At a time when European thinkers revelled in the repetitiveness of Haitian instability and slandered its Africanness, it was a Haitian writer who issued one of the loudest and earliest defences of Africa in the nineteenth century. Anténor Firmin, a lawyer, politician and intellectual from the northern city of Cap-Haïtien published in 1885 the book, De l'égalité des races humaines. In its title it was an explicit rejoinder to Gobineau. More substantively, Firmin insisted on Africa's centrality in world history. As European powers shared up African territory among themselves at the Berlin Conference, Firmin, who held his own among Parisian philosophers, argued that Africa was the epicentre of global civilization. There was no categorical scientific evidence of black inequality. And Haiti was the central argument for the progress of African people. Through its hero Toussaint Louverture, Haiti revealed, 'the astonishing and rapid evolution which Africans have undergone' (Firmin, 2001, p. 369). Toussaint, 'this son of Africa' forced the rest of the world to take note of the achievements of blacks in the Caribbean (Firmin, 2001, p. 374). Firmin presented Toussaint as a symbol of African potential on the continent and in the Caribbean:  
His glory is that of humanity as a whole, but it enables and fills with particular pride all the members of the African race whose marvellous aptitudes Toussaint so perfectly embodies. All these facts allow us to affirm that, when we study the rate at which the Black race has evolved with a measure of impartiality, it is impossible not to conclude that it shows itself eminently suited for all sorts of intellectual and moral achievements [...]. What other proof of the equality of the races do we need if we find no philosophical or scientific significance in the comparison of the initial state and later social development of the different races? (Firmin, 2001, p. 377).