I've been seeing conflicting sources on where the great Haitian revolutionary and Emperor was born. Some say he was born in Guinea and transported to Haiti as a slave, and other say he was born on a plantation in Northern Sant-Domingue. So, which is it?
This is a somewhat debated topic. I won't pretend to be a historian but I have read some pieces about his life. This article in particular is quite useful:
WAS Jean-Jacques Dessalines a Creole or an African? Historian Joan [Colin] Dayan, expressing the standard interpretation of mid- to late twentieth-century historiography, describes Dessalines as literally Creole—born in the colony—yet performatively and ideologically African. In this “vexed entry into history,” Dessalines was born, Dayan writes, “sometime in 1758 on the Cormiers plantation, in a parish now known as the Commune of Grande-Rivière du Nord,” where his first master was “a brutal white named Duclos”; he “was then sold to a black master.” The locally born Dessalines would have inherited the symbolically “French” privileges inherent in the distinction between Creole status and the plight of the newly arrived African, or “bossal,” slave, yet Dessalines was known for “rejecting things French.” In the popular tradition in Haiti, Dessalines was “apotheosized but not purged of incoherence” in Vodou, where Papa Desalin and Desalin Ogou are associated with the incarnation of the warrior’s spirit. In the composite stories about Dessalines “construed with different meanings by diverse groups over time,” Dessalines could “gesturally, figurally become African” to communicate with the majority African-born population. “We are dealing, therefore,” Dayan summarizes, “with a Creole who could take on the role of an African as easily as he could serve the French.”
BUT
In Dessalines’s lifetime the few individuals who spoke of his background at all described him as African-born, and this designation became the accepted historiographical account of his origins until the middle of the nineteenth century. The narrative of Dessalines as Creole, born on a particular plantation, emerged only in the mid- to late nineteenth century, in piecemeal fashion. If Dessalines was Creole, born of local parents on a specific plantation, it remained an astonishingly well-kept secret throughout his life and for four decades after his death: no historical traces, whether in the form of plantation registers, baptismal certificates, or accounts from his lifetime, have yet been discovered to support it. Prominent figures associated with the plantations and families invoked in the Creole narrative of Dessalines’s origins did write about the Haitian Revolution, but they did not mention any association with Dessalines.
The author goes on to discuss this debate but does end on the side of African origins, though she points out that new information could always change that. In the postscript she brings up the point that Dessalines' facial scarification was noted by a number of French soldiers at the time of the revolution. It is possible the practice was reproduced on a plantation or he could have received them growing up in West Africa.
As noted earlier, François-Richard de Tussac, speaking on behalf of a collectivity of exiled colonists, recalled that Dessalines’s body was “embroidered with the scars of ineffectual whippings, as he was incorrigible” and that Dessalines had said of these scars that he “would never have pity, either for blacks or for whites, until the scars had disappeared.”78 Was Dessalines also fighting for revolution as he understood it to keep his African scars from disappearing?