HARRIET TUBMAN SEMINAR

Department of History,
York University

Monday, 8 November 1999

On the African background to the slave insurrection in Saint-

Domingue (Haïti) in 1791: The Bois Caiman ceremony and the
Dahomian ‘blood pact’

Robin Law (University of Stirling, Scotland)1

By a recent decision of UNESCO, 23 August has been designated as the

‘International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its
Abolition’.2 This choice of date alludes to the beginning of the insurrection
of slaves in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern
Haïti), in the night of 22-23 August 1791 (though this actually began
before midnight, and so strictly on 22 rather than 23 August). This
insurrection led directly to the formal abolition of slavery by the French
authorities on Saint-Domingue on 29 August 1793, which was
retrospectively endorsed (and, at the same time, generalized to France’s
other Caribbean colonies) by the ruling Convention in Paris on 4 February
1794. Although Napoleon subsequently re-legalized slavery in French
colonies in 1802, this attempt to re-establish the institution was not
effective in Saint-Domingue, serving only to provoke the proclamation of
that colony’s independence, as the Republic of Haïti, in 1804. Although
the abolition of slavery by France in 1793-4 was in part a reflection of the
radicalism of the then dominant Jacobins (and more particularly, of their
willingness to challenge rights of property), 3 at a more basic level it was
no more than a recognition of realities on the ground in Saint-Domingue,
where slavery as a functioning institution had already been destroyed by
the slave insurrection which began on the night of 22-23 August 1791.
Saint-Domingue was thus not only the first major slave-owning territory in
which slavery was abolished,4 but also the pre-eminent instance where
this liberation was umambiguously effected by the actions of the slaves
themselves.

1 Earlier versions of this paper were read at the International Roundtable on the Insurrection of the
Night of 22 August 1791, Port-au-Prince, Haïti, Nov. 1997; and the Anglo-French Conference on
Slavery and its Abolition, Nuffield College & Maison Française, Oxford, Dec. 1998.
2
29 C/Resolution 40, adopted by the General Council of Unesco, 12 Nov. 1997.

3 cf. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (London, 1988).

4Slavery had been abolished earlier in some individual states of what became
the USA (e.g. Vermont in 1777), and declared illegal in some European countries
(e.g. Scotland in 1778), but in such cases the numbers of slaves affected were
very small..

1
 This action of the slaves of Saint-Domingue in claiming their
freedom has commonly been explained in terms of the impact of the
Revolution in France, through both the influence of its slogans of liberty
and its destabilization of the ruling structures in Saint-Domingue itself. 5
However, it has also been widely recognised, at least in general terms,
that there is an African, as well as a metropolitan French background to
the Saint-Domingue slave insurrection.6 The insurrection of 1791 was,
after all, predominantly, an affair of Africans. Although the highest level of
the leadership of the insurrection, including Toussaint l’Ouverture, were
Creoles, some leaders at a subordinate or local level were African-born (for
example, Haolou, one of the insurgent leaders in the West);7 and more
critically, the mass of the slaves who followed them were predominantly
born in Africa. Recent research on Saint-Domingue plantation records
indicates that at the time of the revolution of 1791, between 60-70% of
slaves were African-born.8 Indeed, tension between the Creole leadership
and the predominantly African rank-and-file was an important sub-text in
the development of the Haïtian revolution.9 It is not argued, it should be
stressed, that African-born slaves were more likely than Creoles to rebel, a
proposition which the pattern of the Haïtian insurrection does not in fact
support: the rebellion was centred in the sugar plantations on the coastal
plains rather than in the coffee plantations in the hills, although the latter
contained a higher proportion of African-born slaves (largely because
coffee cultivation had developed more recently), and the area where the
rebellion began, the northern plain, was in fact that with the highest
proportion of Creoles, indeed ‘probably the only part of Saint Domingue
where creole men outnumbered African men’. 10 Rather, the point is that
that in order effectively to mobilize the mass of slaves, leaders would
have to appeal to or manipulate African cultural traditions.
‘African-born’ slaves, of course, came, not from a generic ‘Africa’,
but from specific African societies, with distinct cultural and religious

5 e.g. in the classic account by C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (revised ed., London, 1980).

6 See e.g. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville, 1989).

7 Haolou was a Nago (Yoruba).

8David Geggus, ‘Sugar and coffee cultivation in Saint-Domingue and the shaping
of a slave labor force’, in Ira Berlin & Philip Morgan (eds), Cultivation and Culture:
Work process and the shaping of Afro-American culture in the Americas
(Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993), 73-98.

9 For some discussion of this issue, see John K. Thornton, ‘“I am the subject of the King of Kongo”:
African political ideology and the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of World History 4/2 (1993), 181-214,
esp. 199-206; David Geggus’ Slave society in the sugar plantation sones of Saint Domingue and the
Revolution of 1791-3’, Slavery & Abolition, 20/2 (1999), 31-46, esp. 41.

10 Geggus, ‘Slave society’, 40-41; cf. also his earlier study, Slavery, War and Insurrection: The
British Occupation of Saint-Domingue 1793-1798 (Oxford, 1982), 40-41.

2
traditions. Conventional theories of ‘creolization’ stress the dissolution of
particularistic African ethnic identities and cultures in the conditions of the
New World;11 but although this perspective clearly has some validity with
respect to long-term developments, it tends to obscure the degree to
which, in the shorter term, slaves in the Americas maintained ethnic
identities based upon their origins in Africa. Even in the case of the USA,
where it is usually supposed that conditions were especially unfavourable
to the persistence of African cultural identities, the most recent analysis
stresses the length of time which it took for a generic black or African-
American identity, transcending particularistic African ethnicities, to
emerge.12 It is clear, in fact, that African-born slaves, if not their
descendants, commonly retained an identification with their African
communities of origin, and organized much of their religious, social and
recreational activities along ethnic lines. This phenomenon is best
documented for the cases of Brazil and Cuba in the nineteenth century; 13
but it was clearly general throughout the Caribbean during the eighteenth
century. To cite just one example, the autobiography of the ex-slave
Olaudah Equiano notes that in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1770s, in slaves’
Sunday gatherings: ‘Here each different nation of Africa meet and dance
after the manner of their own country’.14 In Saint-Domingue likewise,
African religion was clearly also organized in ethnic cults; indeed, down to
the present the loa (deities) of the Haïtian vaudou religion are classified
into nanchons (nations) which are understood to represent their areas of
origin in Africa.15
This is not, of course, to suggest that the ‘nations’ recognised by slaves in
the Americas were simply reproductions of identities which existed in Africa. On the
contrary, they involved the transformation and redefinition of identities; this much, at least,
may be said to be common ground in the sometimes polemical debate between partisans of
cultural ‘continuities’ from Africa and of ‘creolization’ in the Americas as the appropriate
model for understanding slave cultures.16 In particular, the redefinition of identities in the

11 Sydney Mintz & Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A
Caribbean Perpective (Philadelphia, 1976).

12 Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The transformation of African identities in the
Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998).

13 See e.g. the classic studies by Nina Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil (1906, revised ed.,
Petropolis 1932); Fernando Ortiz, Los negros esclavos (1916; reprinted Havana, 1987).

