People & Culture

Sao Tome and Principe sit on the equator in the Gulf of Guinea, the visible peaks of a submerged volcanic chain called the Cameroon Line that also produced Mount Cameroon, Bioko and Annobon. The two main islands and their scatter of islets, the Tinhosas off Principe among them, were built up by volcanic activity over roughly the last fifteen to thirty million years, part of the same tectonic uplift that shaped the whole line. The most striking single feature of that geology stands on the southern half of Sao Tome island, Pico Cao Grande, a needle of phonolite rock plugging an old volcanic vent, rising 663 metres with a prominence of about 370, formed some 3.5 million years ago and visible for miles above the forest canopy. No one lived on these islands before the Portuguese arrived. Sources place the discovery, credited to the navigators Joao de Santarem and Pero Escobar, somewhere between 1469 and 1471, with some accounts giving the more precise dates of 21 December 1471 for Sao Tome and 17 January 1472 for Principe. As with Cabo Verde, this was an empty archipelago waiting for a population, and the population the Portuguese crown chose to send it was not a happy one. The first durable settlement came in 1493, when Alvaro Caminha received the island as a crown grant and began settling it, with Principe following in 1500 under a similar arrangement. Settlers included Portuguese convicts, degredados sentenced to the colony rather than to the gallows, but the founding population also carries one of the uglier footnotes of the age of discovery. In 1493 King Joao II ordered that around two thousand Jewish children, many of them the offspring of Jews who had fled the Spanish expulsion of 1492 into Portugal and then failed to leave the kingdom before a royal deadline, be seized from their parents, forcibly baptised and shipped to Sao Tome to be raised as Christian colonists. Numbers vary between sources, and so does the survival count, since some give roughly six hundred survivors within the first year while others simply record that most died of disease, an unfamiliar climate and neglect. Whatever the precise figures, this was the forced deportation of children as a tool of colonial settlement, and it belongs in this history rather than in a footnote. What that settlement built, within a few decades, mattered far beyond the islands themselves. Sao Tome's planters worked under a crown land grant system, the donatarias, that parcelled out territory to settlers obliged to clear and cultivate it within a fixed term, and the same model was later carried to Brazil. On Sao Tome the crop was sugar, grown on the labour of enslaved Africans bought and shipped from the nearby mainland coast. The islands went from two sugar mills in 1517 to sixty by 1550, producing something over two million kilograms of sugar a year by mid-century, and for a stretch in the 1530s Sao Tome was the largest sugar producer in the world. Historians who have studied the archaeology of these early plantations describe Sao Tome as the place where the Atlantic plantation complex, meaning monoculture cash cropping run on captive African labour at industrial scale, was first assembled as a working system, before Portuguese planters carried that model across the ocean to Brazil in the early seventeenth century and other European powers adapted it for the Caribbean. The island's own sugar economy did not survive its own invention, since poor drying quality, larger and better capitalised Brazilian competition after the 1550s, and repeated uprisings eroded it from the 1580s, and Dutch forces occupied Sao Tome for several years in the 1640s, burning plantation infrastructure as they went. Among the enslaved population that sugar depended on, one group broke from the plantation system entirely. The Angolares controlled the mountainous forested interior of southern Sao Tome as an independent maroon community into the nineteenth century, until colonial authorities finally brought it under administration late in that century. Their own origin story, first written down by a local priest in 1734 and popularised in a Portuguese book of 1844, holds that they descend from survivors of a slave ship wrecked on the rocks at Sete Pedras in the 1550s. Modern linguistic, historical and genetic research has largely dismantled that account, treating the shipwreck story as a nineteenth-century elaboration of oral tradition and pointing instead to the Angolares as a maroon population descended from people who escaped the plantations from the earliest years of colonisation and then lived in relative isolation. Both versions still circulate on Sao Tome today, and the shipwreck story is usually the one a visitor hears first. Escape was not the only response to plantation slavery. On 9 July 1595 an enslaved man named Amador led a revolt that began with an attack on Portuguese worshippers at the parish church in Trindade and grew, within days, into an uprising of thousands, burning sixty of the island's eighty-five sugar mills and threatening the capital itself. Amador proclaimed himself king of Sao Tome and held part of the island under his own rule for months before he was captured on 4 January 1596 and executed. He is remembered today as a national hero, and his rebellion is counted among the largest slave uprisings recorded anywhere in the Atlantic world. The nineteenth century brought a second economic cycle, coffee first and then cocoa, grown on estates called rocas, self-contained