1619: SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States (Source usatoday.com)

Seven thousand miles from Jamestown, on a rise overlooking the Atlantic just south of Angola’s capital city, Luanda, sits an old two-story white building. With a cross on its pediment and a sand-colored baptismal bowl inside, it might seem that its function, centuries ago, was sacred.

But this was a slave-trading hall. Tens of thousands of people were forcibly baptized, marched out the door and eventually put on ships headed west toward what Europeans called the Americas and Angolans called “the land of the dead.’’

In 1619, many of these enslaved Africans had been taken prisoner in Portugal’s war against the Kingdom of Ndongo, whose capital was about 150 miles inland. It was part of a fight that the Portuguese king hoped would open a corridor to his colonies in East Africa. To this end, his governor forged an alliance with a group of fearsome nomadic African mercenaries who practiced cannibalism and infanticide. Weakened by decades of internal strife and battles with rival kingdoms, Ndongo succumbed. The mercenaries sacked the capital and took thousands of captives. The prisoners were marched to the coast. Adults were yoked together with forked tree branches; children too small to keep up were carried in bags. About a fifth of the captives died en route. Those who reached Luanda were branded and jammed into pens until there was room for them on one of 36 slave ships that left in 1619 for the New World, carrying a total of about 15,000 enslaved people. “Never in the history of the Atlantic slave trade would so many Africans from so small an area be taken in so short a time,’’ Tim Hashaw writes in his book “The Birth of Black America.”