The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe 1527572919, 9781527572911

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The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

Copyright © 2024. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe By

Copyright © 2024. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved.

Gerhard Seibert

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe By Gerhard Seibert This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Gerhard Seibert All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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ISBN (10): 1-5275-7291-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7291-1

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Map............................................................................................................ vi List of Tables ............................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introductory Note ...................................................................................... ix List of Abbreviations ................................................................................ xii Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 The First Colonisation Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 22 Slave Resistance and Revolt

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Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 46 Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 75 The Massacre of February 1953 Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 100 Anti-colonial Activism and Independence Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 121 Politics and Economy since 1975 Notes....................................................................................................... 145 Index ....................................................................................................... 177

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Map Courtesy of the World Bank

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

LIST OF TABLES

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Table 1-1 Existing sugar mills, 1517-1736. Table 1-2 São Tomé’s sugar production estimates, 1517-1684. Table 3-1 Population of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1771-1950. Table 3-2 São Tomé and Príncipe’s cocoa exports in metric tons, 18901953. Table 3-3 Origins, period of arrival, and numbers of contract workers 1876-1958. Table 6-1 Cocoa, annual production in tons, 1988–2003. Table 6-2 Cocoa, annual exports in tons, 2005–13. Table 6-3 Cocoa, annual exports in millions of US$, 2015-20. Table 6-4 São Tomé e Príncipe: Official Development Assistance (ODA) conceded by members of DAC/OECD, annual average/annual amount in millions of US$ (2012 exchange rates), 1980-2013. Table 6-5 São Tomé and Príncipe: net official development assistance received (current US$, in millions), 2014-21.

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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First, I would like to thank the many people from São Tomé and Principe who, for the last thirty years, have shared with me numerous documents and lots of other information on their country’s history, culture, politics, and economy. The list of their names is too long to thank everybody individually. This book would not have been possible without their willingness to support my research activities. I am thankful to the following editors, journals, and publishers you have granted permission to republish in this book the revised and updated versions of previously published papers of mine: Boydell & Brewer (Chapter One); Philip Havik and Malyn Newitt (Chapter Two); Portuguese Studies Review (Chapters Two and Four); the e-journal of Portuguese History (Chapter Five), and Estudos Ibero-Americanos (Chapter Six). I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of the original papers for their insightful recommendations and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Richard Sidaway and Sheena Caldwell, who have done the English language revisions of the various chapters with great accuracy.

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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INTRODUCTORY NOTE

As the title The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State suggests, this book is about the early and contemporary history of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small twin-island republic situated approximately 350 km off the coast of Gabon, in the Gulf of Guinea. The islands are volcanic in origin, with mountainous and densely forested tropical landscapes that create striking natural scenery. It is the second smallest African country after the Seychelles, and the smallest of the five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, with a surface area of 1,001 km² and a total population of approximately 225,000. Around 7,500 people live on the smaller island of Príncipe, approximately 140 km away from São Tomé. Unlike most SubSaharan African countries, which are multiethnic societies made up of peoples of different cultures, languages, and religions, São Tomé and Príncipe is a relatively homogeneous Creole society that emerged in the sixteenth century when the hitherto uninhabited islands were settled by Portuguese colonists and enslaved Africans deported from various regions on the mainland. After Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe was the second territory in which Africans and Europeans lived together on a permanent basis. Despite their different geographic locations and natural environments, in cultural and historical terms the two African island nations colonised by Portugal share several characteristics. One of these features is a period of colonial rule which lasted some 500 years, one of the longest periods of European colonialism and significantly lengthier than in the case of most mainland African territories. However, although São Tomé and Príncipe was always nominally a Portuguese colony, it was not colonised continuously throughout this long period. In fact, the islands were colonised twice by Portugal in significantly different economic and historical contexts, first in the sixteenth century during Portugal’s maritime expansion and secondly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the colonisation of Africa by European powers. In these two periods, the small islands played a pioneering role in the economic history of sugar and cocoa, respectively. However, the short-lived economic successes were based on slavery and the harsh conditions of contract labour. Following independence in 1975, the country’s economic development has fallen far short of expectations and consequently its dependence on foreign aid has persisted. This is unlikely

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Introductory Note

to change in the near future, since the country’s oil boom, predicted in the early 2000s, has never materialised. Despite a series of exploratory drillings in its territorial waters by various international oil companies, commercially explorable hydrocarbons have not been discovered yet. After almost fifty years of independence, São Tomé and Príncipe is still one of Africa’s least known countries. Hence, very few English-language academic books focussing on the country’s history and present have been published. The most recent was Catherine Higgs’ Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa (2012), which deals with the “slave cocoa” scandal in the early twentieth century. Before this only three other books on the small country had appeared: São Tomé and Príncipe. From Plantation Colony to Microstate (1988) by Tony Hodges & Malyn Newitt, A History of São Tomé Island 1470 -1655. The Key to Guinea (1992) by Robert Garfield, and my own Comrades, Clients and Cousins. Colonialism, Socialism and Democratization in São Tomé and Príncipe (2006). Unfortunately, Pablo Eyzaguirre’s excellent PhD thesis Small Farmers and Estates in São Tomé, West Africa (1986) has never been published. This book aims to fill the gap in academic books on São Tomé and Príncipe, at least partly. However, the intention is not to provide a complete history of São Tomé and Príncipe from its settlement in the late fifteenth century to the present day, but rather to focus on crucial periods and important events in the country’s more than 500 years of varied and eventful history. The book comprises six chapters on topics relating to the country’s early and contemporary history. They demonstrate that, regardless of the size and remote location of the archipelago, throughout its history local economic and political developments have frequently been linked to Atlantic or global history. The different chapters are organised in chronological order and can be read either consecutively or separately since each one deals with a specific historical period or episode. With the exception of Chapter 3, which has been written especially for this publication, the other chapters have all been published before in various periodicals and books over a twenty-year period. They have all been thoroughly updated and completely revised for this collection of essays. The various Portuguese-language quotations have been translated into English by the author. Chapter One, The first colonisation, deals with São Tomé’s settlement and colonisation in the sixteenth century, which saw the establishment of a plantation economy based on sugar and slave labour, and the emergence of a local Creole society and culture. In this period São Tomé became the first tropical plantation economy driven by the labour of enslaved Africans, subsequently serving as a model for Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas, where it was developed further. The second chapter, Slave resistance and

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe

xi

revolt, discusses the historical origin of São Tomé’s maroon community, nowadays known as Angolares, established in the first half of the sixteenth century in the inaccessible mountainous interior of the island. The second part of the chapter describes the course and repercussions of Amador’s slave revolt in 1595, one of the greatest rebellions of enslaved Africans in Atlantic history. Chapter Three, entitled Recolonisation in the nineteenth century, examines the second colonisation of the archipelago by Portugal. This period was marked by the re-establishment of the plantation economy based on coffee and cocoa and, after the abolition of slavery, the introduction of so-called contract labour. Tens of thousands of contract workers were recruited in Angola, Mozambique, and Cabo Verde for the rapidly expanding plantations. The local Creole population was economically and politically marginalised in the process, while the misery and slave-like working conditions of the foreign plantation workers stood in sharp contrast to the wealth generated by the Portuguese owners of the large plantations. The fourth chapter, The massacre of February 1953, describes the background and course of the tragic events of that month, when dozens of innocent and defenceless Sãotomeans were killed on the orders of the Portuguese governor. The history of this brutal violence became so embarrassing for Portugal’s self-image as a benign colonial power that even after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974 the country’s authorities refused to grant access to an official report on the atrocities for decades. Chapter Five, Anti-colonial activism and independence, focusses on the anti-colonial activities of São Tomé and Príncipe’s few exiled nationalists during the 1960s and 1970s which, in a context favoured by Portugal’s decolonisation during the Cold War period, cumulated in the conquest of national independence in 1975. The sixth chapter, entitled Politics and Economy since 1975, examines political and economic developments in the country after independence. The first part highlights the comparatively satisfactory performance under multiparty democracy, which was introduced in 1990 when the socialist one-party state established after independence and based on the Soviet model had proved to be a complete failure. The second part examines the decline of the country’s cocoa sector, the oil boom that, at least so far, has not materialised, and the continuing dependence on foreign aid.

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ADI AfDB AHD ANP ANTT BNU CLSTP CPI DGS ENAPORT

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ERHC FNLA FPL FRELIMO GDP IMF JDA JDZ JSN MDFM MFA MLSTP/PSD

Acção Democrática Independente (Independent Democratic Action) African Development Bank Archivo Histórico-Diplomático (Historical-Diplomatic Archive) Agência Nacional de Petróleo (National Oil Agency) Archivo Nacional Torre de Tombo (National Archive Torre de Tombo) Banco Nacional Ultramarino (National Overseas Bank) Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (Liberation Commitee of São Tomé and Príncipe) Corpo da Polícia Indígena (Native Police Corps) Direção-Geral de Segurança (General Security Directorate) Empresa Nacional de Administração de Portos (National Ports Management Company) Environmental Remediation Holding Corporation Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (National Liberation Front of Angola) Frente Popular Livre (Free People’s Front) Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Liberation Front of Mozambique) Gross Domestic Product International Monetary Fund Joint Development Authority Joint Development Zone Junta de Salvação Nacional (National Salvation Board) Movimento Democrático Força de Mudança (Democratic Movement Force of Change) Movimento das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Movement) Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe/Partido Social Democrata (Liberation Movement of São Tomé and Príncipe/Social Democratic Party)

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe

MPLA ODA OAU PAIGC PALOP PCD PIDE PSC UDD

Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (People’s Liberation Movement of Angola) Official Development Assistance Organisation of African Unity Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde) Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (Officially Portuguese-speaking African Countries) Partido de Convergência Democrática (Democratic Convergence Party) Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International and State Defence Police) Production Sharing Contract União para a Democracia e Desenvolvimento (Union for Democracy and Development) West-Indische Compagnie (Dutch West India Company) United Nations

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WIC UN

xiii

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CHAPTER ONE THE FIRST COLONISATION*

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Introduction When the first Portuguese navigators arrived in the Gulf of Guinea in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, only the largest island, Bioko (formerly Fernando Po, 2,017 km²), located just 32 km off the coast of Cameroon, had an autochthonous population known as the Bubi. The smaller islands of Príncipe (142 km²), São Tomé (859 km²), and Annobón (17 km²) were all uninhabited and were subsequently settled by Portuguese colonists and enslaved Africans. Portugal claimed the four islands but did not occupy Fernando Po since the island is situated close to the African mainland and its population was hostile towards them. In 1778, Portugal ceded Fernando Po and Annobón together with the mainland territory of Rio Muni to Spain in exchange for Spanish occupied lands in southern Brazil, as part of a land swap agreement known as the Treaty of El Pardo. The territories ceded by Portugal became the colony of Spanish Guinea that in 1968 gained independence as Equatorial Guinea. São Tomé and Príncipe remained a Portuguese colony for almost 500 years until independence in 1975. This chapter focuses on the first colonisation of the hitherto uninhabited tropical islands by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and seeks to put the rise and fall of São Tomé’s early plantation economy into a wider social and political context. As far as the sources are concerned, the chapter draws on the American Ph.D. theses of the historian Robert Garfield on São Tomé’s early history (1972; published in 1992) and of the anthropologist Pablo Eyzaguirre on the island’s plantation economy (1986).1 In addition to earlier Portuguese scholars of São Tomé and Príncipe, contemporary Portuguese historians have provided important new insights into the archipelago’s past in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the latter are the historians Arlindo Caldeira, particularly on the slave trade, and slavery,2 Luís Pinheiro on economy and politics,3 Pedro Cunha on the local

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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2

Chapter One

economy,4 and Cristina Serafim on the economic decline in the seventeenth century.5 In their analyses, the different scholars who largely draw from the same primary sources do not differ as far as the key issues of the archipelago’s early history are concerned. Differences are predominantly restricted to details, such as the number of mills in operation and the quantities of sugar produced. Sugar cultivation was based on a system of slave labour on large estates that served as a prototype for later plantation complexes in the Americas. From the beginning, most of the local population consisted of enslaved Africans from the mainland, since few whites were willing to settle voluntarily in the distant unhealthy tropical islands. São Tomé and Príncipe was already a slave society before the transatlantic slave trade began and similar slave societies appeared on the other side of the Atlantic. The first section of this chapter describes São Tomé’s settlement and colonisation and the emergence of the Creole society and analyses the social-political environment of the local economy which was dominated by the slave trade and the sugar industry. The second section deals with slavery in São Tomé and the development of its slave trade. This was the mainstay of the local economy until sugar production began around the 1520s, and thereafter always remained an equally important economic activity. The last section depicts the rise of São Tomé’s sugar industry and examines the various reasons for its gradual decline, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century. Thanks to the tropical climate, fertile soils, and abundant rainfall the islands offered favourable conditions for the cultivation of sugar cane. However, this was not the case for sugar production, since, due to the high humidity of the tropical climate, the quality of São Tomé’s sugar was inferior to that of Madeira and Brazil. Therefore, the principal factor in São Tomé’s economic decline was the emergence of the sugar industry in Brazil, where both the production conditions and the quality of sugar were significantly better than in the archipelago. Attracted by the promising economic prospects, the São Tomé planters left for Brazil which had become a large-scale sugar producer in the 1580s. Other internal and external factors including political instability, maroon assaults, slave revolts and sea-borne attacks by the Dutch contributed to and hastened São Tomé and Príncipe’s economic decline. By the end of the seventeenth century, the plantation economy in the archipelago had virtually ceased to exist and was replaced by cultivation of foodstuffs both for subsistence and for the supply of passing slave ships, while the slave trade proceeded on a smaller scale until its abolition in the mid-nineteenth century.

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

The First Colonisation

3

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Settlement and society Exactly when the Portuguese arrived in the Gulf of Guinea islands is not known, although most authors believe that the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe were first sighted by the navigators João de Santarém and Pedro Escobar on December 21, 1471, and January 17, 1472, respectively. Both pilots were sailing in the service of the Lisbon merchant Fernando Gomes, who in 1469 had been granted a five-year trade monopoly in the Gulf of Guinea by the king, on the condition that he explore 100 léguas (about 500 km) annually along the West African coast. The first attempt to establish a settler colony in São Tomé, which was densely covered by tropical forests, was only made a few years after the arrival of the two navigators, during the reign of King João II (1481-95), following the establishment of the fort São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) on the Gold Coast in 1482 and the Portuguese arrival in Kongo the following year. The fort at Elmina was designed to support existing regional trade networks.6 Although the islands were small, they seemed well-suited for colonisation, since they were uninhabited and out of reach of potentially hostile African settlements on the mainland. The Portuguese crown expected São Tomé to become a settler colony, sugar producer, food supplier for Elmina and a safe haven for ships returning to Europe from Elmina and those sailing to and from India. However, the Portuguese later realised that the latter objective was not viable, since the most favourable sea routes did not pass by São Tomé.7 The colonisation of the archipelago followed a pattern already used in the previously settled archipelagos of Madeira, the Azores and Cabo Verde. The Portuguese king appointed noblemen as captains of the islands, granting them extensive privileges in exchange for the colonisation of the territory. Privileges and tax exemptions for settlers were a favourite strategy for attracting them to the new territories. However, the settlement of the Gulf of Guinea islands proved to be difficult due a lack of food and the insalubrious tropical climate. Despite the fertility of the volcanic soil, there was a scarcity of food because Mediterranean crops like wheat, rye, barley, grapes, and olive trees would not grow in the inappropriate tropical climate.8 Initially there were almost no local tropical food crops in the archipelago either. Therefore, to start with, food had to be imported along with the enslaved Africans from the Niger Delta.9 While the settlers gradually adapted to a different diet, tropical diseases, particularly malaria, made São Tomé and Príncipe a dangerous environment for Europeans for centuries. Consequently, in Portugal the island quickly gained a reputation as the “white man’s grave” and few settlers went there voluntarily. Many appointed officeholders delayed their

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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4

Chapter One

departure or tried to limit their stay to a minimum once they had arrived on the island.10 Due to a lack of voluntary colonists, deported convicts constituted a significant proportion of the Portuguese settlers from the beginning. Even during the height of the economic boom, around 1570, the entire European population possibly did not exceed 500.11 In December 1485, the Portuguese king appointed São Tomé’s first captain (donatário) João de Paiva (1485-90), to set up the essential public offices, and granted the white colonists certain privileges to attract settlers to populate the island, including free trade in enslaved Africans and other goods on the coast between the Rio Real (New Calabar river) and the Kongo kingdom. The letter of appointment mentioned sugar production as an integral part of São Tomé’s colonisation project.12 At the time, the Portuguese already had experience in both the African slave trade and in sugar production using slave labour.13 However, the first settlement attempt made in the northwest of the island between 1486 and 1490 apparently failed due to tropical diseases and a shortage of food. It was not until 1493 that the third captain, Álvaro de Caminha (149399), succeeded in establishing the first settlement at a bay in the northeast of the island, which later became São Tomé town. The king granted Caminha civil and criminal jurisdiction over the island and the power to appoint treasury and justice officials. He also awarded the settlers additional incentives including trade in all goods – except for gold - from the island and the mainland from the Rio Real and Fernando Po to the entire territory of the Manicongo. The settlers had to pay a quarter of this trade to the crown, which in turn tithed to the Catholic Church. In 1500, the king appointed António Carneiro (1459-1545), a royal knight, as captain of Príncipe (150045), where white settlers benefitted from the same privileges as those in São Tomé. The Carneiro family owned the captaincy of Príncipe until 1753 when the island returned to the crown, while São Tomé had already reverted to the crown in 1522, after the fifth captain, João de Mello (1512-22), had been removed from office due to allegations of corruption. Thereafter, São Tomé was ruled by a governor appointed by the crown.14 In addition to many convicts, the colonists who arrived with Caminha in São Tomé in 1493 included dozens of young Jewish children who had been separated from their parents by force.15 Every five Jewish children were allotted a couple of enslaved Africans to help look after them, while every settler received a female and male enslaved person to work for him.16 After Cabo Verde, São Tomé was the second Atlantic territory where Africans and Europeans lived together permanently. The crown deliberately encouraged mixed-race unions between white settlers and African slaves to safeguard the settlement of the island. Genetic, linguistic, and cultural miscegenation

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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The First Colonisation

5

between Europeans and Africans initiated a process of creolisation that resulted in the emergence of a Creole society with its own culture and languages in the archipelago. The proto-Creole language that developed in São Tomé in the sixteenth century is considered the common origin of the four Afro-Portuguese Creoles spoken in the Gulf of Guinea islands.17 While miscegenation was widespread in São Tomé and Príncipe and Cabo Verde, this was not a common Portuguese practice in Africa at that time. In sixteenth century Arguim (in present-day Mauretania) and Elmina, the crown prohibited unions between Portuguese men and African women.18 Furthermore, in São Tomé miscegenation was more widespread among convicts and decreased the higher the person’s status in the social hierarchy of the settler community.19 Convicts enjoyed the same privileges as the other settlers and could participate freely in all economic activities. In the early period, settlers acquired enslaved persons in the Niger Delta and in Kongo. Supposedly the early population also included a few free Africans from the mainland who served as brokers in the slave trade.20 Slavery in São Tomé was not necessarily a permanent condition since enslaved persons were manumitted from the outset. The first recorded individual letters of manumission for enslaved Africans in São Tomé are mentioned in Caminha’s will in 1499. As early as 1515, at the request of the Portuguese settlers, a royal decree granted collective manumission to their African wives and their common mixed-race offspring. Legally the mixedrace children of the white settlers were their rightful heirs. As a result of the high mortality rate among whites, a significant number of mestizos would soon inherit plantations from their fathers and became part of the local landowning elite. Another royal decree, in 1517, freed the male slaves who had arrived with the first colonists. These royal decrees constituted the beginning of a free African population in São Tomé called Forros.21 Later, freed slaves assimilated into the free African sector. In 1520 a royal charter allowed free mixed-race persons to hold public offices in the local council if they had property and were married. In 1528 this royal decree was confirmed.22 In 1546 another royal decree equated them with white settlers, allowing them to vote and hold office on the city council.23Consequently, from the outset, free mixed-race persons and blacks were able climb up the social ladder. They played a significant role in shaping the emerging Creole society and participated actively in local politics and the economy. Although women within the free population were subject to similar restrictions as their contemporaries in Portugal, under certain circumstances a few women within the landowning elite were able to gain a significant degree of autonomy. Due to the shortage of voluntary settlers, deported convicts were often also appointed to public positions. The crown frequently

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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6

Chapter One

pardoned these convicts in exchange for services rendered. According to contemporary chronicles, the early settlement, known as povoação, grew from 250 households in 1510 to between 600 and 700 households in the mid-sixteenth century.24 The 1510 chronicle compiled by the Lisbon-based German book printer Valentim Fernandes (c.1450-c.1518) mentions another fifteen settled places and six plantations belonging to the captain of São Tomé. Except for one plantation, the entire south of São Tomé was unoccupied.25 In April 1535, a royal charter granted the settlement city rights. São Tomé’s town council was dominated by wealthy sugar-plantation owners. The town council was frequently engaged in power struggles with the governor or the bishop who, in turn, were also regularly in conflict with each other. The frequent disputes between the three parties resulted in considerable political instability in São Tomé. In addition, there were frequent quarrels within the institutions, often between white Portuguese from the mother country and local Creole officials. The high mortality rate among Portuguese officials also contributed to political instability, as it often created a power vacuum. In the period from 1548 to 1770, the city council was entitled to rule in the event of the governor’s absence or death. In the twenty-seven-year period from 1586 to 1613, São Tomé was ruled by eighteen governors, including both those appointed by the crown and interim rulers elected by the town council.26 One of the captain’s powers was to distribute lands to the settlers under the sesmaria system. Under this land-grant system, after five years the grantees became owners of the land, provided that it was cultivated successfully.27 Otherwise, the land could be withdrawn and granted to somebody else on the same conditions. Besides these private lands, there were also crown-owned plantations, at first to cultivate food crops to feed the enslaved population and subsequently to produce sugar for export.28 In 1528, a total of 1,440 enslaved workers produced food crops on three crown-owned plantations.29 During the first years of Caminha’s rule, settlers and enslaved Africans alike starved, the former since they depended on food supplies from Portugal and the nearby mainland, the latter because there was a scarcity of local food crops. The settlement imported flour, wine, olive oil and cheese from Portugal for the white inhabitants. Food shortages continued at least until 1499 when starving settlers were sent to Príncipe.30 Only the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) and one yam species (Dioscorea cayenensis) already existed in São Tomé when the first settlers arrived.31 In the first years the Portuguese introduced domestic animals like cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, donkeys, ducks and chickens, as well as sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), maize (Zea mays), yams (Dioscorea minutiflora & dioscorea

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The First Colonisation

7

alata), figs (Ficus carica), orange and lemon trees (Citrus spp.) and plantain (Musa paradisiaca).32 One banana species possibly already existed in São Tomé, while other varieties (Musa sapientum) were later introduced from Brazil. Coconut (Cocos nucifera), manioc (Manihot esculenta) and sweet potatoes (Ipomea batatas) were also successfully introduced from the Americas in the sixteenth century.33 It was only in the 1510s that São Tomé was able to provide São Jorge da Mina fort with food supplies.34 Irrespective of the availability of food in the archipelago, the mortality rate among white settlers due to tropical diseases always remained high and, demographically, whites constituted a very small minority of the population. The colonisation of São Tomé also marked the beginning of missionary activity in the region since the expansion of Catholicism had been an integral part of the project from the outset. The Catholic Church participated actively in the local economy, both in the slave trade and the sugar industry. The first Catholic priests arrived with Caminha in 1493. The island’s first two churches, São Francisco, which was part of the monastery with the same name, and Santa Maria, were both constructed with stones and bricks brought from Portugal during Caminha’s captaincy.35 Possibly even before 1500, the mother church Nossa Senhora da Graça was erected near the foundations of the Santa Maria church.36 The first Augustinian missionaries arrived as early as 1499.37 By 1504 the Catholic Church had also established the charitable institution Santa Casa de Misericórdia and its hospital, in response to the high morbidity rate. In 1514 the Portuguese king obliged the masters to baptise newly arrived slaves within six months of their purchase.38 By 1519, there were already three Catholic brotherhoods in São Tomé, which along with kinship was the dominant form of collective solidarity at the time.39 At the request of the Forros, in 1526, the king allowed free blacks to establish the Catholic Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary, which was given the right to engage in trade in enslaved persons, spices and gold with Kongo and Elmina. Later, King João III (1521-57) granted the brotherhood the right to demand and obtain the freedom of their enslaved members.40 These concessions reflected the growing importance of the Forros in local society and the economy. In 1534, Pope Paul III (1534-49) established a diocese in São Tomé, the second in Africa, after Ribeira Grande in Santiago, Cabo Verde, in 1533. The new diocese was subordinated to the diocese of Funchal (Madeira) until 1597, thereafter to Lisbon. Its jurisdiction went from the River Santo André (Sassandra) near Cape Palmas (present-day Liberia) to the Cape of Good Hope, including Elmina and the Kongo. São Tomé’s second bishop’s local representative was the vicar general João Baptista (1542-52), son of King Afonso I of Kongo (1509-43) who had sent him for education to Rome.