14 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (London, 1789), ii,
101.

15See esp. Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (trtans. Hugo Charteris, New York,
1972), 28, 86-7.

16 See,, e.g. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The African diaspora: revisionist interpretations of ethnicity, culture
and religion under slavery’, Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation
[electronic journal], 2/1 (1997); Philip D. Morgan, ‘The cultural implications of the Atlantic Slave
Trade: African regional origins, New World destinations and New World developments’, Slavery &
Abolition, 18 (1997), 122-45.

3
Americas often involved the aggregation of previously distinct (albeit culturally and
linguistically related) peoples into larger ‘nations’, whose names in America were sometimes
neologisms but more commonly ethnonyms or toponyms which had a restricted application in
Africa but were given a more inclusive sense in the New World. The term ‘Congo’, for
example, was commonly used in the Americas to refer not only to those who came from the
African kingdom of Kongo, but also to include neighbouring groups who spoke more or less
closely related languages, such as Loango, Mayombe, Mondonge (Teke), and Yaka. 17 A
similar process of ethnic aggregation occurred in the case of the peoples nowadays known as
Yoruba, who in Africa down to the nineteenth century were fragmented among several
independent and mutually hostile states, recognising no common ethnicity, but who in the
Americas came to be classified, and ultimately at least to classify themselves, as a single
‘nation’, generally called ‘Nago’ (but ‘Lucumi’ in Spanish America, including Cuba). 18
Likewise, speakers of the languages nowadays classified as Gbe (or, by
earlier usage, Aja-Ewe), who in Africa had no political unity and employed
no common ethnonym, became aggregated in the trans-Atlantic diaspora
into one ‘nation’, called most commonly ‘Rada’, ‘Arada’ or ‘Arara’ (all
variants of the name of Allada, the most powerful state in the region prior
to the rise of Dahomey in the early eighteenth century), but ‘Jeje’ in Brazil
and ‘Papa [Popo]’ in English and Danish Caribbean colonies. In the Danish
West Indies in the eighteenth century, the ‘Papa’ nation was thus defined
as including the ‘Apeschi [Kpessi, in modern Togo]’, ‘Arrada [Allada]’,
‘Attolli [Tori, between Allada and the sea]’, and ‘Affong [Fon, i.e.
Dahomians]’;19 and in Cuba in the nineteenth century, the ‘Arara’ included
the Mahi and Savalou to the north, as well as the Dahomians.20
In Saint Domingue, despite the multiplicity of African ethnicities
represented among its slave population, certain particular African groups
were disproportionately numerous. Although slaves were drawn from all
regions of Africa, from Senegambia to Mozambique, two regions of supply
were overwhelmingly predominant: West-Central Africa (Angola) and the
‘Slave Coast’ (Bight of Benin). Over the entire period from the 1720s to
the 1790s, West-Central Africa supplied nearly half (45%) of the slaves
whose ethnicities are recorded, the Bight of Benin over a quarter (28%).
Within each of these two regions, moreover, a particular ethnicity of
slaves predominated: those shipped from West-Central Africa were
overwhelmingly ‘Congo’; while of those shipped from the Bight of Benin,

17 So e.g. in Cuba: Ortiz, Los negros esclavos, 45-6.

18 See further Robin Law, ‘Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as ethnonyms in
West Africa’, History in Africa, 24 (1997), 205-19.

19 C.G.A. Oldendorp, Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brüder auf den
caraibischen Inseln St Thomas, St Croix und St Jan (1777), translated in Soi-
Daniel W. Brown, ‘>From the tongues of Africa: a partial translation of
Oldendorp’s interviews’, Plantation Society, 11/1 (1983), 49. Oldendorp, in fact,
also includes the ‘Nagoo’, or Yoruba, within the ‘Papaa Nation’; presumably, this
sort of absorption of distinct but (in Africa) neighbouring groups reflects
bilinguality among transported slaves.

20 Ortiz, Los negros esclavos, 42-3 (‘magino’, ‘sabalu’)

4
around half (52%) came from Gbe-speaking groups, generally called
‘Radas’ (or ‘Aradas’).21 This numerical dominance of Congos and ‘Radas’ is
evidently reflected in the structure of the vaudou religion, whose principal
deities are organized into the two complementary/opposed groups called
‘Rada’ and ‘Petro’, of which the latter seem to be mainly of Congo origin. 22
Cultural influence is not, however, directly or simply correlated with
demographic strength, since although Congos were around three times as
numerous as the Radas in the Saint-Domingue slave population, it is the
Rada rather than the Petro cults which are hegemonic within the vaudou
system (the term ‘vaudou’ itself being, of course, of ‘Rada’ origin). 23 The
explanation for this apparent paradox is as yet unclear, although one
factor may have been that the Radas were relatively more numerous in
the earlier part of the eighteenth century (the balance between them and
the Congos shifting towards the latter during the course of the century),
so that Rada elements were entrenched in Saint-Domingue slave culture
at an early stage;24 another may have been that the proportion of females
among ‘Rada’ slaves was relatively higher, thereby facilitating the process
of cultural transmission.25 In addition, it should be remembered that many
of the slaves taken from Congo were already Christian, rather than
followers of their ‘traditional religion’.26

21See data summarized in Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison, 1969), chapter 6. Also, further material in David Geggus, ‘Sex ratio,
age and ethnicity in the Atlantic slave trade: data from French shipping and
plantation records’, Journal of African History, 30/1 (1989), 23-44.

22Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 85-8. For the African oreigins of the ‘Rada’ cults, see
also Guérin Montilus, Dieux en diaspora: les loa haïtiens et les vaudou du
royaume d’Allada (Bénin) (Niamey, 1988). The view of Maya Deren, The Voodoo
Gods (St Albans, 1975), 65-74, that the Petro cults were basically Amerindian in
origin (though incorporating Congolese elements) is aberrant and implausible.

23 In Fon and other Gbe languages, vodun is the generic term for deities; whereas in Haiti it
designates the system of religious practice, individual deities being termed loa.

24Cf. the suggestive (though problematic) evidence of Moreau de Saint-Méry,

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie
française de l’île de Saint-Dominque (1797), that the Petro rite was introduced
(by one Don Pedro - whence the name) only in 1768: discussed in Métraux,
Voodoo in Haiti, 38-9.

25 David Geggus, ‘Sex ratio’, 36.

26In the Danish West Indies in this period, it was noted that ‘The Negroes from
the Congo nation who come to the West Indies have, for the most part, a
recognition of the true God and of Jesus Christ’: Oldendorp, in Brown, ‘From the
tongues of Africa’, 51. For Christian continuities from Africa to the Americas more
generally, cf. John Thornton, ‘On the trail of voodoo: African Christianity in Africa
and the Americas’, The Americas, 44/1 (1988), 261-78; also Linda M. Heywood,
‘The Angola-Afro-Brazilian cultural connection’¸ Slavery & Abolition, 20/1 (1999),
9-23.

