On a stormy August night in 1791, an assembly of the enslaved in the woods at Bwa Kayiman — with the houngan Boukman and, in most accounts, a priestess named Cécile Fatiman — swore an oath and sacrificed a pig. A week later the northern plain was in flames, and thirteen years later Haiti was the world's first Black republic. Historians debate the details; Haitians treat the ceremony as the revolution's founding moment, which is exactly why Vodou has been the target of so much external hostility since.