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8

Chapter One

Having been involved in continuous conflicts with the local clergy, who feared that the vicar general would succeed in controlling the See, he finally left the island for Kongo.41 Following the creation of the diocese of São Salvador in Kongo in 1596, the geographical jurisdiction of São Tomé was reduced until Mount Cameroon, including the Gulf of Guinea islands. In 1677, the diocese of São Tomé was separated from Lisbon and became part of the archdiocese of São Salvador da Bahia, a measure that testified to São Tomé’s stronger ties with Brazil during that period. As already pointed out, on several occasions the bishops and other members of the Catholic Church were involved in political and financial conflicts with the secular authorities. The prosperity of the islands attracted the interest of other European powers, which had ended the Portuguese monopoly along the African coast. Following the attack on São Tomé by French corsairs in 1567, the Portuguese decided to defend the town with a fort. The construction of the São Sebastião fort close to the eastern side of the city was completed in 1575. The Spanish domination of Portugal and its colonies from 1580 to 1640 increased attacks by foreign pirates and corsairs. The Dutch occupied Príncipe in August 1598 with the aim of establishing a naval supply base on the way to and from Asia, but after being decimated from the initial 500 men to fewer than a hundred by disease and fighting, they abandoned the island after only four months. On October 19, 1599, during the unhealthy rainy season, another Dutch fleet comprising thirty-six ships commanded by Admiral Pieter van der Does (1562-99) landed in São Tomé.42 Despite warnings about the possible Dutch attack, Governor Fernando de Menezes (1593-1599) had not taken any precautions.43 The intention of the Dutch whose attack was part of the war of the United Netherlands against Spain (1568-1648) was to establish a fortified station in Africa.44 When the Dutch entered the town the inhabitants had already fled into the mountains. The next day, the garrison of São Sebastião fort negotiated a cease-fire with the Dutch and handed it over, while Governor Menezes was taken prisoner by the occupants. After one week, the inhabitants returned to the town at night to burn their own houses to drive away the occupants, but they failed. Meanwhile, within a few days Van der Does and most of his officials had died of an infectious disease. After more than 1,200 men had succumbed to the disease in about two weeks and a few ships had lost their entire crew, the Dutch decided to leave the unhealthy island. As the Dutch were unsatisfied by the ransom of 10,000 ducats offered by the settlers they burnt and looted the town and the fort before they departed on November 5.45 The Dutch force’s booty included a hundred cannons, 19,000 boxes of sugar, 1,400 elephant tusks, lots of cotton, linen and other goods, as well as a large amount of money.46 The

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The First Colonisation

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Dutch took Governor Menezes, whom they considered to be a Spaniard, to Middelburg in the Netherlands, from where he returned to Lisbon, where he died shortly afterwards. When the ships returned to the Netherlands in early 1600, the total number of dead had increased to 1,800.47 Notwithstanding, the Dutch did not abandon their intention of seizing the tropical island. In October 1641, a Dutch fleet of thirteen ships with 1,060 sailors and soldiers commanded by admiral Cornelis Jol (1597-1641) conquered São Tomé. The main reasons for the occupation were to cut off the English from the island’s sugar trade and take it over to use it as a supply station for the slave trade with Dutch Brazil (1630-54). This time the mortality rate among the Dutch was also high. Within a few weeks, Jol and all his officers except one, along with hundreds of sailors and soldiers, died of tropical diseases. Notwithstanding, until its departure in January 1649 the Dutch West India Company (WIC) occupied São Tomé’s fort and the harbour, from where they maintained control of the local sugar and slave trade. During the occupation the Dutch benefitted from cleavages within the Portuguese colony, which was divided into three competing interest groups. The Dutch occupation even resulted in a short revival of the declining sugar industry.48 In 1702, the French attacked Príncipe and seven years later they occupied São Tomé town for one month, demanding a huge ransom.49 Thereafter external attacks ceased because of the archipelago’s economic decline.

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Slavery in São Tomé As already mentioned, right from the outset the settlers owned enslaved Africans to work for them. Enslaved people in São Tomé were employed either as household or plantation slaves.50 Newly arrived enslaved persons were called boçais (ignorants), while those born in the archipelago were termed crioulos (Creoles). In 1510, Fernandes estimated the total number of resident slaves at 2,000. Many settlers owned more than fourteen enslaved persons who cultivated food crops. Apart from household and plantation slaves, enslaved Africans held temporarily in São Tomé for re-export constituted a third category, representing a significant proportion of the local population, but due to their limited length of stay, they did not play an active role in the formation of the local Creole society. According to an account by an anonymous Portuguese pilot published in the mid-sixteenth century, enslaved Africans were employed as couples. They built their own wooden houses and were allowed to work one day per week (Saturday) on their own provision plots to cultivate yams and other food crops for their personal needs.51 Some authors have interpreted this to mean that there was

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10

Chapter One

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only one single category of enslaved Africans in São Tomé.52 In 1961 Tenreiro, an author influenced by the lusotropicalist ideology of his time, even claimed that the labour regime in São Tomé was not real slavery, but more akin to serfdom.53 Setting the source in a historical context, however, Henriques argues more convincingly that the mild slave regime only existed in the early stage of the local plantation economy.54 Following the extension of the sugar plantations, the labour regime became more oppressive for captives employed on the privately and crown-owned estates where the slaves lived in slave quarters called sanzalas. In the mid-sixteenth century, planters owned some 150, 200, 300 and up to 400 slaves.55 This would have been fewer than the average of 480 slaves on the earlier royal plantations producing the food crops mentioned above. Garfield estimates there to have been a total of 9,000 to 12,000 enslaved people in São Tomé during the height of the sugar industry, based on an estimate of between sixty and eighty sugar mills with an average of 150 slaves each.56 In the plantations often only the owner, and in his absence the foreman, were white or mixed-race. The caretaker (caseiro), in charge of managing the workforce, could be white or mixed-race, but frequently was also a Forro. In addition to the difference between domestic and plantation slaves, there was a hierarchy according to the tasks they carried out on the sugar estates. The trained slaves exercised various crafts, being employed as carpenters, blacksmiths, boilermakers, sugar masters, refiners, and packers.57

The slave trade The Portuguese began to trade enslaved persons from the kingdom of Benin to Elmina around 1480, before the colonisation of São Tomé.58 Due to an increase in this regional slave trade, in 1486 they established a trading factory at the port of Ughoton (Gwato) in Benin. The trading post was closed in 1506 when the Oba of Benin imposed an embargo on the slave trade.59 The average duration of the slaving voyage to Benin and back to Elmina was two to three months.60 The direct coastal slave trade between Elmina and Benin continued until about 1515. In the beginning of São Tomé’s colonisation, the main commercial activity of the settlers was the slave trade, which was also necessary to recruit labour for the local economy. The first enslaved Africans were traded on the Slave Coast, the Niger Delta, and the island of Fernando Po. Subsequently, the São Tomé settlers bought enslaved Africans in Kongo (Soyo) and Angola. According to an inventory of two estates in 1533, the origins of the enslaved people within the different regions was very diversified.61 The enslaved Africans

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The First Colonisation

11

were sold in São Tomé or were re-exported from there to Portugal and to Elmina. The enslaved persons belonging to the Portuguese king were marked with a cross on their right arms.62 According to Fernandes’ manuscript, in around 1510 some 5,000 enslaved Africans were kept for re-export in São Tomé. In that period, Portugal reportedly imported between 10,000 and 12,000 slaves. In 1551, 9,950 out of Lisbon’s total population of about 100,000 were enslaved Africans.63 In the period from 1578 to 1583 slaves represented one fifth of the city’s population.64 In 1516 over eleven months, the royal factory (casa da feitoria) in São Tomé received a total of 4,072 slaves in fifteen shiploads from the mainland for re-export. In the same period, Fernão de Melo, the captain, had purchased another 234 slaves.65 The first slave ship from São Tomé to Elmina was reported in July 1499.66 From 1514 to 1518 António Carneiro of Príncipe had the monopoly of the trade with Benin and the supply of slaves to Elmina, at the time a centre of the gold trade. In the last two years of his contract, Carneiro shipped 300-400 slaves to Elmina.67 Between 1518 and 1520 on multiple voyages ships owned by Duarte Belo, a Lisbon-based absentee plantation owner and slave trader, brought seventy to eighty enslaved Africans per voyage from Benin to Elmina.68 In 1519 São Tomé became the centre of the slave trade from the Niger Delta to Elmina where the slaves were employed as porters along the trade routes into the interior.69 At that time, São Tomé had a subordinate position in relation to Elmina and served as a support post for the fort as a food and slave supplier.70 Elmina’s factor was allowed to return slaves who did not arrive in good physical condition. The regional slave trade between São Tomé and Elmina lasted until 1540, by which time the Spanish Caribbean (Cartagena and Vera Cruz) had already become a lucrative slave market and the Portuguese gold trade in Elmina had diminished considerably. During the height of the trade, between the late 1520s and early 1530s, some 500 slaves a year were shipped to Elmina.71 In 1533, eighty enslaved Africans on the royal ship Misericórdia revolted between São Tomé and Elmina, killing almost the entire crew. Later, a few of the rebellious slaves recaptured at the Forcados River (Niger Delta) were recognised due to the royal brand-mark.72 The mortality rate of the enslaved people shipped to Elmina was considerably lower than that of those sent to Portugal. On twenty-two ships from São Tomé to Portugal out of a total of 2,202 slaves, 806 died during the voyage, while during the short voyage to Elmina 360 out of 383 slaves arrived alive.73 São Tomé’s slave trade with the kingdom of Kongo began in the early sixteenth century, and subsequently that with Angola. In 1532, however, the

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12

Chapter One

Manicongo prohibited the direct slave trade between Angola and São Tomé because it affected the number of slavers bound for Kongo, and thereafter the kingdom became an intermediary between Angola and the São Tomé traders.74 The São Tomé traders acquired 1,449 enslaved persons in the three-year period from 1525 to 1528. Between 1532 and 1537 the number of enslaved people had increased to 15,844, most of them from Kongo.75 São Tomé’s women were also engaged in this slave trade, such as Cecília de Chaves and Grácia Fernandes, who in 1535 were among the charterers of the slave ship Urbano, which sailed to the Congo River to buy slaves.76 In 1553, King João III reconfirmed the prohibition of the trade with Angola, and Soyo, at the mouth of the Zaire River, became the port of export for Portuguese vessels. In the mid-sixteenth century, over a period of fourteen months between twelve and fifteen slave ships left Kongo for São Tomé, the smaller ones carrying 400 enslaved Africans and the larger ones 700 slaves each.77 The transatlantic slave trade from São Tomé to the Spanish Americas began in 1525.78 Subsequently, most slaves re-exported from São Tomé went to the Caribbean and Brazil. Between 1532 and 1536, São Tomé reexported an average of 342 slaves to the Antilles every year.79 Caldeira estimates the number of enslaved Africans re-exported in the first half of the sixteenth century to be between 5,000 and 10,000 a year.80 Before 1580, São Tomé accounted for 75 percent of Brazil’s imports, predominantly consisting of enslaved Africans.81 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, São Tomé ceased to be an important slave trade entrepôt. In 1614, the São Tomé settlers lost access to the slave markets in Kongo, because they had become a threat to other Portuguese commercial interests and their operations remained restricted to the Gulf of Guinea, from Allada (in present-day Benin) to the Cape of Lopo Gonçalves (present-day Cabo Lopez in Gabon) as the southern limit. With the appearance of the French, English and Dutch, and the occupation of Elmina by the Dutch in 1637, the island’s traders were cut off from their previous supply markets.82 During the Dutch occupation of Luanda and São Tomé (1641-48) the WIC directly controlled the trade in the region. Furthermore, from the mid-seventeenth century Angolan slaves were shipped directly to Brazil and the Spanish Americas and São Tomé’s access to the market in Luanda was disrupted.83 Subsequently, traders from São Tomé traded enslaved Africans predominantly at nearby markets in Gabon and Calabar. The re-export of enslaved Africans continued, but on a much smaller scale than in the sixteenth century. Between 1710 and 1808, the slave ships going from Bahia to the Mina coast and back were obliged to call at São Tomé where they purchased food supplies and had to pay

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taxes. In the eighteenth century, British and Dutch slavers preferred to call at São Tomé to take on water and purchase provisions, while the French and Brazilians went predominantly to Príncipe to buy livestock, fruit and yams.84 The commodities received in exchange from the ships were resold on the nearby mainland, particularly the Gabonese coast, Benin, Warri and Calabar.85 From the mid-eighteenth century São Tomé’s direct maritime connection with Lisbon largely disappeared and communication was made through Angola or Bahia.86

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Sugar cultivation Between 1520 and 1530, the sugar exporting business became as equally lucrative as the slave trade. Sugar cane and the people skilled in its cultivation and processing came to São Tomé from Madeira, where, in addition to the Portuguese, the Genoese and Sicilians were also engaged in the sugar industry. The cultivation of sugarcane concentrated in the island’s northern flatlands started immediately after Caminha’s arrival. When the German physician and geographer Hieronymus Münzer (1447-1508) was received by João II in Évora in 1494, the Portuguese king told him that sugar planted in São Tomé would grow three times faster than that in Madeira.87 The production of molasses is mentioned in Caminha’s will of 1499. Sugar cane was planted and harvested year-round, and it took five months to grow. The original forest was gradually cut back to make room for the expanding sugar plantations in the island’s northern third between Ponta Figo and Santana, while the other two thirds remained covered by tropical primary forest that was largely inaccessible to the settlers. The cultivation of sugarcane in São Tomé proved successful thanks to fertile volcanic soils, the tropical climate, sufficient rainfall and, most importantly, the availability of cheap slave labour from the neighbouring African mainland. The sugar plantations were grouped around the sugar mills, called engenhos, which were built next to local streams to power them, a technique already used in Madeira. The island was highly suitable for this technique, since it had a total of twenty-seven streams and seven small rivers.88 Generally, the streams also marked the boundaries between the different plantations.89 Besides having enough streams to power the mills, the island also provided sufficient firewood to dry the sugar for export. Most plantations were privately owned by royal officials and settlers, and several belonged to the crown and the Catholic charity Misericórdia. In 1535, the crown owned six large plantations that were run by the royal factor.90 A few estates were the property of absentee landlords resident in Portugal. Wealthy plantation owners erected wooden fortresses on their

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14

Chapter One

estates and maintained private armies of armed slaves. On their plantations, the owners exercised great power, while the local authorities were unable to enforce their authority there.91 Armed conflicts and power struggles between rival plantation-owners occurred frequently, contributing to the conflict-prone political climate.92 Due to their wealth, the plantation-owners constituted the most important socio-economic group in the islands. Heywood & Thornton claim that “Some Kongolese nobles also settled on the island and owned estates where they used slave labour.”93 However, the original source of this claim, a description of the island by an anonymous Portuguese pilot in the mid-sixteenth century, does not mention “Kongolese nobles” at all. In the document, the pilot reports that the five times he visited São Tomé between 1520 and 1550 he spoke with

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a negro called João Menino, a very old man, who said that he had been taken there with the first [negroes] who went from the African coast to this island when it was populated by order of our King; and this negro was very rich and had children and grandchildren and married grand grandchildren, who already had children.94

It seems unlikely that João Menino was a Kongolese either, given that the Africans of the first settlement established between 1486 and 1490 came from the Niger Delta, while the Kongo was first mentioned as a slave supplier to São Tomé in 1502.95 Caldeira believes that João Menino had arrived as enslaved person with the first settlers around 1485 and belonged to the male slaves manumitted in 1517.96 Other authors suggest that the old man was one of the free Africans who had settled on the island; however, they do not give his origin.97 Nevertheless, at least one Kongolese may have arrived in São Tomé prior to 1499. In his will, Caminha referred to a Pêro de Manicongo who had worked as a sailor for a settler called Dom Francisco.98 In the 1550s, there was undoubtedly a Kongolese nobleman, Rodrigo de Santa Maria, who lived in São Tomé, from where he travelled frequently to Lisbon. In 1550, King Diogo I of Kongo (1545-61) accused him of having been involved in a conspiracy against him.99 In 1561, a few Kongolese noblemen who had supported King Afonso II (1561), the successor of King Diogo I, who had been killed by his brother, Bernardo I (1561-66) after only a few days in power, sought refuge in São Tomé.100 While the existence of Kongolese planters is not documented, the first mestizo plantation owners born in the island are recorded as early as 1521. In addition, in the sixteenth century wealthy local planters included mixed-race women like Ana de Chaves, Catarina Alves and Simoa Godinho. The latter, who died in Lisbon in 1594, owned three plantations, Rio de Ouro, São Bento, and Laranjeira

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The First Colonisation

15

which she bequeathed to the Misericórdia, which in turn leased them to another planter.101 Sugar production in São Tomé had started by 1517, as the first two sugar mills appear in a document of that year.102 According to the anonymous pilot, in the mid-sixteenth century there were some sixty sugar mills in operation.103 As noted above, Garfield estimates that in the mid-sixteenth century there were sixty to eighty estates in São Tomé with an average of 150 enslaved workers each.104 Eyzaguirre believes that during the height of the sugar boom the number of mills may have reached 200, with an estimated average number of fifty enslaved workers for each mill.105 In 1529, João Lobata, a rich local planter, operated twelve mills on his two estates. According to Garfield, each mill had an annual production capacity of up to 5,000 arrobas of sugar.106 This estimated average, equivalent to 73.5 tons, is considerably higher than the approximately 15-25 tons per mill given by Schwartz.107 Due to the extension of sugar cultivation, less land was dedicated to food crops which in turn resulted in a shortage of food and caused famine among the enslaved people. The mortality rate among slaves was also high, but it was easier to replace them than the white settlers.108

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Table 1-1 Existing sugar mills, 1517-1736. Year

1517

Number

2 109

c. 1550 ca. 60 110

1595

c.1600

1610

1645

c.1672

c.1710

1736

ca. 85 111

ca. 120

45

54

31

18-19

7112

Sources: unless otherwise indicated, see Cristina Maria Seuanes Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé no século XVII (Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar, 2000), 258.

The fully grown canes were cut into smaller pieces that were crushed in a water-driven three-roller mill to extract the juice. The sugar cane waste was used to feed pigs. The juice was boiled three to four times to dry it and then, still semi-moist, put into semi-conical containers to further dry and harden. However, due to São Tomé’s high air humidity, this process needed to be assisted by means of wood fires, but even this failed to dry the sugar completely. About 1,175 kg of sugar cane were necessary to produce one arroba (14.7 kg) of sugar.113 The sugar dried in semi-conical containers called sugar loaves (pães de açúcar) weighing 15-20 arráteis each (1 arrátel = 459 gr).114 For export, the finished sugar loaves were packed into boxes that weighed about 86 kg each. The Portuguese king received one tenth of the sales as taxes. In the 1510s, São Tomé produced an estimated 100,000 arrobas a year. In 1527, sugar producers in Madeira were concerned about the possible negative consequences caused by the competition from

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16

Chapter One

São Tomé’s sugar.115 By that time, Madeira’s sugar production had decreased from some 300,000 arrobas in around 1450 to about 40,000.116 In the mid-sixteenth century, thirty to forty Portuguese ships arrived annually at the port of São Tomé, where they remained for six or seven months to load sugar.117 The voyage from São Tomé to Lisbon took about fifty days, with another five to ten days for the voyage to Antwerp, a significant port for the importation of sugar into Europe.118 Between July 1535 and November 1548, 112 Portuguese ships, almost exclusively transporting sugar from São Tomé, arrived at the port of Antwerp, which is an average of almost nine ships annually.119 Between 1535 and 1551, a total of 483,652 arrobas of sugar arrived in Antwerp from São Tomé. In 1552 and 1553, sugar imports from São Tomé to Antwerp totalled 85,244 arrobas, while from 1563 to 1572 they totalled 260,000.120 In the debt books of the Augsburg-based trading company Christoph Welser and Brothers for the period from 1554 to 1560, sugar from São Tomé was the only registered commodity that was imported through the port of Lisbon.121 The sugar boom also attracted Spanish, Italian and French merchants to São Tomé. However, the demand for the island’s sugar in Europe was due to its abundance and cheapness, rather than quality since it was fairly dark and not very solid. Indeed, in Antwerp São Tomé’s sugar was considered the “worst in the world,” since the loaves were moist and full of tiny black ants.122 Estimates of sugar production by different authors shown in Table 2 differ and are sometimes inconsistent, since they are calculated with figures derived from information on tax revenue, ship loads or the number of sugar mills. The highest figure is 800,000 arrobas for the years before 1578, given by Lains e Silva, who based his calculation on an estimate of forty ship loads a year of 20,000 arrobas each, seems rather unlikely.123 However, there is no doubt that sugar production reached its height in the third quarter of the sixteenth century and a gradual decline began after that, due to various internal and external causes. As far as the position of the sugar industry in the local economy is concerned, there is no consensus on whether it really replaced the slave trade as the principal source of income. Cunha states that even during the sugar boom, the crown’s tax income from sugar did not exceed the revenue earned from the slave trade.124 Other authors believe that sugar became the mainstay of the local economy from the 1520s onwards.125

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The First Colonisation

Year Arrobas

1588 60,000

1517 100,000

1590 64,000131

1529 123,170

1531 135,860

1554 150,000126

c.1570 800,000127

1578 120,000128 175,000

1579 200,000129

1580 2024,000

1584 250,000130

17

1591 1602 1610 c.1624 1645 1651 c.1672 1684 1040,000 60,000 89100,000 40,000 ca. 2,000 12,000 100,000 27,000 Sources: unless otherwise indicated, Isabel Castro Henriques, Invenção de uma Sociedade (Lisbon: Vega, 2000), 92 (for the period of 1517 to 1591) and Cristina Maria Seuanes Serafim & Lúcia M.L. Tomás, “Os séculos XVII-XVIII: O lento declinar da economia,” in A Colonização Atlântica, II, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2005), 355 (for the years 1602-84).

