The Affaire de Bizoton

In February 1864, eight people from Bizoton, near Port-au-Prince, were tried, convicted and shot for the murder and cannibalism of a girl. Haiti in 1864 was a state seeking diplomatic recognition from powers that had spent sixty years describing it as a barbarism, and the government invited the foreign diplomatic corps to attend the trial. Among those who came was Spenser St John, the British consul general.

Twenty years later St John published Hayti, or the Black Republic, and put the case in it at length. The book was widely read and widely believed, and for a century and a half it has been the evidence anyone reaches for who wants to say that Haitian Vodou involves human sacrifice. Almost every later assertion of that claim traces back through this one book to this one trial.

St John was not naive about the proceedings. He recorded that the confessions had been obtained by beating the accused. He published the case anyway, as a demonstration of what Haiti was, which tells you what the account was for.

The Haitian state had its own use for the trial. A public conviction, watched by European diplomats, was a demonstration that the government was suppressing rural practice and was therefore a government of the kind that could be recognised. Both parties to the event had reasons to want the verdict that was reached, and that is the difficulty a reader now has to sit with.

There is a strong temptation to close this case in one direction or the other, and both closures would be false.

It would be false to say the accused did what they were convicted of. No trial transcript survives. The confessions were beaten out of them, on the word of the prosecution's own foreign witness. The court proceeded in French before defendants whose language was Creole. The government had a diplomatic interest in a conviction, and the observers had arrived already persuaded of the charge.

It would be equally false to say the case was invented. Nobody has demonstrated that. A crime of some kind may well have occurred; a rural community may have been scapegoated for it; several other things are possible. What is missing is not an argument but a record, and no amount of reasoning replaces one.

So this is recorded as unknown rather than as debated. There are no scholarly camps holding rival reconstructions of the night in Bizoton, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from. What exists is a gap that the accusation has been growing in ever since.

The distinction matters beyond this case. A claim that a religion practises human sacrifice is one of the oldest instruments there is for arguing that its practitioners are not fully people, and it has been used against Jews, against Christians in the Roman Empire, against West African, Pacific and Indigenous American peoples, and against Haitians. Where such a claim rests on a single trial with no surviving record, the honest report is that nobody knows, and that somebody could still go and look.