Afonso wins the Kongo throne in battle and rules for thirty seven years

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.

Estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492 run from about one hundred thousand to eight million, and the spread does not much matter for what followed. By 1508 no more than sixty thousand Tainos remained. Forty years after that fewer than five hundred were left. Within a single generation the native population of the island had for practical purposes ceased to exist, killed by European diseases and by forced labour. The gold that had sealed their fate ran out quickly, and when word of the riches of Mexico and Peru reached the island the Spanish began to leave. Those who stayed concentrated on the eastern side around Santo Domingo, and the western third, the future Haiti, stood almost empty for close to a century. The Spanish also combed the neighbouring islands for replacement labour and emptied the Bahamas of people in the process. The first African slaves reached Hispaniola early in the sixteenth century.

Sugar cane is not native to Hispaniola. The first plant reached the island in 1506, brought from the Canary Islands by a Spaniard named Pierre d'Atenza. The first mill for crushing it was put up by a proprietor in the eastern part of the island, Gonzalez de Veloza. The plant took to the ground with a completeness that surprised later observers. There are tracts where cane went on reproducing itself by spontaneous growth for fifty years at a stretch, reaching twenty four feet in height and five inches through, and needing nothing beyond cutting when it ripened. In other sugar countries of good repute the crop has to be replanted every three, four or five years, and in Florida every year. Everything that followed on this island for three hundred years, the plantations, the forced labour, the ships, the wars over who owned the ground, ran on the crop that arrived in 1506 in one man's baggage.

Afonso I, king of Kongo, said that during a battle in 1506 he saw Saint James the Greater above the field, and that the saint assured him of a victory his numbers did not justify. He won. Saint James became the working patron of the kingdom, and many Kongolese came to treat him and Afonso as one figure, a royal ancestor carrying a sword. Catholic practice in Kongo was already old by then, and it kept the saint at the centre of royal display for two more centuries. In the last decades of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Kongolese were sold into Saint-Domingue, most heavily onto the northern plain. They arrived knowing Saint James. West Africans working the same fields matched the armed saint to Ogou, the spirit of iron. The July pilgrimage that fills Plaine-du-Nord with drums and mud baths inherits both lines at once.