Year Arrobas

Table 1-2 São Tomé’s sugar production estimates, 1517-1684.

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18

Chapter One

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Decline of the sugar industry As already indicated, because of the high humidity of the tropical climate the crystallisation and refinement of São Tomé’s sugar was poor and, consequently, its quality was always inferior to that of Madeira and Brazil. As a result, as early as 1533, the medical use of São Tomé’s sugar was prohibited.132 The local planters were unable to improve the quality of their product due to the lack of the appropriate technology. Therefore, the prices paid for São Tomé’s sugar were always lower than for that of its competitors. From 1578 to 1582, when São Tomé’s annual sugar production reached its peak, prices ranged between 630$000 and 950$000 réis per arroba in Lisbon, while Madeira’s sugar was traded for 2,500$000 – 3,000$000 réis per arroba.133 Brazilian sugar, large-scale production of which had begun around 1533, had also fetched higher prices, with 1,400 1,850 réis per arroba. The gradual decline of São Tomé’s economy started in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, when Brazil emerged as a large, fast-growing sugar-producer. In 1548 six mills existed in Brazil, where the sugar industry was developing at a rapid pace.134 In contrast, in 1579 sugar production in São Tomé dropped by 35 percent due to drought and, helped by impoverished soils, an infestation of worms which attacked the plants’ roots. This decline in production was not offset by higher prices, as Brazil was already producing considerable quantities of sugar for the European markets at the time. By 1583, a total of 102 mills in Brazil produced 200,000 arrobas.135 Furthermore, the Brazilian mills produced three to four times more per unit a year.136 Equally important was the higher quality of Brazilian sugar, which was white and dry, and, consequently, fetched better prices on the world market. Apart from better production conditions and higher prices, in comparison, Brazil also provided planters with a more stable political environment and, last but not least, a healthier climate. While competition from Brazil was the most important reason for the gradual collapse of São Tomé’s sugar industry, there were also other external and internal causes. The constant political instability caused by frequent conflicts between the political and religious authorities negatively affected the local economy. This instability was exacerbated by the assaults of runaway slaves and a great slave uprising in 1595, both of which are dealt with in the next chapter. The slave revolt, occurring at a time when the economic decline had already begun, accelerated the exodus of São Tomé’s planters to Brazil, where they found better conditions for sugar production. Externally, from the late sixteenth century the archipelago was increasingly threatened by the appearance of other European powers in the Atlantic. As already mentioned,

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The First Colonisation

19

the Dutch occupied Príncipe in 1598 and looted São Tomé in the following year. Based on Dutch sources, Ratelband claims the occupiers in 1599 destroyed sixty-four out of 118 mills existing at the time.137 This total tallies with the 120 mills given by Serafim for this period (see Table 1), but not with the number of approximately eighty-five existing mills mentioned in a document of the slave revolt in 1595.138 Whatever the exact numbers, it is certain that within a short period the local economy suffered severe damage. Yet the settlers still tried to create favourable conditions for economic reconstruction. In response to a request from the settlers dated December 24, 1605, the king granted tax exemptions for ten years for sugar produced in rebuilt mills. The king considered all mills that had lain dormant for longer than two harvests to have been rebuilt.139 Despite these efforts, the sugar industry never recovered completely from the destruction suffered during the slave revolt and by the Dutch raid in 1599. However, there was a partial recovery, as the statistics for mills and sugar production in the seventeenth century show. As already mentioned, during the Dutch occupation from 1641 to 1648 the sugar industry even enjoyed a short revival. In this period, however, the island’s governor, Lourenço Pires de Távora (1642-45), complained that the planters had been unable to replace deceased enslaved plantation workers due to a shortage of boats and commodities for the barter trade on the coast.140 The scarcity of available ships also affected sugar exports to Portugal. The increasing activity of pirates and corsairs had resulted in the loss of Portuguese ships, while others were used to protect merchant ships in other territories like Brazil, which had priority.141 Insufficient maritime transport to São Tomé also led to a shortage of commodities for the slave trade and spare parts for the sugar mills. When Governor Pedro da Silva (1661-68) left São Tomé in 1672 only thirty-two mills remained, producing about 27,000 arrobas a year.142 Subsequently, the decline gradually continued until sugar production ceased almost completely in the early eighteenth century. In the course of the seventeenth century, most planters had left for Brazil in search of new opportunities. In the same century, sugar production expanded to the Caribbean, but never returned to São Tomé, since the island could not compete with the new sugar producers in the Americas. Because of the settler exodus from São Tomé, the local white population almost disappeared, and the mixed-race population gradually became more African in character. At the same time, the island’s total population stagnated as a result of the overall economic decline. The plantation economy virtually disappeared, while the tropical forest covered many of the former sugar estates. Some of the former plantations passed to the crown, which did not make any attempt to exploit them. Other

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20

Chapter One

abandoned estate lands were appropriated by landless Forros to cultivate food crops.143 In 1736, the seven sugar mills still in existence in São Tomé mainly produced gin, which was consumed locally and used in the coastal barter trade for enslaved people. Around 1770 the Praia Melão estate, with 150 enslaved workers at the time, was one of the few with a sugar mill. However, in addition to sugar and liquor, it mainly produced cassava flour, palm oil, coconuts, and other fruits.144 The sugar monoculture was gradually replaced by diversified subsistence agriculture, whose surplus was sold to passing slave ships. This smallholder agriculture was complemented by the breeding of pigs and chickens. Slavery continued without large plantations, though it was predominantly household slavery that prevailed. Meanwhile most slave owners were also African, which enabled slaves to become incorporated into the free Forro category, either by marriage or by assimilation in successive generations.145 The plantation economy only reemerged in the mid-nineteenth century when the Portuguese recolonised São Tomé and Príncipe.

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Concluding remarks From the beginning, the Portuguese expected São Tomé and Príncipe to become a sugar-producer comparable with Madeira. Indeed, unlike the drought-stricken Cabo Verde Islands, the Gulf of Guinea islands offered favourable conditions for sugarcane cultivation, since there were fertile soils, level land, abundant rainfall, numerous streams to drive the sugar mills, and firewood to dry the sugar loaves. Besides, cheap slave labour was easily available on the nearby mainland. Equally significant was the fact that the archipelago was uninhabited and out of reach to potential enemies from the mainland. A great danger, however, existed on the archipelago itself in the form of life-threatening tropical diseases for whites. Consequently, the distant islands quickly proved unsuited to becoming a settler colony such as Madeira and the Azores, and the bulk of the local population were enslaved Africans from the neighbouring mainland. Initially, the São Tomé settlers engaged in the slave trade, which remained an important economic activity after the beginning of sugar production in the early sixteenth century. Due to the favourable natural conditions, the production of sugar was successful for almost a century. São Tomé became the first plantation economy in the tropics based on a monoculture crop and African slave labour. Commercial sugar production did not emerge as an alternative to the slave trade, but the two commercial activities were complementary. São Tomé’s slave labour system in the sixteenth century was a prototype for later plantation economies in Brazil and the Caribbean.

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The First Colonisation

21

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However, while São Tomé offered excellent conditions for the cultivation of sugarcane, this was not the case with regard to sugar production. Due to high humidity, the quality of São Tomé sugar remained always inferior to that from Madeira and Brazil. The demand for São Tomé sugar was based on quantity, but not on quality. Consequently, when Brazil emerged as a large-scale producer of sugar, the decline of São Tomé’s sugar industry became inevitable. In addition to poor quality and the competition from Brazil, the decline of São Tomé’s sugar industry was reinforced by political instability, while assaults by runaway slaves and a great slave revolt in 1595 accelerated the emigration of São Tomé planters to Brazil. The end of the Portuguese trade monopoly in the region due to the appearance of the French, Dutch, and English in the seventeenth century also contributed to the island’s economic decline. In addition, the war between the Dutch and Spanish had resulted in a shortage of Portuguese ships both for sugar exports and the regional trade, because they were sent to Brazil where their support was considered more urgent. As a result of these external and internal factors, the plantation economy gradually disappeared in the seventeenth century. Largely abandoned by the Portuguese and virtually controlled by the local Creole elite, until the end of the slave trade to Brazil in 1850, São Tomé and Príncipe became predominantly a supply station for foreign slave ships that took on food, provisions, water, and firewood before sailing to the Americas.

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CHAPTER TWO SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REVOLT*

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Introduction The history of slavery and slave societies is also one of resistance and revolt. São Tome and Príncipe is no exception to this rule, in fact quite the contrary. The most frequent form of resistance amongst enslaved people was to run away from the master’s home and the plantations, either individually or in small groups. Often runaway slaves were recaptured or returned voluntarily after some time, when they lacked the necessary conditions to survive in their hideouts. This was the case in the smaller island of Príncipe, but not in São Tomé where the existence of largely inaccessible mountainous tropical forests in the interior enabled them to establish an independent maroon community in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, unlike the maroon communities in Brazil, Suriname and Jamaica, the maroons of São Tomé are little known, partly because the Portuguese colonial historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries denied the history of grand marronage (enslaved people running away permanently) and explained the existence of a community of “savage Negroes” in the interior as the consequence of the supposed shipwreck of a slaver off the coast of the island. In 1595, São Tomé was the scene of one of the largest slave rebellions in Atlantic history, but even among scholars of the history of slavery in the Atlantic world this event is not widely known either, partly because in the twentieth century influential colonial authors denied its occurrence to conceal the existence of slavery in the past for political reasons. The first *

This chapter consists of the following two previously published papers by the author, which have been completely updated and revised for this edition: “Castaways, Autochthons, or Maroons? The Debate on the Angolares of São Tomé Island,” in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, eds. Philip J. Havik & Malyn Newitt (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 82101; “São Tomé's Greatest Slave Revolt of 1595: Background, Consequences and Misperceptions of One of the Greatest Slave Uprisings in Atlantic History,” Portuguese Studies Review 18, no. 2 (2011):29-50.

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Slave Resistance and Revolt

23

part of this chapter traces the history of runaway slaves and the establishment of a maroon community in São Tomé’s interior. The sections that follow thoroughly discuss the three competing theories of the origin of the Angolares, as São Tomé’s descendants of maroons are called. The final section provides a detailed history of São Tomé’s great slave revolt of 1595 and its aftermath.

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The emergence of a maroon community From the beginning of São Tomé and Príncipe’s settlement, enslaved people ran away and tried to survive in the inaccessible mountainous interior of the islands. Runaway slaves, as well as those who committed suicide, were documented as early as 1499 in Caminha’s will.1 Contrary to the European colonists, the Africans managed to adapt themselves relatively better to the harsh tropical environment and succeeded in surviving in the forests. Therefore, the dense and impenetrable mountainous forests that covered two thirds of São Tomé during the sugar-cane period constituted a suitable shelter for runaway slaves. Departing from their hideouts in the forests the escaped slaves, who were organised in gangs, each headed by a leader, assaulted, and looted the sugar mills and the town, repeatedly creating a threat for the colony. Other slaves fled by dugout canoe to the open sea. Over the centuries, some of these canoes were carried by the sea currents to Fernando Po (Bioko). Communities of descendants of former slaves from São Tomé and Príncipe were sighted around Ureka in the south of Fernando Po by the Spanish in 1778 and by the British in 1827 respectively.2 Between 1514 and 1527, out of 12,904 enslaved persons imported and registered by the royal treasury (fazenda real), 670 escaped, the equivalent of 5 percent of the captives.3 In the year 1529, the administrator João Lobata reported that enslaved Africans escaped to the forest due to the lack of food cultivation on the sugar-cane plantations.4 The following year, 230 slaves of the king’s administrator disappeared into the forest.5 The lack of food on the sugar plantations due to insufficient food crop production, such as in the crisis period between 1531 and 1535, was one of the main reasons for slaves to escape.6 On the other hand, many of the runaway slaves in São Tomé died of starvation since there were few food crops and almost no edible animals available in the mountainous tropical forests. Runaway slave organisations first appeared in the 1530s when they formed gangs and attacked settlers and plantations. More isolated plantations were abandoned because of the insecurity caused by the frequent maroon attacks.7 The maroon settlements

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24

Chapter Two

in the inaccessible interior of the island were known as macambos. In late 1531, the local Portuguese authorities complained about settlers and blacks being killed in the fight against the maroons and feared that the whole island might be lost if the problem was not solved.8 In response, in 1533 the local authorities waged a “bush war” (guerra do mato) against the maroons with militia units commanded by a bush captain (capitão do mato). Nevertheless, in 1535 the situation had deteriorated to such an extent and the settlers were so terrified that they expected a great assault at any moment by the maroons on the town. They urged military support from Lisbon and the following year a contingent of armed troops was sent to participate in the bush war. In 1584, a decree waived prisoners’ sentences for up to five years in exchange for participating in the bush war. Similar decrees were issued in 1591 and 1593 which demonstrates the threat the maroons constituted at the time.9 The post of bush captain was maintained until the last quarter of the eighteenth century.10 In 1685 the position of bush captain was held by a free black.11 The financial burden of the bush war was shared equally between the royal treasurer and the town council.12 In 1547, one of the military expeditions returned with forty recaptured slaves.13 As early as 1549 two men from the maroon community appeared in the town where they were taken in by the wealthy mixed-race planter Ana de Chaves and claimed to have been born free men. With the support of Ana de Chaves, they sent petitions to the king asking that the local authorities should not consider them as captives, but as free men, a request that the monarch approved.14 The highest incidence of grand marronage coincided with the sugar boom in the mid-sixteenth century, when the number of plantation slaves had increased significantly. In 1574, runaway slaves from the macambo attacked the town, but they were expelled by the settlers.15 As a result of the bush war, between 1587 and 1590 the runaway slaves were almost defeated. Many slaves were recaptured during the military action and others returned voluntarily due to the difficult living conditions in the macambos. However, they succeeded in reorganising themselves and in 1593 again caused concern to the authorities. In that year, after having organised a military campaign against the maroons the governor claimed that he had “extinguished almost all the rebel slaves.”16 Despite the military action, the settlers failed to reoccupy and inhabit the south and western part of São Tomé which remained insecure due to the proximity of the maroons.17 The Dutch, who occupied São Tomé from 1641-48, reported that Portuguese planters gave preference to slaves from Adra (present-day Benin) over those from the river Calabar (present-day Nigeria), because many of the latter fled to the interior or disappeared by boat to the sea.18

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Slave Resistance and Revolt

25

In 1693, the bush captain Mateu Pires carried out the last large military campaign against the maroons, who had captured slave women in the plantations. Thereafter, assaults by the maroons decreased drastically and confrontations between the maroons and the settlers took place only sporadically.19 After the defeat they remained in their territory in the south, where allegedly “no stranger risked entering, on pain of not leaving alive.”20 In 1771, Sao Tomé’s chief-captain Vicente Gomes Ferreira (1770-79) reported that the settlers considered the maroon community useful since their slaves did not run away because they were afraid of them.21 The relative isolation of the maroons in the south of São Tomé was possible due to the inaccessibility of their territory and was helped by the economic and demographic decline of the island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22 In the eighteenth century, the maroons were known in São Tomé as Angolas or Angolis and they have been known as Angolares since the early nineteenth century. The historian Caldeira explains the designation Angolas or Angolis given to the self-liberated Africans in the interior by the fact that in the sixteenth century most enslaved people used to come from Angola and Congo, while thereafter the majority of them were Minas slaves, taken from the Mina (Elmina, Ghana) coast that had been transformed from a purchasing area of slaves into a supply market for slaves.23 Consequently, in the eighteenth century people in São Tomé distinguished the Minas slaves from the Angolas.24 The assaults and looting of the Angolares have been considered an important internal factor that contributed to the decline of São Tomé’s sugar industry in the seventeenth century. Until the late nineteenth century, the Angolares enjoyed a certain autonomy under the leadership of their captain. The colonial government called him chief magistrate (regedor). He exercised administrative and juridical functions and had at his disposal a militia consisting of some eighty men, besides lieutenants and ensigns.25 In 1803, after six months of negotiations, the governor, Gabriel António Franco de Castro (1802-05) reached an agreement with the Angolares. Under the agreement, around 400 Angolares were granted freedom and in turn promised to settle and build their houses all at the bight of São João, in the south-east of São Tomé.26 In 1815 São Tomé’s chief-captain, João Ferreira Guimarães (1810-15), imprisoned the leader of the Angolares, Diogo Soares, under the accusation of allegedly having killed escaped plantation slaves, chopped them into pieces, and given to the pigs instead of detaining them. In addition, Soares had prompted his people to leave the settlement for the mountains to avoid persecution by the authorities. Guimarães had threatened the Angolares that they would themselves be

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26

Chapter Two

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enslaved to replace the runaway slaves in the plantations if they did not arrest and hand them over properly to their masters. In 1815, Guimarães’ successor, Raimundo José da Cunha Matos (June – November 1815), discovered the supposedly killed runaway slaves almost all alive and returned them to their masters. Consequently, in 1816 the governor, Luís Joaquim de Lisboa (1805-17) pardoned Soares for a crime that he had not committed.27 Thereafter, priests recruited among São Tomé’s native clergy were sent as missionaries to Santa Cruz dos Angolares where a parish was formally established in 1848. This was another step to their complete submission under the authority of the local government. In 1878, their village Anguéné (Santa Cruz) was occupied by a contingent of twenty-seven Portuguese soldiers to definitively subordinate them to the colonial government that was acting in the interest of the Portuguese planters, who in turn wanted to establish estates in the unexplored south of the island. Thereafter the local chief magistrate was no longer the leader of the Angolares, but the position was occupied by someone from outside.28 In 1883, Francisco Stockler (1838-84), a Creole primary school teacher and poet, writes about the Angolares, whom he, himself a Negro, classifies in the racist language of his time as a “horde of savages” and “illiterates, more backward, more barbarian than the ants of Texas”29 thus: The Angolar, everyone knows, dies for his misunderstood independence; misunderstood, because that independence would be his disgrace. Thus he hates, however much he tries to hide it, everything that comes from the legitimately constituted authorities, even though they fear them; of the whites, in general, whom they give the rather unsympathetic name of Flemish (flamengo), no matter how many benefits they receive from them; and the natives, to whom, despite being of their colour, they grant the injurious name of támedê.30

Nevertheless, the appropriation of their territory by the planters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did not provoke serious conflicts, for it did not result in a radical change of their economic life, principally dedicated to artisanal fishing, which is still today their main occupation. The Angolares used to exchange their fish for bananas, cotton cloths, machetes, and young pigs on the estates. In addition, they dedicated themselves to the production of sea salt, made planks cut with their machetes, which they sold in town, together with fish, pigs, food stuffs, hats made of palm straw, ropes, wooden bowls, and other handmade utensils. In 1895, about 2,000 Angolares lived in the parish of Santa Cruz dos Angolares and dispersed along the coast up to Neves, in the northwest of the island.31 Their last captain, Simão Andreza, died in the beginning of the twentieth century without leaving descendants. The occupation brought

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Slave Resistance and Revolt

27

strangers to their territory and in turn the Angolares increasingly came into contact with the other social groups on the island.32 The occupation resulted in the dissolution of the social organisation, a greater dispersion over the island and an acculturation process to the dominant Forro culture. Notwithstanding this assimilation with the majority Creoles, the Angolares have largely succeeded in preserving their own language and other features, such as their dwellings and nucleated villages, and remain a distinct group with their own social-cultural identity.33 The population census of 1950 indicated the existence of 4,490 Angolares.34 According to the 2012 population census, 11,377 people (6.5 percent) spoke the Angolar Creole language, which provides at least some indication of their present-day demographic position.35 Currently they live along the south coast, from Ribeira Afonso to Porto Alegre in São Tomé’s southern Caué district, and on the northwest coast, from Neves to Bindá in the Lembá district. In addition, small groups exist near São Tomé town in the localities of São João da Vargem, Pantufo and Praia Melão.36 All villages of the Angolares usually have a chief who considers himself a descendant of the founders of the settlement.37 The Angolares have always worked predominantly as fishermen, with canoes carved from the trunks of large trees, locally known as ocá (Ceiba pentandra). The canoes are steered with oars supported by small quadrangular sails. Nowadays, generally, one canoe does not carry more than three persons. During the period of abundance of the flying fish (Cypselurus lineatus), from the end of May until early September, many fishermen migrate temporarily from the south to the north coast, where they construct temporary settlements called chadas with simple makeshift huts.38 Typically, the task of the women is to sell fish in the markets. They also engage in growing food crops in small enclosures between their houses. Although there is overwhelming documental evidence in São Tomé of the existence of maroons from the early sixteenth century, there has been no consensus about the origin of the Angolares since there have been two other theories about their ancestry. According to the oldest and still widely propagated theory, the Angolares are supposedly descendants of survivors of a slave-ship that was shipwrecked off the south coast of São Tomé in the mid-sixteenth century. The second theory claims that the Angolares are the first indigenous inhabitants of São Tomé, who had arrived there prior to the Portuguese. Not surprisingly, in the 1970s local nationalists quickly embraced this unproven explanation.

