Santo Domingo: Primera de América – A City of Firsts
By Anisha Pemjee (TDS)
5 November 2026
The screening of Santo Domingo: Primera de América, directed by José Enrique Pintor, at the Bioscope in Johannesburg, presented by the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in South Africa as part of the Diversitas Festival, offered an opportunity to revisit one of the most consequential chapters in the history of the Americas.
The film explores the establishment of Santo Domingo and its significance as the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. Founded in 1498, the city became home to the first cathedral, hospital, customs house and university in the New World. Its colonial architecture and urban planning influenced subsequent European settlements across the continent. UNESCO recognises its Colonial City as a World Heritage Site.
Pintor's film provides an accessible chronological account of the city's beginnings, bringing together historical dramatisation, personalities and events that shaped its development. It introduces audiences to the city's historical importance, but also invites a more difficult examination of what its establishment represented for the people who inhabited the island before the arrival of the Europeans.
The human cost of conquest
The arrival of the Spaniards was not the beginning of civilisation on Hispaniola. It was the beginning of the destruction of an established indigenous society.
The Taíno people had developed organised communities, political structures, agricultural systems and rich cultural traditions. They were capable, resourceful and socially established, living in harmony with their environment long before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Their society was not an empty landscape awaiting European discovery.
Spanish colonisation brought a brutal disruption to this way of life. Violence, forced labour, displacement, disease and the destruction of indigenous social structures devastated the Taíno population. Their land was taken, their autonomy dismantled and their communities subjected to a colonial system that valued their labour and resources above their lives and dignity.
The scale of the demographic catastrophe was immense. Within decades, the indigenous population had suffered an extraordinary decline. While disease played a significant role, it cannot be separated from the violence, exploitation, malnutrition and harsh conditions imposed by the colonial authorities.
As the indigenous population diminished, enslaved Africans were brought to the island to sustain the colonial economy. Their forced labour became central to the development of the settlement and its institutions.
This is where the film's historical narrative could have gone further. The establishment of Santo Domingo's impressive colonial institutions and architectural heritage came at an enormous human cost. The wealth and development of colonial cities across the Americas were built substantially on the labour of enslaved Africans, who received none of the benefits of the societies they were forced to build. Their contribution was extracted through violence and coercion, while the rewards accumulated in the hands of colonial authorities and settlers.
The Dominican friar Fray Antón de Montesinos, whose 1511 sermon challenged the treatment of indigenous people by Spanish colonists, is an important figure in this history. His intervention exposed the contradiction between the Christian principles professed by the colonisers and the brutality of the system they had established. It was an early challenge to colonial oppression, although it did not bring an end to exploitation.
The film would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the Taíno experience and the lives of enslaved Africans. Their histories are not peripheral to the story of Santo Domingo. They are fundamental to understanding how the city was established and at whose expense its development took place.
From abolition to universal human rights
The history of Santo Domingo also provides an opportunity to consider the evolution of the struggle against slavery.
Slavery was abolished in the eastern part of Hispaniola in 1822 under Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer. Following Dominican independence in 1844, the prohibition against slavery was reaffirmed.
The United Nations, established in 1945, subsequently strengthened the international framework against slavery and discrimination. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted through General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) on 10 December 1948, explicitly prohibits slavery and servitude in Article 4. Subsequent international conventions strengthened these commitments.
The debate has now moved beyond abolition towards reparatory justice, with the UN General Assembly's March 2026 resolution recognising the transatlantic trafficking and racialised enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity and calling for dialogue on reparations.
Yet, the abolition of slavery did not undo the destruction of indigenous societies, restore what was taken from them or compensate generations of Africans whose forced labour created wealth from which they were excluded.
A historical chronicle, but an incomplete conversation
As a historical introduction to Santo Domingo, the film succeeds in establishing why the city occupies such an important position in the history of the Americas. Its strength lies in making this history accessible through dramatisation rather than presenting it as a conventional historical lecture.
However, its emphasis on European foundations and institutional achievements leaves an opportunity to confront more fully the devastating consequences of colonisation. The story of Santo Domingo cannot be told adequately through its cathedrals, hospitals, universities and colonial architecture without acknowledging the people whose land was seized, whose societies were destroyed and whose labour made much of that development possible.
This is not a criticism of the importance of preserving Dominican history. Rather, it is an argument for a more complete interpretation of that history, one that recognises both achievement and suffering.
The Diversitas Festival provides an appropriate platform for this conversation. Cultural diplomacy through cinema allows countries to share their histories while inviting audiences from other societies to question, reflect and engage with difficult historical truths.
For South African audiences, the parallels are particularly relevant. South Africa's own history demonstrates how racial classification, dispossession and institutionalised inequality can shape generations long after the formal systems that created them have ended. There is a common lesson in both histories: political and legal emancipation are necessary, but they are not sufficient to achieve social and economic equality.
The unfinished legacy of freedom
Ultimately, Santo Domingo: Primera de América is an important contribution to the preservation of Dominican historical heritage. It introduces audiences to a city whose influence extended far beyond the Caribbean and whose colonial institutions became precedents for European expansion throughout the Americas.
But the film also invites a larger question about how nations remember their past.
Can a country celebrate its place in the history of the Americas without confronting the destruction, exploitation and inequalities that formed part of its foundations?
Perhaps the most important reflection to emerge from the screening is that history should not only celebrate the institutions and personalities that shaped nations. It must also give recognition to those whose suffering, labour and resistance helped build them.
If Santo Domingo is remembered as the birthplace of the first institutions of the Americas and an early centre of challenges to colonial oppression, how do we reconcile that legacy with the reality that its development, like that of so many colonial cities, was built on the dispossession of indigenous people and the forced labour of Africans who never shared in its prosperity?