For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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Afro Americans: presence and expansion^*

Nicomedes Santacruz

The number of black people that the trade snatched from the African continent to make them slaves in the New World is unknown. The massive trade began in 1518 with the first slave ship that arrived in America directly from Africa with its "load" of ebony pieces. Knowing that the slave traffic was suppressed in 1873 and considering that licenses granted at the beginning authorized a total of 4000 "pieces" a year, and gradually increased until the 18^th century with the participation of slave ships from all interested nations, to an average of 100.000 per year, the total number of black people introduced during those nearly four centuries has been estimated at 15 to 20 million.

However, such estimates do not include clandestine trade, which extended until the final years of the 20^th century. And if one thinks about the gross figures of the process, which began with the burning of African towns, continued with tying with ropes those captured who marched to coastal factories, continued with the "intermediate journey" that reduced the stock considerably and, finally, the ports of Cartagena of the Indies, Veracruz, Havana, Portobelo, Bahia, and Buenos Aires for their domestic marketing, one would have to double or even treble those estimated total figures.

Bozales, ladinos and criollos

"The black slave", according to Rolando Mellafe, "was the object of trade that arrived everywhere with conquest itself, not after. In the hordes that laid siege on the marvelous city of Tenochtitlan, in those which with a strike of luck and audacity caught Atahualpa, in those which crossed the Andean highlands to arrive in the fresh valleys of Chile; in all those, black slaves were sold and bought, alternating trade with war and with the acts of taking possession and founding the first cities".

In effect, the first black people arrived in the New World with the first Spaniards. These black people came from the Iberian Peninsula, where they lived since the end of the 14^th century, amounting to tens of thousands by mid 15^th century. They received the name of ladinos because they had been christened and spoke Spanish. Most discoverers and conquerors carried black people in their enterprises as "allies" or "aides", having the same destiny as their Castillian masters and participating in the spoils in the case of triumph.

The above quoted Rolando Mellafe calls them "conqueror-slaves", and it is quite possible that these black people may have possessed Indian slaves during their short period of privilege that begins to wane in mid 14^th century, when, once the fights among encomendedores¹ had been calmed and the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru had been consolidated, the great demand for manual labor begins.

This is when their luck changes. At the beginning of the 17^th century and with the approval of the viceroyal authority, Indians can then obtain black slaves; and not only caciques and village chiefs, but also the common Indian, as the Peruvian architect Emilio Harth-Terré observes in numerous cases: "María Choque...and her brothers...requested the Corregidor, in 1640, to be allowed to sell a plot of land so they could pay for a Negro".

There is also data in wills of Indians: "...among their possessions, they left a black slave, named Magdalena Bañón, whom they had bought, having as witness Francisco de Fuentes, Indian, town-council clerk". Those cases no longer deal with ladinos, but with so-called "bozales" or black people from Africa, although being cases in Peru, they may well have been "criollos", as the children of Africans born in America were called.

However, the brief presence of the early ladino black people, whether as "aides" of the conquerors or as workers in gold placers of Antillean rivers, does not constitute a cycle to take into account as important chapters in the history of Black African slavery in America. The true labor activity has an agricultural character (with the exception of mining in Brazil or Upper Peru). And Cubans divide it into two cycles: one, comprising predominance of tobacco, and the other that of sugar cane. A third cycle results from the latter, based on sugar processing.

The discovery of America acquires a special meaning not because Columbus was already familiar with the sugar industry through his experiences in Madeira and the Canary Islands, but because the new continent, plethoric with plentiful lands, would allow the development of the plantation economy beyond the imaginable.

"Syrup cane " and the sugar islands

In Europe at the end of the 14^th century, "syrup cane", introduced centuries before by Marco Polo, produced small quantities of sugar in Madeira and the Canary Islands, and this product was sold by the ounce and at gold prices.

Sugar cane arrived in America in Columbus' third voyage (1498) to be acclimatized in the Hispaniola, from where it quickly spread throughout the continent. The urgency with which the cane has to be grounded, after being cut, and the fact that harvesting requires a cutting period as brief as possible, created the need to accumulate available, cheap and stable manual labor, for a job that is discontinuous in itself.

