The Black kingdoms of America (part 1)
The textbooks talk about "European contact" after 1492. But for centuries, large areas of the non-native New World were African—and free.
Already read this one? Here’s part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
Upon a peak in Darien
Vasco Núñez de Balboa made quite a name for himself, for the third son of an Extremaduran hidalgo. John Keats ended a poem with a scene from the conquistador’s eventful life, although the poet misattributed Balboa’s exploit to Hernán Cortés:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Balboa was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the New World.
But “European” is doing more work here even than you might think. Of course native people living in the area—present-day Panama—had enjoyed that same view the day, week, decade and millennium before Balboa.
But accounting for that, Europeans weren’t the second group to survey this stretch of Pacific either. Balboa’s stare and his men’s surmise marked the arrival to America’s west coast of the earth’s third continental contingent (assuming, as it seems we shouldn't, no Polynesians ever came through).
Even more surprising—for me at least—Balboa might have known he’d been beaten to the Pacific by people from his side of the Atlantic, finding out soon after if not before he claimed all the land abutting the entire ocean for Spain. (Which yes, he did.)
Within a couple days’ walk of that peak in Darien, according to contemporary Spanish sources, lived a community of Black people: almost certainly, Africans who were brought to the New World in chains by the Spanish, escaped the island colony of Hispaniola and settled on the isthmus after crossing the Caribbean.
We don’t know when or how they crossed the sea, or much of anything else about this community’s no-doubt fascinating (and painful) beginnings.* While that’s tragic, at least we do know something about many other similar communities in the early and not-so-early post-Columbian era in the New World.
The free Africans Balboa met and perhaps shot at—he killed hundreds of people in a predominantly indigenous village where Africans also lived—were not unusual. They were just early.
Thousands of communities of escaped slaves and their free-born descendants (in some cases many generations of them) established themselves in the New World at various times, especially in the early years of European colonization. Collectively, hundreds of thousands of people probably lived in these communities at any given time.
Refocusing historical narratives on the margins—putting the periphery at the center—is important and valuable intellectual work, not to mention very much in academic vogue.
But I’m not really doing that here. In sizeable areas of the New World, European contact with indigenous people just wasn’t really the main event.
Europeans were no doubt the driving force behind what unfolded after Columbus, but in terms of the actual number of people involved, there’s a strong case to be made that—especially early on—the real story is African contact with indigenous peoples.
In the crucial—from Spanish colonists’ perspective—choke point of Panama, in the forests of northeastern Brazil where the Portuguese and Dutch fought for control of the sugar trade, in British—then Spanish—Nicaragua, in the jungles of Ecuador and many other places I’ve had to leave out (another time), the non-native population was overwhelmingly Black.
(Not that they always stayed non-native—more on that later.)
This is a central point of Charles Mann’s 1493, my main source here. Mann reevaluates the traumatic union of the Old and New Worlds so radically and engagingly, the book reads like the best speculative science fiction. But it’s very much nonfiction, drawing on a plethora of fascinating scholarship.
And if you happen to already know the extent to which fugitive slaves and their descendants shaped the early and not-so-early history of the post-contact Americas, read 1493 anyway. Mann will blow your mind at least 26 other discrete times. (And don’t get me started on 1491.)
Just miles from the colonists’ tiny coastal footholds, the 16th- and 17th-century western hemisphere was a very different place from what your textbooks probably described. (Mine mentioned none of this. And you can trust me: I did the reading and had lots of friends.)
Mann makes the point better than I can:
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are only now beginning to unravel.
And while it was anything but the rule or representative of the overall course of events, Black people and their native kin and allies repeatedly forced Europeans to capitulate—occasionally, to accept a humiliating, permanent settlement.
These free Black communities are known as quilombos, cumbes, palenques, mocambos and—referring to the people not the places—maroons. (The present-tense “are,” by the way, is intentional.)
Most of what we know about their history comes from their interactions with white outsiders. The communities that still exist today have a rich collective memory in the form of stories, rituals and dances, of course, and that’s a rich seam for scholars to mine.
But the documentary dearth is real. Seventeenth-century quilombos did not share the 17th-century Iberian habit of writing down the particulars of a given event as it happened, and then filing it away in some government archive for scholars to peruse centuries later. This fact limits our understanding of free African communities in the New World to a maddening degree, since our window onto the subject is so minuscule.
And when you contemplate how shot-through our few, scattered European sources are with bias, distortion and outright lies … it gets disheartening.†
If free Africans and perhaps a few of their New World-born children were already established and going about their business in Panama in 1513, how many other villages, forts, towns, queens, kings, wars, truces, alliances and betrayals don’t we know about—to say nothing of all the low-drama daily realities that even high-quality records tend to gloss over?
Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands if not millions of free Black people in the Americas lived alongside and to some extent became native people. And we only know a fraction of that story.
No worries though. What we do know is the stuff of sagas, epics, operas—even newsletters.
Next time, The Black kingdoms of America (part 2): hubris and fever—a malaria-ridden handful of colonists from a temperate zone tries to enslave a whole lot of combat veterans from the tropics. In the tropics.
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
* If you’re skeptical of this story, so was I. I’m relating it more or less exactly as 1493 author Charles Mann did. I trust Mann, who I’ve found to be a responsible journalist, based on his coverage of topics I’d studied prior to reading his work. That said, this anecdote about Balboa has a distinct Africans-beat-Columbus-to-America vibe about it, and I wanted to check his sources. Now, is a pre-Columbian African presence in the Americas possible? Absolutely. There just isn’t any evidence for it, and proposing theories based on possibility rather than evidence is a decent definition of pseudoscience. Proponents of this theory generally point to the Olmec stone heads, which kind of look Black (but look even more like indigenous people from Southern Mexico). It shouldn’t be necessary to systematically debunk paper-thin conjecture, but these scholars were kind enough to do it anyway. Back to the Panamanian maroons: I dug up Mann’s source, Panamanian writer Armando Fortune, who does indeed claim that Africans preceded Columbus in America, citing the story about Balboa as evidence. That said, Fortune quotes contemporary Spanish sources at length. These describe—secondhand 😭—Black people in Panama in pretty unambiguous terms. Mann appears to have taken these original sources, discarded Fortune’s interpretation, and applied the much more plausible hypothesis that the people in question were Africans who had been enslaved by the Spanish in Hispaniola and escaped. (A primary source quoted by Fortune says they may have been shipwreck survivors—also plausible, a maroon community in Ecuador originated that way, as we’ll see). I hope you’ll forgive me for burying all this in a footnote: I wouldn’t want discussions of sources to get in the way of a good story. Here’s a sketchy pdf download link to Fortune’s article. Best I could do.
† Since the reliability of white sources is going to be a nagging question here, I’ll share that I am one.