This article posits Nat Turner’s rebellion against slavocracy and Samory Toure’s resistance to French colonialism as cases of successful military strategies utilized by a subaltern group against a supposedly stronger enemy. It actually recognizes the two Black leaders as brilliant war strategists, who knew they were disadvantaged at many levels, but still faced their oppressors. By secretly plotting and killing tens of his masters while they were sleeping for instance, Turner succeeded in traumatizing the slavocracy. With his scorched earth strategy, Toure was able to terrorize the French colonial army. These methods offered both leaders psychological ascendency over the enemy. While much research is limited to the spatial and temporal paradigms of Turner’s and Toure’s fight against oppression, our study goes beyond and discusses the issue of the psychological impact of the two fighters’ rebellions on enemies, local populations, and sociopolitical systems afterwards. Our paper aims at analyzing Turner’s and Toure’s military experiences from a psychological perspective and this helps us generate a new historical perspective of both leaders’ efforts to dismantle oppressive systems.

Turner psychological Samory strategy victory