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28

Chapter Two

The castaways theory The earliest known historic account of the shipwreck is from Lucas Pereira de Araújo e Azevedo, São Tomé’s chief judge from 1712-17, who reported in his memoirs that in the island’s interior “uninhabited by settlers, only some savage Negroes live, who used to do great damage to the plantations by nocturnal assaults to steal and abduct women, which is what they needed most, but today they no longer harm anyone,” adding that “according to a tradition they come from a ship which had run ashore on the beach.”39 Around 1734, the local Creole priest Manuel do Rosário Pinto (1669-c.1738) wrote in his manuscript Relação do Descobrimento da Ilha de São Tomé that

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When a ship from Angola loaded with slaves ran aground at a beach in the south-west of this island, the majority of the slaves escaped and established their village on a mountain peak (pico). And they increased in such a manner that, armed with arrows, they destroyed many sugar mills, and in the same year when Bishop Dom Gaspar Cão died (1574) they came with determination to take the town. As the island’s captain had been warned, he sent soldiers, who attacked them with crossbows. The soldiers defeated them and proclaimed victory which discouraged the Negroes Angola of the mountain and, with some people dead, they fled.40

Savage Negroes called “Angolas” or “Angolis” in São Tomé’s interior are mentioned in another three documents from the late eighteenth century. In a document dated 1770 and entitled Relação da ilha de S.Thomé e de todas as prayas e portos à roda della the author writes: “...before reaching the Ponta Azeitona (coming from Macaco islet) is a bight where the savage Negroes called angolas come to make salt.”41 In the same year São Tomé’s school master, Manuel de Deus Penaforte e Oliveira, reports that “in the said island one finds a good deal of Angolis Negroes, still pagan and savage, who live there independently.”42 In March 1789 São Tomé’s chief-captain João Baptista e Silva Lagos (1788-99) writes in a letter to the Secretary of State in Lisbon that In the mountains of this island live a number of slaves, who were from a ship departed from Angola that ran ashore on this island. In the first years they made their thefts on the plantations and did not only steal fruits, but also slave women, and reproduced to such an extent that they are divided into three settlements, with the necessary cultivation for subsistence and the livestock taken from the plantations and retained. There was a disease that killed many (and) some came to talk to the slaves of the nearest plantations to tell of the occurrence. They offered subjection to the town without harming it and the settlers did not take them prisoners either as they did in

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the beginning to kill or enslave them. I asked two to come to me and through somebody who understood them they said they wanted to present them and move from the sickly place to get baptised and to ask the government to teach them. I asked the bishop to listen to them, some are already baptised and without your determination nothing can be carried out.

The chief-captain proposed the Secretary of State to settle these maroons in an area close to the parish of Trindade, suited for the cultivation of cinnamon, pepper, and coffee, and to instruct their children.43 The first published information on the Angolares appeared in Cunha Matos’s book Corographia Histórica das Ilhas de S.Thomé, Príncipe, Anno Bom e Fernando Pó in 1815. Cunha Matos (1776-1839), who was a soldier in São Tomé from 1797-1814 and governor from 1816-17, used the designation Angolares that first appeared in a letter of Governor Franco de Castro (1802-05) in 1803.44 Apparently based on Rosário Pinto’s account, Cunha Matos calculated the date of the supposed shipwreck at between 1540 and 1550. Without quoting any source he says that:

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It is not exactly known in which year the ship ran ashore that brought us the Angolares: ungrateful gift of that time and now very esteemed. It is to presume that it was approximately in the years from 1540 to 1550, because the sons of the first arrivals accompanied their fathers in the attack and robbery of much sugar mills in the year 1574.45

In his posthumously published book Compêndio Histórico das Possessôes de Portugal na África Cunha Matos reveals that the story of the shipwreck is a legend: “They say that then a ship that came from Angola loaded with slaves had been shipwrecked on the island’s south coasts: those were the ancestors of the people that are today called Angolares.”46 Notwithstanding, since Cunha Matos’s writings many authors have accepted the story of the shipwreck, although there is no document to prove this event ever occurred. In 1844 Lopes de Lima, who derived his information from Cunha Matos, invented the exact place of the tragedy by stating that “they rescued themselves by swimming from a slaver, which had shipwrecked on the east coast, at the Sete Pedras cliffs, around 1544.”47 In 1882 the governor of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) in São Tomé presented for the first time a number of the survivors of the shipwrecked slaver. In his report he narrates that: Left to themselves after they were shipwrecked on the cliffs called Sete Pedras, in a ship coming from Angola in 1540, (the Angolares) reached the coast and fled into the forests; then savages, as they ought to be, just

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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departed from the African bush...Their number, less than 200 in the midsixteenth century when they arrived here, today amounts to some 2,000.48

With regard to their language, the German scientist Richard Greef (1829-92) claimed at the same time that they had maintained the Mbundu language taken from Angola, since “the numbers of the Angolares generally correspond entirely to that of this language.”49 The fact that, according to the narrative, the presence of the castaways remained unnoticed among the settlers for thirty years was explained by their taking refuge in the dense forest in the south of the island, their small number and their fear of being discovered.50 In 1895 the colonial administrator Almada Negreiros51 asserted in his História Ethnographica da Ilha de S.Thomé that the anatomical and physiological characters of the Angolares betrayed an “inferior anthropological type,” “with extraordinary length of arms,” “of the type of Africa’s interior,” and therefore considered them different from the other ethnic groups living in São Tomé.52 In 1950 and 1954, the Portuguese Bio-anthropological Mission of Angola and the Ethno-sociology Brigade respectively, both headed by the physical anthropologist António de Almeida (1900-84), tried to investigate the origin of the Angolares on the base of physical anthropology (antrobiologia) that at the time was still dominant in Portugal, while elsewhere cultural anthropology had become the leading branch of anthropology. The most prominent Portuguese representative of this science of the races was António Augusto Mendes Corrêa (1888-1960) of the University of Porto, who was president of the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações do Ultramar in the 1950s. According to Mendes Corrêa, the role of the Anthropological Missions was “the investigation of the bio-ethnic characteristics of the population as well as of their capacities of collaboration with the regime and their economic utilisation.”53 Contradicting Greef, Almeida maintains that “the characteristic dialect of the Angolares is the Kimbundu.” However, after having evaluated some meristic data (body height and the cephalic, nasal and Pignet indexes) obtained from a sample of a hundred Angolares, the researchers concluded that they resembled the Mussurungos, Kikongo speaking people living at the left side bank of the river Zaire, formerly part of the kingdom of Kongo. Almeida believed that cultural anthropology and linguistics could not contribute sufficiently to solve the problem of the origin of the Angolares. He was convinced that only the statistical study of several dozens of morphological characters from the sample of the hundred Angolares would make it possible to metrically confirm his hypothesis that the language of the Mussurungos shipwrecked in the sixteenth century was subsequently

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replaced by the language of the tribe of the Angolas of the interior of Luanda.54 Meanwhile, in 1959, another Portuguese physical anthropologist, Leopoldina Ferreira Paulo (1908-96), concluded that with regard to the natives of Angola, by their statures the Angolares are similar to the peoples of the interior of Angola such as the Biessos and the Bailundos...the characteristics observed point to greater affinities of the Angolares with the Angolans than with the natives of Guinea.55

The geographer Francisco Tenreiro (1921-63) also accepted the story of the shipwreck in his monograph A Ilha de São Tomé (1961). Based on Lopes de Lima, Tenreiro writes that

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as it seems...they were Negroes, who rescued themselves swimming from a slaver that had shipwrecked on the east coast, at the Sete Pedras rocks, in approximately 1544 and that thirty years later they assaulted the town and its sugar mills in the northeast, which they looted.56

In addition, Tenreiro suggests that before the occupation of their territory by the Portuguese the Angolares had been gatherers in the forest and only afterwards had formed groups of fishermen close to the beaches and became sailors of canoes. This assertion, however, contradicts both a seventeenth-century Dutch map of São Tomé that shows several fishing villages in the south of the island57 and Araújo’s memories of the eighteenth century that report: “These savages live on…fishing they practise at the beaches of the west.”58 In fact, there was no radical transformation of their economy at all as Tenreiro claimed. Nonetheless, Tenreiro’s book contributed considerably to the further dissemination of the version of the shipwreck.59 Taking into account the contributions of all these authors in 1971 Castelo-Branco concluded that: it can be said that anthropological, ethnological, and philological investigations do not contradict the traditional version about the origin of the Angolares and in a certain way they even confirm it. The divergence pointed out, however, oblige us to consider these proofs with reserve and caution.60

Nevertheless, many authors continued to transmit the story of the shipwreck without any question-mark and accepted the oral tradition about the origin of the Angolares. In his book A Economia de S.Tomé e Príncipe, written in 1960, updated and published by the Portuguese Cooperation in 1993, Oliveira asserts: “The Angolares are, as we know, the descendants of a group of castaways arrived in São Tomé in the sixteenth century.”61 The historian Garfield (1992) and the anthropologist Eyzaguirre (1986) also

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accepted the legend in their PhD theses. Subsequently, in his thesis São Tome e Príncipe. Elementos para uma análise antropológica das suas vulnerabilidades e potencialidades published in 1997, Heitor Romano writes a little more cautiously about the Angolares: “Little is known about their origin, because it is only known that a ship loaded with slaves originating from Angola en route to Brazil had been shipwrecked at Sete Pedras.” Interestingly, he does not consider any other hypothesis about their origin, although it had already been debated for many years. In addition, Portuguese TV-documentaries on São Tomé, such as Gente Remota (1994) and O Coro das Palavras (2005) both by Carlos Brandão Lucas and Fragmentos de um País (1995) by Paulo Costa and Vítor Barreto repeat uncritically the oral tradition of the shipwreck as if it was an uncontested and incontestable historic fact. In 1988, Hodges and Newitt were among the first scholars to doubt the story of the shipwreck in the mid-sixteenth century. They believed that “it is more likely that the Angolar population dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century, for it is only then that the first references to them occur in contemporary documents.”62 In addition, these authors suggest that Angolares and escaped slaves were different categories that coexisted side by side prior to the recolonisation of São Tomé in the mid-nineteenth century.63 Around the same time, the Portuguese historian Castro Henriques, without rejecting the story of the shipwreck, suggests that the majority of the so-called Angolares were runaway slaves from the plantations.64 In another article first published in 1994, Castro Henriques also claims that escaped slaves and Angolares constituted two separate communities. The latter had settled a long way from the Europeans in the inaccessible south, where they had remained isolated until the second half of the nineteenth century.65 In a small article on Quilombos in São Tomé published in 1996, Vansina concludes that the story of the shipwreck is: the obvious possibility that the whole (oral) tradition began as an etiological story of origin current among the majority population of São Tomé to explain a foreign settlement in their midst and a story that grew after 1700 as this now peaceful group of settlers was in the process of becoming recognised as an ethnic group, the Angolares…in essence the so-called Angolares are the descendants of a maroon community, first mentioned as a refugee settlement «macambo» existing in the 1580s, a community that grew as more refugee slaves joined it.66

In fact, there exist numerous documents from the sixteenth century that confirm the flight of plantation slaves into the forests; however, there is not a single reference to the alleged shipwreck in the mid-sixteenth century. In

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her book São Tomé e Príncipe. A Invenção de Uma Sociedade (2000) Castro Henriques finally rejects both the oral tradition of the castaways as well as the nationalist myth of the autochthons that “equally marked by an almost caricaturist nationalist load by recurring to the same models of interpretation used by colonial history, compromise the elaboration of rigorous explanations of the past of African peoples exposed to Portuguese colonial domination.”67 As already pointed out, in São Tomé and Príncipe, however, this view is still widely ignored or rejected.

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The claim of African primacy The theory of African primacy is closely related to the controversy around whether São Tomé was already settled by Africans when the first Portuguese arrived there in the 1470s. The first assertions that São Tomé was not uninhabited when the Portuguese settled the island in the late fifteenth century appeared in the 1950s. In his report about a visit to São Tomé in December 1951, the famous Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-87) wrote that at the time of discovery the islands “already had their black population.”68 Unfortunately Freyre did not support his assumption by any documentary evidence. A testimony of a Portuguese bank employee about an argument with a Sãotomean in 1952 confirms the existence of this thesis during that period of growing tensions between the Sãotomeans and the Portuguese colonial government. During the dispute the islander claimed that the assertion that São Tomé was uninhabited prior to the arrival of the Portuguese was an invention of white colonial historiography.69 Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl’s (1914-2002) famous Kon-tiki expedition to Easter Island in 1947, a few years before São Tomé and Príncipe’s independence, the Portuguese Jorge Trabulo Marques (1945-), at the time young employee at the Agrarian Station in São Tomé, tried to prove that continental Africans could have sailed with simple canoes from the coast to the Gulf of Guinea islands. However, the courageous adventurer never attempted to sail by canoe from the continent to São Tomé. In 1971 Marques, who had learnt from local fishermen the art of navigating a fragile canoe, sailed alone in a canoe the 150-km distance from São Tomé to Príncipe Island where he arrived after three long days. Five years later Marques, now a journalist, bought another canoe in São Tomé and departed again alone, this time in the direction of the Nigerian coast. After an alleged odyssey of twelve days, during which he was hit by four tornados, Nigerian fishermen found him completely exhausted off the coast and took him onshore. A third solitary voyage by canoe from São Tomé ended in abject failure. Marques claims that after thirty-eight dramatic days at sea he was

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Chapter Two

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thrown onto a beach on Fernando Po (Bioko), where he was detained and interrogated by the local Equatorial-Guinean authorities before he was allowed to return to São Tomé.70 In São Tomé, the theory of the primacy of an autochthonous African population became official historiography after independence. In 1975 an official but anonymous publication titled Esboço Histórico das Ilhas de S.Tomé e Príncipe that has been attributed to the local historian Carlos Neves (1953-) rejected the story of the shipwreck and claimed the Angolares were present prior to the Portuguese colonisation. The author concludes that “In my opinion the Angolares are a branch of the Bantus, who probably had settled in the Gabon and Rio Muni regions and who subsequently might have moved to some of the Gulf of Guinea islands.”71 In addition, the author points out that in their myths the Angolares themselves would not refer to any shipwreck of their ancestors. He wonders: “Suppose that (the Bantus) sailed as far as Fernando Po, why should they not have advanced a little more, to São Tomé?” The writer was the first to put the question as to how the shipwrecked survivors could cover the distance between the Sete Pedra cliffs and the coast and concluded that “they had to be individuals used to the sea or to large rivers, because to save their own lives it would have been indispensable for them to be able to swim…”72 In 1975, the Portuguese author of the book S.Tomé e Príncipe: do Colonialismo à Independência also asserts that Contrary to that what the colonialist «Histories» narrate, there are no fundamental proofs that guarantee the absence of autochthonous peoples at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese…Such circumstances (sugar cultivation in the northeast), added to the island’s topography, as well as the distribution of the vegetation (impenetrable forests that separated the relatively flat north from the mountainous south) would have necessarily prevented contacts between the colonialist invaders and the peoples of the south, a hypothesis (of course it is a hypothesis), which the colonialist historians refused to admit by claiming the Angolares were survivors of an imaginary shipwreck that would have hit a slaver that transported slaves from Angola to Brazil, thirty years before.73

In a long article on the archipelago’s history, based on Marxist historiography, published by the state-owned paper Revolução in 1977, Carlos Neves again rejects the story of the shipwreck as inconsistent and unlikely. He claims that ... the Angolares were a fishing tribe of the African coast that during an unknown period moved to the south of São Tomé. Although it is not

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possible to demonstrate this at this moment, I am convinced that future research will lead us to more satisfactory conclusions.74

In 1985 an unpublished manuscript titled A História da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe compiled by a group of prominent Sãotomeans together with a team of Soviet researchers confirmed the theory presented ten years before. The authors claim that

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The small territory and the small population of the islands meant that the indigenous peoples were liquidated, dispersed, or expelled by the invaders in the first period by the Europeans, to unexploited regions. The colonialists wanted to delete the memory of the islands’ first inhabitants and declared them uninhabited. But soon the Portuguese would have to convince themselves of the presence of the people, who appeared in São Tomé independently from them, and feel by own experience their anger and intransigence towards their subjugation. Then these people were declared descendants of slaves, who were on a ship shipwrecked off the coast of São Tomé in the 1540s and got the name Angolares.75

The theory that the Angolares are descendants of the autochthonous inhabitants has been widely believed in São Tomé, whereas the theory of the maroon origin has frequently been ignored or denied. Illustrative for this position is an online article published in 2011 by a Sãotomean author who asked himself “Did there exist an Angolar people who were independent, autonomous and free from colonial power?” Considering the conflicting theories of their origin, he replied that “We support the thesis that this group reached the coast of São Tomé in their own boats, coming from the African coast, long before the arrival of the Portuguese. They were the first to arrive at the archipelago that is now called São Tomé… We do not have to accept a colonialist vision in which our ancestors necessarily appear in a position as slaves, brought by Europeans, instead of having arrived in our country on their own initiative, as free men…”76 Obviously the author rejects the hypothesis of the maroons for the simple reason that formerly they had been enslaved Africans brought to the island by Europeans.

The maroon origin In fact, the maroon theory is not only supported by abundant historical documents on runaway slaves and maroon communities, but also by linguistic and genetic research findings. The first scholar who suggested that the Angolares might be descended from runaway slaves was the Luso-South African linguist Luiz Ivens Ferraz, who had visited São Tomé in 1969.77 Ferraz quickly discovered that the Angolares did not speak a Bantu

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language, as Greef and Portuguese researchers had maintained, but a Creole language which was distantly related to the Creole of the Forros. He posed the question as to how the Angolares could speak a Portuguese-based Creole if they had lived in isolation from the rest of the population for a long time. He concluded that runaway slaves, who constituted the early Angolar communities, already had some knowledge of the local Creole that shared 67 percent of the lexicon of Angolar Creole.78 Subsequent linguistic research by other experts in Creole languages has confirmed Ferraz’ findings. According to Maurer’s linguistic analysis of the lexicon of the lunga ngolá, the Angolar Creole, 65 percent is derived from Portuguese, 1 percent is of Kwa origin, 15 percent stems from Bantu languages with the origin of the remaining 20 percent still unknown.79 Later Lorenzino stated that Portuguese cognates amount to some 80 percent of Angolar vocabulary, which is only 10 percent less than in Forro. 80 The same author suggests that the lunga ngolá can be understood as the linguistic result of the need for escaped slaves to develop communicative behaviour and to maintain the integrity of the group, to give symbolic and psychological value to the Angolar community and, at the same time, make their language incomprehensible. In this line of thought, the development of such a secret language had become advantageous for the survival of the Angolares, whose existence was constantly threatened by the colonial society.81 Hagemeijer’s theory is more plausible in suggesting that although mutually unintelligible, the four Creole languages spoken in the Gulf of Guinea region have a common genetic origin in a proto-Creole language that developed during the short homestead period in the early sixteenth century in São Tomé.82 Hagemeijer comes to the conclusion that the first maroons already spoke this proto-Creole.83Moreover, comparative genetic research conducted among Forros, Tongas84 and Angolares supports the maroon theory. According to this DNA research, in comparison with the other two groups, the Angolares show less genetic variation, although they do not possess any genetic homogeneity that would support the first or second theory of their origin.85 Consequently, Trovoada et al. conclude that: …taken together these findings seem to be rather compatible with the Angolares being the descendants of fugitive slaves, who with time consolidated a community who lived in relative isolation from the other São Tomé e Príncipe inhabitants.86

More recent genetic research “rules out the possibility that the Angolares originated from a specific region of Angola, as assumed by the frequently cited hypothesis according to which they descend from survivors of the wreck of a ship carrying captives from Angola” but corroborates the claim

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that their origins “trace back to a maroon community strongly influenced by the political and cultural dominance of one or several related men from Angola.”87 Finally, the fact that domesticated plants and domestic animals were absent in São Tomé when the first people settled there in the late fifteenth century is more evidence that the island had not been inhabited previously by human beings.

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Slave revolts Armed revolt on a large scale as a form of slave resistance occurred three times in São Tomé’s history. The greatest slave revolt led by Amador occurred in July 1595 at a time when the decline of the sugar industry had already begun and when the local authorities were weakened because of a conflict over the detention of the treasurer of the deceased, between the Catholic bishop, Francisco de Villanova (1590-1600), and the governor, Fernando de Menezes (1593-99). In August 1594 this dispute culminated in the excommunication of the governor and his followers by the bishop who, afterwards, felt threatened by his enemies and fled for his life to Lisbon where he arrived in May 1595.88 Subsequently, the governor’s own authority was challenged by the town council.89 Apparently Amador took advantage of the resulting political divisions within the colony. The oldest account of the uprising titled Relatione uenuta dall’ Isola di S.Tomé was possibly written by an Italian clergyman in São Tomé and is kept in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.90 The second report of the revolt is included in the above mentioned chronicle Relação do Descobrimento da Ilha de São Tomé by Manuel do Rosário Pinto, a local black priest, who became Dean of the See.91 According to Caldeira, Pinto apparently made use of an anonymous contemporary account of the insurrection, since it is written in the “we” form.92 This account is integrated into Pinto’s manuscript that covers the period from 1471 to 1734. His description of the events is more detailed than the Vatican document, but neither source differs significantly in the narrative of the revolt that is as follows. The revolt began on July 9, 1595, when Creole slaves93 led by Amador, slave of Bernardo Vieira94 and two other slave leaders, Lázaro, slave of Bernardo Coelho, and Domingos Preto, slave of Afonso Rodrigues, revolted. First, they entered the parish church in the small town of Trindade and killed some white men who were attending mass. There, Amador, after having drunk palm wine from the holy chalice ordered them to kill the priest Matias Luís who was delivering the mass. Álvaro, one of the rebels, volunteered to execute the priest and took him secretly outside the church, since there was much rampage and tumult inside. However, he felt

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compassion with the priest and tacitly let him run away. Thereafter the rebels went to the plantation of Pedro Álvares Freire, killed the owner, and sent his wife and mother-in-law to town before they burnt the mill and the houses with the corpse inside. Freire was one of the settlers who had been excommunicated by the bishop. On the 11th, a growing number of rebellious enslaved people burned plantations and sugar mills in various areas. Altogether the rebels destroyed fifteen sugar mills on that day.95 The same day the governor sent a group of armed men, who had been blessed beforehand by the interim bishop together with their flag, to confront the rebels outside the town. The rebels, however, informed by a spy about the governor’s intentions, attacked the town. There, the bishop with all his clergymen and the governor with some people who had remained in town confronted the rebels. During the fighting three whites were killed, while the slaves withdrew from the town with lots of stolen clothes to the creek that flows through the town. The next day, the slaves continued burning plantations and sugar mills all over the island. Meanwhile, 2,000 slaves had joined Amador and thirty sugar mills had been destroyed.96 In the face of the destruction, the acting bishop wanted to reconcile the church with the governor and his followers. He went to the See, called the governor and the other excommunicated men, delivered a sermon, acquitted them all and lifted the interdict. On the 14th, the militia and armed inhabitants including the bishop and the entire clergy confronted the rebels commanded by Amador in another clash. Amador had proclaimed himself king of São Tomé empowered to free all captives. The slaves fled but were regrouped by Amador into four units in an attempt to encircle the town, one each from the principal parts of the town. On the way from Madre de Deus to the Cubelo, Amador was in the mood to kill all whites and mixed-race people; along the street Rua Santo António the negro Lázaro approached as captain of a squad: Cristóvão came along Rua Mato dos Bois as captain of the Angola Negroes,97 while the Creole Negro André Gomes Pereira approached along Rua da Conceição, and along the Rua São João came another group commanded by captain Domingos Preto, slave of Afonso Rodrigues, who gave orders to set this entire street on fire. However, in the fighting the defenders again succeeded in forcing the rebel slaves to retreat from where they had come. More than 800 enslaved people participated in the fighting, of whom 300 fell, while only three or four defenders were killed.98 On the 23rd Cristóvão de Aguiar, a captain of the militia, his ensign Jerónimo de Sá and soldiers from their company went to the Água Grande estate, where according to information provided by a spy, they expected to surprise a group of rebels. Before they arrived at the estate, they met a spy