5
The African background to the insurrection of 1791
The African background is relevant to the success of the slave insurrection
of 1791 in various ways. In the first place, as John Thornton has argued in
a recent (1991) article, it is likely that the military effectiveness of the
insurgent slaves reflected their previous experience of military service in
Africa. Although Thornton based this argument more on grounds of a
priori probability than direct documentation, he was able to cite one
explicit statement, by the rebel leaders Jean-François and Biassou shortly
after the uprising, that their African-born followers had been ‘accustomed
to war’ in their homelands.27
That attitudes and beliefs derived from Africa also played a role in
the insurrection seems likewise hardly in question. The classic study of
Haïtian history by Thomas Madiou records traditions of the rising, which
make clear that different insurgent leaders appealed variously to
Christianity and to African religions, or sometimes to a combination of
both. Thus the original leader of the insurrection in the North, Jean-
François, employed a Catholic priest as his regimental chaplain, but his
two principal lieutenants, Biassou and Jeannot, surrounded themselves
with priests of African cults (‘sorcerers’ and ‘magicians’, in Madiou’s own
loaded terminology). In the West, one insurgent leader in 1792-3, Romaine
Rivière, claimed to be the godson of the Virgin Mary, but another,
Hyacinthe Ducoudray, although he obliged a Catholic priest to bless his
army, also employed ‘sorcerers’ who promised his soldiers that if killed
they would be re-born in Africa; while the African-born Haolou depended
on ‘sorcerers or papas [i.e. vaudou priests]’; and later, in the war of
independence in 1802-3, Lamour Derance likewise employed ‘fetish
priests and papas’.28
It is questionable, however, whether, as is sometimes suggested, it
was African religion which provided the means through which the
insurgent slaves achieved a common organization, 29 because it is likely
that ‘voodoo’ as it existed in the revolutionary period still represented a
series of essentially separate ethnic cults, rather than a synthetic system
which could have transcended ethnic divisions: this seems not only
probable on a priori grounds (given the division into separate ‘nations’
which characterizes the organization of ‘voodoo’ cults even to the
present), but has been argued on the basis of the (admittedly
fragmentary) contemporary record in a recent study by David Geggus. 30

27John K. Thornton, ‘African soldiers in the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of

Caribbean History, 25/1-2 (1991), 58-79.

28Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti (repr. Port-au-Prince, 1989), i, 96-7, 128, 131-
3, 234; iii, 33.

29 For a typical statement, see James, Black Jacobins, 86: ‘Voodoo was the medium of the
conspiracy’.

30Cf. David Geggus, ‘Haitian Voodoo in the eighteenth century: language, culture
and resistance’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
LateinAmerikas, 28 (1991), 21-51.

6
African religions probably served to secure the solidarity and loyalty of
individual war-bands, rather than unity at the level of the insurrection as a
whole. There is, indeed, some suggestion in Madiou’s account that the
insurgents were organized into ethnic regiments: thus Jean-François and
Biassou in 1791 are described as commanding ‘bands composed of
Congoes, Mandingues [Mandinka], Ibos [Igbo], Senegalese, etc.’, and
Haolou in 1794 ‘bands of Congos, Ibos, Dahomets, Senegalese’; and more
explicitly, Lamour Derance’s forces in 1802 were ‘grouped by tribes ...
bands of Congoes, Aradas, Ibos, Nagos, Mandingues, Hausas [emphasis
added]’.31 Consideration of the African ideological background to the
Haitian revolution should therefore arguably seek to identify particular
ethnic traditions which may have played a role.
In recent literature, the main attempt to link the insurrection of 1791
to a specific African ideological tradition has been by John Thornton, in a
recent (1993) article which argued that the civil wars which occurred in
the kingdom of Kongo, from which many slaves were brought to Saint-
Domingue, between 1779-88 might have moulded the insurgents’
perceptions of the character and limits of royal authority, as much as the
contemporary Revolution in France.32 In the specific terms in which it is
presented, this argument is largely speculative; there is no doubt that
some of the slaves interpreted the revolutionary situation in the light of
their Kongo experience, but (as Thornton’s own account shows) the point
in the progress of the insurrection where this connection is most explicit is
the period immediately following the execution of the king in France,
when, ironically, these African parallelisms led them to support the
monarchy (and the Roman Catholic Church) against the Revolution. During
1792-3, when a sort of monarchist international comprising Spain and
Britain was intervening in support of the French counter-revolution,
Madiou reports that there was a popular belief among the insurgent slaves
that the King of Kongo was also part of the anti-Republican coalition; and
the rebel leader Macaya, in rejecting Republican overtures in 1793,
declared himself ‘the subject of three kings, the King of Kongo, master of
all the blacks, the King of France who represents my father, and the King
of Spain who represents my mother’.33

The Bois Caiman ceremony

The focus of the present essay is a better known, though (for different
reasons) no less problematic instance of African influence in the events of
1791, one specific episode in the preparations for the insurrection, the
ceremony held by some of the slaves plotting rebellion in the North in the

31Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, i, 96, 235; iii, 33.

32

John K. Thornton, ‘“I am the subject of the King of Congo”: African political
ideology and the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of World History, 4/2 (1993), 181-
214.

33Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, i, 176, 182.

7
Bois Caiman, probably during the night of 21 August 1791. 34 According to
the received story, the ceremony was presided over by one of the
prospective leaders of the rebellion, Boukman, and involved the slaughter
of a black pig, and the drinking of its blood by those assembled, who then
swore obedience to Boukman.35 The conventional view of the importance
of the vaudou religion in the organization of the slave insurrection, in fact,
rests heavily upon this particular instance.
It has to be admitted, as recently pointed out by David Geggus, that
the evidence for the Bois Caiman ceremony, and for its role in the slave
insurrection, is not very good. 36 It is not mentioned in any strictly
contemporary account, and among restrospective accounts those which
seem to be based upon first-hand testimony do not corroborate some of
the details which subsequently became canonical - including notably the
presence/leadership of Boukman. However, the evidence that the
ceremony involved the sacrifice of a pig and the drinking of its blood is
compelling; and the assertion in more recent tradition that this ritual
represented an oath of allegiance or commitment to a common purpose is
persuasive.
This use of a ritual involving the drinking of a magical potion,
consisting of or including blood, in the organization of a slave insurrection
was by no means unique to the case of Haïti. A recent study of slavery in
British colonies by Jim Walvin refers generally to religious rituals
associated with slave revolts: ‘administering fetishes, the swearing of
secret oaths sealed with a drink mixed from rum, earth and cock’s blood,
the killing of animals’.37 In the British West Indies in the eighteenth
century, contemporary accounts refer to the use by slaves of a form of
‘oath of secrecy or purgation’ which was administered to wives on
suspicion of infidelity, and which involved the drinking of blood:

Human blood, and earth taken from the grave of some near
relation, are mixed with water, and given to the party to be sworn,
who is compelled to drink the mixture, with a horrid imprecation,
that it may cause the belly to burst, and the bones to rot, if the
truth be not spoken.38

34Though often dated to 14 August, through confusion with an distinct earlier

meeting of leaders of the slave insurrection: for discussion, see David Geggus,
‘The Bois Caiman ceremony’, Journal of Caribbean History, 25/1-2 (1991), 41-57.

35Different versions are quoted e.g. by Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 42; Geggus,
‘The Bois Caiman ceremony’, 41. For a recent literary elaboration of the story,
see Déita, La légende des Loa: Vodou haitien (Port-au-Prince, 1993), 9-12.

