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From Slave Revolt To A Blood Pact With Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting Of Haitian History, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a ‘‘blood pact with Satan.’’ This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then …