Dutty Boukman @ Bois Caiman Ceremony - All over Print Tshirt -

On the night of August 14, 1791, representative slaves from nearby plantations gathered to participate in a secret ceremony conducted in the woods by nearby Le Cap in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The ceremony was presided over by Dutty Boukman, a prominent enslaved African leader and Houngan, and Cécile Fatiman, a mambo.^[2] A witness described the presence of 200 enslaved Africans at the event.^[3] The ceremony served as both a religious ritual and strategic meeting as enslaved Africans met and planned a revolt against their ruling white enslavers of the colony's wealthy Northern Plain. The ceremony is considered the official beginning of the Haitian Revolution.

Participants of the Bois Caïman ceremony were inspired to revolt against their white oppressors due to their promise to the mysterious woman who appeared during the ceremony. The African woman figure had declared Boukman the “Supreme Chief” of the rebellion. In the following days, the whole Northern Plain was in flames, as the revolutionaries fought against the whites who had enslaved them. To reduce the social disorder of the rebellion, the French captured Boukman and beheaded him. The French then displayed his head on Cap's square to prove his mortality and French power.^[4]

Clouded in mystery, many accounts of the catalytic ceremony and its particular details have varied. There are no known first-hand written accounts about what took place that night. It was first documented in the white colonist Antoine Dalmas's "History of the Saint-Domingue Revolution", published in 1814.^[5]