Wynter's manuscript opens by refusing the terms of an old quarrel. Where Herskovits and Frazier disputed how much culture enslaved Africans had kept or lost, she treats the premise itself - the myth of a cultural void - as an instrument of domination: literacy was made the measure of being human, Christian theology recast other peoples' gods as demons, and to be outside Europe became to be outside humanity.

She names the resulting ideology after Sepulveda and insists on its material function, the theologian having been retained by colonists defending their claim on Indian labor. An argument drawn from theories of unequal exchange follows: because the enslaved were a workforce forbidden to move, the bundle of goods keeping them alive stayed fixed while wages rose elsewhere.

Against this she sets indigenization, whereby exiles remade a homeland - Africa surviving as the living country of ancestors one might join - with revolt and marronnage at its center.