36Geggus. ‘The Bois Caiman ceremony’.

37James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (2nd ed., London, 1993),
179.

38 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies
(1793), quoted in Roger D. Abrahams & John F. Szwed (eds), After Africa: Extracts from British
Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries concerning
the Slaves, their Manners and Customs, in the British West Indies (New Haven, 1983), 69.

8
Oaths of this sort were certainly employed at least occasionally in the
organization of slave insurrections, as well as for domestic purposes. For
example, in the conspiracy led by the African-born slave Tackey in Antigua
in 1735-6, an oath was administered by the sacrifice of a chicken and the
drinking of its blood, mixed with rum. 39 Likewise in Jamaica, in the Maroon
War of 1795, one of the Maroon captains tried to recruit a runaway slave
by ‘making three cuts on his wrist and catching the blood in a calabash,
intending to make him drink it at the next full moon and to swear an oath
not to return to his master but to act as a recruiting agent’, though in this
case the man fled before the oath could be administered. 40 In Jamaica
again, a slave conspiracy in 1816, although reportedly inspired by the
preaching of a black Baptist missionary, also employed a non-Christian
oath, ‘with all the usual accompanying ceremonies of drinking human
blood, eating earth from graves, etc.’41
By the early nineteenth century, however, slave insurrectionists
were beginning to invoke Christian rather than African ritual to bind their
associates. A conspiracy in Trinidad in 1805 reportedly involved an oath
based on ‘a blasphemous parody of the Catholic mass’ (as well as
reference to the recent Saint Domingue insurrection); and in the rebellions
in Demerara in 1823 and in Jamaica in 1831, oaths were taken on the
Bible.42
While it has generally been acknowledged that the Bois Caiman
ceremony represented the transposition of an African ritual, there has
been dissensus over the likely provenance within Africa of this ritual. One
tradition of scholarly interpretation within Haïti itself has held that the
ceremony was a specifically Petro, i.e. Congolese, rather than a Rada
rite.43 One commentator, indeed, has insisted on this with great emphasis,
claiming not only that it was the Petro cults which gave ‘both the moral
force and the actual organization’ to the insurrection, but also that the
Rada rites, by their nature, were incapable of serving this function: ‘For
this kind of action the Dahomean gods had not prepared them; nor were
the Rada gods the kind of deities who could inspire an enslaved people to

39Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the West Indies
(Ithaca, 1982), 122-3.

40Ibid., 218. Maroon tradition also recalls that the treaties signed with the British
(in 1739 and 1796) were sealed by ‘a binding oath pledged in rum and blood’.

41Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (ed. Judith Terry, Oxford,
1999), 137 [16 March 1816].

42Craton, Testing the Chains, 235-6, 277, 281-3, 300. Note, however, that one
account claims that a blood/earth oath as described by Edwards was used in the
1831 insurrection: R.R. Madden, A Twelve Months’ Residence in the West Indies
(1835), in Abrahams & Szwed, After Africa, 199.

43Odette Menesson-Rigaud, ‘Le rôle du Vaudou dans l’indépendance d’Haïti’,

Présence africaine (févr.1958).

9
revolt’.44 This argument seems to be based on the conventional perception
of the Petro loa as more violent, in contrast to the ‘gentle’ character of the
Rada deities.45 But it is not persuasive, running in fact quite counter to
another conventional perception, associating the Congos with passivity in
servitude, and those from ‘Guinea’ (meaning West Africa, but more
especially Dahomey) by contrast with resistance and revolt. 46 The
conventional contrast between the violence of Petro and the gentleness of
Rada loa, in fact, should be understood as referring to their relations with
their worshippers, rather than to the behaviour which they inspired in
these human followers.
Ritual oaths involving the drinking of blood do not appear to have
survived into recent times in Haïti, either in the Rada or the Petro
tradition.47 The use of a blood oath within the vaudou tradition is,
however, attested in one contemporary account of the immediate pre-
revolutionary period; this is the famous description of a ‘vaudoux’
possession ceremony by Moreau de Saint-Méry, which notes that the
presiding priestess killed a goat, and used its blood to ‘seal the lips of all
present with a vow to suffer death rather than reveal anything’. 48 Moreau
himself associated ‘vaudoux’ specifically with the ‘Radas’, and this is on
the face of it confirmed by his description of the deity as represented by a
snake, a practice seemingly specific to the Dahomian-Rada tradition. 49
However, the matter is complicated by the fact that a chant which Moreau
de Saint-Méry records as used in this ceremony is in fact in the Kikongo
language (and addressed to the Kongo deity Mbumba); though whether

44Deren, The Voodoo Gods, 66-7.

45Cf. also Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 88-9.

46Guérin Montilus, ‘Guinea versus Congo lands: aspects of the collective memory
in Haiti’, in Joseph E. Harris (ed.), Golbal Dimensions of the African Diaspora (2nd
ed., Washington DC, 1993), 159-65. The same stereotypical contrast appears in
Déita, La légende des Loa, 5, 8, which credits Boukman with Dahomian ancestry,
but claims that details of the Bois Caiman ceremony were betrayed to the whites
by ‘certain Congos, spies of the whites’.

47This assertion is advanced only tentatively, based on the silence of the limited
selection of the literature which I have read: esp. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti;
Deren, The Voodoo Gods; Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo (trans. Robert B. Cross,
San Francisco 1985).

48 Cited in Métraux, Voodoo in Haïti, 36.

49 Various deities in the Gbe-speaking area of West Africa are represented or conceptualized as
serpents (Dan), but the worship of actual snakes was specific to the cult of Dangbe, the royal python,
the national deity of the Hueda (Ouidah) people. In Haiti veneration of living snakes seems to have
died out after the nineteenth century, and Dangbe is no longer (if he ever was) a major deity, though
his name is not totally forgotten: cf. Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo, 51, 58, 62 (referring to Yé Dan-Gbé).
Presumably Dangbe in Haïti was largely subsumed into the cult of the Damballa-Wedo, the rainbow
deity, symbolized by a serpent (though not incarnated in actual snakes), which remains one of the
leading ‘Rada’ deities.

10
this reflects syncretism between different African religious traditions, or
confusion on his part, is debatable.50
The attribution of the Bois Caiman ceremony to the Petro cults in
recent tradition is seemingly based mainly on the report of the sacrifice of
a pig, which in Haïti in recent times has been associated especially with
Petro.51 But against this, ritual oaths by the drinking of blood do not seem
to be reported as a feature of religious practice in the Congo area from
which the Petro cults derived.52 One account, obtained from Congo slaves
in the Danish West Indies, does mention a ‘purification potion’
administered to wives suspected of adultery, which was thought to kill
them if they were guilty; but this is said to have been made from the bark
of a tree, rather than blood.53
By contrast, the Dahomey area, the cradle of the ‘Rada’ cults, not
only has a well-attested tradition of such ritual ‘blood pacts’; but these
also involved, in at least some of their variants, as will be seen, the
sacrifice of pigs. The classic study of Haïtian vaudou by Alfred Métraux,
while suggesting that traditions about the Bois Caiman ceremony were
‘confused’, unhesitatingly identified it as a form of the ‘blood pact’
practised in the Dahomey area.54

The ‘blood pact’ in Dahomey

The ceremony of the ‘blood pact’ in the Dahomey area is best known
through the study published by the local scholar Paul Hazoumé in the

50 See discussion by Geggus, ‘Haitian voodoo’.

51Cf. Métraux, Voodoo, 169: ‘black pigs are set aside for the petro loa, guinea
fowl for the Ibo, turkeys for the Kaplau-ganga, dog for the Mondongue’.

