The Black kingdoms of America (part 5)
Three worlds collided when Columbus landed. The meeting of Africa and indigenous America played an enormous part.
Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
A New World
When Sepúlveda, the Quiteño judge, finally struck a treaty with the leaders of Esmeraldas, he celebrated by commissioning their portrait on behalf of King Philip III. The work is a stunning piece of portraiture, just, period. But in light of its context in the post-Columbus Americas, it’s mesmerizing.
Three men stand beneath labels giving their names and ages. At least for someone who doesn’t know much about 16th-century Spanish portraiture, nothing obviously stands out as unusual in their dress or posture. Each could be any old peninsular notable.
They wear fine clothes and starched, frilly Shakespeare-style collars, conveying wealth and status. Each has a hand on a weapon, conveying virility, martial prowess and unfuckwithableness. The labels above their heads start with don: sir.
Except that the weapons aren’t the sabres any red-blooded Spanish conde would pose with. They’re iron-tipped African spears. And of course, the men are Black. Black men in this time and place did not wear the fine clothes of the Iberian leisure classes. They did not carry weapons: Medina writes that in Quito it was illegal for Black people, enslaved or free, to bear arms. Those same laws let any “español”to kill any “negro” for attacking them, armed or not—or even “questioning” them.*
And yet these Black men were having their portrait painted for the king (to whom they at least sometimes vocalized loyalty), and if their spears were just props in this particular moment, they certainly knew something about combat. Unequal to the task, the colonial administration had long ago given up on a military solution to its Esmeraldas problem.
If you’ve read this far, you know this sort of thing was less uncommon than commonly assumed. No need to (further) belabor the point. But the painting holds one more surprise: the prominent gold jewelry in the three men’s noses, ears and lips. The style is obviously indigenous.
Unlike the fancy European clothes (since they lived in the equatorial rainforest, the Esmeraldeños felt no need for such sweaty apparel), the Indian jewelry wasn’t borrowed.
According to Medina, during the Spanish colonists’ last attempt to pacify Esmeraldas, soldiers
bore witness to the intense ethnic crossover that had been transpiring in Esmeraldas. Many observed the lack of physical differentiation between maroon offspring, called mulattos, and their native allies. The process of ethnogenesis was clearly felt among first generation Esmeraldeño mulattos. Their marriage into native matrilineal tribal structures hastened the adoption of native ritual, language, dress and adornment.
(In case your 19-year-old self didn’t saddle your present self with an anthropology degree, “ethnogenesis”—as you might have guessed—is the process by which a new ethnic group is created.)
According to a friar who lived in the community (cited by Medina), intermarriage was a conscious project: “the indios join only with mulatas, and the mulatos join only with indias, and for this reason, all who are born here are mulatos.”
At the same time as the maroons of Esmeraldas fought the Spanish sent by Quito, their correspondence expressed loyalty to distant European authorities: the Christian God† and the king of Spain.
At the same time as they enslaved and massacred some Indians, they more or less became—through kinship, language and culture—other Indians.
In their power politics, they were Spanish encomenderos, defining their territory based on which native villages they could extract labor from. Or were they native caciques, practicing a form of brutal Realpolitik that was nothing new—just a bit hispanicized in its particulars? Or were they African chieftains making their way on a new continent, something like the Palmarinos?
What I’m trying to say is, there’s a lot going on in that portrait.
Nor was Esmeraldas unique in thoroughly, fractally blending American, European and African cultures.
Around the time they were landing at Plymouth 2,000-odd miles north, the English were setting up another colony off the coast of Nicaragua, on what they called Providence Island. The Spanish put the kibosh on that project after just 10 years, in 1641, and a large number of slaves the English had brought to the colony escaped to the mainland.
There they allied and gradually merged with the indigenous Miskitu and a handful of English settlers, founding a kingdom that persisted, with English support, until nearly the 20th century. Like their Panamanian counterparts to the south, the leaders of this maroon polity saw their main adversary as the Spanish and their most useful ally as the English—though they probably weren’t naïve about the motives of their former enslavers.
The English armed the Miskitu and participated in joint raids on Spanish plantations, where they would capture and sell Indian and African slaves. The Miskitu fought and recaptured other maroons on behalf of the English. In return they received political recognition from England (then Britain) as a sovereign kingdom, confirmed in British-sponsored coronation ceremonies.