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of the slaves called Gungu. When they took him prisoner, he began to scream alerting the other slaves who had been sleeping nearby. In the subsequent fighting Count Silvestre, corporal of the rebels and a Creole slave from Rui Dias’s plantation, was killed, while the others were defeated and fled. Count Silvestre’s death deeply affected Amador and the entire slave army. Amador swore to take revenge on the death of his corporal by waging a great battle against the settlers. When the governor received the news that Amador would attack with a great army of some 5,000 enslaved people, he organised all soldiers and the settlers and quickly formed an army that was somewhat inferior to the slave army, but significantly better armed. In the early morning of July 28, the slave army that had camped behind the church of Santo António waged the final assault on the town. Amador advanced with many slaves through the street of Madre de Deus and fiercely attacked the settlers. The slave captain Cristóvão came with so many rebels from the street of Praia Pequena that they spanned the entire street of Espalmadouro up to the houses of Gaspar de Mouro. Another group commanded by captain Adão approached from the left to the Campos de Bois, while rebels commanded by Captain Domingos Preto advanced from São João. When Domingos Preto saw that he could not fight the settlers from that direction due to two trenches with eight pieces of artillery and many soldiers, he joined Amador and his group in the Cruz da Índia. The settler army confronted the slaves all over the town during heavy fighting that lasted four hours. Finally, the slaves withdrew in flight pursued by the settler army as far as the plantation of António Vaz. The number of slaves killed in the fighting was 200, while many were wounded, among them Lázaro, one of Amador’s commanders. Adão, another of his captains, was taken prisoner and hanged. The settler army lost only one member, a boy from Fernando Dias. The same day, after the fighting, the settler army’s captain Cristóvão de Aguiar went with many people to the Cabeça estate, where many rebel slaves stayed together with women and girls and with lots of clothes they had stolen in the town. The women and children and the stolen goods were taken to the town. On the 29th the slaves who had escaped began to come to town and asked the authorities for clemency, leaving Amador alone and isolated. Without power and without comrades-in-arms Amador sought refuge in the island’s interior where he remained in a hideout. However, he was betrayed by a follower and detained. On August 14, 1595, Amador was hanged and quartered, and his remains were exhibited in four public places.99 Even before Amador’s detention and execution the slave leaders Domingos Preto, Francisco Ilha and Domingos Ana were arrested and hanged. Another slave rebel, Duarte Amarroco had his hands cut off and then he was hanged for

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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40

Chapter Two

having killed his master, Pedro Álvares Freire. More than sixty of island’s mills had been destroyed during Amador’s twenty-day revolt, while only twenty-five remained intact.100 Amador’s revolt and the devastation of the sugar plantations had repercussions in Brazil where it provoked fears among the Portuguese colonists who were heavily outnumbered by enslaved Africans. Consequently, a four-member board of experts of Brazil agreed to use the Amerindians as defence against possible slave revolts. In July 1596, a law was passed that instructed the missionaries to settle the Amerindians from Brazil’s interior in villages close to the colonial settlements on the coast to prevent the flight of enslaved Africans and the formation of macambos.101 After Amador’s revolt, smaller slave revolts occurred in São Tomé in 1617 and in 1709, the year when the island was occupied for almost a month by French corsairs. During the occupation, the wealthy setters sought refuge on their estates where they armed the slaves to help defend them against a possible attack by the French. After the French corsairs had left in exchange for a large ransom, the armed slaves waged a revolt and tried to invade the town, but they were easily defeated by the settlers. Amador’s revolt is also mentioned in two books cited above by the Portuguese military and amateur historian Raimundo José da Cunha Matos (1776-1839) that were published in 1815 and posthumously in 1963 respectively. Cunha Matos was born in Faro in the Portuguese Algarve and aged fourteen joined the Portuguese army in 1790. He served three years in France, eighteen years in São Tomé (1797-1814) and subsequently about two years in Rio de Janeiro. From there he returned to São Tomé where he was interim governor from 1816-17. In 1817 he settled for good in Brazil where, after independence, he later became a member of the Legislative Assembly and head of the Military Academy. Cunha Matos possessed a copy of Pinto’s 1734 manuscript that he had received from a local priest in São Tomé.102 His book Corografia Histórica. Ilhas de S.Tomé e Príncipe, Anno Bom e Fernando Pó includes only a short passage on the slave revolt confirming that Amador “was detained and executed in 1596.”103 In his second book Compêndio Histórico das Possessões de Portugal na África that contains a more detailed account of the revolt based on Pinto’s manuscript he claims that the slave leader was “quartered on 4 January 1596.”104 In both books Cunha Matos does not quote any source for these dates that deviate from both Pinto’s manuscript and the Vatican document that give no date or a different date respectively. In addition to Cunha Matos, other nineteenth-century authors on São Tomé mention Amador’s great slave revolt and the raids of the Angolares. In 1844 Lopes de Lima writes that “the revolt of the negro Amador that

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41

dismayed the entire island with countless damage caused by horrendous sedition.”105 In his book História Etnográphica de S. Thomé (1895) Almada Negreiros narrates that “in the midst of this tumultuous spectacle, there appeared, in the following year, the Negro Amador, who styled himself King of São Tomé, pretended to be furious Attila, ahead of those of his colour, revolutionised the whole island, killing and looting furiously.”106 In 1961, Tenreiro went much further than his predecessors by claiming that “in 1595 and 1596 this [island] even fell into the hands of the Angolares, headed by the already legendary figure of Amador.”107 None of the nineteenth-century authors or earlier chroniclers had ever connected the Angolares with Amador. Tenreiro was not the first author who associated Amador with the Angolares, but it was his influential book that disseminated and popularised this myth, since it is widely considered a standard work on São Tomé. Probably the first author who linked Amador to the Angolares was Vasconcellos who, in 1918, wrote about “atrocities by the Angolares rebels, under the command of the Negro Amador…”108 In fact, as already said, during the slave revolt, on July 14, 1595, Angolares may have participated in the fighting against the settlers; however, they did not lead the revolt, let alone was Amador a maroon. Curiously, Tenreiro does not quote any source for his claim, while Vasconcellos’s book is not even included in his bibliography. On the other hand, his book’s extensive bibliography includes Cunha Matos, Lopes de Lima, and Almada Negreiros, authors, who did not associate Amador and the 1595 slave revolt with the Angolares at all. In contrast, Tenreiro completely ignores Amador’s revolt, and does not mention the phenomenon of runaway slaves at all, while he asserts that São Tomé’s labour regime in the sixteenth century did resemble serfdom rather than real slavery. A look at Tenreiro’s career can explain why his claims were considerably ideologically biased. Born in São Tomé as son of a Portuguese father and an African mother, at the age of two Tenreiro was taken to Lisbon where he was brought up by his father’s family. As a student in Lisbon Tenreiro got in touch with nationalist African students like Amílcar Cabral (1924-73) and Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-90), who would become prominent figures in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism. However, unlike his African companions Tenreiro never joined the anti-colonial struggle against the Salazar regime (1932-74). Instead, Tenreiro was committed to his academic career and was promoted by proSalazar-regime academics. He followed the theory of lusotropicalism developed in the 1930s by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who claimed that the Portuguese had a special aptitude for racial and cultural mixing with people in the tropics. In the 1960s, the Portuguese regime used

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42

Chapter Two

Freyre’s lusotropicalism to scientifically legitimise its colonial policies, which categorically rejected any demand for decolonisation. After independence in 1975 the government of São Tomé and Príncipe presented Amador as a national hero of the country’s anti-colonial struggle. In a handbook of the children’s organisation Organização dos Pioneiros de São Tomé e Príncipe (OPSTP) produced in Cuba for the country’s then socialist regime, Amador was portrayed as a precursor of the national liberation struggle who “liberated a large part of the national territory and on July 13, 1595 was proclaimed king.”109 From 1976, when the Portuguese escudo was replaced by the new national currency dobra, until 2018 the country’s bank notes depicted Amador’s invented effigy created by the Sãotomean artist Protásio Pina (1960-99) who also designed the county’s coat of arms and various postage stamps. Following monetary reform in 2018, Amador only appeared in the watermark of the four highest domination banknotes. However, Amador’s effigy returned on a new 200-dobra note issued in 2021. In 2003, Alda Graça Espirito Santo (1926-2010), a prominent local nationalist and poet wrote a poem dedicated to Amador.110 In 2004, thirteen years after the country’s transition to multiparty democracy, the National Assembly declared January 4 as a national holiday in homage to Amador.111 The date is not based on any primary source, but on Cunha Matos’s book written in the early nineteenth century, although only published in 1963. In 2018 President Evaristo Carvalho (2016-21) inaugurated a threemetre-high marble statue of Amador in the square in front of the capital’s National Library. While the small African country has commemorated Amador and the 1595 slave revolt during two political regimes, in Atlantic history São Tomé’s great slave revolt and its background and consequences have remained largely unknown.

Concluding remarks The thesis of the shipwreck to explain the origin of the Angolares is an old oral tradition that probably emerged among the local population to explain the presence of alien “savage Negroes” in the interior of the island, outside the colonial government’s control. This legend was first published by Cunha Matos and further embroidered by other nineteenth and twentieth century colonial authors. During that period of contract labour, the Portuguese denial of the existence of a maroon community that had survived in the forest also served to conceal the successful resistance to forced labour. Considered the strong sea currents around the Sete Pedras cliffs and the distance of about 4 km to the coast, it would have been almost impossible for the shipwrecked survivors to reach the beach alive, even if one assumes

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that they could swim. As for the physical characteristics of the Angolares, it is striking that the followers of Mendes Corrêa did not associate them with their professional activity as fishermen. Even if a shipwreck had occurred, it is unlikely that the survivors constituted the demographic origin of the Angolares; they would only have joined an already existing group of escaped slaves. For the same reason, it is unlikely that Angolares and runaway slaves existed separately at the same time. It seems much more likely that settlements of escaped slaves, the so-called macambos, gradually developed into the maroon community that became known as Angolares. Comparative genetic studies in São Tomé also strongly support this assumption. The theory of a local African settlement prior to the Portuguese arrival was inspired more by nationalist thought than proved by scientific evidence. At the time of independence, this claim became a crucial element for the national identity of the new state. By asserting a pre-colonial human history in São Tomé, the regime attempted to equate the country’s history with that of continental Africa to constitute a political identity as an African nation state that had its supposed origin in a remote pre-colonial past. In addition, the denial of the Portuguese primacy in São Tomé reflected the colonial stratification system that defined different group status on the island by the time of arrival on the archipelago. When the Portuguese arrived in the Gulf of Guinea region in the late fifteenth century only Fernando Po (Bioko), which is only 32 km from the coast of Cameroon and visible from the mainland, had an existing autochthonous population, the Bubi. This island had been connected to the mainland in the recent past at a time when the sea level was low, whereas the other three Gulf of Guinea islands were certainly never linked to the mainland. Besides, the characteristics of São Tomé’s flora and fauna such as the absence of food crops and carnivores and mammals at the time of the discovery by the Portuguese refute the alleged existence of a human presence. Linguistic research proving that the lunga ngolá is a Portuguesebased Creole also contradicts this theory. In addition, Thornton explains that although the Africans had built boats for the coastal and river navigation, they had not succeeded in overcoming the problems of long-distance ocean navigation. For this reason, Cabo Verde and the Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles, Reunion and Mauritius were also uninhabited when the first Europeans arrived, while the Comoros were first settled by MelanesianPolynesian people in the sixth century. Neither did Marques, the Portuguese adventurer, prove that maritime currents could at least in theory have taken people in canoes involuntarily from the mainland to São Tomé.

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44

Chapter Two

Despite abundant historical evidence that the escape of slaves constituted a constant problem from the beginning of the island’s colonisation in the late fifteenth century, both the thesis of the shipwreck and that of African primacy completely ignore this phenomenon and the consequent establishment of a maroon community in São Tomé. Besides, it is known that quilombos existed in the Caribbean, Brazil, Surinam and in other slave societies. The Creole elite in São Tomé also owned enslaved persons and therefore was not interested in recognising the existence of maroons in the archipelago and preferred to accept the story of the shipwreck. In addition, politically this elite was more interested in claiming the country’s African pre-colonial past. Therefore, they also never promoted São Tomé e Príncipe as a Creole society. As a result of this claim, and despite strong historic and linguistic evidence, the Angolares of São Tomé are still widely ignored in academic studies on maroon communities in the Atlantic world. São Tomé’s slave revolt in July 1595 was one of the earliest and largest slave revolts in Atlantic history, both in terms of duration, destruction and the number of people involved. According to the two existing documents on the events, about half of São Tomé’s entire enslaved population participated in the insurrection that was put down after three weeks of fighting. It is not known if there was any particular incident that triggered Amador’s uprising or if it was simply a revolt against captivity. We only know that the rebels capitalised on existing political instability caused by divisions between the island’s religious and secular authorities and that their violence was directed against whites and mestizos, thus the slave holders, plantations owners and rulers. The destruction caused during the uprising was a severe blow for the island’s already declining sugar industry that was aggravated by the Dutch three-week occupation five years later. Both events, together with the recurrent political instability and the raids of the runaway slaves, contributed significantly to the disappearance of the sugar industry in São Tomé. However, the most decisive factor was the inferior quality of São Tomé’s sugar and the emergence of Brazil as a large producer that offered much better conditions for sugar cultivation and production. Inspired by Freyre’s theory of lusotropicalism, in the early 1960s Tenreiro reinvented São Tomé’s history by claiming that Amador had been the leader of the Angolares, who in turn, according to an already existing oral tradition, had been the descendants of survivors of a slaver shipwrecked off São Tomé’s coast in the mid-sixteenth century. By this Tenreiro denied both the slave revolt and the flight of enslaved Africans in São Tomé. Although he did not support his claims with any documents, they have been widely disseminated and are still believed today by many people in São Tomé. However,

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Slave Resistance and Revolt

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irrespective of the persistence of Tenreiro’s legend, officially São Tomé and Príncipe has always portrayed Amador as the leader of the 1595 slave revolt without associating him with the Angolares maroons.

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CHAPTER THREE RECOLONISATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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Introduction There has been a consensus among scholars of São Tomé and Príncipe that the two islands were colonised twice by Portugal in quite different historical contexts: first in the sixteenth century during the Portuguese maritime expansion, and again in the mid-nineteenth century during the Scramble for Africa which involved seven European colonial powers. The two periods varied significantly in terms of international politics and developments in transport, communications, and manufacturing. Equally important is the fact that at the time of the recolonisation a local society had existed on the archipelago for more than 300 years, whereas the islands had been uninhabited when the first colonisation began. Regardless of these differences, one common denominator in the first and second colonisations was the plantation economy, based on monoculture for export and forced labour. The geographer Francisco Tenreiro has called the 200-year period between the two colonisations “o grande pousio” (the great fallow).1 This notion of a general decline applies mainly to the disappearance of the sugar industry and the plantation economy, as well as to a drastic reduction in the white population and direct links with Portugal. During this period, local agriculture was based on diversified food production for local consumption and to supply ships of the transatlantic slave trade, while the islands also remained involved in the slave trade, albeit on a smaller scale. In the eighteenth century, slave ships from Bahia had to pay taxes in São Tomé on their way to and from West Africa. Consequently, the links with Salvador, in Bahia, became much more regular than those with Lisbon. In 1753 the capital of the archipelago was transferred from São Tomé to Príncipe for political and public health reasons, which contributed to the decline of the former. Due to the weak form of colonial rule, the islands were largely controlled by the local Creole elite.

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Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

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Inevitably, the recolonisation of São Tomé and Príncipe in the midnineteenth century, which is described in this chapter, resulted in considerable changes to the archipelago’s colonial situation. The first section discusses the state of affairs in São Tomé shortly before and at the beginning of the second colonisation, while the second section focusses on the re-establishment of the plantation economy and the early decades of its development. The third section examines the introduction of contract work after the abolition of slavery in 1875 and the recruitment of thousands of indentured workers from Portugal’s other African colonies. The final section describes the harsh living and working conditions of the African contract workers on the Portuguese-owned plantations.

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On the eve of recolonisation In the period dating from the demise of the sugar industry in the seventeenth century to the independence of Brazil in 1822, São Tomé and Príncipe maintained stronger ties with this Portuguese colony than with Portugal itself, in particular with Bahia, the homeland of many of its colonial officials and soldiers. From 1677 to 1844, the diocese of São Tomé was separated from Lisbon and subordinated to the archdiocese of São Salvador da Bahia, further evidence of São Tomé’s close ties with Brazil during this period, while the local clergy was dominated by Sãotomean priests educated in Salvador.2 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, São Tomé’s economy, based on the supply of provisions for slave ships, declined as a result of the shrinking transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, the archipelago experienced a demographic decline due to a reduction in the slave population.3 Nevertheless, São Tomé and Príncipe was still a slave society, since the number of enslaved Africans surpassed that of the free black population until the 1840s, while the resident white population was very small. In 1807, local farmers employed about 60 percent of the enslaved people on the islands. In São Tomé twenty-six farmers owned 1,394 enslaved workers, an average of fifty-four each, while in Príncipe thirty-five farmers owned 2,477 slaves, an average of seventy-one each.4 In 1808 slave ships from Bahia stopped paying the taxes levied on enslaved Africans purchased on the West African coast, which they had been obliged to pay in São Tomé and Príncipe since 1710. Thereafter the total tax due had to be paid to the treasury in Bahia, which, in turn, paid São Tomé the sum of 9,000$000 réis per year in compensation until 1824.5 São Tomé’s revenue, which had mainly come from customs and port duties, fell from 30,000$000 réis in 1812 to less than 7,000$000 réis in 1838.6

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48

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Having been transferred to Príncipe in 1753, the return of the capital to São Tomé in October 1852 marked the beginning of the recolonisation of the islands and their effective return to the sphere of Portugal’s colonial empire. The recolonisation of the archipelago entailed considerable transformations to the economic structure and composition of its society. This process benefited from the fact that Brazil had become independent in 1822, thus redirecting Portugal’s attention to its African territories, which had hitherto played a lesser role within its colonial empire. The end of the civil war in Portugal in 1834 also helped to enable this change of focus. Prior to this, the re-establishment of the plantation economy on the islands had been facilitated by the introduction of new cash crops from Brazil by João Baptista da Silva Lagos, who was captain-major of São Tomé (178899) and twice governor of the archipelago (1799-1802 and 1820-24). Silva Lagos first introduced coffee from Brazil in around 1788, followed by cocoa, in around 1820. São Tomé and Príncipe was the first African territory in which cocoa was cultivated: from there, the crop reached the neighbouring island of Fernando Po (Bioko) and subsequently spread to continental West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. In São Tomé and Príncipe, the noteworthy production of the new cash crops only began after 1850 when Brazil’s slave trade was finally abolished, a forced disinvestment that encouraged new investments in tropical export agriculture. The slow development of cash crop production was also due to the lack of economic infrastructures, since there were no regular shipping services, financial institutions or warehouses for storing crops.7 The recolonisation and consequent increase in the number of Portuguese residents did not meet with resistance from the Sãotomeans, since it did not initially entail significant changes to the life and work of the local population.8 Unlike Angola and Mozambique, under modern colonialism São Tomé and Príncipe was not a settler colony, since the Portuguese usually only remained there only for their years of service rather than settling permanently. Like the first colonisation in the sixteenth century, the recolonisation was also affected by considerable political instability. In the period 184272 the archipelago was ruled by twenty-two governors and eight government councils.9 Nevertheless, important innovations associated with modern colonialism appeared during this initial period. Following the introduction of a printing press, the first issue of the archipelago’s Boletim Oficial, the government gazette, was published in October 1857. In 1858 a regular monthly shipping connection was established with Lisbon, operated by the Companhia União Mercantil. In the 1870s a steamship took around twenty-two days to travel from Lisbon to São Tomé, whereas a schooner had needed about forty-five days to complete the voyage. In 1867 a branch

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Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

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of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) was established in São Tomé, and in 1878 Portuguese missionaries arrived, the first white missionaries since 1794 when the last Italian Capuchins had left the islands.10 In 1878, out of a total population of 18,266, including almost 600 whites, only 261 people could read and write and 345 were attending school.11 In 1881 the deportation of criminals from Portugal was halted, in order to improve the reputation of the islands abroad and attract more voluntary white settlers. In that year, there were 572 white residents, of whom forty-six were women and 250 were deported convicts, including ten women. During the years 1867–74 the white population gradually increased from 362 (including thirty-three women) to 793 (including ninety-six women). However, in 1875 the numbers fell to 741 (including sixty-six women).12 This demographic decline was partly caused by the abolition of slavery in the same year, which prompted some of the newly arrived colonists to return to Portugal, since they considered it harmful for their investments. Table 3-1 Population of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1771-1950.

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Year

Whites

Mixed Race 351 383

Native Creoles 5,125 4,756 5,485 5,178 7,054 7,523 10,703 12,360

Slaves/ Freedmen 8,290 6,561 6,507 5,294 5,514 4,580 8,107 8,575

Serviçais

Total population 13,953 11,827 12,613

1771 187 1807 127 1827 1839 1844 185 12,753 1855 150 12,253 1868 485 19,295 1872 650 21,585 1875 786 31,341 1878 572 20,928 1900 1,187 280 19,153 21,510 42,130 1908 30,826 1914 1,659 20,288 36,887 58,834 1918 43,936 1921 1,115 19,243 38,697 59,055 1926 1,242 19,063 31,200 51,505 1940 995 31,039 28,456 60,490 1950 1,152 34,947 24,060 60,159 Sources: Robert Nii Nartey, From Slave to Serviçal: Labor in the plantation economy of São Tomé and Príncipe: 1876-1932 (PhD diss., Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois, 1986; Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S. Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993); Augusto Nascimento, “São Tomé e

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

50

Chapter Three

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Príncipe,” in O Império Africano 1825-1890, ed. Valentim Alexandre & Jill Dias (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 269-318; Augusto Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano nas Roças de S. Tomé e Príncipe. De finais de oitocentos a meados de novecentos (Lisbon: self-published, 2002); Augusto Nascimento, Atlas da Lusofonia. São Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Prefácio, 2008); Patrícia Gomes Lucas, “The demography of São Tomé and Príncipe (1758-1922): preliminary approaches to an insular slave society,” Anais de História de Além-Mar XVI (2015): 52-73.