agro-industrial settlements built with their own housing, hospitals and chapels and, on the larger estates, their own railways. Roca Agua Ize, still one of the largest and most visited of these, ran fifty kilometres of internal rail by 1884 and worked two and a half thousand Angolan contract labourers under fifty European overseers, and its hospital, finished in 1928, was in its day rated the best equipped in West Africa. By 1908 Sao Tome had become the world's largest producer of cocoa. That output depended on a labour system, the servicais, that the Portuguese crown built to replace slavery after abolishing it legally in 1875 and formalising indentured contract recruitment from Angola, Cabo Verde and Mozambique the following year. In practice contracts renewed automatically, bound workers' children to the same terms, and left conditions on the rocas, in the judgment of historians of the period, barely distinguishable from the slavery the system had officially replaced, right up until reforms began to take hold around 1910. The scandal reached Europe when the chocolate manufacturer William Cadbury, who had heard rumours of forced labour as early as 1901 and whose firm was then buying more than half its cocoa from the islands, investigated conditions directly. After Portuguese promises of reform in 1903 and 1907 went unmet, Cadbury Brothers announced in March 1909 that it would stop buying Sao Tomean cocoa, and Fry's, Rowntree and the German firm Stollwerck followed with boycotts of their own. The resentment that system built among the islands' Creole population, the forros, who refused plantation labour as a continuation of slavery, came to a head on 3 February 1953. The colonial governor Carlos Gorgulho, facing forro resistance to being pressed into contract work, allowed police and colonist violence against Creole communities around the town of Batepa, and the death toll is disputed, with figures ranging from several hundred to over a thousand. The Batepa massacre, occurring eight years before Portugal's wider African colonial wars began in 1961, is remembered as the founding trauma of Sao Tomean nationalism, and it fed directly into the growth of the Movement for the Liberation of Sao Tome and Principe, the MLSTP, which led the islands to independence on 12 July 1975 under Manuel Pinto da Costa. The new government nationalised the Portuguese-owned rocas into a set of state enterprises, a policy that redistributed land but also coincided with cocoa output falling sharply through the 1980s as the estates lost the capital and management that had run them, however brutally, for a century. Alongside plantation and rebellion, the islands built a stranger cultural inheritance. Tchiloli, performed on Sao Tome for more than five hundred years, stages a medieval Portuguese text about the Emperor Charlemagne sentencing his own son to death for murder, brought to the islands by displaced Madeira sugar planters and gradually reworked with Sao Tomean music, dance, costume and audience participation into performances that can run six hours, with roles passed down within families across generations. It is one of the more unexpected things a visitor can encounter here, a Renaissance European court tragedy kept alive as living, riotous, Central African theatre. Much of that layered history is still standing. Roca Agua Ize can be walked today, its railway lines and hospital staircase intact enough to read the scale of the operation that once ran through them. On Principe, Roca Sundy, once the largest privately owned plantation on the island, is where the astronomer Arthur Eddington set up his equipment on 29 May 1919 to photograph a total solar eclipse from the plantation grounds, producing the observations that confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity when they were announced in London that November, a piece of scientific history that unfolded on a working cocoa estate. Obo National Park, established in 2006 and covering roughly 235 square kilometres, about thirty percent of the country's land area, protects rainforest that international assessments rank among the most biologically important on the continent, reaching across both islands, with Pico Cao Grande rising within its boundary and Lagoa Azul, a sheltered volcanic-boulder bay near Guadalupe on the north coast, sitting inside the same park and drawing snorkellers to its clear water. Principe itself, its emerged land and surrounding islets, was designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve in July 2012. In Sao Tome city, the sixteenth-century Fort of Sao Sebastiao and the pastel colonial facades and iron balconies around the Praca de Independencia form the compact historic core of the capital. On the southeastern coast, Praia Jale hosts nesting olive ridley and hawksbill turtles between September and April, with guided night visits run under protocols that limit group size and light exposure. Moving through this history at ground level asks for a certain restraint. The rocas are not ruins in the picturesque sense, since they were built and run on forced and coerced labour spanning nearly four centuries, and the people whose ancestors worked them still live around and sometimes inside them. Go with a local guide who can explain what a building actually was, ask before photographing people living on former plantation land, and hold the beauty of the forest and the coast in the same view as the reason so much of this territory was cleared and settled in the first place.