1791-08-14: (The Bois Caïman Ceremony, the Vodou Gathering Led by Boukman Where the Haitian Revolution Was Planned, the Spiritual and Political Act That Tran…

1791-08-14: (The Bois Caïman Ceremony, the Vodou Gathering Led by Boukman Where the Haitian Revolution Was Planned, the Spiritual and Political Act That Transformed Individual Grievances Into Collective Armed Resistance, and That Pat Robertson Would Defame Two Centuries Later as a “Pact With the Devil”): On August 14, 1791, a houngan named Boukman led a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman in the mountains above the northern plains of Saint-Domingue. What happened that night was both spiritual and strategic: in the presence of the lwa, Boukman unveiled his plans for a coordinated slave insurrection against the French plantation owners. The ceremony fused the sacred with the political in a way that was distinctly Haitian, a way that the colonial authorities had always feared and never understood. Vodou was not incidental to the Revolution. It was the organizational infrastructure, the communication network, and the spiritual fuel that made collective action possible among a half-million enslaved people who spoke different languages and came from different African nations. Bois Caïman was the moment when a shared spiritual practice became a shared political commitment. On January 13, 2010, the day after the catastrophic earthquake, American televangelist Pat Robertson declared on national television that the Haitian people were cursed because Boukman had signed a pact with the devil at Bois Caïman. The statement was ignorant, racist, and theologically illiterate, but it revealed something true about how the Western world has always viewed Haiti: as a place whose suffering must be deserved, whose spiritual traditions must be satanic, and whose revolutionary courage must be explained away as something other than what it was.