52Again, this assertion is based on the silence of relevant secondary literature:

Georges Balandier, Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth century (trans. Helen Weaver, London, 1968); Anne Hilton, The
Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford, 1985); John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil
War and Transition 1641-1718 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1983). A study of one group
in the interior, the Bobangi, does refer to a form of ‘blood brotherhood’,
employed to cement commercial partnerships, but this involved the direct
mingling of the participants’ blood, through cuts in their wrists, rather than
drinking it: Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire
Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (New Haven, 1981),
esp. 188-90. The references to ‘blood brotherhood’ as a feature of commercial
organization in West-Central Africa in Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant
Capital and the Angola Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (London, 1988), seem to derive
solely from Harms’ account. A form of ‘blood covenant’ was used in the Yeke
kingdom in Katanga, but is explicitly described as an innovation, introduced from
East Africa in the early nineteenth century, rather than an established local
practice: Jan Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna: A history of Central African
states until the European conquest (Madison, 1966), 227, 234.

53 Oldendorp, in Brown, ‘From the tongues of Africa’, 55.

54Métraux, Haitian Voodoo, 42-3.

11
1930s;55 subsequent discussions of the practice in the ethnographic
literature are essentially derivative from this work. 56 The ritual is
documented among all the major Gbe-speaking groups - the Ewe
(Ouachi), Adja, Houla and Hueda to the west, the Mahi to the north, and
the Gun to the east, as well as among the Fon of Dahomey; and also
among some western Nago (Yoruba) groups in neighbouring areas - Ketu,
Sabe, Dasa, Holli - among whom it presumably represents a borrowing
from the Gbe-speakers.
The term ‘blood pact’, if understood as implying that the purpose of
the ritual is to create fictive ties of kinship (‘blood brotherhood’), is
misleading; the point was rather that the ritual draught was thought to
have the power to kill any participant who broke the oath. Particular forms
of death, involving the swelling of the body and delirium, were thought to
be symptoms of the operation of the ‘pact’. 57 Moreover, although most of
the forms of the oath described by Hazoumé do involve the participants
drinking each others’ blood, a few do not. In the simplest (and, in
Hazoumé’s assumption, original) form of the ‘pact’ the participants drank
each other’s blood directly, by sucking on incisions made in their wrists;
but in more elaborated versions it was mixed with or replaced by other
substances and drunk from a calabash (or sometimes, a human skull). The
ritual drink thus includes a mixture, in various versions, also of blood from
sacrificed animals, remains of victims sacrificed earlier, earth (sometimes
taken from the shrines of vodun, especially Hevioso, the god of thunder,
and Ogun, god of iron/war), ashes, and alcoholic drinks (palm-wine, beer,
or imported spirits). In indigenous idiom, the ceremony is termed not a
‘blood-pact’, but ‘drinking vodun’, or ‘drinking earth’.
As just noted, the blood ingested in the ritual of ‘drinking vodun’ in
Dahomey was not only human, but sometimes also that of non-human
sacrificial victims. The animal sacrificed is usually specified as fowl
(chicken or duck), but in six of the fourteen variants described in detail by
Hazoumé, a pig is mentioned as an alternative or supplementary victim:
this is recorded of forms of the ritual practised among the Adja, Hueda
(i.e. the original inhabitants of Ouidah, displaced westwards by the
Dahomian conquest in 1727), in Ouidah itself (two versions), in Abomey
(the historical capital of Dahomey), and among the Gun of Porto-Novo. 58
(In one variant, it may be noted, as an alternative to a pig, a goat may be
killed, as in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s eighteenth-century account.)
Hazoumé’s explanation of the symbolic appropriateness of the pig in this
role - as a symbol of discretion, because he ‘goes around looking at the
ground ... doesn’t look at the sky’ - is perhaps fanciful. 59 More prosaically,
55Paul Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey (Paris, 1938).

56Esp. A.J. Argyle, The Fon of Dahomey (Oxford, 1966), 156-69.

57 Hazoumé, Le pacte du sang, 104.

58Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang, 58, 62, 66, 68, 71, 80.

59Ibid., 98.

12
it may be suggested, it was simply a matter of scale; as he explicitly says
in four of the cases, the participants would use a pig ‘if they are
numerous’.
There are, of course, serious problems about the procedure of
extrapolating from twentieth-century ethnography to reconstruct the
cultural backrgound of slaves taken from Africa two hundred years earlier.
In this case, however, although it is best known from Hazoumé’s modern
account, the Dahomian ‘blood pact’ was certainly already practised in pre-
colonial times, when it is attested in contemporary European accounts.
The ceremony is first described by Jean Barbot, a French trader who
visited the Hueda kingdom in 1682, who gives it the name of ‘drinking
dios [god]’, evidently translating the indigenous idiom ‘drinking vodun’:

They make two small holes in the earth, into which they let some of
their blood drip, and after having diluted the blood with a little of
the earth, the two drink as much of it as they can. By this means
they enter so strongly into one another’s interest that whatever
happens to them, good or ill, is common to both. That is why they
reveal to each other whatever they think, and whatever they hear,
whether said for good or ill, imagining that the least relaxation in
this respect will make them die suddenly. 60

A second account, in an unpublished French manuscript of the 1710s,

alludes to another form of the practice, noting that the ashes of human
sacrifices offered to the god Dangbe (the royal python, the national deity
of Hueda) were collected and preserved, in order to be mixed with water
and given to ‘a Black who wants to affirm something, convinced that the
least relaxation in this respect will make them die suddenly’. 61 A chief of
Hueda, the Aplogan, seeking to mobilize opposition to the reigning king in
1715, is reported to have bound his supporters to him by ‘drinking
together on the snake or fetish’ - i.e., here again, on the god Dangbe; and
King Agaja of Dahomey, after his conquest of Hueda in 1727, likewise
‘drank the fetish’ with a displaced Hueda prince whom he proposed to
install as puppet ruler there, as a guarantee of his loyalty.62
The practice is also attested in contemporary sources in the Gun
community of Badagry on the coast to the east (in south-west Nigeria). In
Badagry, indeed, such ritual oaths played a critical role, in a politically
fragmented society without formal institutions of central government, in
maintaining the cohesion of the community. As described by an English
missionary in 1844, the Badagry chiefs met annually, or in times of

60Paul Hair, Adam Jones & Robin Law (eds), Barbot on Guinea: The writings of
Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1679-1712 (Hakluyt Society, London, 1992), ii, 641.

61‘Relation du royaume de Judas en Guinée’ (ms in Archives Nationales, Section

d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence: Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies, Côtes
d’Afrique, 104), 64.

62For references, see Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550-1750: The
impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African society (Oxford, 1991), 114-15.

