Bois Caiman (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's article on the Bois Caiman ceremony, community-edited. Reliable for the ceremony's date, most commonly given as 14 August 1791 (one source cited in the article gives 24 August), its location in woods near Le Cap in Saint-Domingue, roughly 200 enslaved Africans present, the Houngan Dutty Boukman and the mambo Cecile Fatiman leading it, a pig sacrificed to Ezili Dantor, and its standing as the traditional opening of the Haitian Revolution, Boukman captured and beheaded within days. The article also carries the genuine historiographical dispute over the event: no first-hand account survives, the earliest written record is colonist Antoine Dalmas's in 1814, and some scholars, Leon-Francois Hoffmann among them, argue the ceremony as commonly told may be a later mythologized creation.