# 1521 Santo Domingo Slave Revolt

The 1521 Santo Domingo Slave Revolt in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola took place around the time of Christmas festivities in 1521. It is the earliest recorded slave rebellion in the Americas. Just days after the rebellion, the colonial authorities introduced a set of laws to prevent another uprising. These are thought to be the earliest surviving laws created to control enslaved Africans in the New World.
There is some disagreement by historians on the precise date of the rebellion. Some historical sources state the rebellion took place on the first or second day of Christmas. Contemporary historians generally mark the anniversary of the rebellion as December 25th or 26th, other sources mistakenly call it the "1522 slave rebellion".
The rebellion started on the Nueva Isabela sugar plantation (located today in the northwestern outskirts of Santo Domingo city) owned by the colony's governor Diego Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus. The text of 1522 slave laws describe that a "certain number" of slaves "agreed to rebel and rebelled with intention and purpose to kill all the Christians they could and to free themselves and take over the land." The historical documents present the uprising as well-planned and coordinated action. Local oral tradition says that the rebellion was led by Maria Olofa (Wolofa) and Gonzalo Mandinga, a romantic couple, both Muslims from the Wolof nation.
On January 6 of 1522 (Day of the Three Kings also known as Ephiphany), just days after the uprising, the governor of Santo Domingo, introduced strict laws designed to prevent the "Black and slaves" from uprising again. These are thought to be some of the earliest laws created to control enslaved Africans in the New World. The 1522 laws restricted the physical movements of the enslaved, prohibited the enslaved from bearing arms and accessing weapons, required enslavers to keep strict slave registers, and introduced harsh punishment in the form of physical torture and execution.

## Background

At the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the next, the Spanish conquerors and colonizers who arrived on the island of Hispaniola imposed a system of exploitation, first on the native population, but as this ethnic group became extinct and they were not in conditions for this type of work, the importation of African slaves was authorized to work in the mines, in sugar production and in other productive areas.

