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Tula
He did not only fight the Dutch: he asked them to show him the law that made him a slave.
The rise
Nothing is recorded of his birth. He was enslaved on the Kenepa plantation, called Knip, in the west of Curaçao, and took the nickname Rigaud from a general of the Saint-Domingue revolution. In 1795 the Netherlands fell under French rule, and word reached the island that France had freed the slaves of its colonies.
What they did
On 17 August 1795 he refused to work, walked off Knip with forty or fifty others to demand their freedom, and was sent on to the governor in Willemstad; the march grew plantation by plantation to a thousand and more. For a month he argued his case in law and scripture through the envoy Father Jacobus Schinck. Betrayed on 18 September, he was broken on the wheel and beheaded on 3 October.
The full picture
The revolt was crushed and slavery in the Dutch colonies lasted until 1863. Nearly everything known of him comes from the envoys who negotiated with him and the men who tortured him, including a confession extracted under torture. Curaçao named him a national hero in 2010; the Dutch state restored his name on 3 October 2023.
Why it matters
He turned a revolt into an argument — French law, Dutch defeat, the book of Genesis — and made the colony answer it. Two centuries later Curaçao built its national identity on that demand.
“We have been ill-treated too long. We mean harm to no one, but we want our freedom.”