Marie Catherine Kingué was a midwife, healer, and vaudoux queen associated with the Port-Margot and Limbé zone of northern Saint-Domingue, who appears in Eddins's Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution as one of the enslaved African and African-descended women who 'deployed their spiritual practices to support the liberation struggle.
' She belongs to the longer lineage of women's sacred leadership in Saint-Domingue — the continuum of mambos, midwives, and ritual specialists whose spiritual authority helped sustain insurgent organization before and during the revolution, a lineage that later includes Cécile Fatiman.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Fick's Making Haiti situates women like Marie-Catherine Kingue within the colonial South Province's enslaved and free communities — figures whose roles as healers, spiritual practitioners, and resistance organizers appear in the colonial archive's fragmentary records of women's agency in the plantation world. Fick's subaltern methodology recovers these women from the court records where they appeared as suspects and witnesses, making visible how women's access to healing knowledge, poison networks, and spiritual authority gave them forms of power that the plantation system simultaneously deployed (in domestic labor) and feared (in resistance). Kingue's role as a healer and Vodou practitioner places her within the ritual networks that Eddins traces as the infrastructure of revolutionary mobilization.
Kingue represents the enslaved women whose healing and spiritual authority Fick recovers from the colonial archive — figures whose access to knowledge networks gave them forms of power the plantation system simultaneously deployed and feared.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1791-08-14
Bois Caïman Ceremony
Situated in the longer lineage of women's ritual leadership that culminates in the Bois Caïman ceremony; Kingué precedes and parallels the role women like Cécile Fatiman would play.