[2] Before the Bois Caïman ceremony, Vodou rituals were seen as an event of social gathering where enslaved Africans had the ability to organize.
The ceremony was presided over by Dutty Boukman, a prominent enslaved African leader and Houngan, and Cécile Fatiman, a mambo.
The Haitian writer Herard Dumesle visited the region and took oral testimonies in order to write his account of the ceremony.
Translated, it reads: …This God who made the sun, who brings us light from above, who raises the sea, and who makes the storm rumble.
[7]This excerpt from the official "History of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution"[8] serves as a general summary of the ceremonial events that occurred: A man named Boukman, another houngan, organized on August 24, 1791, a meeting with the slaves in the mountains of the North.
With a knife in her hand, she cut the throat of a pig and distributed the blood to all the participants of the meeting who swore to kill all the whites on the island.
Despite purported facts and embellishments that have dramatized the ceremony over the centuries, the most reoccurring anecdote is the sacrifice of a black Creole Pig to Ezili Dantor by the mambo Cécile Fatiman and the pact formed through its blood.
Dr. Leon-Francois Hoffmannn theorizes that the event simply had motivational and unitary roles to politically gather allies throughout Haiti.
In the 1970s, Roots Music has referred to the Bois Caiman event as a parallel to resisting the Duvalier totalitarian regime like their ancestors.
[12] Due to the influx of American Protestants in Haiti during the 1990s, some neo-evangelical Christians recontextualized the events at Bois Caïman as a Haitian "blood pact with Satan"[10] They were influenced by "spiritual warfare" theology and concerned that the Aristide government had made efforts to incorporate the Vodou sector more fully into the political process.