1526 to 1867 · Africanspan
One label covered dozens of nations in the Kongo and Angola trade
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West Central Africa sent more captives into the Atlantic than any other region, and its politics were far more elaborate than the shorthand used in the Americas suggests. The Kingdom of Kongo was a Christian state with provinces, a court and an ambassador in Rome. The Lunda Confederation controlled trade routes deep in the interior. The Ovimbundu kingdoms of the highlands traded and raided in every direction. From 1526 to 1867 people taken from all of these were sold to Portuguese buyers by war leaders working the routes inland from Luanda and Benguela, and once they were landed on the far side of the ocean the paperwork called them Congos. That single word covers languages, laws and religions with nothing to do with one another. It matters for Haiti. Kongo people were a large share of the arrivals in Saint-Domingue in the last decades before 1791, and the Petwo rite in Vodou carries a great deal of that inheritance.
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