A significant death rate among the white population also contributed to the demographic decline. São Tomé town, in particular, had been known for its unhealthy environment for centuries. In 1862 a health report mentioned several causes for the persistent insanitary conditions, including the low altitude which resulted in the accumulation of water and puddles, the large swamp close to the sixteenth-century São Sebastião fort, the absence of tap water and the use of contaminated river water, as well as houses that lacked ventilation and sufficient natural light, and backyards full of vegetation that were also used as waste disposal sites.13 São Tomé was hit twice by a smallpox epidemic, in 1864-65 and in 1877.14 Between 1864 and 1876, 720 whites died on São Tomé Island, 226 of whom were exiled convicts and 161 soldiers. At times, the mortality rate even surpassed the birth rate: in the years 1868-75, a total of 6,289 people died on the island, while a total of 5,009 births were registered during the period 1867-75.15 In 1872 São Tomé town had a total population of 7,975, including 431 white residents.16 At the time the town had 995 households but only sixty were urban buildings, the majority made of wood, with a tiled roof. In 1876 the best buildings in town were those which belonged to the BNU, seven owned by traders, and another ten belonging to planters, all constructed in the ten preceding years. In the same year, the state possessed only four buildings in the town, three of which were very old, dilapidated private homes without proper facilities that served as accommodation for exiled convicts, a prison, and the governor’s residence, respectively. The fourth was a large shed used to accommodate the Riflemen Battalion. All other public institutions, including the court, the registry office, the boys’ and the girls’ schools, the customs house, and the hospital, were based in old houses leased from private owners. The police were also accommodated in a shed, while the local government and the town council occupied a shack that lacked basic conditions.17 The state of the many church buildings in the archipelago was equally deplorable: in 1891 only one church could provide decent conditions for the celebration of mass.18

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Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

51

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The return of the plantation economy Francisco Mantero (1853-1928), himself a wealthy and politically influential plantation owner in the early twentieth century, considered the following four men to be pioneers of the nineteenth-century plantation economy in the archipelago: Francisco d’Assis Bélard (1823-92), a shop owner and founder of the Santa Margarida, Monte Macaco, and Maianço estates; Manuel José da Costa Pedreira (1816-67), founder of the Monté Café estate; José Maria de Freitas (18??-68), owner of the Bela Vista, Santarém, and Ilhéu das Rolas plantations, and João Maria de Sousa e Almeida (1816-69), owner of the Água-Izé estate.19 Bélard, born in Spain, began his career in São Tomé as a commercial agent. In 1869 he invited his nephew, Francisco Mantero, to join him in São Tomé. In 1887 Mantero also became Bélard’s son-in-law when he married his daughter, Maria Amélia Bélard. In 1843 Pedreira established the Casa Pedreira, a supplier of ship’s equipment in São Tomé. In 1854 he acquired, with a partner, the Monte Café estate, which would become the archipelago’s largest coffee producer. Freitas began to produce sugar cane at the Bela Vista estate in 1848 and, from 1853 onwards, also cultivated coffee and cacao there. In 1864 Freitas purchased the Ilhéu das Rolas estate and by 1860 had acquired the Companhia União Mercantil shipping line from João Maria de Sousa e Almeida; however, the company already closed down in 1864.20 Undoubtedly the most famous of the four pioneer planters was João Maria de Sousa e Almeida, a mestizo born in Principe in 1816. His father, colonel Manuel de Vera Cruz Almeida (1770-1833), the son of a wealthy merchant from Salvador, had served as captain-major in São Tomé and become a leading businessman in Príncipe, where he owned the Papagaio estate. João Maria’s mother, Pascoela de Sousa Leitão, was also a local landowner in Príncipe and the daughter of a soldier from Bahia who had served on the island.21 His godfather was José Ferreira Gomes (1781-1837), born in Príncipe of a Brazilian father, a soldier, wealthy businessman and owner of slave ships. Gomes owned Casa de Cima-ló, the largest residence in Príncipe, where he used to give lavish parties for the small local mestizo elite. He was married to Maria Correia Salema Ferreira (1788-1861), the island’s legendary Princesa Negra (Black Princess), the daughter of a Brazilian soldier and a local woman. Maria Correia was a wealthy lady who owned several plantations and almost 400 enslaved workers in Príncipe.22 These individual biographies provide further evidence of the archipelago’s strong ties with Brazil in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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In his youth Sousa e Almeida trained as a soldier and soon reached the rank of officer. Aged sixteen, he was appointed deputy clerk in the colony’s finance department. In 1834 he moved to Benguela in Angola, where he became a successful merchant and slave trader. In 1839 and 1842, as a military commander with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was involved in supressing the revolts of Africans in Dombe Grande, south of Benguela, for which he received military awards. In 1841 he was appointed governor of Benguela. Two years later he returned to Príncipe, where he continued his business. In 1845 he left for Lisbon and from there spent some four years visiting the main capital cities in Europe before heading to Brazil to study cocoa cultivation, returning to the Portuguese capital in 1850. He owned palaces in both Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. In May 1853, he returned to Príncipe where he dedicated his time to cocoa cultivation on the Papagaio estate. In October of the same year the king issued a decree granting him a special permit to take one hundred of the enslaved people he possessed in Benguela, who had the status of freedmen (libertos), to Príncipe to work on his plantation. Special permission was required because the transport of more than ten enslaved workers had been banned since 1836, the year in which the slave trade was abolished in Portugal’s colonies. In 1854 Sousa e Almeida acquired the Água-Izé estate in São Tomé in a public auction, together with more than 600 enslaved workers. In 1855, he moved to São Tomé to develop this plantation at Praia Rei, one of the largest on the island. In addition to cocoa, the plantation also produced coffee, tobacco, palm oil and copra. From 1857 to 1858 he was also mayor of São Tomé town.23 In January 1858, Sousa e Almeida published a guide to cocoa cultivation in the Boletim Oficial. In the same year, he introduced the breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) to São Tomé to improve the diet of the plantation slaves and set up the Companhia União Mercantil shipping company, which introduced a regular shipping service between Lisbon and Luanda at the end of that year.24 In 1868 the king granted him the title of Baron of Água-Izé, the name of his large estate. Only one year later, Sousa e Almeida died of malaria. He had no children with his wife Mariana Antónia de Carvalho but had fathered twelve children with other women between 1835 and 1864.25 One of his sons, Jacinto Carneiro de Sousa e Almeida (1845-1904), became the manager of Água-Izé, meanwhile troubled by serious financial problems. Due to huge outstanding debts, the BNU took over the Água-Izé estate in 1884. In 1898 the BNU sold the plantation to the Companhia da Ilha do Príncipe, co-owned by Francisco Mantero, who successfully managed the plantation. In 1908, the estate possessed an extensive narrowgauge railway network of almost 35 km and employed fifty Europeans and

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

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some 2,500 African plantation workers.26 Meanwhile, following the loss of Água-Izé, Jacinto had established the large Porto Alegre estate in the south of São Tomé in 1890. He became a successful and wealthy planter in his own right and in 1901 received from the king the title of Viscount of Malanza, the name of the river that ran through his vast estate. Nevertheless, he had accumulated considerable debts by the time he died.27 José Luís Constantino Dias (1855-1932), a wealthy plantation owner from the next generation, was a Portuguese subject of humble origins who had arrived in São Tomé in 1871 at the age of sixteen. He began working as a shop assistant, but by 1874 was seeking employment in the Valle Flôr estate, which would become the first plantation he acquired. In 1882, at a time when white plantation owners were backed by the colonial state and the BNU, he purchased the Bela Vista estate (formerly owned by José Maria de Freitas) and later the Diogo Vaz, Rio do Ouro, Boa Esperança and Nova Estrela estates. In 1890 he founded the Sociedade Visconde de Valle Flôr & Co. which, in 1905, employed more than 3,000 African contract workers and accounted for about 12 percent of São Tomé’s total cocoa production.28 The company’s estates, which had a total cultivated area of 5,850 ha, were connected by 68 km of narrow-gauge Decauville railway. He became mayor of São Tomé town (1890-91) and in 1907 was granted the title Marquis of Valle-Flôr. Between 1902 and 1915 he constructed a luxurious palace in the Alto de Santo Amaro neighbourhood in Lisbon.29 This was acquired by the Portuguese hotel group Pestana in 1992 and classified as national monument in 1997: after remodelling and renovation, it became the luxury five-star Pestana Palace Lisboa hotel in 2001. The plantations, known in São Tomé as roças, were initially set up on abandoned lands formally owned by absentee Portuguese landowners or the state. Sometimes their ownership was not clearly defined, since there was no proper land register: some of these lands had been occupied by local people for generations, while other properties were legally owned by them. In addition, in 1845 around half of the state-owned lands were rented by Sãotomeans.30 In 1872 there were twenty-one state-owned estates, which had been subdivided and rented to small producers. Initially, most of the newly arrived Portuguese planters purchased land. However, if the local landowners were not willing to sell, their lands were often appropriated by fraud, force, or other illegal means. Property documents were falsified, boundary markers were arbitrarily altered at night, properties were invaded by armed thugs, or the Creole owners were intimidated into selling with threats of violence.31 Between 1867 and 1872 the São Tomé registry office recorded 233 plantations of different sizes, almost all located in the northeast of the island where the sixteenth-century sugar plantations had

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Chapter Three

been established.32 From 1875 onwards the plantations expanded further to the south into areas that had never been occupied during the sugar period. In 1878 the territory of the Angolares, at the time a community of around 2,000 people, was occupied. Coffee was usually cultivated at altitudes ranging from 300 to 1,100 m, and cocoa at altitudes of 30 to 600 m. The roças differed in size and layout, largely depending on the particularities of their individual topography. However, the larger plantations followed a model typical of tropical estates elsewhere. In the centre of the plantation was a square, known in São Tomé as terreiro, surrounded by the residence of the owner or administrator, called the casa grande, the residences of the white employees, the African contract workers’ quarters, known as sanzalas, cocoa dryers, workshops, warehouses, stables, creches and hospitals. A few plantations had Catholic chapels where occasional church services were held, although many plantation owners were opposed to religious instruction for their workers, while the latter frequently kept to their own religious beliefs and practices.33 Large company plantations had several smaller plantation units known as dependências, which were sometimes located several kilometres away from the headquarters and had their own accommodation for the workers and foreman. A large estate could contain between two and one dozen of these semi-autonomous branches, depending on its size and topography. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the larger plantations operated their own small-gauge Decauville railway systems to facilitate transport within the estate and from there to a jetty at the coast, where the crops were shipped to the town’s Ana Chaves port for export. Before the 1940s this was the main route to the town since there was only a very limited and inadequate road network on the islands. In 1901, São Tomé possessed only 3 km of asphalt road, 18 km of dirt road and about 130 km of cart tracks in poor condition, while Príncipe had only about 12 km of cart tracks. At the time, the plantations had 15 km of narrow-gauge railway operating with steam traction and another 30 km which used animal traction.34 In 1910, twenty estates in São Tomé possessed 246.5 km of railway and two plantations in Príncipe had a combined total of 39 km, while there were approximately 285 km of cart tracks in São Tomé and a further 19 km in Príncipe. By 1926, the plantations in São Tomé Island had 500 km of railways, 310 km of which used animal traction.35 In 1908 work began on the construction of a 24-km public railway line extending from the city port to the town of Trindade in the interior of the island, which had been planned since 1899. The railway opened in June 1913 but closed down in February 1930 because it had proved to be unprofitable. In that year, only fifteen of 132 estates in São Tomé used the train for transport.36

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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55

In the first decades of the re-establishment of the plantation economy coffee was the dominant cash crop, but in 1890 cacao became by far the most important export crop, both in terms of volume and value.37 Coffee growing did not need much capital but was more labour-intensive and when coffee prices began to fall in the 1880s the planters switched to cocoa, which was easier to cultivate and became more profitable thanks to increasing demand and rising prices. Between 1872 and 1899 the export share of cocoa increased from 5.3 percent to 91.4 percent.38 In 1898 the small archipelago became Africa’s largest cocoa producer, with 11.5 percent of world production.39 At the beginning of the twentieth century São Tomé and Príncipe even became the world’s largest cocoa producer for a few years, surpassing Brazil, Ecuador, and Trinidad in terms of quantity. In 1910, the islands produced 16 percent of world cocoa production.40 In 1913, São Tomé and Príncipe’s cocoa production reached 36,500 tons, the highest output ever.41 From 1890 to 1914 the islands generated a significant surplus of revenue that covered two thirds of the deficits of other colonies, particularly Angola.42 At the time, the small archipelago became Portugal’s wealthiest colony and it is therefore not surprising that during this period the Portuguese called the two islands “ocean pearls”.43 However, the decline of cocoa began in the 1920s when an infestation of cocoa thrips (Heliothrips rubrocinctus) in some areas ruined a third of the cocoa plantations.44 Soil erosion, increasing competition from more efficient smallholder producers on the African mainland, and the fall in international cocoa prices due to the world economic crisis also contributed to the decline of São Tomé’s cocoa. Despite the low wages, total labour costs in the São Tomé plantation economy were, in fact, comparatively higher than those of the African smallholders who produced cocoa, since they included high recruitment costs and expensive supervisory staff, as well as the low productivity of an unmotivated and unskilled coerced workforce.45 In 1955 labour costs in São Tomé accounted for 70 percent of the gross export value, whereas in Ghana and the neighbouring Spanish island of Fernando Pó (Bioko) the figure was 33 percent and 38 percent respectively.46 As a result, after World War I, cocoa production decreased continuously from 56 percent to 24 percent in the periods 1920-29 and 1950-59 respectively, compared with the production level of the boom years 1910-19.47

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Table 3-2 São Tomé and Príncipe’s cocoa exports in metric tons, 18901953.

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1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908

2,849 3,598 4,995 3,445 6,036 7,203 7,669 6,775 10,737 11,028 11,429 13,571 16,867 20,923 22,978 24,259 22,245 22,861 27,187

1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1926 1940 1950 1951 1952 1953

32,103 36,148 32,312 36,091 36,501 33,319 27,956 33,999 29,097 13,788 55,831 20,023 28,406 12,470 6,972 8,002 7,078 8,378 10,882

Sources: Hélder Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a Cultura do Café (Lisbon: Junta de Investigação do Ultramar, 1958) (years 1890-1901); “Alguns dados estatísticos sobre S. Tomé e Príncipe” Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, no. 43 (1929):172-73 (years 1902-21); Francisco Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1961), 107 (years 1926-53).

Initially, the larger Creole landholders were actively involved in the reestablishment of the plantation economy, particularly when coffee, which only needed a minimum of investments, was the main crop. However, as previously noted, within a few decades they had gradually lost their lands to Portuguese owners by both legal and illegal means. In addition, they were disadvantaged in terms of access to bank loans to finance the recruitment of serviçais (servants), as the African contract workers were called. Other local landowners were inclined to lead an extravagant lifestyle, rather than accumulating capital and consequently went into debt and were forced to sell their property to Portuguese investors.48 In 1872, out of 153 big landowners, ninety-six were Sãotomeans, thirty-six Europeans, four Brazilians, one Asian, and sixteen of unknown origin.49 By 1878 the majority of the 1,014 registered landowners were still Creoles, but all the large plantations

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

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were owned by whites. In the 1880s there were twenty-one large Portuguese-owned plantations, each employing between 150 and 1,000 serviçais; by 1908 the ten largest roças employed between 458 and 4,802 contract workers.50 In 1910 when the newly proclaimed Portuguese Republic provided some scope for social and political activism, the local São Tomé elite created the Liga dos Interesses Indígenas (LII) to defend their rights and interests. One of the objectives was to protect their property rights and prevent the sale of their lands. However, by then the Sãotomean plantation owners were only a small minority, whereas most of the large Portuguese-owned plantations were owned by joint-stock companies based in Lisbon, who were represented locally by administrators. In 1910 twelve such companies owned seventeen large roças;51 by 1914 the companies owned 24 percent of the roças, while the other 76 percent belonged to individual private owners. In 1929 there were nine plantations with more than 1,000 workers.52 In 1934 twenty-two large plantations alone occupied 725 km² of a total surface area of 938.4 km².53 At that time 138 roças existed in São Tomé and another nineteen in Príncipe. The major companies were the Companhia Agrícola Colonial (Porto Real), Companhia da Ilha de Príncipe (Água-Izé, Infante D. Henrique), Sociedade de Agricultura Colonial (Santa Margarida, Pedra Maria, Maianço) and Sociedade Agrícola Valle-Flor (Rio de Ouro, Diogo Vaz, Bela Vista). In 1950, out of 109 estates with a total of 19,800 workers, two employed more than 1,000 workers, eleven had more than 500, and eighteen had less than ten workers.54 Within a few decades the expansion of the large export-oriented plantations had radically changed the economic structure of the archipelago. A few large Portuguese-owned plantations occupied almost all the land, while the remaining 10 percent, predominantly located in the north-east of São Tomé, belonged to Sãotomeans. In 1955, the local population of 30,000 only produced roughly 1 percent of the total agricultural exports.55 For decades the wealthy Portuguese plantation owners, and subsequently the absentee owners of the large companies, were the most politically influential and powerful group in the archipelago.

From slavery to contract labour The re-establishment of the plantation economy initially led to a rise in slavery, as the first plantation workers on the islands were enslaved Africans, mainly from Gabon and Angola. Consequently, from 1855 to 1872 the number of enslaved Africans on the islands increased from 4,580 to 8,575.56 A considerable part of the local Creole population also owned

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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slaves, while many plantations belonged to local Creoles known as Forros. As in other colonial slave societies, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Portuguese colonies was a gradual process that started in 1815 with the banning of the slave trade north of the equator. In December 1836 Portugal abolished the slave trade in its colonies, but still allowed the limited transport of slaves between Portuguese colonies. Nevertheless, the illicit transatlantic slave trade from Portuguese colonies only ended completely in 1850, when Brazil finally abolished the slave trade. The treaty of July 1842, which allowed British ships to inspect Portuguese vessels suspected of trafficking enslaved Africans, had already made their transport more difficult. Due to the British repression of the slave trade, the acquisition of enslaved people from Gabon ceased and was replaced by the importation of larger numbers of workers from Angola who were classified as freedmen (libertos), a status created by the decree issued on December 14, 1854. This decree obliged all existing slaves to be registered, created the Protective Board for Slaves and Freedmen, liberated slaves who belonged to the state, and stipulated that all slaves imported by land in Portuguese territories should be classified as freedmen who had to work for ten years for their masters. In Angola the export of so-called freedmen partly compensated the local slave traders for the loss of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850. A new Portuguese decree issued on April 29, 1858, determined that all slaves would be free within twenty years. Meanwhile, São Tomé’s planters took advantage of permission to transfer restricted numbers of freedmen between Portuguese territories to acquire increasing numbers of workers in Angola.57 As the number of freedmen that could be transported was restricted to a maximum of ten, the recruiters frequently shuttled back and forth by boat between Luanda and São Tomé carrying this amount of so-called freedmen to the archipelago.58 Another decree issued on February 25, 1869 declared the end of slavery in the Portuguese colonies simply by classifying all enslaved persons as freedmen who were obliged to work for their owners until April 29, 1878. A new decree issued on April 29, 1875, then ruled that the freedmen would be free within one year but subject to public protection until 1878 and had to work, preferably for their former masters, during this period. Most of the planters in São Tomé were opposed to the abolition of slavery, which they considered detrimental to their economic interests, and frequently reacted with repressive measures against the freedmen.59 Despite the existing legislation, until late 1875 the freedmen in São Tomé whose ten-year period of compulsory service had ended were not liberated, with the tacit agreement of the local authorities. Instead, the planters increased the workload by extending the working days to include

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

Recolonisation in the Nineteenth Century

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Sunday mornings. Consequently, the slaves and freedmen frequently resisted the maltreatment and despotism of the planters by escaping from the plantations. When the April 29 decree, which arrived in São Tomé in June, became known among the approximately 6,000 enslaved plantation workers existing at the time, they began leaving the plantations and crowded into the town, demanding their freedom. To avoid public unrest, on November 8, 1875, governor Gregório José Ribeiro (1873-76) announced the end of slavery in São Tomé and Príncipe, against the wishes of the plantation owners. On February 3, 1876, the overseas minister João de Andrade Corvo (1875-77) confirmed this decision. Initially many former slaves agreed to return to the plantations under contract, as paid labourers. However, the former freedmen later abandoned the plantations for various reasons, including slave-like working conditions and failure to pay their wages. Consequently, several planters suffered considerable losses due to the sudden shortage of labour The abolition of slavery had more a severe effect on the Creole plantation owners because, unlike the Portuguese, they could not easily obtain contract workers from abroad.60 In the late nineteenth century, a Portuguese resident in São Tomé told a British visitor that in 1875: Within a few days the town was filled with 10,000 slaves, crowding in from the plantations. There was not sufficient extra accommodation or food for hardly one-hundredth of that number; but they did not consider that point. All they knew was that they were no longer obliged to work, and accordingly they left their masters without having any particular object in view, and without forming any plans for their future subsistence. When set free, they had little or no money, and on reaching the town could not pay for food or lodging but wandered about the streets appealing to the charity of the inhabitants…. The harm done to the estates was enormous and almost irreparable. The whole produce of the island was ruined for two successive years, on account of there being no hands to work on the plantations.61

Generally, the Forros refused to do manual work on the plantations, considering it slave labour beneath their social status as free Africans. This refusal was an integral part of Forro identity. Therefore, except for the small, educated elite, public servants and local plantation owners, the Portuguese viewed the local Creole population as decadent and workshy. For the same reasons as the Forros, the Angolares also refused to accept contract work on the plantations, although the Portuguese had a different opinion of them since they accepted casual work on the estates, such as felling trees, and served as boatmen for the coastal shipping of export crops from the roças to the harbour in the town.

