Yams, mounds, and the labour that builds a chief

Yams enter Caribbean farming late and change more than the menu. A yam is a root crop that keeps, and a crop that keeps can be counted, stored and handed out. In parts of the Pacific this produced a visible politics: the yam house, a shed of stored roots standing where everyone could see it, was the measure of a leader's capacity to gather a surplus and redistribute it. No yam shed has been excavated in the Caribbean, and Keegan and Hofman claim none. What the islands do show is mounded cultivation, the heaping of soil into raised beds, which takes sustained coordinated labour and returns yields well beyond the needs of the household that worked the field. Somebody organised that labour and somebody allocated what it produced. The chiefdoms the Spanish encountered in the Greater Antilles rested on this arrangement, which is to say that the political structures of 1492 had been grown in the ground over the preceding centuries.

In April 1482 a Portuguese squadron under Diogo Cao was working its way south along the African coast in search of a sea road to India when it came on the mouth of a very large river. Cao took his ships in and landed at Mpinda, the chief port of the kingdom of Kongo. People of the coastal province of Soyo told him that the ruler of the country lived far inland, at Mbandza Kongo. Cao belonged to the Order of Christ, the Portuguese crusading order that Prince Henry the Navigator had directed and that paid for these voyages. Travelling inland the Portuguese found six provinces, well watered farmland, cattle herds, cloth woven locally, streets lined with orange and lemon and pomegranate trees, and a royal court whose ceremony they compared with their own. This meeting opened three centuries of traffic between Portugal and Kongo. The same coast later supplied a large share of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue, the colony that became Haiti.

Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean and the ground on which several of the most consequential events in the hemisphere took place. Haiti holds the western third and the Dominican Republic the eastern two thirds. Columbus named it La Isla Espanola in 1492, the Spanish island, and the Latin form of the shortened version became the standard name in English. Together with Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico it makes up the Greater Antilles. The colonial names still cause confusion in print. Saint-Domingue was the French colony in the west and Santo Domingo the Spanish colony in the east, and writers applied both loosely to the whole island, blurring the distinction between two territories that were already becoming separate countries. The Taino had their own words for the place. Those words appear in a few early Spanish documents and then vanish. A name is a small thing to lose, and it is usually the first thing taken.

When Columbus arrived in 1492 the island was divided among five Taino chiefdoms, each under a leader called a cacique. Jaragua in the south and Marien in the north cover most of what is now Haiti. Higuey, Magua and Maguana occupied the eastern two thirds, roughly the territory of the Dominican Republic. These were more than villages. Each chiefdom held many settlements, collected tribute, organised labour for planting and building, and conducted relations with its neighbours. Succession was matrilineal. When a cacique died, authority passed to the eldest child of his eldest sister, so a woman's line carried political legitimacy and women themselves could and did rule, as Anacaona of Jaragua did. Spanish administration had no place for any of this and set about replacing it within a decade. The island had a political geography before 1492, with borders, capitals and rules of inheritance. What arrived in December of that year was one system of power destroying another.