Istwa Nou

Pernambuco, in the northeast corner of Brazil, was the first place in the Americas to grow sugar on a plantation scale. Everything the Caribbean later became was tried there first: the mill, the gang, the calendar of cutting and boiling, the arithmetic of buying people to replace people. Over the following three centuries more than seven hundred thousand Africans were landed in the region. Portuguese and Brazilian ships carried nearly all of them, and West Central Africa supplied the great majority. Recife received the arrivals and organised the voyages that went back for more. That combination of one supplier and one carrier held steady while every other branch of the Atlantic trade shifted its sources as war and price reshaped the African coast. The consequence is audible in northeastern Brazil today, in its religion, its drumming and its vocabulary, which point toward Angola and the Kongo with a directness most of the Americas cannot manage. Saint-Domingue copied the sugar model a century and a half later and out produced the place that invented it.