Boukman Dutty

Dutty Boukman was born around 1740, most likely in Senegambia, and trafficked through Jamaica before being sold into Saint-Domingue. By 1791 he had risen to the position of houngan — a senior priest of the Vodou tradition — and to the position of commandeur, the field overseer who held the lash, on the Clément plantation on the northern plain.

On the night of the fourteenth of August 1791, he convened a clandestine ceremony in the Bois Caïman — the wood of the caimans — in the hills outside Cap-Français. He presided alongside Cécile Fatiman, a mambo. A storm was breaking. A black pig was sacrificed. The prayer Boukman delivered, transmitted orally and recorded by escaped French planters who heard it under interrogation, addressed the god of the slave-holders directly: "the god of the whites demands of us crimes; ours wants beneficence." The assembled enslaved swore an oath. One week later, on the night of the twenty-first of August 1791, simultaneous uprisings across the northern plain set the plantations alight.

Within forty-eight hours, one thousand plantations had been burned. The slave economy of the richest colony in the Atlantic world — which produced more sugar and coffee than every English Caribbean colony combined — collapsed in three weeks. The Haitian Revolution had begun.

Boukman was killed in combat by French troops on the seventh of November 1791. His head was severed and displayed in Cap-Français with a placard reading "the head of Boukman, leader of the rebels." He had been a slave for the entirety of his life.

The work he began ran for thirteen years and produced the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.

He is honored here as the priest who lit the longest revolution.