The Great Wolof Scare of 1521
Thursday, January 5, 2017: 2:10 PM
Mile High Ballroom 1C (Colorado Convention Center)
Jane Landers
Vanderbilt University
AHA Abstract, 2017
The Great Wolof Scare of 1521
On Christmas Day, 1521 twenty allegedly "bellicose and perverse" Wolof-speaking slaves launched the first recorded slave revolt in the Americas, fleeing from Diego Colón’s sugar estate, La Isabela. These runaways, it turns out, had organized a regional rebellion and over the next weeks, Spanish planters tracked them and executed many. This paper examines the provenance of the rebels, the Reconquest experience of their pursuers, and subsequent prohibitions against the importation of Wolofs allegedly “contaminated” by Islam.