Thus, the need for abundant manual labor in America did not increase slavery, but it did increase the slave traffic to levels never seen before. In order to be able to quantify this, we will take the western part of la Hispaniola as an example. Under French colonialism, it produced by 1750 "the best and most beautiful sugar in the whole world". Such was the importance it had over the other French colonies of the Caribbean, that instead of Saint Domingue, it was called "The Pearl of the Antilles".

For the same year as the French Revolution breaks out, this was the economic panorama of Saint Domingue: "In that period of 1789 the colony was at its height: its population was composed of 40 to 50.000 whites, 500.000 black slaves, and an almost equal number of mulattos and free blacks. In the Western part, there were 813 sugar, 3.117 coffee, 789 cotton plantations, 3.150 indigo, 54 cacao haciendas, 182 rum factories, 6 cooper's shops, 370 lime ovens, 29 ceramic workshops and 37 tile shops.

"Its exports to France increased that year to 135'620.000 million Francs and its imports to 65'578.000. Foreign trade amounted to only 7 million Francs in imports and 3'007.000 in exports. Sea transport between Saint Domingue and France used 700 ships and over 18.000 seamen.

"Exported sugar in 1790 increased to 6'416.209 arrobas, equivalent to 401.013 boxes; exported coffee increased to 76'837.219 pounds; cotton to 7'400.724 pounds and indigo to 758.628 pounds. Likewise, 29.502 barrels of residue honey, 303 casks of low-grain rum, 7.887 tanned leather, 5.180 untreated leather and 5.000 pounds of tortoise shells".

In this way and with the labor of African slaves, America made possible for sugar to go from being a product available to very few, to become a food which due to its energetic qualities, would play a transcendental role in the history of human nutrition.

Cimarrones and apalencados

The history of slavery in America, with all its monstrous barbarism, has a parallel heroic counterpart in Indians and cimarrones, whose systematic escapes to freedom -or to death- occur from the years immediately following discovery, to continue uninterruptedly until the end of the 19^th century.

Initially, the term cimarron was applied to domestic cattle that escaped to the mountains in the Island of Hispaniola. Later, colonizers applied this name to the Indians who had escaped from the encomiendas; and by 1530 fugitive black slaves began to be called that way. Rural slaves who run from plantations towards the forest were called cimarrones, but the domestic slave who escaped from one village or another, was called "runaway".

Palenque was the name applied to fortified cities, erected by cimarrones to take refuge and to defend themselves. Cimarrones in a palenque were called apalencados. The toponymy registers at present many localities under the name "Palenque" in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Peru, and all of them owe their name to those places of refuge guarded by palisades, to the former palenques of cimarrones.

The English word maroon, as well as the French marron, derive from the Spanish word cimarron. The Brazilian equivalent to the palenque was the quilombo, particularly in the States of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goias, Alagoas, Bahia, Maranhao and Sergipe. Colonial authorities of Brazil, in the 17^th century understood by quilombo "any room of over five fugitive black people, partly without provisions and even if it does not have a built hut or if there are no pallisades".

In the Caribbean and the Antilles, those who searched and captured cimarrones were ranchers, and in order to obtain their reward they showed the client the two ears of each dead black person. Forty Cuban ranchers and their one hundred dogs exterminated the undefeatable cimarrones of Cudjoe, in Jamaica. Two hundred dogs and their ranchers were sent to cimarrones of Ti Noel, in Haiti.

However, not even the harshest punishments or the cruelest tortures and mutilations, nor their end at the gallows and immediate dismemberment, were able to prevent slaves from running away or reduce slaves to the point that they gave up their stubborn intent to search for freedom, resorting to palenques until the final consequences. On the contrary, there were many cases in which colonial authority gave up and, after reaching an agreement with the leader of apalencado cimarrones, would end by recognizing a degree of sovereignty of the palenque or, at least, grant freedom to the slaves in them.

Uprising and rebellions

The late Brazilian professor Edison Carneiro, classifies slave insubordination in his country in three types:

1. Escape to the forests, resulting in quilombos.

2. Organized revolt, against local pro-slavery power.

3. Armed uprising, as part of the independence struggle.

This scheme is applicable to the entire American continent, but attempting to establish a chronology of these three types of struggles would be an arduous task, and we would be too far from including all the names, dates and places.