### Intervention of Dominican friars

There are various versions about whether or not there was an African presence during the first and second voyages of Admiral Christopher Columbus to the New World. But it is assumed that these voyages are the product of new Atlantic commercial societies dependent on slave labor. In 1496, when Columbus was in the Cape Verde archipelago, in a letter addressed to the Catholic Monarchs, in a fragment he notes: “Slaves were sold for eight thousand maravedis per head” 4. It would not be surprising if on the first or second voyage he transported African blacks. Dominican historian Celsa Albert Batista, quoting Carlos Larrazábal Blanco, states: “In 1496, when the city of Santo Domingo was founded, there was a black presence on the island” 5 . There are documents that provide important clarifications on the facts discussed. Consuelo Varela and Isabel Aguirre, in a recent investigation, express: “A young free black man, named Juan Moreno or Juan Prieto, worked as a servant of Columbus in Hispaniola, he is considered as the first black person to arrive in America in 1492 or in the second voyage in 1493. Years after the death of Columbus, with the name of Juan Portugués, he participated in the colonization of Central America” 6 . In the following years, other blacks were brought by Spanish colonizers to work as their servants. Towards 1501, the bringing of blacks who were raised in Spain as a slave labor force was being considered, excluding those who were not Christianized. The first merchants who obtained permission to do so were: “Juan de Córdoba, a wealthy convert, silversmith, friend of Columbus and later of Cortés, in 1502 sent a black slave to Hispaniola in the company of other agents in order to sell him and Luis Fernández de Alfaro, captain of merchant ships, traded with the recently discovered Spanish domains” 7 .
Others who obtained licenses were the Sevillians Juan Sánchez and Alonso Bravo, both Christians. Precisely, in the year 1502, the Catholic Monarchs sent Nicolás de Ovando as governor of the island of Santo Domingo, a man characterized by being efficient and far-sighted; also implacable and insensitive. He was ordered to force the natives of the island to work because of the great “freedom” that said Indians have… “they flee or separate themselves from the conversation and communication of the Christians, so that they do not want to work and wander around as vagabonds. I ordered that you compel and urge the said Indians to work, paying them the wages that you have set; which they should do and fulfill as free people, as they are, and not as servants, and see that the Indians are well treated” 8 . While he had the government in his hands, Ovando was the one who carried out the most policy changes; He requested that the crown suspend the importation of African slaves, believing that not only did they take advantage of every opportunity to flee, but they also encouraged the Indians to rebel. In 1504 the Spanish Crown allowed ten years of free trade with Hispaniola, with the exception of trade, gold, silver, arms and horses; it is assumed that the exception was included because they were needed in Europe. The following year, the crown authorized the importation of seventeen black slaves, with the promise of others; however, Ovando was later ordered to expel the Berber and pagan slaves, for not adapting to the type of work. By this time, there was already sugar cane, although in modest quantities. In 1505 a colonist named Aguilón cultivated it in La Vega. According to Las Casas, “He ground it with certain wooden instruments with which the juice was obtained” 9 . He did this by means of slave labour, in sugar mills brought from the Madeira or Canary Islands. Shortly after Ovando ceased to be governor of the island in 1509, a decisive change in the strategy regarding slaves took place. The new governor, Viceroy Diego Columbus, wrote a letter to King Ferdinand about the shortage of labour. In a fragment of the letter he says: “The Indians had a hard time breaking the rocks where the gold was found” 10 . The Spanish monarch had recently given him “carte blanche” to import all the natives he wanted from the surrounding islands; he could kidnap them, as in the case of the Lucayans of the Bahamas, as had been done on other occasions, place them where they were needed and distribute them according to the custom that had been followed until then. In 1510 “there were only about twenty-five thousand people left who were fit to work” 11 . The Indians had shown that they were not profitable in labour, unlike the African blacks.
On February 14, 1510, King Ferdinand authorized the Casa de Contratación to manage the Spanish maritime activities of the slave trade. From then on, the sale of all captives would be regulated, as well as a tax on the license; smuggling was encouraged. However, the obligation to buy slaves would be an important source of income for the Crown, representing the beginning of the slave trade to the Americas; its basic incentive was gold, later in sugar production and in other productive activities on the island. From this moment on, a constant flow of slaves was established, many of them ending up in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, a point that served as a redistribution port for trade coming from the Iberian Peninsula to other Spanish colonies in America.

### Mistreatment of the Africans

Referring to the massive black presence, Spanish author Carlos Esteban Deive explains: “The African black arrived in Santo Domingo as a slave, and it was he who completed, with his forced labor, the activity of the Spanish conqueror… He arrived with a broken culture; forcibly torn from his land, transported and transplanted to a new habitat that was not his own, forced to integrate into an unknown society; he found himself in a position of economic and social subordination. He thus saw his tribal and political organization destroyed, his ways of family life, in short, all his native social and cultural structures” 12 . These Africans were stripped of their languages, gods, tools and work instruments. They were also stripped of their conception of time and their imagination of their landscape. Most of them came from different areas of western Africa; they were distinct ethnic groups in which they reflected diversity of characters. Therefore, they had cultural and linguistic differences, which made any type of communication difficult for them.