13
emergency, to exchange ritual oaths, involving drinking from human
skulls, ‘that they would unite to defend the town’; blood is not mentioned,
and the oath is said to have been taken in the names of the ‘fetishes’ of
‘thunder and snakes’, i.e. Hevioso and Dangbe.63
Such ritual oaths, it may be noted, were commonly employed in
agreements between Europeans and Africans, as well as in intra-African
dealings. When the chief factor of the English Royal African Company at
Ouidah in 1687, for example, sought to form a military alliance with Ofori,
chief of Little Popo to the west, he proposed to make him ‘take fetish to
serve the Company only’;64 and the English slave-trader William
Snelgrave, trading at Jakin, east of Ouidah, in 1727, in negotiation with
the ruler of the town, recorded having ‘taken his fetische or oath’ to
secure the agreement.65
There is no reason to doubt that the practice of the ‘blood pact’ was
carried to the Americas by slaves transported from the Bight of Benin. An
‘Arada’ slave in the Danish West Indies thus told the missionary Oldendorp
in the 1770s that ‘his people believe that whoever swears a false oath will
definitely die within seven days’.66 The ceremony at the Bois Caiman in
1791 is clearly interpretable as a Dahomian-type ritual oath, even though
some of the details may have become confused in Haïtian tradition.
Specifically, recollection of the drinking of human blood may have
dropped out of the story (although, as has been seen, this was not in fact
an invariable concomitant of ‘drinking vodun’); and the blood of the
sacrificed pig was more probably mixed, along with other ingredients, into
water, than imbibed neat.

Alternative traditions: Ritual oaths elsewhere in West Africa

It might be questioned whether the taking of an oath by drinking blood, as
performed in the Bois Caiman, can confidently be attributed to the specific
region of Dahomey, as opposed to other areas of western Africa. Ritual
oaths involving the drinking of a magical potion were, certainly, not
peculiar to the Dahomey area. On the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to the
west, for example, several European authors from the seventeenth
century onwards describe similar practices there. Already in 1602 the
Dutch trader Pieter de Marees noted that, among other forms of ritual

63Caroline Sorensen-Gilmour, ‘Badagry, 1784-1863: The political and commercial

history of a pre-colonial lagoonside community in South-West Nigeria’ (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Stirling, 1995), 120-22.

64Robin Law (ed.), Further Correspondence of the Royal African Company of

England relating to the ‘Slave Coast’, 1681-1699: Selected documents from Ms.
Rawlinson C.645-747 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (African Studies Program,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992), no.53: John Carter, Ouidah, 10 May
1687.

65 William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea (London,

1734), 22.

66 Brown, ‘From the tongues of Africa’, 58.

14
oath, ‘some will for a further affirmation take a potion’; and the German
clergyman (in Danish service) Johann Müller in the 1660s more fully
describes the practice of ‘eating or drinking in the name of ... fitiso
[fetish]’, though he discusses it primarily in a judicial context, as a means
whereby an accused person might establish his innocence. 67 Two accounts
from the 1690s make explicit the rationale of the practice. The English
trader Thomas Phillips notes that the potion taken ‘is to kill them the very
minute that they break or violate the oath or promise they took on it’; and
the Dutch trader Willem Bosman that ‘When they drink the oath-draught,
‘tis usually accompanied with an imprecation, that the fetiche may kill
them if they do not perform the contents of their obligation’. 68 Among
later writers Rømer in the 1750s and Isert in the 1780s also describe the
ritual of ‘eating fetish’ on the Gold Coast: the former, like Müller, in the
context of judicial oaths, and the latter as a means of concluding military
alliances between African communities.69 As in the Dahomey area, such
ritual oaths were commonly used on the Gold Coast to seal agreements
between Europeans and Africans. When the factors of the Royal African
Company’s factory at Accra concluded an agreement with the King of
Akwamu in the interior in 1681, the king’s son ‘took the fetish’ to seal the
agreement; two of the Englishmen swore on the Bible, but a third took
‘their fetish’.70
Likewise in the Efik community of Old Calabar to the east (in south-
eastern Nigeria), oaths were sealed by the drinking of a magical potion
called mbiam, which was believed to cause anyone who swore falsely to
swell up, sicken and die.71 Although not unambigously documented before
the mid-nineteenth century, it is probable that the mbiam oath-draught

67Pieter de Marees, Description & Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of

Guinea (trans. Albert van Dantzig & Adam Jones, Oxford, 1987), 108; Wilhelm
Johann Müller, in Adam Jones (ed.), German Sources for West African History
1599-1669 (Wiesbaden, 1983), 174-6.

68Thomas Phillips, ‘Journal of a voyage made in the Hannibal of London’, in

Awnsham & John Churchill, Collection of Voyages & Travels (London, 1732), vi,
224; William Bosman, A New & Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea
(London, 1705), 149-50.

69L.F. Rømer, Le Golfe de Guinée 1700-1750 (trans. Mette Dige-Hess, Paris,

1989), 77-8; Paul Erdman Isert, Letters on West Africa & the Slave Trade (trans.
Selena Axelrod Winsnes, Oxford, 1992), 129-30.

70Robin Law (ed.), The English in West Africa 1681-1683: The local
correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681-1699, Part 1
(Oxford, 1997), no.409, inclosure: note by James Nightingale, George Phipps, and
William Pley, Accra, 9 Sept. 1681. For other instances of ‘fetish’ oaths in this
corpus, see nos 1, 23, 28, 55, 59-60, 196, 385, 387, 411, 516, 540.

71Donald C. Simmons, ‘An ethnographic sketch of the Efik people’, in Daryll

Forde (ed.), Efik Traders of Old Calabar (London, 1956), 20. This is to be
distinguished from the esere (poison bean) drink, administered as a form of trial
by ordeal to suspected witches.

15
was already used earlier, during the period of the Atlantic slave trade; a
reference in the diary of the Old Calabar merchant-chief Antera Duke, in
1785, to the refusal of another chief to ‘drink doctor’, probably relates to
mbiam.72 A similar ‘oath-draught’, believed to kill perjurors, was reportedly
employed, apparently for judicial purposes, in Bonny.73
In these cases, however, there is no reference to the drink
containing blood, whether human or animal. The Gold Coast ‘oath-
draught’ is described by Müller as consisting of ‘the juice of green leaves,
water and other ingedients’; by Phillips as ‘water mixed with powders of
divers colours’.74 Mbiam in Old Calabar was also clearly seen as distinct
from the ‘blood pact’ (termed locally ‘chopping [i.e. eating] blood’, as
opposed to ‘chopping doctor’, for mbiam), which appears to have come in
as an innovation in the mid-nineteenth century.
The only other area of West Africa where a ritual oath-draught
consisting of or including specifically blood is clearly recorded is in fact
Igboland, in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra (south-eastern Nigeria),
where such ‘blood pacts’ are called igba ndu (literally, ‘binding life’).75 In
the Igbo form of the ritual, the participants’ blood was smeared onto kola
nuts or mixed into palm-oil to be eaten or drunk; it sometimes also
included the sacrifice of chickens (or a cow), but it is not made clear
whether their blood was also drunk. Here too, the ‘blood pact’ was not
thought of as creating fictive kinship links, but to kill those who broke the
oath. Although not clearly attested in any contemporary record before the
twentieth century, there is no reason to suppose that the practice was not
already established earlier, during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave
trade. The Igbo form of ‘blood pact’ was used to cement commercial
agreements between communities and individuals, and according to
tradition played a critical role in the expansion of the commercial system
of the Aro, which supplied many slaves for sale to the Europeans at the
coast, during the eighteenth century. 76 It was, in fact, very probably from
the Igbo interior that the ‘blood pact’ was introduced into Old Calabar in
the nineteenth century.
Despite the reputation of Igbo slaves in the Americas for docility (or
more precisely, for expressing their disaffection through suicide rather

72Diary of Antera Duke, 8 June 1785, in Forde, Efik Traders, 33. For the term
‘chopping doctor’, used of the mbiam oath (as distinct from ‘chopping nut’, for
the esere ordeal), cf. Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the
West Indies & Central Africa (London, 1863), 379.