Just as an example we will mention: in Hispaniola "Captain Lemba" and Diego de Campo (1548); in Tierra Firme the black man "Felipillo" in the Planeque of San Miguel (1549); in Barquisimeto -New Granada- the famous black man Miguel (1555); in Castillla del Oro Antón Mandinga (1582) and Pedro Cazanga, Juan Angola and Antón Sosa (1559); in Martinica Francisco Fabule (1665); the black man Michel, in Bahoruco, Santo Domingo (1719); and in Venezuela the black man Andresote, campaigning in Puerto Cabello and Tucacas (1732), Miguel Luengo, in Tutú (1747), José Leonardo Chirinos in Coro (1795) and Francisco Pirela in Maracaibo (1779).

Another notorious case is the black man Bayano, cimarron who forms a large palenque in the mountainous area of Panama. Raised as "King of the Black People" (1553), he reigned for five years in the region, until the Governor reached an agreement with Bayano, recognizing the freedom of his palenque in exchange for not accepting new cimarrones.

The quilombo complex of Palmares in Pernambuco (Brazil) resisted for nearly a century (1630-1695). In 1646, it had around 6.000 cimarrones. Later it became a confederation of quilombos over an area of 60 leagues, housing over 20.000 souls. The so-called Black Republic of Palmares was governed by a dynasty of kings, founded by Ganga Zumba. A nephew of his, Ganga-Sumbi, governed Palmares when it was crushed in 1695 by an entire army led by Domingo Jorge Velho. King Zumbi was decapitated.

The great Haitian epic

The case of Haiti, which culminates triumphantly, founding the first sovereign Republic in Latin America, deserves a separate chapter. Among the rebellious leaders who from mid 18^th century had risen against French colonialism, Francois Macandal stands out on his own merit. He said he was enlightened, inspired by the superior divinities of Africa, with the sacred mission of expelling white people and make Saint Domingue an independent black kingdom. For five years, colonizers of the plain persecuted the cimarron leader, until they finally caught him and Macnadal was burnt alive on January 20, 1758.

The struggle was continued by Boukman, a black slave from Jamaica, who died heroically in 1791. He was followed by Jean Francois, who made himself be called generalissimo; and joining him are Henry Christophe and Tousaint-Louverture. The terrible epic of slaves to found a free country lasted for thirteen years. On January 1^st 1804, in Gonalves Square, Jean Jacques Dessalines, champion of the Napoleonic troops, surrounded by his generals, soldiers and people, proclaimed the independence of Haiti.

In the Constitution of 1805, Dessalines, the Founder, had inserted the following precept: "No white man, whatever his nation, may step on this territory as master or owner and may not acquire any property in the future ".

However, thirteen years of bloody struggles, in which the black slave bearing the libertarian torch -not as a poetic metaphor but as a destructive weapon- had burnt farms and sugar cane plantations alike, left Haiti in total ruin, reducing to insignificant numbers that immense production which had supplied three-fourths of the world market, as the sugar cane plantation that had not been destroyed did not have a single sugar cane to ground.

Conclusion

Cuba filled the gap left by the Haitian sugar market. The sudden disappearance of the Haitian production had already produced a huge increase in prices; and Cuban sugar, for which there were few customers, became the object of sharp demands, paying over twice the price. The Haitian catastrophe opened a new era in the Cuban sugar production, but the effect of these events, both in their causes and their consequences, affected both islands negatively all through the 19^th century.

While Haiti, after becoming the first republic created by slaves in the entire history of humanity, was immediately blocked by a "security fence" so that the bad example would not spread throughout the continent. Cuba, which benefited even from the migration of the sugar-elite fleeing from the Haitian revolution to seek refuge in the east, saw its independence postponed until 1902. Likewise, it had to bear slavery until 1886 (abolition arrived only two years before it did in Brazil), as a result of its late sugar boom produced by the confrontation, both in the peninsular metropolis as in the Antillean colony, between agricultural landowners (conservative) and industrial owners (liberals), the latter favoring free contracts between boss and worker, rejecting the term slavery from its mercantile system.

As a corollary of those four centuries of slavery, racism stayed behind. Slavery was closely identified with black people until the synonym was produced. Thus, a racial turn was applied to what had been an economic phenomenon. Eric Williams clarifies this thus: "Slavery was not born of racism; on the contrary, racism was the consequence of slavery. The slaved labor force of the New World was mestizo, black and yellow; it was catholic, protestant and pagan".

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