A man in Amhara declares himself Christ born again for the Gentiles

Around 1604 a man called za-Krestos began preaching in Amhara that he was the new Christ, born a second time in Ethiopia for the Gentiles. The Emperor Za Dengel had him executed. That did not end it. His followers multiplied and built a church of their own with a hierarchy, its own rites, and a communion in which people received the body of za-Krestos, said to have been taken from a woman named Amata Wangel. The Emperor Susenyos eventually wiped the movement out by force, and many of its members threw themselves off a precipice rather than submit. Very little is known about it beyond that. The shape is worth holding in mind, because exactly a century later a young woman in the Kongo would announce that a saint had taken the place of her soul, gather a following in a shattered kingdom, and be burned for it. Both movements spoke the language of the church that had been brought to them.

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.

Antonio Manuel Nsaku Ne Vunda was accredited to the Holy See in 1604 as ambassador extraordinary of the kingdom of Kongo, the second African to hold such a post at the Vatican. At home he had commanded the constitutionalist forces under king Mpanzu a Nimi, whose reign ran from 1587 to 1614. The journey took years and ruined his health. He died in Rome on 6 January 1608 and was buried in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. He had told his hosts that the trade in Black people appeared nowhere in the ten commandments. Kongo had by then been sending missions to Europe for more than a century. Kasuta Nsaku, who took the name Joao da Silva, served as the kingdom's first ambassador to Portugal from 1488 to 1490, and Dom Pedro de Sousa led an embassy to Pope Leo X in 1516. These were sovereign missions from an African state, sent while Portuguese ships were already carrying its people across the Atlantic.

Guaman Poma de Ayala was a Quechua living in Tawantinsuyu while the territory of the Inca was being replaced by the Viceroyalty of Peru. His Nueva coronica y buen gobierno, of 1616, addressed Philip the Third of Spain directly, and its last forty or so drawings are given over to labour in Tawantinsuyu, a conception of work that had nothing to do with the European medieval idea of labour and was being displaced by it. He wrote from inside the world under discussion. The Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, arguing at the same period about the rights of the Indians, wrote from Salamanca about people he had never met, and de Vitoria has been praised, criticised and enthroned as a founder of international law ever since. Guaman Poma was ignored until recently, and his book is still treated as a document rather than as a political treatise. Both men wrote about the same conquest.