The fallout from the American Revolution wrecked British influence in the region, but the Miskitu maintained their independence from Spain and then—following its independence—Nicaragua.
Referring to the Miskitu as maroons, as I did a paragraph or so ago, is probably an oversimplification. Their language was and is indigenous. (It’s part of the Misumalpan family, since I know you were gonna ask. Many also speak an English-based creole and/or Spanish.) Miskitu culture had probably been mainly indigenous for a long time. The Black refugees from English slavery left an outsized legacy in terms of physical appearance, though, since people of African descent were less susceptible to European pathogens.
And the Miskitu were fiercely proud of their European heritage and connections as well, wearing European clothes, using English names, recognizing a noble caste based on its European counterpart and giving their three main leaders (besides the King) the titles General, Governor and Admiral.
As always happens, this pride had a vicious streak, and the Miskitu felt entitled to abuse and enslave the “wild” Indians around them.
In 1894 Nicaragua forcibly annexed the Miskitu kingdom, aided by the United Fruit Company.
If I thought I could get away with a part six, I’d be introducing the Black Seminoles now (perhaps another time).
But hopefully the main point of this series is clear-ish enough: the familiar story of the New World since 1492 isn’t wrong, just incomplete. Europeans did conquer, enslave, oppress and spread disease. Indigenous people did lose their land, lifeways and lives to European depredations. Europeans did force Africans across the ocean in chains, to work in appalling conditions without pay and suffer constant assaults on their persons and dignity.
What that story doesn’t acknowledge is that over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Black people at least won and often kept their freedom for generations. They fought white colonizers to stalemate or defeat and negotiated with them as equals—if not victors.
In the story of Old and New World “contact” (a term that, when you think about it, seems a bit too bland for what happened) it was often—very often—Africans doing the contacting. They married native people, learned their languages, lived in their communities and became for all intents and purposes native. Or they enslaved native people, massacred, raped and killed them. Or they suffered similar fates at native people’s hands.
Likely they did all of the above, more or less at the same time, because after all, indigenous America was hardly a single, homogeneous group of people you could only have one kind of relationship with. Native tribes, nations, factions, bands and empires treated each other in every conceivable way, before and after Columbus.‡
Now everything I’ve shared here, by necessity, comes from the (European) documentary evidence. Otherwise I wouldn’t know about it. Yet even what we do have evidence for (Palmares, Esmeraldas, the Africans who beat Balboa to it) seldom makes it into the narrative. Why?
An obvious reason is the Eurocentric bias that runs clear through from the primary sources to the whatever-comes-after-tertiary sources (middle school textbooks). Who was First To Behold the Eastern Pacific? The answer has to be a European surname. Indigenous people don’t count, and escaped slaves—sorry, who? Did Africans just win a war against their would-be masters and force concessions of freedom and territory? Don’t be socialist! Winning!
There may also be a more forgivable reluctance to distract from the suffering of millions and the crimes of those who inflicted it on them. The Aqualtunes, Yangas and Zumbis are all very inspiring. But is there something a bit too comforting about paying attention to a few free Black communities, rather than the overwhelming majority of enslaved ones?
Perhaps there is, if you ignore the horrors of slavery and laser-focus on feel-good stories of marronage. But at least in my Anglophone North American milieu, no one does that.
Besides, we clearly have only the tiniest glimpse of this history. Hundreds of years of shared history between Black and native communities played out where white people couldn’t see it—probably for the best, as far as the Black and native communities are concerned, except it means we know almost nothing about it today. A few soldiers’ diaries about the enemy, a friar’s dispatch about the lost sheep ….
With any luck there’s more evidence hiding in plain sight, in places like conquistadors’ diaries. And archaeology and oral traditions can help.
But we’ve probably just got to accept that the vast majority of the real New World origin story is lost to us. So … have a nice day.
Next time, Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 1)—in the 1500s, Japan had guns: good ones, and a lot of them. Within a couple of centuries, they had basically none. What happened?
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
* “… qualquier negro que se tomare a palabras con español e alçare mano con armas o sin ellas … el dicho español le pueda matar.”
† According to the best available evidence, God is not European.
‡ Mann’s got this other book, 1491. You and probably all American middle schoolers should read it.