73 Hugh Crow, Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool (London, 1830), 246-7.

74Müller, in Jones, German Sources, 174; Phillips, ‘Journal’, 224.

75Felicia Ekejiuba, ‘Igba ndu: an Igbo mechanism of social control and

adjustment’, African Notes (Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan), 7/1
(1972), 9-24.

76Kenneth Onwuka Dike & Felicia Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria
1650-1900 (Ibadan, 1990), esp. 118-20, 163, 198-9, 244-5.

16
than rebellion), it seems quite likely that it was the Igbo form of blood-
oath which was utilized in some recorded slave insurrections. The
conspirators in Jamaica in 1816 seem to have been predominantly Igbo,
since they proposed to elect a ‘King of the Eboes’ as their leader. 77 It also
seems possible that the blood oath reported in Tackey’s conspiracy in
Antigua in the 1730s had an Igbo origin, since Igbo were relatively
numerous among the slaves taken to English Caribbean colonies (though
Tackey himself was presumably, from his name, an Akan-speaker from the
Gold Coast).78 It is perhaps conceivable that the Haïtian ritual oath of 1791
also derived from an Igbo rather than a Dahomian prototype, but it does
not seem very likely: not only because Igbo were numerically less
significant than ‘Radas’ in the Saint-Domingue slave population, but also
because there is no suggestion in accounts of the rituals of the Igbo ‘blood
pact’ that they involved the sacrifice of a pig.
In a recent publication, David Geggus has queried the view that the
Bois Caiman ceremony was ‘simply’ a ‘Rada’ or Dahomian ritual, partly on
the grounds that slaves from this region of Africa were in fact less
numerous in the North than in other areas of Saint-Domingue, and
suggests that its role in the insurrection in the North would be more
intelligible if it was understood as ‘a syncretic bringing together of people
from West and Central Africa’.79 There is clearly some force in this
argument, inasmuch as ‘Congos’ formed a much greater proportion of
African-born slaves in the northern plain than ‘Radas’ (over half) -
although it has to be said that we do not, in fact, know precisely which
slaves were involved in the Bois Caiman ceremony, or in the beginnings of
the insurrection which followed it. It does not necessarily follow, however,
that ‘syncretism’ is the most appropriate way of conceptualizing the
putative trans-ethnic appeal of this ritual. It was arguably inherent in the
nature of the ‘blood-pact’ (and of other forms of ‘oath-draught’) that they
provided a means for organizing collective action independently of
existing political institutions, which might therefore transcend the
boundaries of existing communities, in Africa as well as in the Americas;
as they served, for example, as has been seen, to cement agreements
between African traders from different communities, and indeed between
African and European slave-traders.

77 Lewis, Journal, 139 [22 March 1816].

78 It should be noted, however, that Gbe-speaking (‘Papa’) slaves, exported mainly through Ouidah,
were also relatively numerous among those imported into the English Caribbean in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

79 Geggus, ‘Slave society’, 42-3. In fact, as Geggus acknowledges, if slaves designated by the names
of individual Gbe-speaking groups (Fon, Hueda, Aja) are added in with those specifically called
‘Rada’, there is no significant difference in the regional strength of the latter among African-born
slaves: 16.2% on sugar plantations in the North, 15% in the South, and 15.7% in the West. A marked
regional difference emerges only if the Rada are combined with the Nago (Yoruba), who comprised
16.9% of African-born slaves on sugar plantations in the West, 14.7% in the South, but only 8.1% in
the North (see Table 5).

17
Ritual oaths, social control and slavery
Although the ‘blood pact’ clearly came to Haïti from West Africa, the social
function which it served there was very different. In West Africa, ritual
oaths generally functioned essentially a means of social control,
reinforcing the authority of ruling elites, rather than as an organizational
tactic of insurrection. On the Gold Coast, for example, Müller noted that
the ceremony of ‘drinking fetish’ was employed by husbands to test and
secure the fidelity of their wives.80 Likewise in Dahomey, husbands ‘drank
vodun’ with their wives, and the king with his subjects, in order to secure
their loyalty.81 (In the West Indies also, it will be recalled, African ritual
oaths were used by husbands to prevent or detect infidelity by their
wives.)
However, the practice could clearly be used against, as well as in
support of, established authority. The ‘blood pact’ in Dahomey was, in
fact, sometimes used for criminal purposes, by thieves or bandits. 82 It
could also serve as a means of organizing political opposition, as in the
case of the Aplogan of Hueda in the early eighteenth century, cited earlier.
The coup d’état by which King Gezo seized the Dahomian throne in 1818
likewise seems to have been based on use of the ‘blood-pact’: Gezo is said
to have had over 600 ‘sworn-friends’, of whom the best known was the
Brazilian slave-trader Francisco Félix de Souza, who notoriously financed
the coup.83 The Kings of Dahomey, indeed, recognised the subversive
potential of the blood pact, to the extent that they forbade their subjects
from contracting pacts among themselves (as opposed to with the
monarch, individually), since this was seen as a potential constraint on
royal power.84
Such cases of the use of the ‘blood pact’ for oppositional purposes,
however, related generally to factional divisions within the ruling class,
rather than to the mobilization of a subordinate social group, such as
insurgent slaves. In most of the few cases where ritual oaths are linked to
issues concerning slavery, in fact, they served as a means of maintaining
masters’ control over their slaves. On the Gold Coast in the seventeenth
century, for example, it was noted that a man’s ‘newly bought slaves’, as
well as his wives, were ‘bound by oath to remain faithful to their ...
master’.85 Likewise in Dahomey a man would ‘drink vodun’ with his
‘servants [serviteurs]’, as well as his wives, to secure their loyalty.86

80Müller, in Jones, German Sources, 176.

81 Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey, 46, 136.

82Ibid., 40-3, 137.

83Ibid., 27.

84Ibid., 137.

85Müller, in Jones, German Sources, 176.

86Hazoumé, Le pacte de sang au Dahomey, 46.

