Alongside the Bois Caiman ceremony discussed in the main entry, the figure of Francois Makandal, a maroon leader active in Saint-Domingue in the 1750s, occupies a similarly important place in the historical memory Petwo carries, though the record around him is thinner and more contested than the ceremony is.
Makandal, an enslaved man who escaped and led a maroon community, was accused by French colonial authorities of organizing a poisoning campaign against enslaved collaborators and slaveholders, using knowledge of local plants, and colonial sources credit him with substantial religious authority, describing him in terms colonial writers associated with sorcery, though these accounts come entirely from hostile French sources and require caution. Captured in 1758, Makandal was burned at the stake in Cap-Francais, and Haitian oral tradition transformed him into a legendary figure said to have transformed into an insect or animal to escape the flames, a story functioning as a statement that his spirit survived his execution.
Makandal is remembered within Haitian tradition as an early forerunner of the revolutionary current later associated with Petwo's forceful character, connecting a documented mid-eighteenth-century episode of resistance to the religious formation the main entry describes as shaped under conditions of extreme violence, though, as with Bois Caiman, historians caution against treating the popular narrative, particularly its supernatural elements, as fact rather than as memory reshaped over two and a half centuries.