The Black kingdoms of America (part 2)
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.
Missed part 1? It’s right here. Read this already? Here’s part 3, part 4 and part 5.
Hubris and fever
It’s hard to conceive of an act of greater evil and cruelty than trying to enslave another human being. And evil and cruelty—at least when combined with power—often to go unpunished.
But believing it’s possible to own a person the way you would an object is also an act of extreme hubris. And hubris, by blinding the powerful to the limits of their power, creates an opening for at least a measure of justice.
Take the experience of the earliest Portuguese colonists in Pernambuco,* in northeastern Brazil, in the 17th century: they expected to be able to import people from Angola (the source of the vast majority of enslaved Africans brought to Brazil in that period) and in exchange for nothing but meager rations, meager accommodations and extreme brutality, to extract a fortune in sugarcane.
Overall, they were successful by their own unconscionable standards. Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888, having imported 4 million people in bondage from Africa, or 40 percent of all those brought to the Americas. That sheer level demand implies that the planters were making enormous amounts of money.
Still, the Portuguese encountered fierce resistance from the people they regarded as chattel: almost immediately, they found themselves mired in a protracted, costly war against an independent, self-sustaining—and most importantly free—Black and Indian state.
Called Palmares, this community was founded by escaped slaves and lasted for nearly a century. It was a thorn in the Portuguese side because it provided a haven for escaped slaves, threatening the planters’ bottom line. But perhaps more importantly, having a hostile, militarized, fortified settlement just inland effectively blocked the Portuguese colony’s expansion.
As a result, it represented a strategic threat to Portuguese Brazil every bit as real as the Dutch, who in this period dreamed of a Pernambuco without Iberians and raided accordingly.
A couple of factors led to the establishment of this African kingdom on the other side of the Atlantic.
First, in the 17th century, in the American tropics, Europeans died like flies. This was an era of truly appalling mortality for pretty much any human being in the New World. Native peoples suffered not just slavery, war and genocide at the hands of Europeans—but even more lethally, the ravages of European diseases like smallpox and influenza, to which they had no immunity.
These pathogens killed large proportions of people even in places that wouldn’t see a white person for centuries to come.
But European diseases aren’t the whole story. Africans, obviously through no fault of their own, brought another set of diseases to which neither Europeans nor indigenous people had any immunity: tropical ailments like malaria† and yellow fever positively thrived in the humid equatorial regions of the Americas.
Horrific numbers of enslaved Africans died in the Middle Passage, and upon arriving in the New World many more were killed by violence, overwork and maltreatment: a third to half of those arriving in Brazil didn’t survive five years, according to Mann.
But in some areas, especially in the early years of colonization, Europeans died at similar—sometimes even greater rates—than the people they enslaved.
(Native people died at even more staggering rates than either of these groups. The 16th and 17th centuries saw something like a 90% decline in the Indian population—in other words, around a fifth of all the people on earth died. Forests grew back in the depeopled Americas to such an extent that the global average temperature fell.)
Only a fraction of the white colonists arriving in the equatorial New World would survive their first year of “seasoning”—the ominous euphemism for fevers which weren’t guaranteed to end after that first year, but might recur for a decade. Invariably Europeans made their situation worse by clearing forests and creating not the old-country pastoral idylls they probably had in mind, but hyper-efficient mosquito hatcheries.
Africans, when they could get out from under European depredations, had basically no trouble surviving—even thriving—in this new environment. Most had survived malaria and other Old World tropical killers as children, as had countless generations of their ancestors, conferring a range of defenses from antibodies to inherited mutations in blood cell proteins.
Another factor in Africans’ favor was that many of them had a very particular set of skills.
A bit of context on the 17th-century slave trade, in case you’re picturing white raiders attacking Angolan villages and taking those they capture to Brazil. Don’t, this almost never happened.
European money was very much present in Africa in this period, with devastating consequences, but actual European people essentially absent, with only a few hundred individuals in a few ports participating in the final steps of a long, brutal supply chain. At every step prior to the Middle Passage, that supply chain was controlled by Africans.
Partly as a result, white people 17th-century Brazil were unlikely to have any idea where their slaves had originally come from. Except, as mentioned, that the vast majority were from Angola.
One thing they likely didn’t know was that a great many of these Angolans were in fact prisoners of war: men who only months before had been combat soldiers and who, under different circumstances, might have sold dozens or hundreds of their defeated enemies to a slave broker, rather than the other way around.‡
In thrall to the crippling hubris of the slaver—and wracked by tertian fits and agues—the planters probably gave their victims’ pasts no thought at all. This was a dangerously myopic mentality when, as Mann puts it, “their army of slaves could be an enslaved army.”
A final point: Africans in Pernambuco (and many other areas of the New World) enjoyed a serious numerical advantage over Europeans. This was due in large part to the tolls of malaria, but also the structure of Brazil’s plantation economy: a vast enslaved labor force performed the brutal work of harvesting and processing sugar cane, with a thin layer of free people overseeing the work on behalf of the ultimate beneficiaries, frilly-collared mercantilists quaffing caipirões in Lisbon.§
In short, a fever-stricken handful of colonists from a temperate zone was trying to enslave a much larger number of combat veterans from the tropics. In the tropics.
It went poorly.
Next time, The Black kingdoms of America (part 3): Palmares—an Angolan kingdom rises in the Brazilian forest and joins the colonial power struggle.
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
* The area we’re talking about is actually in the modern Brazilian state of Alagoas, not Pernambuco. But it was known as Pernambuco in the 17th century.
† Strains of malaria have been documented in Europe since people started documenting things, but a level of resistance to these varieties didn’t help Europeans who were exposed to African strains of malaria.
‡ At this time Angola was plagued by war, much of which was aimed expressly at taking slaves. The money earned as a result would buy Portuguese firearms, which fueled the fighting and essentially compelled participation, because if you were outgunned, you would be captured and sold into slavery. A similarly vicious, slavery-fueled arms race was taking place around the same time among the indigenous tribes of the American southeast.
§ No these had not been invented yet.