Robertson continued, “True story. And so the Satan mentioned, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’ However ever since, they’ve been cursed by one factor after one other.”
Robertson, who died final yr, may not have been essentially the most dependable authority: He endorsed the declare that feminists and homosexual folks have been chargeable for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults and predicted, at numerous factors, the approaching arrival of an Earth-destroying asteroid, “one thing like” a terrorist nuclear strike on america, and a Mitt Romney presidency.
However he didn’t invent the story of Haiti’s supposed take care of the Satan. Variations of it have been circulating for hundreds of years.
In its present kind, based on the Yale scholar Marlene Daut, the declare has been round for no less than 30 years, standard amongst evangelicals intent on spreading their interpretation of Christianity within the Caribbean nation. (I first heard it from a bunch of younger American missionaries in Port-au-Prince in early 2004 — one other turbulent second for Haiti, with a insurgent rebellion within the countryside, lethal violence within the capital and the flight of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile.)
Nevertheless it goes again a lot additional than that, to what many historians imagine was an actual occasion: a clandestine meeting of Africans in 1791 plotting in opposition to their European enslavers in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. As practitioners of Vodou, the admixture of West African and Catholic beliefs indigenous to the nation, they sacrificed an animal.
The gathering has been misrepresented by frightened White folks ever since.
Now, as felony violence in Haiti spikes, its embattled prime minister prepares to step down and america tries as soon as once more to rise up a brand new authorities, the story is resurfacing — aided, this time, by social media.
“Reminder that the Haitian rebels made a take care of a demon (doubtlessly Devil himself) to achieve their independence,” one X consumer wrote this month. “Haiti’s infinite struggling is just the satan amassing cost.”
“Haiti is hell based mostly on the voodoo ceremony pre-Haitian Revolution,” one other agreed. A 3rd provided recommendation: The nation “must repent of their take care of the satan, that Christ might void it.”
That night time within the Bois Caïman
As theology, the story has holes. “In Haitian Vodou, there is no such thing as a Devil,” mentioned Daut, a professor of French and African diaspora research. “There’s a god, however he’s Bondye, a god of everybody, god. There’s not a satan.”
However as historical past, it’s worse: It turns the triumph of the Haitian Revolution — a profitable slave revolt to create the world’s first Black republic, a key achievement within the historical past of human rights — right into a cautionary story. And it absolves, by omission, america, France and others of their efforts to strangle the younger nation in its cradle — the destabilizing international interference that really has bedeviled Haiti since its founding.
“It’s a lazy means of explaining the complexity of what occurred and what’s occurring now,” mentioned Bertin M. Louis Jr., an anthropologist on the College of Kentucky. “It obscures the precise evil that’s been carried out and perpetrated in opposition to Haitians.”
So what actually occurred that stormy August night time within the wooded mountains outdoors the northern metropolis of Cap-Français?
For Haitians, the gathering within the Bois Caïman — Alligator Forest — is a second of glory: step one within the nation’s 12-year march from slavery and colonization to freedom and independence.
There’s no identified eyewitness testimony of the ceremony, and a few students have argued it’s a legend, created to unify and inspire the rebels. However there are a number of near-contemporary studies, from French settlers in addition to Africans, asserting that some kind of assembly was convened on or round Aug. 14, 1791, outdoors town now referred to as Cap-Haïtien, at which the members sought a blessing for an rebellion.
Most agree on key factors. As many as lots of of Africans, representing a number of space plantations, met at a prearranged time and place to listen to Dutty Boukman, a houngan, or Vodou priest, and Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, or priestess.
“It was raining and the sky was raging with clouds,” based on an account revealed by the Haitian authorities. “The slaves then began confessing their resentment of their situation.”
Fatiman, “taken by the spirits of the loas” — supernatural intermediaries between people and Bondye — “began dancing languorously.” She sliced open the throat of a black Creole pig to honor Èzili Dantò, the female loa of affection. Then the attendees “swore to kill all of the whites on the island.”
To make Saint-Domingue the world’s most profitable colony — by the top of the 18th century, it was the main producer of espresso and sugar, and a significant supply of cotton, indigo and cacao — the French practiced slavery with infamous violence.
Women and men have been pressured to labor within the tropical solar for 12 hours or extra a day to meet ever-rising manufacturing quotas. Those that have been injured or turned sick have been typically discarded; the French might import replacements. Punishments for alleged transgressions — working too slowly, feigning sickness, working away — included rape, amputation and being burned or buried alive.
