The lie the slave traders told about Africa is still in circulation

The men who bought and sold human beings needed a story about the people they were selling, and they built one. Africa was backward, its peoples had no history worth the name, and bondage was therefore a kind of promotion. That story outlived the traffic by two centuries and it is still resident in a great many heads. Ehret refuses to treat the persistence as a lag that education will dissolve on its own. He calls it structural, a standing refusal by historians to engage African sources that have been available for decades, so the continent stays invisible in the general histories even where the evidence is abundant. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Haiti is where the story was tested. People drawn from Kongo, Dahomey and the Bight of Benin destroyed the strongest army in Europe and founded a state, and the world answered by isolating the country and then explaining its poverty by the character of its people.

On 28 November 1985 soldiers and tontons macoutes killed three schoolchildren in Gonaives. The country caught fire from that town, and the burning ended with the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier on 7 February 1986. Twenty six years later, on 16 December 2011, the law faculty of Gonaives invited the former president for life to sponsor its graduating class. He came, and he asked the audience for a minute of silence in memory of the three children. The bar association of Port-au-Prince made no comment, although its own head had joined the first defence team for the former dictator. Through the twenty nine years of the dictatorship young people of both sexes went to the front line for liberty more than any other group. One survivor described the regime by a single act, the turning of the only library in a provincial town into a barracks for its militiamen.

Nicolas de Ovando reached Hispaniola in 1502 as governor, bringing two thousand five hundred colonists, among them the first European families to settle anywhere in the Americas. Families change what a colony is. Single men on a gold expedition can leave. Households with children, tools and livestock intend to stay, and they need land, which has to come from somebody. Ovando's answer was policy. Rouse records that he set out to eliminate the independent caciques so the expanding settlements would be secure, and over the next two years he carried it through with a thoroughness that ended Taino political life on the island. This is the administration that fixed the shape of Spanish colonisation everywhere it went afterwards: a royal governor, a settler population holding land grants, a subject population assigned to work those grants, and the removal of any indigenous authority capable of saying no.

In the autumn of 1503 Ovando went into Xaragua, gathered the district chiefs into a single building on the pretext of a meeting, and had it set alight with eighty of them inside. Anacaona, who governed the province, was hanged in public. Rouse states the result plainly: this destroyed the last independent chiefdoms on Hispaniola and gave Spain complete control of the island. Eleven years had passed since the first European ship anchored off the coast. In that time a society of several hundred thousand people organised into five polities had been reduced to a labour supply with no leadership of its own, and the killing of a chief had become an administrative act performed by a governor holding instructions from Madrid. Everything that followed came out of a decision to leave nobody standing who could negotiate: the encomienda, the gold tribute, the collapse of the population, and the shipping in of Africans to replace it.