The first Africans reach the island as indentured servants from Spain

Mocombe dates the first landing of Africans on the island and specifies their status carefully. These initial arrivals, he writes, were indentured servants brought from Spain rather than people shipped directly from Africa into chattel slavery. The distinction matters for his larger argument, since he wants to date the African presence on the island from the earliest colonial moment and to separate the legal category from the later plantation regime. He then jumps forward, noting that by 1697 the French and Africans together would displace the Spanish from the western side of the island. The detail also sets up his central claim about consciousness. Later arrivals, imported in large numbers and relatively isolated from whites and from free people of colour, were able to keep and reproduce their own religious and productive practices without interruption.

In 1503, and possibly a few years before that, ships carrying enslaved Africans reached Hispaniola. They were the first to arrive anywhere in the Americas. Columbus had landed on the island in 1492 and set up a short lived regime that put the Taino people to work pulling gold out of the rivers. The gold gave out. Fighting, overwork and imported sickness killed almost the entire indigenous population inside about fifty years, and neither the removal of Columbus from command nor a series of royal orders issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile slowed the dying. Officials and settlers now wanted two things, a workforce and a crop that paid. They found the crop in the sugar estates of the Canary Islands, which had already shown how cane fields, a mill and captive labour could be assembled anywhere warm enough. The two answers arrived together, and Hispaniola became the ground on which the Atlantic plantation was first built.

Daut retells the killing of the Xaraguan queen as nineteenth-century Haitian writers told it, which is the point of her whole method. Anacaona, whose name joined the Ayitian words for flower and for gold, accepted an invitation from the new Spanish governor Nicolas de Ovando along with three hundred of her people, was accused of treason once inside, and was hanged. Half a year of near indiscriminate slaughter of the Xaraguans followed, leaving orphans including her daughter Higuemota. Her husband Caonabo had already been seized in 1496 and, in the Haitian accounts, died aboard the ship deporting him to Spain. Daut stresses how Vastey drew the parallel that mattered to him, comparing Caonabo's end to Toussaint Louverture's death in a French prison. For these writers the island's Indigenous dead were not a separate prehistory but the first chapter of the same continuing crime.

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.