My plane landed at Rochambeau Airport in French Guiana. But who is this Rochambeau? Well, it is the name of the most fearsome executioner France ever sent to Saint-Domingue—the name of Haiti before independence—to crush the slave revolt. Rochambeau is known for having organized that tragic ball in Port-au-Prince where wives danced in one room while their husbands were being slaughtered in the next. He was also the one who brought from Cuba dogs trained to hunt down maroons, those slaves who fled the hellish plantation system. For Haitians, Rochambeau still represents the absolute enemy today. And guess whom Haitians—there are more than 20,000 of them in French Guiana—come across when they arrive in Cayenne? Rochambeau.

All right, we will admit that Rochambeau is at home here, on French territory, but French Guiana is overwhelmingly inhabited by Black people, the same people who were brought from Africa to the Americas in the holds of ships to replace the Indigenous people decimated by labor that was too harsh. The shared history of Black people in the Americas. It is still unfortunate that French Black people in the Americas—Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana—have studied the history of the kings of France far more than that of slavery. This is what the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant calls “a case of successful colonization.” When one raises this subject in French Guiana, people reply in an irritated tone that it is not the same Rochambeau. It would instead be his father, Jean-Baptiste Rochambeau. It is true that the father was a hero of American independence, so why not make that clear by also using his first name? For us, Donatien Rochambeau, the son, is one of the worst monsters the colony ever knew. Fortunately, since 2012, the name has been changed to Félix-Éboué International Airport, named after this son of French Guiana who became Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa.