François Mackandal

François Mackandal was a maroon and spiritual leader in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), sometimes described as a vodou priest (houngan). Born in Central or Western Africa and enslaved young, he is thought to have lost his right arm in a sugarcane press, and from around 1748 he lived as a maroon, making protective charms and holding rituals among the enslaved. Amid a panic among enslavers over poisoning, he was captured in 1758, accused of joining the maroons to kill slave owners, and burned at the stake without ever confessing; recent scholarship disputes that he ever used poison to kill. His case was seen as a precursor to the Haitian Revolution.