Bois Caïman, and the Trouble with the Only Witnesses

On or about the night of 14 August 1791, at a wooded place in the northern plain of Saint-Domingue, enslaved people from a number of plantations met. Within days the northern plain was in revolt, and within two years the colony had ceased to function as a slave society. What happened at that meeting is another matter. The earliest sustained account comes from Antoine Dalmas, a French colonist writing in the following decade, whose purpose was to show that the revolt was the work of savages; he describes an animal sacrifice and an oath.

Later versions add a presiding priest, a woman with a knife, a prayer against the God of the colonists, and a text of that prayer whose earliest appearance is much later still. Historians accept a gathering and treat almost everything else as open. Some hold that the accounts preserve a recognisable Vodou ceremony conducted by people for whom it was ordinary. Others hold that what survives is a colonist's idea of African ritual, reused for a century and a half, and that reading it as ethnography imports the observer's assumptions as fact. Both readings agree that the gathering was, above all, an act of organisation across estates that were meant to be kept apart.