This morning John Thornton and Linda Heywood asked that I forward to the
list some clarifying comments regarding the Washington Post article.  Their
message follows:


Thanks so much for sending us the link to the discussion on the  Va history
list serve.  We don't subscribe to it, but we'd like to make a few comments
for that list, if you could pass it on, we'd be grateful.

First of all there were some real factual errors in the report which we
would like to correct, dealing with Africa.  First the article states that
Ndongo was converted to Christianity in the 1490s, which is not true at
all, the country in questions was Kongo.  Second it also states that the
Portuguese conquered both Kongo and Ndongo in the 1500s.  It did not
conquer either then or for centuries to come.  The Portuguese did carve
their colony of Angola out of territories of these two countries, and to
the degree that they took the lands from Kongo and Ndongo, the statement is
true.

One other small comment.  English law did recognize slavery in the early
seventeenth century.  Law cases in New England and Bermuda at least
condemned people to slavery for crimes, the earliest one we know is 1617
for Bermuda.  In these cases slavery was for a fixed term though it could
be life.  Also "Negro" had come to mean slave in Portuguese by that time,
and the term was borrowed into English from that language, it may well have
meant slave.  All this is dealt with in greater detail in our forthcoming
book, in production at Cambridge, probably to appear in 2007.

John Thornton and Linda Heywood

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