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In the late nineteenth century, the previously quoted Portuguese local resident in São Tomé assured the British visitor: “The natives of the island are very lazy and will not do any labour as long as they can get a plantain to eat or a sugarcane to chew.”62 In turn, Negreiros, a Portuguese colonial officer stationed in São Tomé from 1890-99, considered the Forros “the island’s most decadent generation, who take advantage of the abundance of the land to sustain their endless idleness”.63 In 1910, the planter Mantero affirmed that “the natives, descendants of various African races, inclined by nature to indolence and vice, preferred idleness to work”.64 José Duarte Junqueira Rato, São Tomé’s governor from 1926-28, argued that

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The native population of S. Tomé is averse to working in agriculture and only a few natives look for work on the estates, in tree felling and in the treatment of palm trees. For those descended from the slave population who have acquired freedom over time, rural work has become associated with the idea of slavery. Moreover, the local environment is convenient for leading a life of idleness, even if miserable. The vagrant can easily obtain fruit to eat, he happily lodges in a squalid cabin. Produce from neighbouring farms, the illicit trade in spirits with plantation workers and the exploitation of female prostitutes are all resources for those who do not want to be subjected to work.65

Even in the late 1950s, the Portuguese economist Oliveira described the Forros as follows: “It can be said that, in general, they maintain nowadays the characteristics of idleness and parasitism that have characterized their ancestors since the beginning.”66 British observers shared the stereotypes of the work ethics of the Forros. A handbook on São Tomé and Príncipe published by the Foreign Office in 1919 affirms that A few of the better educated (natives) engage in agriculture or business, but the majority prefer to do nothing. The abundance of natural products enables them to obtain their food with little or no difficulty, while the warm climate reduces demands for housing and clothing to a minimum. A certain number of natives are employed on the cocoa plantations but, as a rule, work there is regarded as derogatory. Intemperance is said to prevail.67

In the mid-1930s the governor introduced a poll tax to force the local population to accept plantation work. However, the measure largely failed to achieve the intended results. For the year 1935 the local authorities reported a monthly average of 1,318 locals employed in the task work system, 1,200 of whom were agricultural workers, 100 labourers and eighteen employees, well below the figure of 5,000-7,000 locals which the authorities had expected to employ in the plantations at the time.68

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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Moreover, many of the local workers on the plantations were, in fact, Tongas, the local name for the children of serviçais born on the islands.69 Following the abolition of slavery in 1875, a few Portuguese planters refused to adapt to the new conditions and abandoned the islands, but the majority quickly adjusted to the new reality. Abolition was immediately followed by the introduction of a contract labour system and the BNU became important in this context, since it financed the recruitment of contract workers by white planters. The serviçais constituted a new social category in the islands. They reintroduced African beliefs and practices, such as the puíta dance and the djambí spirit possession cult. The serviçais were imprisoned within the plantations, strictly separated, in spatial terms, from the island population who lived in the capital, small towns or hamlets known as luchans. Hence, they could not socialise with the local population, whose possible influence was considered harmful and unwanted by the planters. Consequently, before independence the contract workers remained largely unassimilated into Creole culture and social institutions.70 The Creole population, in turn, did not identify with the serviçais at all. In general, the Forros maintained an attitude of superiority towards the serviçais, whom they called gabões, as they had called the enslaved people before them, irrespective of their true place of origin.71 Although influenced by early twentieth-century Pan-Africanist ideas, the Forro elite organised around the Liga dos Indígenas was more concerned with their own demands than with the fate of the African plantation workers. Moreover, many Sãotomean landowners also employed serviçais and their differentiation from the latter served to reinforce the sociopolitical status of the Creole population.72 While culturally homogeneous, Forro society was considerably stratified in socioeconomic terms. Following the loss of their landed property, the elite sought employment in the colonial administration where they occupied low and intermediate positions. The majority lived from subsistence farming on small plots of land known as glebas, which were also markers of Forro identity, since plantation workers could not own land. Tenreiro classified the coexistence of subsistence farming on the glebas and cash crop production on the large plantations as two lifestyles, “two mentalities that react in a different way in the presence of a common nature.”73 Other markers of Forro identity were Portuguese names, language, Catholic beliefs, cultural associations, and religious brotherhoods, as well as their style of clothing, which distinguished them from the African plantation workers. Still in 1875, the office of the Curadoria Geral dos Serviçais e Colonos de São Tomé e Príncipe (Plantation Labour Inspectorate) was established to organise the distribution of workers to the different estates and to oversee

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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compliance with the labour regulations. In theory, the labour inspectors were expected to supervise contracts and protect the workers, but in practice they tended to serve the interests of the planters and administrators. Although most contract workers were employed in the plantations, they also worked for the Department of Public Works, local trading houses, and in the harbour. In 1918 a total of 814 employers, including 186 plantations, used contract workers. Only nine companies employed more than 1,000 workers, while another seventy-eight had between 100 and 1,000 workers, and 565 employers had contracted between one and five serviçais.74 In that year, the number of serviçais reached a total of 43,936, the highest number ever, including only 6,429 women. From 1900 to 1940 the plantation workers exceeded the local population in number (see Table 3). In 1950, 9,680 out of a total of 23,613 contract workers were Angolans, 6,320 Cabo Verdeans, 4,917 Mozambicans, and 2,696 Tongas.75 Subsequently, due to the decline of cocoa, the number of plantation workers steadily decreased to some 22,000 in 1961. In the period from 1876 to 1958 a total of around 250,000 contract workers arrived on the islands, including 60,000 during the expansion phase of the plantations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (see Table 3-3).

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Table 3-3 Origins, period of arrival, and numbers of contract workers 1876-1958. Period/ Origins Angola Ajuda Cameroon/Gabon Gold Coast Sierra Leone Liberia Dahomey Macau Cabo Verde Mozambique Other Total

18769 5,294 24 3,229 738 39 516

188090 50,640

188587

1895

19022776 50,772

192858 30,166

9,261 44,127 19 104,179

28,363 25,729 21 84,279

716 450

9,840

50,640

716

450

18761958 136,872 24 3,229 738 39 516 716 450 37,624 69,856 40 250,104

Sources: James Duffy, A Question of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 98 (years 1885-1900); Abel Augusto Mendes da Costa Neves, “A mão de obra para S.Tomé e Príncipe,” Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, no. 43 (1929): 63 (years 1876-9), 67; 71 (years 1902-28); Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S. Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993), 242 (years 1928-58).

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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In addition to Angola, the planters initially recruited contract workers in Liberia and the Gold Coast, transported by the British and African Steam Navigation Company. The first group arrived in September 1875, almost two months before the abolition of slavery. In September 1876, when the company refused to transport new workers, the planters chartered the Portuguese brig Ovarense to hire up to another 400 workers in Liberia. After leaving passengers and the recruiting agent in Liberia, the captain sailed to neighbouring Freetown in Sierra Leone to obtain provisions, inform the local authorities of his mission, and present the authorisations issued by the Portuguese. However, on arrival in early December, the British seized the brig on the suspicion of slave trafficking in Sierra Leone, since it had a larger amount of water and rice on board than necessary for a crew of fourteen people. The Portuguese immediately filed a complaint against this decision, which they considered arbitrary. In August 1880, a court in London absolved the Portuguese ship and sentenced the authorities in Freetown to pay £10,000 in compensation. Nevertheless, following this incident the planters recruited labour almost exclusively in Angola until the early twentieth century. There, the principal ports where they ransomed workers from local agents were Luanda, Catumbela, Benguela and Novo Redondo (Sumbe).77 Before the twentieth century there were only two exceptions to this rule. In August 1885 the governor of São Tomé and Príncipe signed the Treaty of Aguanzum with Prince Conhondú of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which placed the port of Adra under Portuguese control with the aim of obtaining labour from there. However, by December 1887, Portugal had cancelled the treaty and France subsequently occupied Dahomey. During the twentyseven months of Portuguese control, 716 enslaved Africans from Dahomey were shipped to São Tomé. The Portuguese presented humanitarian arguments to justify this slave trade, claiming that the captives were mostly prisoners of war who would have been killed in ritual human sacrifices at the royal court in Dahomey if they had not been sold into slavery.78 In 1895 the planters hired 450 Chinese coolies in Macau, including eleven women. When their five-year contracts ended in 1900, only 161, including four children, left the archipelago. The majority had apparently died during the five-year period, although a few remained in São Tomé and became shopkeepers. In 1902, two companies in Príncipe received twenty-one prisoners of war from Portuguese Guinea. In 1905, the Companhia da Ilha do Principe recruited nineteen Indian contract workers in Goa for a period of five years.79 In 1913, another seventy-two Indians were deported to Príncipe to assist in the fight against an epidemic of sleeping sickness.

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More importantly, however, the early twentieth century saw the beginning of the regular recruitment of contract workers from Cabo Verde and Mozambique, in 1903 and 1908 respectively. Mozambicans were recruited in the north and centre of the territory since migrant workers in the south usually worked in South Africa’s mines. In general, both Cabo Verdeans and Mozambicans received renewable two-year contracts. Unlike the Angolans and Mozambicans, the Cabo Verdeans were never formally classified as indígenas. They were forced to leave their impoverished archipelago due to recurrent droughts followed by severe famines and misery. Unlike the Angolans and Mozambicans, they often spoke Portuguese, many were literate, and they were Catholics. They were often better paid than the other serviçais and were regularly repatriated at the end of their contracts. Although classified as more civilised, many planters considered the Cabo Verdeans more difficult to manage, since they tended to be more assertive than the other Africans. Understandably, the Cabo Verdeans preferred to emigrate to the United States, their principal destination since the early nineteenth century. In order to oblige them to emigrate to São Tomé instead, the planters arranged for the Cabo Verde authorities to charge a passport fee of 4$800 réis for those wishing to leave for the United States.80 However, contrary to the Angolans and Mozambicans, Cabo Verdean contract workers did not play a significant role in the expansion phase of the plantations, as they were only recruited in larger numbers after World War II. In 1912 the planters set up the Lisbon-based Sociedade de Emigração para S.Thomé e Príncipe (São Tomé and Príncipe Emigration Society), which followed the example of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association in South Africa, a recruiting agency for mine workers. The largest of its seventy shareholders was the BNU (18 percent of the stakes), followed by the Sociedade Agrícola Valle Flor, Companhia da Ilha do Príncipe, Claudina de Freitas Chamiço (the owner of the Monte Café estate), and José Ferreira do Amaral (15 percent each). The society’s function was to hire free salaried labour in Portugal’s other African colonies. It had an office in São Tomé, a general agent in Angola, and agents in the other Portuguese colonies in Africa. The main objective was to appease the critics of the recruitment system through a more efficient organisation of the regular immigration of contract workers from Angola, Cabo Verde and Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. In 1936, due to the increasing number of repatriations, a decree permitted the planters to contract workers directly in these territories, thus bypassing the Sociedade de Emigração.81 In 1958 Angola definitively banned recruitment, while the

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recruitment of contract workers in Mozambique and Cabo Verde ceased in 1961 and 1970 respectively.

Harsh living and working conditions

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In the last quarter of the nineteenth century contract workers in Angola were frequently recruited against their will through the existing slave trade networks. In the early 1880s the price of an Angolan worker was between 40$000 and 50$000 réis, in the 1890s the average price was 100$000 réis and in the 1900s it ranged from 110$000 réis to 160$000 réis.82 Following the abolition of slavery, in 1878 the first decree on contract work in Portugal’s African territories was issued. It was followed by a series of decrees that regulated the recruitment, transport, employment, working conditions, nutrition, health services, punishment, and repatriation of African contract workers. Under the 1878 decree contract workers remained on the islands for five years and then were entitled to repatriation. However, prior to the early twentieth century this obligation was not honoured, particularly in the case of Angolans, whose contracts were often tacitly renewed by the planters without the full knowledge of the illiterate workers. In the late nineteenth century plantation workers sang a refrain that reflected this situation: “In São Tomé there is a door to enter, but none to leave.”83 In 1893 Nogueira described the Angolan serviçais as follows: The serviçal is not the free man who comes to São Tomé to look for work because he will be given a higher salary there than he could earn in his homeland. He is not the labourer, of whom there is a surplus in Angola, who seeks, or is forced by some necessity to seek, work elsewhere. He is the individual who, having fought on the losing side in a war, has been taken prisoner and cannot be rescued, or else, having committed a crime, has been reduced to slavery and sold, or who is already a slave and therefore is sold due to his inferior qualities.84

In the same period Negreiros, who claimed “not to believe in the complete anthropological inferiority of the Negro” but believed that “the coercion to regular work is still a means and a duty to civilise the savage,” classified the Angolan serviçal as “the most inferior of his race,” as he had been intolerable in his own community, from whence he had been taken by force, or imprisoned as a slave.85 Neves shared this idea, stating that the Angolans who arrived on the islands before 1903 did not represent the finest of the local population, since they were mainly convicts and prisoners of the incessant wars in the interior of Angola.86

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As justification for their failure to repatriate, the planters alleged that the workers had a better life on the plantations than in their homeland and therefore did not intend to return home at all. The 1908 manager of the Água-Izé estate claimed that, unlike workers from other territories, the serviçais from Angola’s interior were savages who had been subjected to the tyranny of local chiefs, had no notion of homeland or family, did not know who their fathers were and, given the sexual promiscuity of the Angolan women, they did not even know who the fathers of their own children were. Consequently, they would only be civilised in the harmonious community of the roças. The plantation manager argued that under these circumstances it would be cruel to demand the forced repatriation of the Angolans, since they would return to the savage slavery they had managed to escape for a much better life in São Tomé’s hospitable plantations.87 The persistence of the slave trade in Angola under a new name, destined for the plantations in São Tomé, was first denounced by British travellers and diplomats in the 1870s. Additional reports by missionaries and travellers of an ongoing slave trade in Angola to supply labour for São Tomé appeared in the 1880s. Subsequently there were also reports about harsh living and working conditions very similar to slavery on the estates in the archipelago. The Portuguese responded to the British accusations by issuing a decree in 1903 which officially permitted recruitment of contract workers in all Portuguese colonies and stipulated their repatriation at the end of the contract. Under this decree, Angolans received renewable contracts for five years, while the contract period for Cabo Verdeans and Mozambicans was two years. Although Portuguese Guinea was mentioned in the decree, no contract workers were hired in that colony. Three-fifths of their wages were withheld and deposited in a repatriation fund. If the worker agreed to renew the contract for another five-year term, the wage was increased by 10 percent. However, the new legislation did not silence anti-slavery activists and other critics of the Portuguese labour system. In the early twentieth century the journalist Henry Nevinson (1856-1941) went to Angola and São Tomé to investigate the accusations. The results of his inquiry, first published in Harper’s Magazine and later in his book A Modern Slavery (1906), confirmed previous accusations of slavery and forced labour in Angola and the islands. He was followed by Joseph Burtt (1870-1940), who went there at the request of William Cadbury (1867-1957), the director of the British chocolate manufacturer of the same name. As a Quaker and member of the Anti-Slavery Society, Cadbury was sensitive to accusations against the labour regime in São Tomé, which supplied cocoa for his factory. In his

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report published in 1907, Burtt confirmed the existence of slavery in São Tomé, since the workers were brought there against their will and were never repatriated as required by the regulations.88 In 1908 William Cadbury himself visited Angola and São Tomé to investigate the accusations. His findings also confirmed the allegations against the planters. In response to the British accusations, another decree was issued in July 1909 which reduced the maximum renewable contract period from five to three years. The recruitment of minors under fifteen years old was prohibited. However, the new regulations made no provision for mandatory repatriation or for public contracting, as demanded by the British. Nevertheless, as a result of the campaign the regular repatriation of Angolans finally began, in 1908. In that year, more than thirty years after they had been recruited, the first twenty-nine serviçais were repatriated to Angola.89 From January 1907 to September 1909 a total of 12,007 serviçais arrived, 9,249 of whom were from Angola, and 944 workers were repatriated in the same period, only forty of whom were Angolans. Due to the campaign, Angola’s governor suspended the recruitment of workers from this colony between 1910 and 1911. In March 1909, before the new decree was published, the chocolate factories Cadbury Brothers, Fry & Sons of Bristol, Rowntree of York, and Stollwerk of Cologne, in Germany, had declared a boycott on the purchase of São Tomé cocoa, pressured by the British campaign against slave cocoa. At the time, British chocolate manufacturers imported about one third of São Tomé’s cocoa, representing approximately one sixth of world production.90 In 1910, the year in which the monarchy was replaced by a republic in Portugal, Francisco Mantero, the leader of the São Tomé planters, published a book in which he rejected the accusations of the British critics as false and unjustified and claimed that the labour system on the islands was sound. In addition, several foreigners supported the position of the Portuguese planters in conferences and newspaper articles. One of the most prominent defenders of the planters was John Alfred Wyllie, a lieutenant colonel in the British Indian Army whose first wife was a Portuguese woman born in India. In 1909 Wyllie wrote to the editor of The Times on the absence of repatriation: It is not the planter’s fault that the present serviçal of the islands cannot possibly be repatriated for want of a record of his original habitat. The Angolan in the native state is an absolute animal – he has neither home nor family – please grasp this fact firmly, for it is essential to the question. His case is that of a monkey taken to a Zoo, with this important difference, that the Zoo may be (generally is) in the most suitable of climates for monkey life, whereas the Angolan’s new abode is the very reverse. The islands,

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deadly as they may be for Europeans, are a veritable paradise for the blacks, or would be so could the Angolan but realize his ideal – absolute idleness, plenty of rum, and no care for the morrow.91

Even the Sãotomean Nicolau dos Santos Pinto (1875-1922), a prominent activist in the Pan-African movement in Lisbon in the early twentieth century and a leading member of the Liga Africana (1920-24), refuted the British accusations of slavery during a session of the II Pan-Africanist Congress held in Paris in September 1921.92 However, Pinto might have been biased, since he was owner of the Guegue estate in São Tomé 93 where serviçais may have been employed. Other critical voices in Portugal condemned the slave-like labour system in São Tomé and Príncipe. In 1912, a former labour inspector in Príncipe published a leaflet titled Alma Negra! (Black Soul) in which he denounced the maltreatment of the serviçais and confirmed the British accusations. He argued that “The existence of slavery in the islands is a fact, although it appears to the public to be a system of free labour. The very nature of it involves a compulsion that makes the Negro renew the contract again and again, till it constitutes forced labour for life.”94 Nevertheless, the planters and their allies frequently stated that the true motive for the boycott had been economic rather than humanitarian, since the British were in fact aiming to favour the cocoa produced by African smallholders in the British Gold Coast. This argument is still repeated in more recent Portuguese publications on the “slave cocoa” affair.95 While the slave cocoa campaign succeeded in publicly revealing the continuation of forced labour in Portuguese Africa, the boycott failed to affect São Tomé’s cocoa exports. From 1910 to 1913 its cocoa exports even increased, from 28,148 to 36,500 tons. The number of African contract workers arriving on the islands did not fall either but increased from 30,826 in 1908 to 36,887 in 1914. Irrespective of the war, at least until 1917, the British authorities monitored the regular repatriation of the contract workers. In 1921 the São Tomé and Príncipe Emigration Society sent a report to the Portuguese government rejecting the accusations made by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in a report sent to the British government and distributed among the League of Nations delegates in Geneva in 1920. In the said report the anti-slavery activists again accused the planters in São Tomé of hiring African workers against their will and failing to repatriate them at the end of their contracts. The Emigration Society denied all the accusations, claiming they were groundless and based on misinformation, since the planters strictly applied all the provisions contained in the law of October 14, 1914.96

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During most of this period the contract workers were predominantly men: a more balanced gender ratio only existed among the Cabo Verdeans. Between 1876 and 1881 only 2,772 out of 6,917 Angolan contract workers were women. In 1910 the workforce in São Tomé comprised 20,929 men and 15,274 women, while in Príncipe there were 2,030 men and around 1,300 women. Subsequently, the balance deteriorated further as the planters became less interested in families being established on the plantations and later restricted them. Consequently, in 1921, out of a total population of 59,055 only 16,518 were women, resulting in a masculinity rate of 257.5 percent that year.97 From 1927 to 1931 the planters recruited 11,660 men from Angola, but only 1,218 women. The planters only initially encouraged unions between plantation workers to foster social peace and help convince workers to extend their contract when their partner’s contract had not expired. As previously mentioned, the children of contract workers born in the islands were called Tongas. They were considered the property of the plantations and future contract workers, another aspect that resembled slavery. Nevertheless, from the beginning childcare was specified in the regulations and creches run by black nurses existed on various plantations from as early as the 1900s.98 The children rarely had access to schooling or religious education.99 Their numbers remained relatively small since, due to the lack of women, the birth rate among the serviçais was low and infant mortality was high because of inadequate medical care. In 1897, the Portuguese naval officer Joaquim Biker (1867-1926) reported that, due to malnutrition, breastfeeding mothers had no milk, there was no maternity leave and women were submitted to the same harsh labour regime as men. He asked rhetorically “if the planters were more humane and far-sighted instead of wanting to recover, in a short space of time, the capital and interest on the money used to purchase serviçais, would they not have a new population, the offspring of the serviçais, on their plantations by now?”100 Even in the period 1947-1957 the mortality rate for minors on the plantations under the age of fourteen was between 49.0/000 and 115.7/000.101 In the late nineteenth century, the mortality rate was particularly high among the newly arrived serviçais from Angola, which the planters attributed to the change of climate. In 1882, death rates of 28 percent and 19 percent were reported for newly arrived women and men, respectively.102 The most common diseases that resulted in high mortality rates within the plantation communities were anaemia, malaria, typhoid, amoebic dysentery, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis, alcoholism, and geophagy (the consumption of earth), while suicide was also not uncommon.103

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In the late nineteenth century, Angolan workers frequently committed suicide by hanging, supposedly believing they would be reborn in their homelands.104 When cases of suicide increased dramatically on one plantation, the administrator summoned his workforce of around 300 to tell them that he was aware they would kill themselves to return to their homes. Then he cynically threatened to hang himself so that he could find them in their homeland and give them a brutal flogging if anyone committed suicide in future.105 Due to an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Príncipe in the early twentieth century, the mortality rate on this island was considerably higher than on São Tomé Island. In 1902 the mortality rate in the former peaked at 22 percent, while the mortality rate in the latter was 4.1 percent in the same year. In 1905, 1908, and 1915 the mortality rate in Príncipe was 11 percent, 13.16 percent, and 4.21 percent, while in the same years in São Tomé it was 8 percent, 8 percent, and 5.86 percent respectively.106 In the period 19151917 the mortality rate was 59/000 in São Tomé and 35/000 in Príncipe. Ten years later, between 1925 and 1927, the rate had dropped to 18/000.107 However, according to Oliveira, by 1947 the adult mortality rate was 25.1/000 and thereafter gradually decreased to 6.4/000 in 1957 because of improved health care.108 In 1929 a doctor had to make daily visits to the hospitals of the nine plantations that had more than 1,000 workers, while the hospitals of those with 600 to 1,000 workers had to be visited three times a week, and the hospitals of those with 100 to 600 workers once a week. The large roças, namely Água-Izé, Rio do Ouro, Ponta Figo, Porto Alegre, Perseverança, Colónia Açoriana, and Dona Augusta, had their own resident medical doctors.109 As previously noted, most plantation owners obstructed missionary work among the contract workers. It was only in 1947 that missionaries were allowed to proselytise within the estates and in the late 1940s the serviçais were permitted to attend the Sunday mass in the local parish churches.110 Between 1901 and 1928, a total of 99,821 serviçais arrived in São Tomé Island. In the same period, 40,880 were repatriated to their homelands, while 25,008 serviçais died on the island between 1911 and 1928.111 The bodies of deceased workers were only occasionally buried in parish cemeteries; in general, they were buried in cemeteries within the estates.112 In later decades the repatriations increased significantly. From 1928 to 1958, 92,277 serviçais returned to their homelands, while 84,397 arrived in the archipelago during the same period. Between 1947 and 1958, 56,869 contract workers arrived and 56,805 were repatriated.113 There was a wide range of punishments on the estates, varying from fines to detention and deportation. The most common offences were

