Mbandza Kongo becomes the first diocese in Black Africa

In 1595 Pope Clement VIII raised Mbandza Kongo, which the Portuguese called Sao Salvador, to a diocese, the first in Black Africa, and the bishop's seat was installed there two years later. Jesuits opened a college in the city for six hundred pupils, where local men studied grammar and moral theology and were prepared for the priesthood. Bishop Francisco de Soveral, who held the see from 1627 to 1642, ordained Black and mixed race graduates of that college. The Jesuits printed catechisms in Kikongo: Mateus Cardoso published La Doutrina Christaa in 1624, following an earlier text by the priest Diogo Gomez in 1555. Kongo nobles put the Portuguese form Don, or Ndona for women, in front of their Christian names, in the manner of the kings of Portugal, which is why the records carry names such as Ndona Beatrice and Dom Pedro. Christianity in Kongo was old, written and locally staffed long before captives from this coast reached Saint-Domingue.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.

Before the trade in Africans reached full volume, the French islands were worked by engages, indentured labourers recruited in Europe among vagabonds, beggars, the idle, former convicts and people who did not fit. Tobacco, cotton, indigo, cacao and cattle needed hands, and colonists and merchants took them wherever they could be found. Shipped to the Antilles, an engage owed thirty six months of service to a planter. His conditions were those of a slave, with the single difference that his servitude ended. A few who survived the term set up afterwards as managers or overseers. Others had come as ruined artisans, coopers, masons, carpenters and blacksmiths hoping for a new start, and most were disappointed. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the arithmetic changed. Large sugar works needed only a thin layer of white supervision plus abundant unskilled labour that was cheap and permanent, and the white emigration was stopped.