Bois Caïman ceremony
부아 카이망 집회
The Vodou ceremony and conspiracy at which, on the night of 14 August 1791 in woods near Cap-Français, some 200 enslaved people are said to have planned the rising of the northern plain. Presided over by the priest Dutty Boukman and the priestess Cécile Fatiman, with a black pig sacrificed and an oath sworn, it led a week later to the slave rising of 21–22 August, the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. No first-hand account exists, the earliest record dates from 1814, and whether it happened is debated.
In depth
White planters allowed Vodou rituals as harmless social gatherings, and the enslaved used them as opportunities to organise. According to tradition, on the night of 14 August 1791 some 200 representatives of the nearby plantations met in the "Alligator Wood" (Bois Caïman) on the Choiseul plantation near Cap-Français, where the priest Boukman and the priestess Fatiman presided over the last of a series of meetings held for weeks to organise a revolt. Jean-François, Biassou and Jeannot are said to have attended, and Toussaint Louverture's biography records that the same day 200 slave foremen, Creoles and freed slaves met at a plantation at Morne-Rouge, where Biassou was chosen as leader on Toussaint's nomination. The first written account is the white colonist Antoine Dalmas's History of the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1814: "A black pig, surrounded by the slaves believe to have magical powers, each carrying the most bizarre offering, was offered as a sacrifice to the all-powerful spirit", whose blood the participants "believed to have marked themselves on the forehead with" and whose bristles they thought would make them invincible. Boukman's prayer, recorded by Hérard Dumesle from oral testimony in 1824, runs: "The God of the whites pushes them to crime, but he wants us to do good deeds. But the God who is so good orders us to vengeance... Throw away the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears. Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts", but Dumesle did not name Boukman, and the text appears to be a dramatisation with references to Greek and Roman writings. A week after the ceremony, on the night of 21–22 August, the whole northern plain was in flames.
Critics such as Léon-François Hoffmann hold that the story served to motivate and unite the rebels but that there is no factual basis for the event. By contrast the University of Gothenburg researcher Markel Thylefors writes that "the event of the Bois Caïman ceremony forms an important part of Haitian national identity as it relates to the very genesis of Haiti", and the ceremony has often been used as a source of inspiration to nationalists and as a symbol of resistance to oppression. In the 1970s roots music likened resistance to the Duvalier dictatorship to the ancestors' Bois Caïman. Under the influence of American Protestant missions in the 1990s, some evangelicals reinterpreted the ceremony as a "blood pact with Satan", and after the earthquake of 2010 Pat Robertson was denounced for saying that Haitians had been cursed after swearing "a pact to the devil". Boukman was killed by French troops on 7 November 1791, and Haitians admitted him to the pantheon of the loa, the guiding spirits.