18
 Intriguingly, the practice was adopted by at least one European
slave-trader. The Englishman Thomas Shurley (who died trading off the
West African coast in 1693) is said to have ‘used to make his negroes
aboard take the fatish, that they would not swim ashore or run away, and
then he would let them out of irons’, using for this purpose ‘a cup of
English beer, with a little aloes to imbitter it’. His fellow-slaver Thomas
Phillips, who reports Shurley’s practice, while acknowledging that this
‘operated upon their faith as much as if it had been made by the best
fatishes in Guiney’, nevertheless observed sardonically that ‘for my part I
put more dependence upon my shackles than any fatish I could give
them’.87
The only parallel for a ritual oath serving in the organization of a
slave insurrection in West Africa of which I am aware is the case of the
society of ‘blood men’ (nka iyip) organized among slaves in Old Calabar in
the nineteenth century. This was based on a blood oath, involving a
mutual exchange of blood. As described by a European missionary in
1858:

They had a small quantity of blood in a plate, which they had

drawn, a drop or two from those who came forward to take the
oath, by tasting which, and pronouncing the oath, they entered into
a covenant ... [The administrator of the oath] pulled up the wrist
and cut it, drawing a drop or two of blood, which was mixed with
that in the plate, and the individual took out of the blood one of the
seeds, which has a symbolical significance, eat [sic: ate] it, and
then dipping his fingers in the blood, put them in his mouth. 88

One modern account has interpreted this ritual as establishing a form of

fictive kinship,89 but the contemporary account makes clear that, as in
Dahomey, it was intended rather to kill defaulters; the oath administrator
‘made a formal address to the blood, charging it to look and avenge the
violation of any breach of the covenant’.90
The ‘blood pact’ in Old Calabar was clearly distinct from the mbiam
oath, and no doubt represents, as suggested earlier, a borrowing from the
Igbo interior - most of the slaves held in Calabar being Igbo. 91 The practice

87Phillips, ‘Journal’, 226.

88The only detailed description of the ritual I have traced is that in Hugh Goldie,
Old Calabar and its Mission (Edinburgh, 1890), 198-200.

89 Jones, ‘Political organization’, 149, suggests that since slaves were ‘not full lineage members’, the
ritual ‘may have been intended to remedy this lack of agnatic ties’.

90 Goldie, Old Calabar, 200.

91UK Parliamentary Papers, First Report from the Select Committee on the Slave
Trade, 1849, Minutes of Evidence, 20 April 1849, Rev. HM Waddell: ‘The two
principal slave markets to which the Old Calabar people go are the Ebo [Igbo]
and the Qua [Ibibio] ... they buy many more slaves at Ebo than at Qua’. As
Waddell noted, slaves were no longer exported through Calabar by this time, but
were purchased solely for local use.

19
is first attested in Old Calabar in the 1840s, and took on an insurrectionary
character during 1850-1, when slaves on the plantations belonging to the
Duke Town section of Old Calabar reportedly ‘began to bind themselves
together by a covenant of blood for mutual protection’. The objective was
not, strictly, as in Haïti in 1791, to overthrow slavery, but rather to resist
and limit abusive treatment by their masters, and more particularly the
sacrifice of slaves at chiefs’ funerals: that ‘they should not be killed for
nothing, or flogged without cause’.92 The Old Calabar authorities,
supported by the British Consul John Beecroft, attempted to repress the
practice, negotiating a treaty with the disaffected slaves which provided
that ‘no slave who has a master living shall chop blood with other slaves
without special permission of the said master’, and that ‘all combinations
among slaves for interfering with the correction of any domestic servant
by his or her master shall be henceforth declared illegal’; 93 but this
attempt at control was clearly ineffective. King Eyo Honesty II, ruler of the
Creek Town section of Calabar, likewise initially forbade his slaves from
entering into such blood covenants with each other; but on his death in
1858, his own slaves, fearing that they might be taken for funeral
sacrifices, also ‘entered into a covenant of blood to defend themselves’. 94
Even in the Old Calabar case, indeed, there is an element of
ambiguity, since the ‘blood pact’ was used there by masters to control
their slaves, as well as by slaves to defy their masters; and indeed, even
the organization of the ‘bloodmen’ was quickly co-opted into the political
system. The earliest allusion to the blood oath in Old Calabar, in 1848, in
fact, relates to the settlement of a dispute between a Calabar chief, Adam
Duke, and his slaves, in which Duke was made to swear an mbiam oath
not to punish his slaves, and at the same time ‘chopped blood’ with their
headmen, as a means of reconciliation. 95 By 1851 the ruler of Duke Town,
King Archibong I, had made his peace with the ‘bloodmen’, and ‘joined
their covenant to secure their allegiance to himself’;96 and the famous
invasions of the city by the ‘bloodmen’ - in 1851, 1852 and 1871 - seem to
have been more concerned with supporting rival factions among the Duke
Town freemen (and especially enforcing trial by ordeal on those suspected
of using witchcraft against the king) than with asserting the rights of
slaves as such.97 Likewise in Creek Town, in the crisis following King Eyo
Honesty II’s death in 1858, the blood oath was in the end used to secure

92

Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 476-7.

93PRO, FO84/858, John Beecroft, 21 Feb. 1851, quoted in K. Onwuka Dike, Trade
and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885 (Oxford, 1956), 158.

94Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 478, 643.

95Ibid., 379.

96Ibid., 476.

97Cf. A.J.H. Latham, Old Calabar 1600-1891 (Oxford, 1973), 94-5, 121.

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the slaves’ allegiance to his son and successor, Young Eyo (King Eyo III).
Although Young Eyo himself, as a Christian convert, declined to take any
oath, the headmen of the slave communities ‘administer[ed] the oath of
allegiance to all under them. They swore to be true to [Young Eyo], to hear
his word and do his work; and when they deserved it, to take their
punishment’, while at the same time securing a reiteration of guarantees
against mistreatment: ‘they must not be killed for nothing’. 98 The invasion
of the town by the Creek Town ‘bloodmen’ in 1861, on the death of King
Eyo, was likewise directed against the late king’s enemies rather than
against oppression of slaves by masters.
That the ‘blood pact’ should have served a quite different social role
in the Diaspora from in Africa should perhaps occasion no surprise, and is
certainly by no means a unique case. A close parallel is provided by the
case of the Cuban ‘secret society’ of Abakuá, which is clearly derived from
the well-known Ekpe (Egbo) masquerade society of Old Calabar. 99 Ekpe in
Old Calabar was a society of wealthy merchant-chiefs (its class, rather
than ethnic, character being illustrated by the fact that some European
merchants were allowed to join it); and was explicitly understood to serve
the function of maintaining the authority of wealthy freemen: ‘to keep
women and slaves in subjection’;100 whereas Abakuá in Cuba was a society
of slaves (and in the longer run, free wage-labourers) which defended
their interests against their owners (or later, employers). The reality of
cultural ‘continuities’ across the Atlantic does not mean that African
institutions were transported unchanged, or fossilized in the Americas,
any more than they were unchanging or fossilized in Africa itself.

98Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 644. Waddell does not specify whether this ‘oath
of allegiance’ was the blood oath or the Efik mbiam; but the account in Goldie,
Old Calabar and its Mission, 199-200, refers explicitly to the administration of the
blood oath.

99Stephan Palmié, ‘Ekpe/Abakuá in Middle Passage’, paper presented at the

conference on ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade in African and African-American Memory’,
University of Chicago, May 1997.

100Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 314.

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