### Arrival of first enslaved Africans

No one ignores that the island of Hispaniola, like all slave societies in America, was governed by special treatment for slaves: producing wealth by working from dawn to dusk without rest and suffering physical abuse. According to French politician Victor Schoelcher, he noted that the whip was part of the colonial regime, when he stated that: “The whip was the main agent; the whip was his soul; The whip was the bell of the houses, it announced awakening and retirement, it signaled the time for work; The whip also marked the time of rest; and the guilty were punished with the sound of the whip, and the members of a room were gathered in the afternoon as in the day for prayer; The day of death was the only time in which the black man forgot waking up with the whip” 13 . For his part, Colombian anthropologist Aquiles Escalante Polo points out that: “The punishments given to the runaway fugitives ranged from lashes, the stocks, the cutting off of their genitals, limbs and death itself… to the escaped black, after twenty days of having fled. , he was sentenced to one hundred lashes, given in such a way: that one day in the morning, he would be taken to the pillory of this city, in which he would be tied and put on a belt of bells tied to his body... everything, so that the bells would resonate. to each lash of the executioner” 14 . They were common punishments for slaves in all the colonies of America; Of course, all this led them to constant escapes and rises to the mountains.
Cyriaque Simon Pierre, quoting Martinican historian Edouard Glissant, says: “The enslaved person was undoubtedly a mobile tool in a slave production system” 15 . Undoubtedly, the enslaved person did not possess material goods, a characteristic of this system. In addition, the most commonly known arguments of that time consisted of depicting the black person in an angle of barbarism and savagery, first in Europe and then in the American colonies. Although the term barbarian was rejected many years ago by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, he stated “The barbarian is first the person who believes in barbarism” 16. The black person was sought to be feared by other peoples. Francisco Jimenes de Cisneros, who was King Regent of the Spanish Crown between 1516 and 1517, quoted by Carlos Federico Guillot, stated: “Blacks are suitable for war, men without honor and without faith and thus capable of betrayals and unrest, which by multiplying will infallibly rise up, wanting to impose on the Spaniards the same chains that they carry” 17 . It was a kind of warning to the Spanish that they had to distrust black slaves and take the necessary measures to prevent any uprising. With the accession to the Spanish throne of Charles V, surprisingly, the Jerónimo friars, who had been appointed governor of the island of Hispaniola by the now deceased Cisneros, also made requests to bring in African slaves. One of them was Friar Bernardino de Manzanedo, who wrote a letter to the Spanish monarch, and in a fragment of it he literally states:18
   That all the citizens of Hispaniola asked His Majesty to grant them a license to import blacks, because the Indians were not enough for the colonists to support themselves... they should send as many women as men and, since the blacks raised in Castile could turn out to be rebellious, that these new slaves should be bozales (brought directly from Africa), from the best territories of Africa or from any part south of Senegal.
In January 1518, Judge Alonso Zuazo, “very concerned” about the decline in the Indian population, wrote to the Emperor Charles suggesting ways to increase the labor force in the New World, “where the land was the best on the planet, where it was neither too cold nor too hot, where there was nothing to complain about, where everything was green and everything grew, as when Christ, in the great Augustinian peace, redeemed the Old World; he added, obsequiously, that there was something similar in the arrival of Charles, for he would redeem the New World…he recommended that he grant a general license for the importation of blacks suitable for work on the islands, unlike the natives, “so weak that they were only good for light work…it would be foolish to suppose that, if they were brought there, the blacks would rebel…the canes were as thick as a man’s wrist and it would be wonderful to build large sugar mills” 19 . As a result of all of these, on August 18, 1518, Charles V granted permission to export black slaves to all Spanish colonies in the New World. The massive arrival brought with it a series of problems that owners and authorities had to face; these were the so-called rebellions.
In reference to the power of the monarch, British historian Eric Hobsbawm stated that: “The king or emperor himself, apart from his power as a great patron or lord, functioned through the mediation of local patrons or patrons rooted in localities who responded to negotiation rather than orders."20 The King exercised power through the apparatus of state or state-authorized officials, a practically total monopoly of power over everything that happens within his borders. As for the facts, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas firmly supported these requests, to bring African slaves to be replaced in the work done by the Indians. Las Casas, a recognized and established defender of the Indians to protect them from mistreatment, protested for many years that he was blinded to the need to prevent Africans from suffering these same treatments. Later, in the 1550s, when he was writing his “History of the Indies,” he would explain that he had realized that it was wrong to want to replace one form of slavery with another.
The harsh working conditions, punishment, discrimination, excessive working hours, among other aspects, led many black slaves to rebel against the colonial order. The bringing of slaves to the island has a very long history, between the years of 1515 to 1518 the need to import more slaves was discussed; Most of the colonial authorities advised the Spanish monarch, Charles V, to acquire them directly from Africa and not in Spain, because it was believed that the latter lived in the Iberian Peninsula, becoming familiar with Spanish and could communicate with each other to plot rebellions and rise up against the slave system.