Jamaica took six hundred thousand captives in a single century

Jamaica was the largest destination for enslaved Africans anywhere in the British Empire, receiving over six hundred thousand people in the century before the American Revolution. Most came from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast, which reflects the trading connections of the Bristol and Liverpool merchants who dominated the traffic. British vessels accounted for nearly every documented arrival, a measure of how tightly the empire held its own market closed. What a continuous inflow from two regions produced is legible in Jamaican life: Akan influence from the Gold Coast in naming, in the maroon communities of the interior and in the rising led by Tacky in 1760, and Igbo influence from the Biafra ports in speech and belief. Jamaica lies about a hundred miles west of Saint-Domingue and was its closest rival in sugar until the French colony outproduced it. The two islands drew their labour from different stretches of Africa and ended the eighteenth century in very different conditions.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.

In 1757 an enslaved man named Medor went before the court at Cap Francais in Saint Domingue and confessed without being compelled. He said that he and many others used magical powders to persuade owners to grant them their freedom. His statement opened the enormous investigation that became the Makandal affair. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus have since tracked the timing and geography of the deaths blamed on poison that year and argue that mycotoxins in spoiled flour, during a wartime blockade, are the likelier cause. On that reading Medor and the others who confessed to using poison and spells to tame their owners may genuinely have believed their taming had killed by accident. The same pattern turns up far away. In Suriname, Clarinda and Nero insisted that the mixture Nero made from bush herbs was meant to calm Clarinda's mistress, and Clarinda was alarmed when the woman fell ill and died.

Sailing home from Angola, Francisco Buytrago stopped at Salvador in Bahia and stayed with a relative. He found many people there, free and enslaved, described as sick of charms, with drawn out illnesses of three or four years and no prospect of recovery. His relative owned an enslaved woman who was dying, her body swollen and her pulse sluggish, and those around her believed she had been afflicted deliberately. Buytrago had nkasa bark with him from Angola. He used it, in 1729, in what he called his first exorcism, and it was judged successful enough that others came to him. He sold some of the bark and performed at least ten more treatments before he left. In the decade before that day more than 82,000 Africans had landed in Bahia, about 30 per cent of them from West Central Africa. Some of the people in that room may well have known the bark by its Kikongo name.