Bois Caïman (Haitian Creole: Bwa Kayiman) is the site of the Vodou ceremony presided over by Dutty Boukman on August 14, 1791. The stated purpose of the ritual was to attempt to overthrow French rule, which was based on slave labor.[1]
According to the official "History of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution",[2] in 1791 the following events occurred:
A man named Boukman, another houngan, organized on August 14, 1791, a meeting with the slaves in the mountains of the North. This meeting took the form of a Voodoo ceremony in the Bois Caiman in the northern mountains of the island. It was raining and the sky was raging with clouds; the slaves then started confessing their resentment of their condition. A woman started dancing languorously in the crowd, taken by the spirits of the loas. With a knife in her hand, she cut the throat of a pig and distributed the blood to all the participants of the meeting who swore to kill all the whites on the island. On August 22, 1791, the blacks of the North entered into a rebellion, killing all the whites they met and setting the plantations of the colony on fire. However, the French quickly captured the leader of the slaves, Boukman, and beheaded him, bringing the rebellion under control.
The following paragraph then goes on to say:
The death of Boukman although it had temporarily stopped the rebellion of the North failed to restrain the rest of the blacks from revolting against their condition. The Revolution that would give birth to the Republic of Haiti was under way and nothing could stop it.
The ceremony was first documented in 1814 by Antoine Dalmas in his book History of the Saint-Domingue Revolution.