The formal cause for his departure was a heart attack complicated by kidney failure and diabetes.

Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada left this mortal world surrounded by hundreds of his beloved disciples. In November of 1977, His Divine Grace A.C. Twenty years later a rumor began that alleged his departure was due to an intricately planned, secret plot, masterminded by his most trusted disciples, to poison him with an elixir of exotic heavy metals.The Poison Conspiracy (PCON) sounded completely absurd to those who lovingly. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.In November of 1977, His Divine Grace A.C. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó’s contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades.

Deception by William G. Roberts