Cartagena and Portobelo receive the Spanish mainland's captives

The Spanish possessions on the American mainland, from New Granada down through Peru, drew their enslaved labour overwhelmingly from West Central Africa between 1520 and 1810. The ships landed at two ports. Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, and Portobelo, on the isthmus of Panama, were the licensed points of entry, and from there people were marched or shipped inland to the gold workings of the Choco, to the silver districts, to the ranches and the mills. Portuguese and Spanish vessels carried the traffic at first, since the asiento contracts were held in Lisbon and Seville. Dutch and later British merchants came in as the volumes rose. The consequence is visible now. The African-descended populations of the Colombian Pacific coast and of coastal Peru trace back mainly to Kongo and Angola, and their drumming and burial practices preserve elements that scholars can match to particular West Central African traditions.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

In March 1529 Ahmed Gran, who led the armies of the Muslim sultanate of Adal, destroyed the Ethiopian army at Chembra Koure. He then worked through the country year by year, starting in the east and moving north and west, targeting churches and monasteries. Dabra Libanos went up in flames on 14 July 1532 and a number of its monks threw themselves into the fire. The cathedral of St Mary of Zion at Aksum, which probably dated from the sixth century, was reduced to rubble. Early in 1540 the royal fortress of Amba Geshen fell with the treasury and the state archives inside it. Tens of thousands of people accepted Islam and many more were marched off into slavery. Almost no Ethiopian manuscript survives from before 1530. By 1540 Gran considered himself king of the country and much of the population obeyed him. His soldiers had brought their wives from Adal and settled.

In 1605 and 1606 the colonial authorities in Santo Domingo destroyed the settlements along the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola. The aim was to stop the contraband trade that those towns carried on with foreign shipping. The result was a further fall in a population that was already shrinking, since many Spaniards on the island left for the American mainland, drawn by stories of rich indigenous kingdoms and by a crown that now cared more about its continental colonies. New settlers from Spain saw no reason to come to the Caribbean. The nineteenth century Dominican historian Jose Gabriel Garcia, a doctrinaire liberal, called the operation a violent answer to a problem the government could not win by law, and held that a freer trade policy would have prevented it. He also drew the longer line. Emptying the north and west of the island opened the door for French colonists to settle there.