Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue was the French colony on the western third of Hispaniola and, by the late eighteenth century, the most profitable plantation colony in the world. Its population was overwhelmingly enslaved, overwhelmingly African-born because mortality was so high that the workforce was replaced by importation rather than reproduced, and drawn from a range of West and Central African peoples.

What became Haitian Vodou was assembled in those conditions. People arriving from the Bight of Benin brought the vodun of the Fon and Ewe, people from the Kongo brought a different system, Yoruba practice arrived with others, and none of them arrived with their shrines, their lineages or their ritual specialists intact. Baptism was legally required and Catholic instruction minimal, which supplied a further vocabulary of saints, prayers and images. The result is a tradition with distinct rites within it, Rada and Petwo above all, whose differences preserve those origins rather than blurring them.

Its structure is recognisably African: a distant creator, a working population of spirits called lwa who are served with drumming, song, food and dance and who arrive by possessing devotees, and the dead as continuing participants. Its calendar and its imagery are partly Catholic. It is not a syncretism in the sense of a blend that lost its parts; the parts remain identifiable, and practitioners distinguish them.

In August 1791 a gathering is said to have taken place at a place called Bois Caiman in the north of the colony, at which a pig was sacrificed, an oath was sworn and a rising was agreed. The insurrection that began days later grew into the revolution that ended slavery in the colony and produced the independent state of Haiti in 1804, the only state in history created by a successful revolt of the enslaved.

The historical questions about the ceremony are real. The earliest detailed accounts were written some decades afterwards, by authors with strong views about the revolution's character, and the details vary between them. Whether an event of this kind occurred is generally accepted; the specifics, the names of those present and the words spoken, are much less secure than their frequent repetition suggests.

What is certain is what the story has been used for. In Haiti it stands as the founding act of the nation, in which the religion of the enslaved is the medium of their liberation. Outside Haiti it has been used in the opposite direction, most persistently in the claim that the country was dedicated to the devil at its founding and that its later misfortunes follow from that, a claim revived publicly after the 2010 earthquake.

Kate Ramsey's history of the Haitian state's laws on Vodou traces how the practice was criminalised, tolerated and prosecuted in turn under successive governments.