A priest born in Sao Salvador writes the first book in Kikongo

By the end of Afonso's reign perhaps a hundred Portuguese were living in the Kongo, some with white wives, most with black wives or concubines. Their trade was slaving and their religion was Catholicism, and their children grew up speaking Kikongo as readily as Portuguese. Out of that group came the country's first local clergy. In 1546 the Bishop of Sao Tome ordained at Sao Salvador a young man named Diogo Gomes who had been born in the city. He turned out to be a capable priest, later joined the Jesuits, and composed the first catechism in Kikongo, which was printed in Lisbon. No copy has survived and it does not seem to have stayed in use for long. That failure mattered more than it looked. A church of Latin ritual with almost no priests and no scripture in the local language had nothing to leave behind between clerical visits.

In 1544 Spanish officials on Hispaniola reported that the indigenous population had effectively ceased to exist. Fifty-two years had passed since Columbus anchored off the northern coast. Inside one long lifetime a society of hundreds of thousands of people, organised into chiefdoms with their own leaders, farming systems, ceremonial centres and trade links across the islands, had been reduced to a handful of survivors absorbed into colonial households. Nothing on that scale had happened in the Atlantic world before. What the report meant in practice was that the labour question was settled. Spanish Hispaniola would run on Africans from then on, and it did, for the two and a half centuries that followed. The island's later history, French Saint-Domingue, the revolution and the republic, takes place on ground whose original population had been erased before the French arrived. Haiti keeps the Taino name for the island. It is the largest thing the Taino left in the world.

The encomienda was a grant from the Spanish crown giving a settler the right to take labour from a named group of indigenous people. Its stated justification was Christianisation. Its working purpose was to supply hands for the mines and the cattle ranches, to raise silk, and to feed the encomendero along with the workers in the towns. On the islands of the Caribbean the settlers pushed it so hard that the population it rested on died out. In 1549 a royal cedula changed what an encomienda could demand, moving the obligation from labour to tribute. Wallerstein reads that as a move away from something close to slavery towards a system in which the threat of force stayed in the background while the crop still had to be grown and sold. When the change cut the labour supply too far, Spain compelled wage work outright, called the cuatequil in Mexico and the mita in Peru. Every step was taken by law, and every step kept the estates supplied.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.