Revolutionary Voodoo Leaders

Abstract

It is outside our major interest to trace here the formation of Voodoo as a religion on the island. The dates 1750 and 1767 given for the formation of Voodoo — which are given both by Moreau de Saint-Méry (Paul 1962: 230) and by an anonymous author (Price-Mars 1928: 113) — are misleading because they refer only to the years when colonists became aware of the existence of Voodoo on the island. In this chapter, I present data about revolutionary leaders and their use of Voodoo ideology and Voodoo meetings to show that, by the end of the eighteenth century, colonial Voodoo was indeed a politico-religious movement, and it was a critical factor that — among others — helped make successful the Haitian Revolution.