Eighty chiefs are burned in one house at Xaragua

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.

Nzinga Nkuvu died in 1506. He was said to have named Afonso as his heir, but the great chiefs at Mbanza Kongo picked another son who had not converted. Afonso marched on the capital with the Portuguese who had been with him in Nsundi, defeated and killed his brother, and took the throne. His supporters claimed a vision of St James had helped, in the Iberian manner. He ruled until 1543. He fought few wars and expanded no borders, spending his reign instead on schools, churches, craftsmen and medicine, and Lisbon treated him as an independent Christian king to be trained in the habits proper to one, including living in a house with two storeys. From the moment he won that fight the Kongo monarchy never publicly renounced Christianity again for more than three hundred years. Afonso had made a new kind of legitimacy, and it became part of what the kingdom understood itself to be.

In 1492 an Italian navigator sailing for Spain reached a green Caribbean island and named it La Isla Espanola. Africans came to the Americas on that first voyage, but the year normally cited as the official entry of African slaves into Hispaniola is 1502. They were taken from villages and cities along the Gulf of Guinea and brought in to replace the Taino and Arawak, whom the Spanish had subjugated and enslaved and who were disappearing fast. Fleurant's point about what arrived with them is precise. They carried their religion, and the religion carried the historical memory of where they had come from, preserved in a form that could survive transport. A people can be stripped of language, lineage and name and still keep a working account of its own origin, provided the account is lodged in ritual rather than in writing. That is what happened on this island.

Around 1500 the world was polycentric and not yet capitalist. Several civilisations coexisted, some ancient and some newly formed. In China the Ming had ruled since 1368 and would rule until 1644. Three sultanates had emerged out of the Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman with its centre at Constantinople, the Safavid at Baku, and the Mughal, which ran from 1526 to 1707. In 1520 the Muscovites expelled the Golden Horde and declared Moscow the third Rome. In the Americas the Inca in Tawantinsuyu and the Aztecs in Anahuac were both sophisticated civilisations at the moment the Spaniards landed. No single centre imposed itself on all the others, and conflicts stayed local because there was no reference point against which alternatives had to be measured. Within a century Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac had been dismantled, the Maya were already in decline, and the Atlantic had become the axis around which the rest of the planet was arranged.