When the Africans rose up, they returned the brutality in form, invading houses to awaken and kill their enslavers and looting and burning plantations. Over the following dozen years, Haitian rebels and French troopers waged a vicious conflict of attrition. Both sides misplaced tens of 1000’s of fighters — a number of instances the casualties suffered by america and Britain within the American Revolution.
France finally surrendered, and on Jan. 1, 1804, the revolutionary chief Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence. However Paris wasn’t carried out with its former prize colony. At first, the French refused to acknowledge the brand new state. So did america and the European powers, fearful that the Haitians’ success would encourage comparable revolts among the many folks they have been enslaving in their very own territories.
Lastly, in 1825, France’s King Charles X provided a means ahead: reparations — for the previous enslavers. The value of admission to the household of countries, he mentioned, could be 150 million francs — an indemnity, ostensibly, to repay the French colonizers for property, together with enslaved folks, that they had misplaced within the revolution.
This literal king’s ransom has been estimated at 10 instances Haiti’s annual authorities income on the time. Charles despatched warships to Port-au-Prince to gather the primary installment.
With greater than 500 French cannon pointed on the capital, President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed — and instantly took out a mortgage from a Parisian financial institution to cowl the preliminary cost. Thus started the double debt, a snowball of compounding curiosity owed to French and later American lenders that successfully arrested the event of the war-ravaged new nation.
The U.S. reimposes pressured, unpaid labor
Whereas Latin American neighbors spent the nineteenth century gaining independence, constructing infrastructure and modernizing their economies, the Haitian authorities was sending the majority of its revenue to France. Poverty unfold, corruption flourished, public discontent grew.
France didn’t set up diplomatic relations with Haiti till 1838; Britain, not till 1859. America held out till 1862, when the Civil Struggle reframed the nationwide debate over slavery.
Persevering with claims a couple of Faustian cut price, in the meantime, saved Haiti remoted from its neighbors.
“It’s the concept that the American Revolution is providential and has resulted as a result of the founders made a pact with God,” Daut mentioned, “and the Haitian Revolution is satanic as a result of the Haitian revolutionaries made a pact with Devil.”
It took Haiti greater than 60 years to lastly fulfill the indemnity, in 1888, and practically 60 extra to repay the related curiosity, in 1947. The price of this burden in cash spent and growth misplaced, the New York Instances reported in 2022, quantities to $115 billion — eight instances the dimensions of Haiti’s financial system in 2020.
However the loss doesn’t finish there. Indemnity-related debt held by Individuals offered a pretext for President Woodrow Wilson to order the Marines into Port-au-Prince in 1915, set up martial regulation and occupy the nation for the following 19 years.
In a tragic irony, america subjected Haitians to corvée — pressured, unpaid labor — for public constructing tasks. To Haitians, it was the reimposition of slavery. However rebellions have been swiftly put down; Marines and the U.S.-trained Gendarmarie killed 1000’s of Haitians.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934. Nonetheless, Washington would stay carefully concerned in Haiti’s affairs, funding growth but additionally supporting despots who promised to again U.S. pursuits. These included, initially, François “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Child Doc” Duvalier, murderous kleptocrats who terrorized and plundered the nation from 1957 to 1986.
In a more moderen instance, U.S. officers pushed the Haitian authorities to incorporate Michel Martelly within the 2011 presidential runoff. The favored singer’s five-year time period was marred by allegations of corruption and violence. A U.N. panel final yr accused him of utilizing “gangs to broaden his affect over neighborhoods to advance his political agenda, contributing to a legacy of insecurity, the impacts of that are nonetheless being felt at the moment.”
That’s sufficient devilry to elucidate no less than a lot of Haiti’s challenges with out resorting to tales of satanic affect. However Daut sees one other objective to that declare.
“It’s actually a technique to take consideration off the truth that the Haitian revolutionaries did one thing the world had by no means seen by completely abolishing slavery and making a slavery-free state in the course of all these different slaving empires,” she mentioned.
“Should you say the Haitian Revolution was essentially the most radical revolution the Western world had ever seen, folks will say, ‘Yeah, however have a look at Haiti now. How are you going to say the Haitian Revolution was profitable?’
“However in fact it’s! We reside in a world now the place everybody agrees that slavery is unhealthy, and for the Haitians to be the primary ones to carry that narrative ahead is highly effective and necessary, and shouldn’t be allowed to be obscured by charlatans on the market peddling theories that actually are simply meant to transform extra folks to their faith.”
Widlore Mérancourt contributed to this report.
