigmentation.

Of the Equality of Human Races

In his best known work, De l'égalité des races humaines published in 1885, Firmin tackles two bases of existing theories on black inferiority in an effort to critique Gobineau's De l'Inégalité des Races Humaines. On the one hand, Firmin challenges the idea of brain size or cephalic index as a measure of human intelligence and on the other he reasserts the presence of African Blacks in pharaonic Egypt. He then delves into the significance of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and ensuing achievements of Haitians such as Léon Audain and Isaïe Jeanty in medicine and science and Edmond Paul in the social sciences.

Founder of Pan-Africanism

Firmin is one of three Caribbean men who launched the idea of Pan-Africanism at the end of the 19th century to combat colonialism in Africa. As a candidate in Haiti's 1902 presidential elections, he declared that the Haitian state should "serve in the rehabilitation of Africa". Along with Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams and fellow Haitian Bénito Sylvain, he was the organizer of the First Pan-African Conference which took place in London in 1900. That conference launched the Panafricanism movement. W.E.B. Du Bois attended the conference and was put in charge of drafting the general report. After the conference, 5 panafrican congresses were held in the 20th century which eventually led to the creation of the African Union.
Firmin was invested in the three main elements of Pan-Africanist thought: the rejection of the postulate of race inequality, proof that Africans were capable of civilization, and examples of successful Africans producing knowledge in diverse fields. In looking to move away from the biological understanding of race, Firmin's scientific approach was informed by the idea of a Black Egypt as the source of Greek civilization.

Pan-Caribbeanism

Anténor Firmin devised between 1875 and 1898 a Caribbean Confederation project which envisioned the unification of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
Firmin was interested in creating political and social unity throughout the Caribbean. This can be seen through his relationship with Puerto Rican intellectual and physician, Ramon Emeterio Betances. The pair first met in a meeting of the Society of Latin American Unity, an organisation that served as a social and political network for exiles from Latin America. It is here where they discussed the ideals of political sovereignty throughout the region. Unlike other icons from the Cuban and Puerto Rican separatist movements, Betances celebration of the Haitian Revolution countered those who did not see Haiti as an ideal revolutionary model, thus excluding it in their own plans for a Hispanic Caribbean federation.

Letters from St.Thomas

After a failed bid for presidency in 1902, Firmin was sent to live in exile in St. Thomas. In his last works, Letters from St.Thomas, Firmin remaps Haiti in the archipelago of the Americas, outlining its significance to the region as a whole. The letters reinforces Firmin's anti-essentialist agenda first displayed in L'Egalite des Races Humaines.

Selected works