Rome gives the Kongo its own diocese and the first bishop dies within a year

Partly because of Pigafetta's book, the Pope agreed in 1596 to create a diocese for the Kongo with its cathedral at Sao Salvador. It was an unusual thing, a see that was not based in Portuguese territory, and Rome rather than Lisbon had decided on it. Italy and Spain took a lively interest in the place afterwards, which is the only way to explain the scale of missionary effort aimed at it in the following century. The first bishop arrived in 1601 and died a year later. Within twenty five years his successors had effectively moved the see to Loanda in Angola, a colonial port whose economic function was the shipping of enslaved people. The seminary opened by the Bishop of Sao Tome in 1571, closed in the 1580s and reopened in the 1590s, did produce a score or more of priests, white, black and of mixed parentage, to serve the new diocese.

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.

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.

In the seventeenth century, speakers of Civili and related languages north of the Congo river created an institution called Lemba. It governed the markets and the trade routes running from Malebo Pool to the ports at Loango and Cabinda, and it also healed. Its members were the healers, merchants and chiefs most deeply involved in selling people to Europeans, and what qualified a person for membership was an affliction understood to come from angered ancestors. Initiation meant a public purification and payment to the society in palm wine and manioc root, a plant that had arrived from the Americas and become a staple. The vocabulary came from an inherited verb meaning to calm, to soothe, to turn away the anger of a spirit. Leaders in the region faced a real paradox. The imported cloth they needed in order to hold their followers could be bought only by selling some of those followers. Lemba was the ritual answer to it.