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escaping, attempting to escape, threatening superiors, drunkenness, disobedience, and personal quarrels.114 Although corporal punishment was prohibited by law, it was frequently used on many estates. The type of punishment not only depended on the offence that had been committed but also the vindictiveness of the planters and administrators, who were uncontested rulers on the estates. Beating the hands or soles of the feet with the palmatória, a paddle-like piece of hard wood, and lashing with the chicote (whip) in more serious cases were the usual forms of corporal punishment, often in front of the other workers to intimidate the entire workforce. Frequently planters ruled with the carrot and stick approach, offering advantages to workers in exchange for submissiveness and zeal. When international protests against the labour regime in São Tomé increased, workers accused of theft and misdeeds were handed over to the colonial authorities for punishment more regularly. The most common punishment was forced labour for the local Public Works department, while serious crimes were punished by deportation to other Portuguese colonies.115 The oppressive labour system and the abuses resulted in several forms of resistance by the plantation workers. Like the enslaved workers before them, the serviçais frequently escaped from the estates. Occasionally the authorities organised raids to recapture fugitives in areas where they suspected they would take shelter. The highest incidences of escape occurred after arriving on the islands.116 In a report written in 1918 the Curator-General estimated that 5 percent of the total serviçal population were runaways.117 In the early twentieth century, any worker who recaptured an escaped colleague received a reward of 1$500 réis, while his monthly wage was 2$500 réis.118 One administrator of the Porto Real estate in Príncipe was said to have ordered the guards to shoot escaped serviçais dead.119 Most of the fugitives were recaptured and forced to return to the plantations, but occasionally runaways managed to hide in the inaccessible mountainous interior, where they built small huts and lived in misery. Some of them tried to survive by mugging and theft, and there were also incidences of local women being raped by escaped serviçais.120 Others fled the islands in stolen boats, trying to reach the mainland. A few of these runaways were driven by the currents to the neighbouring island of Bioko. Although there were many more contract workers in São Tomé than former slaves, both in total number and on individual large plantations, they never organised any large-scale collective uprisings such as those that had occurred in 1595 and 1875. This difference is possibly due to more effective coercive measures and surveillance, a lack of unity due to ethnic divisions, the increasing lack of hideouts due to the expanding plantations, and, at least

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theoretically, the hope of repatriation. Occasionally humiliated and maltreated workers attacked superiors and even killed them. In 1907 in one such case twenty workers from a plantation on Príncipe killed a Portuguese employee with machete blows. They were neither charged nor tried: one third of them were deported and the others died in custody on the island.121 The plantation owner and, in his absence, the administrator were the uncontested rulers of the estates. They were followed in the hierarchy by the overseers, foremen, caretakers, and guards. Only the two latter positions were frequently occupied by Africans.122 Generally, the superiors were always whites, while the lower-ranking staff were exclusively black. In the early twentieth century the ratio of white employees to serviçais on the large estates was one to between thirty and fifty.123 The workers were not allowed to leave the plantations without permission. From Monday to Saturday, serviçais were obliged to work nine hours a day, from 5.30 am to 6.00 pm, with breaks for meals, usually eaten at the workplace, and a rest period of two and a half hours. Meals, mainly consisting of beans, rice, salted meat, and salted fish imported from Angola were served twice a day. However, this was not always the rule, since in the late nineteenth century not all planters provided fish or meat for their workers, thus forcing them to buy additional food from the plantation shops with their meagre salaries.124 On Sundays the serviçais had to work five hours, meaning that Sunday afternoon was the only time they had free. Usually, payday was on the first Sunday of the month. On this day the workers frequently celebrated by dancing until late in the night. At 9 pm the workers were shut up in the barracks to sleep until 5 am.125 There was a rollcall early in the morning and at the end of the day, when the workers were allocated work tasks and received medicine and payment, but also exemplary punishments. Twice a year, in June and December, the planters provided clothes for the plantation workers and in May they received a cotton blanket.126 Many plantations had their own shops which mainly served to ensure that the serviçais remained in debt to their employers and also to prevent them from secretly visiting shops and bars outside, considered by the planters to be places where excessive amounts of alcohol were consumed and stolen cocoa was sold.127 The main type of housing in the plantations were the crowded and insanitary barracks called sanzalas, meaning slave quarters. A few planters allowed the workers to construct small houses, mostly wooden sheds but sometimes also built in brick to reduce the risk of fire.128 In their quarters the workers were usually separated by place of origin and the planters saw ethnic divisions as a means of preventing workers from uniting.129 The different groups rarely mixed and intergroup unions occurred only occasionally. Workers who had arrived in the same

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vessel would maintain special ties with each other, known as navio, literally meaning ship.130 Officially, the workers could complain to the Curadoria, although this was impeded by a lack of Portuguese, intimidation, and the authoritarian regime on the roças which did not allow them to leave without permission to make a complaint. Many plantations were closed communities ruled by an oppressive system similar to a penal colony and had little communication with the outside world. Initially there were no roads, particularly in the remoter areas, and cocoa and other goods had to be transported by the serviçais on their backs. Sometimes sacks of cocoa weighing 64 kg had to be carried 5-8 km by porters over rough terrain.131 It seems that at the time mules and donkeys were used to a much lesser extent for transport. Subsequently, the improvement of local transport infrastructures meant that porters were no longer used. Overall living and working conditions gradually improved somewhat over the course of the twentieth century, although there were no significant changes to the plantation system. There were three reforms of the contract labour regime: in 1909 due to the “slave cocoa” campaign, in the 1940s to attract local labour, and in 1961 when the discriminatory Estatuto dos Indígenas was abolished.132

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Concluding remarks Several features of the São Tomé and Príncipe recolonisation have had a lasting impact on the country’s economy and society. One of the major legacies of modern colonialism was the plantation system based on cocoa monoculture, which was largely retained by the independent state until the late 1990s, when the estates were dismantled as part of an agricultural reform and the plantation economy ceased to exist. Nevertheless, cocoa remained the main agricultural export for more than a hundred years although in recent decades its volume has been less than 10 percent of that of the early twentieth century. Palm oil only exceeded cocoa in terms of volume and value in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The social and spatial segregation between Sãotomeans and plantation workers and the superiority complex of the former towards the latter have hindered the full integration within local society of the African contract workers who remained in the islands after independence, as well as their descendants. Most of those who stayed in the country came from Cabo Verde. As a result, currently 8.5 percent of the country’s population is of Cabo Verdean descent, while in Príncipe (7,500 inhabitants) the descendants of Cabo Verdeans constitute most of the local population. The privileged status of Portuguese, which is currently spoken by the entire population while native Creole languages are

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Chapter Three

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steadily declining, is partly an indirect result of the massive influx of African contract workers in the first half of the twentieth century. The huge presence of African immigrants created fears of indigenisation among the Sãotomeans. This, in turn, led to greater pressure to assimilate, which included the use of Portuguese to the detriment of the local Creole languages that were increasingly considered inferior. This trend was reinforced after independence since local governments promoted the use of Portuguese as the official language to foster national unity.

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CHAPTER FOUR THE MASSACRE OF FEBRUARY 1953*

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Introduction In February 1953, attempts by the colonial administration in São Tomé to force the Creole population to work on the roças to solve the labour problem provoked a spontaneous popular protest. On the orders of Governor Carlos Gorgulho (1945-53), the local police Corpo da Polícia Indígena (C.P.I.), which consisted mainly of Angolan soldiers, supported by white volunteers, and hastily recruited Angolan and Mozambican contract workers persecuted the local population, killing numerous innocent and defenceless people. It was the most violent action against civilians of modern Portuguese colonialism in times of peace. Although there was no war at all, the atrocities have also been known as Batepá War, named after the locality, where they started. The governor justified his punitive operations by claiming to be fighting an alleged communist insurrection. Due to the isolation of the island and the censorship in Lisbon at that time, only a short official version of the bloody events reached the outside world.1 In 1955, Basil Davidson (1914-2010) mentioned the massacre in his book The African Awakening and in the same year, under the pseudonym Buanga Fele, the Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-90) published a small article titled “Massacres à São Tomé” in the Paris-based periodical Présence Africaine.2 The geographer Edwin Munger (19212010) of the American Universities Field Staff wrote a letter mentioning the events in early 1955, which was not published until 1961.3 Much later, in 1972, René Pélissier (1935-) published a more detailed article about the massacre.4 Nevertheless, many errors and misunderstandings about the tragic events have circulated. For example, apparently misguided by Marxist doctrine various publications have stated that in February 1953 the *

Completely updated and revised text based on an earlier version titled “The February 1953 Massacre in São Tomé: Crack in the Salazarist Image of Multiracial Harmony and Impetus for Nationalist Demands for Independence,” Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2002/2003): 53-80.

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Portuguese in São Tomé had shot plantation workers on strike, but this is definitively wrong.5 In turn the book A Economia de S.Tomé e Príncipe by the economist Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira (1933-2016), published by the Portuguese Cooperation in 1993 does not even mention the massacre.6 Until 2011, the Portuguese authorities denied access to a report on the massacre commissioned after the Carnation Revolution, in June 1974, and kept classified in the Historical Diplomatic Archive (AHD) in Lisbon. Nevertheless, in the last twenty-five years, the bloody events in São Tomé in 1953 have become known in Portugal thanks to several publications by the author and other researchers. Finally, during the annual commemorations of the massacre in São Tomé in February 2018, Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (2016-) expressed regret for the atrocities committed in the name of his country. This chapter analyses the background and the antecedents of the massacre and narrates the events and their aftermath.

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Social and historical background The modern plantation economy of São Tomé e Príncipe, established during the second colonisation of the archipelago from the mid-nineteenth century, was constantly plagued by a shortage of manpower. After the abolition of slavery in 1875, the Portuguese planters had resorted to indentured labour recruited in Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. As already pointed out, the autochthone population constituted by Forros and the small community of the Angolares refused manual field work on the roças, since they considered it beneath their status as free blacks. However, the Forros accepted employment in the workshops and offices of the roças. The educated Forro elite occupied the lower positions in the colonial bureaucracy. The Angolares were artisanal fishermen, but also accepted odd jobs as woodcutters on the plantations and as boatmen in the coastal shipping of cash crops from the plantations to the harbour in São Tomé town. Besides their refusal to work in the fields, the numbers of the native islanders were in any case insufficient to supply the necessary labour for the expanding plantation economy. From the end of the nineteenth century until 1940, contract workers called serviçais outnumbered the native Creoles. Unlike Angolans, Guineans, and Mozambicans, both Sãotomeans and Cabo Verdeans were not submitted to the discriminatory colonial legislation of the Estatuto dos Indígenas (1926-61) since the Portuguese considered the two Creole societies more “civilised” than the continental Africans. Sãotomeans enjoyed a certain kind of de facto citizenship, including limited voting rights.7 However, formally, Portugal excluded the people of Cabo

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The Massacre of February 1953

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Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe from this racist legislation only in 1947 and in 1953 respectively. Due to their history as descendants of manumitted slaves, the Forros were the only blacks in São Tomé who possessed small private plots of land, known as glebas, whereas the indentured labourers and their offspring called Tongas were not allowed to till any land for themselves, let alone own any private plots. Forros who did not work for the colonists were able to subsist on the produce of their glebas, the sale of cocoa stolen from the estates and the sale of palm-wine and locally produced gin to the plantation workers.8 The majority of the Forros were physically African in appearance, but owing to their history as free blacks they maintained an attitude of superiority towards other Africans. Moreover, the various groups were different in terms of culture and language. Even when somebody was not known personally, the surname was sufficient to identify his/her background. A woman’s group membership could be identified by the distinctive way in which she wound her scarf. Within the estates, Angolans, Mozambicans, and Cabo Verdeans rarely mixed with each other.9 In addition, the groups were socially and spatially segregated from each other. The serviçais and Tongas lived exclusively on the estates, the Forros in towns and dispersed settlements known as lúchans, while the Angolares were concentrated in a nucleated settlement in the south of São Tomé Island. In general, the groups were endogamous; however, Forro men, who are polygamous, used to maintain intimate relationships with serviçal women. Despite their socioeconomic diversity, the Forros maintained a high degree of cultural uniformity. When recruitment of labour from abroad became increasingly difficult and costly, the colonial authorities tried to persuade the Forros to accept wage labour on the estates, however without a great deal of success. As already mentioned, due to their aversion to plantation labour, the Forros had a bad reputation both among the white colonists and abroad. The whites perceived this stance as laziness and arrogance, as well as a threat to the labour discipline of the contract workers. Even the Quaker and chocolate manufacturer William Cadbury (1867-1957), who came to São Tomé in 1908 to investigate the appalling labour conditions on the plantations, shared such opinions about the Forros, reporting: The “native of S.Thomé”, as he is now called, is a brown-skinned individual, insolent, lazy, and lawless. His women, some of whom, I am told, are possessed of a certain dusky comeliness, are notoriously loose in character. The “natives” live a miserable life, squatting on land in various parts of the island, a great number living near the town. They are not enumerated, they pay no taxes or rates, they are not subject to military service, they look down upon the serviçal population as slaves, and are fond of repeating on all occasions their motto, “The native of S.Thomé does not

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Chapter Four work”. If you meet them on a muddy road and there is a dry path only wide enough for one person, you must walk in the mud.10

While officially São Tomé enjoyed racial harmony, the governor’s oppressive policies, as well as the potential threat of plantation labour contributed to the increasing racial tensions on the island.

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The antecedents of the massacre On April 5, 1945, Carlos de Sousa Gorgulho (1898-1972), at the time captain of the artillery, took office as governor in São Tomé.11 He was a zealous military man who had become known for his role in the suppression of the revolt of Portuguese seamen on the Tagus in September 1936. Then revolting sailors had seized three navy ships that they supposedly wanted to hand over to the Republican Government in Spain.12 After World War II, cocoa prices had begun to rise considerably, while in São Tomé local cocoa output declined due to a lack of labour.13 From the onset, Gorgulho's policies aimed to modernise the colony's infrastructures and resolve the labour problem that plagued the local economy. He took various measures both to hinder the subsistence of the Forros and to improve the working conditions on the roças to attract local labour. Gorgulho enforced the government's supervision of the estates, which he frequently inspected personally. Consequently, the serviçais, whose repatriation was delayed due to the war, could return home and the overall situation of the contract workers was alleviated. The corporal punishment of workers was prohibited, the maximum daily working time was limited to nine hours, and their nutrition was improved. In 1947, he prohibited the production and sale of palm wine and aguardente (local gin) to improve the productivity of the plantation workers and to deprive the Forros of their economic base.14 Between 1948 and 1952, Gorgulho gradually increased the poll tax he had introduced from 30$00 escudos to 90$00 escudos, in order to compel the Forros to seek wage labour.15 These measures were in accordance with the Salazarist policy of obliging all Africans in the Portuguese territories to work for the colonial economy. In 1943, the Minister of Overseas Territories, Vieira Machado, had declared: If we want to civilise the native, we must make him adopt as an elementary moral precept the notion that he has no right to live without working.16

Nevertheless, during his first years in office Gorgulho's relations with the local Creole population were apparently good. The governor, who was considered a benign and honest man, used to ask the people on the street

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The Massacre of February 1953

about their lives and to give sweets to the children.17 On the occasion of his birthday on December 12, 1948, the local people even awarded him a sword of honour to recognise the merits of their governor. At the end of his first term of office, in the following year, the Creoles sent a petition with more than 2,000 signatures to Lisbon demanding the reappointment of Gorgulho. The Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), who visited São Tomé in December 1951, wrote that Gorgulho was “a man highly esteemed by the common people though disliked by some wealthy men.”18 It was Gorgulho who introduced family allowance and rent subsidy, as well as free medical care for civil servants. During his government there were a number of other innovations: the local weekly A Voz de S.Tomé (1947), an annuity insurance for the functionaries' families,19 an Arts and Crafts School for vocational training (1948)20 and the Colégio-Liceu (1952),21 the archipelago’s first institution of secondary education. But ultimately, none of Gorgulho's measures could convince the Forros to change their attitude towards manual work on the estates, which they continued to regard as “slave labour”. For them contract work on the plantations was not simply a question of working conditions or adequate payment, but rather one of identity. Due to the reluctance of the Creole population to engage in wage labour, despite the local demand for labour and the social improvements, the Portuguese inevitably became increasingly agitated, in turn heightening the latent racial tensions. In fact, the situation had already changed when in the Portuguese presidential elections of February 1949 most voters in the town of Trindade did not show up; and the only three voters who went to the polls failed to vote for Salazar's candidate, the incumbent Marshal Oscar Carmona (President 1926-51), but instead voted for the rival candidate General José Norton de Matos (1867-1955).22 Obviously, the population of the region wanted to demonstrate their disapproval of certain measures introduced by the governor. Here the rounding up of Forro men for forced labour had begun in 1947.23 The Trindade area had been a Forro stronghold with the highest number of smallholders. In this region, relatively distant from the capital, the way of life facilitated dissident thoughts. In their dispersed settlements, the Forros could subsist on the produce of their glebas and the sale of palm wine, aguardente, and cash crops stolen from the estates. Meanwhile the settlement pattern and their hostility towards the colonial government made the enforcement of taxes and other government measures difficult. Gorgulho attributed the low turnout and the adverse votes to Salustino Graça, and his brother Januário, a primary teacher, who belonged to the most prominent Sãotomean family of that time,24 as well as to the white planters Virgílio de Almeida Lima,25 Carlos da Cunha Soares,26 .

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Eduardo António de Oliveira,27 and Alvaro da Silva Cruz,28 who were all known for their anti-Salazarist opinions. In addition, Salustino Graça, the owner of the roças São Vicente, São Januário, and Formosa, was considered by Gorgulho the mentor and brain of the Forros and, together with his brother Januário, as being a communist. In revenge against the poor turnout, Gorgulho ordered the detention of 300 voters who had not participated in the elections and obliged them to serve in the disciplinary labour gangs. He also cut the power in Trindade and withdrew the generator from the electricity plant, and suspended the subsidies for the Association of Mutual Assistance in the town.29 He further retaliated by sending Januário Graça, who had presided over the polling station, to a mixed school on Príncipe Island, although by law such schools had to be headed by female teachers.30 In turn, on September 30, 1950 the population of Trindade sent a petition to the Minister of Colonies, Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues (1950-55) asking for an inquiry into Gorgulho’s oppressive actions, which provoked fury on the latter's part. In retaliation, in October, he ordered the detention of seventeen prominent signatories of the petition, who were accused of communist activities. Subsequently, Gorgulho requested from Sarmento Rodrigues the deportation of Salustino Graça, Avelino dos Santos, the whites Virgílio de Almeida Lima and José da Costa Louro, and the punishment by forced labour of sixteen other signatories. In turn, on October 10 and 19 Salustino Graça, Almeida Lima, and Costa Louro sent telegrams to Sarmento Rodrigues demanding his intervention to stop the arbitrary nature of these measures. On December 4 the minister asked the authorities in São Tomé for moderation and rejected any punishment by deportation. Consequently, on December 22 the last detained petitioners were all released from custody.31 During his first mandate, Gorgulho began to carry out an ambitious urbanisation and modernisation scheme in São Tomé to attract more and better educated whites to the archipelago. In contrast to Angola and Mozambique, in São Tomé and Príncipe no permanent white settler community existed; most whites remained there only temporarily. Moreover, Gorgulho was preoccupied with the low educational level of the whites and the high rate of illiteracy among them. In his report on the years 1946 and 1947 he complained: Here you find nobody who can master himself in a style befitting a colonist, those men who left their native land in Portugal and who with a small suitcase of clothes and money, but a great tenacity and confidence in themselves, came on a journey to Africa and settled here, organising life and fortune, giving to the country the best of their health, intelligence, and activity. In S. Tomé these colonists do not exist. The entire white population

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lives with the only purpose of accumulating a nest-egg to allow them to return to Portugal, to buy a plot of land and a house, and to continue to live their life in that way until the end of their days… Their social level is very low, not only because the wages paid are in general ridiculous, but also because there are a great number of illiterates, and those who are not completely, are almost [illiterate].32

Within a few years, the labour gangs of the Department of Public Works, headed by one Faustino da Rocha Malheiro, an illiterate former foreman of the municipality known as Cabo Malheiro, had completely changed the face of São Tomé. They transformed a swamp area into a residential quarter called Bairro Salazar; constructed houses for civil servants along the coastal avenue; built a new police headquarters, a town market hall, an antituberculosis dispensary, the airports on both São Tomé and Príncipe, a sports stadium (baptised Sarmento Rodrigues to flatter the Minister of Overseas Territories of the time), the Cinema Império, the hotels Miramar and Salazar, as well as bridges, streets and roads, and, last but not least, a new prison. The former residents of the construction sites were expelled and their houses destroyed without compensation.33 These buildings still largely dominate the appearance of the city of São Tomé today. Due to the demand for labour for the construction works, the governor found a novel way of solving this problem. It was announced in town that wage labourers were needed for construction. However, when the labourers came into town to work on the construction sites, they were dismissed after two weeks due to the alleged lack of finance. After a few hours, many of them were rounded up by the police and forced to work for a salary of 1$00 escudo per day, whereas a voluntary worker was entitled to earn 12$50 escudos daily. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that only four or six volunteers appeared when the chief magistrate of the parish of Trindade, José dos Santos, invited the local population to work for the Public Works department for one month at 12$50 escudos daily, although the governor had obliged him to present thirty men.34 In addition, Gorgulho sent the police all over the island to pick up people without identity papers for the labour gangs. The commander of the raids was lieutenant Fernando Ferreira.35 Reportedly, the governor considered attractive women among the victims of such a raid as his personal prey.36 The workers, subject to corporal punishment and other ill-treatments, earned little or were not remunerated at all, although their names appeared on the payrolls. There were no fixed working hours; frequently the labour gangs had to work twelve hours or more. Several projects were under construction simultaneously and every week one building had to be completed.37 According to the collective memory of the Sãotomeans, the

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workers who succumbed to the harsh conditions were allegedly buried beneath the foundations. The foremen of the labour gangs were convicted criminals who had been released from prison by the governor for that purpose. The head of one labour gang was the notorious José Joaquim, a mestizo born on the Roça Ponta Figo, convicted for murder, and commonly known as Zé Brigada or Zé Mulato.38 Due to the increasing demand for labour the raids intensified, prompting the Forro communities to develop a system of warning signals to avoid being captured for forced labour.39 The problem of labour for the plantations had by no means been solved during the construction boom. The situation had even worsened when the recruitment of contract labour from Angola was suspended in April 1950 due to an acute shortage of domestic labour in that colony. Consequently, a development plan for São Tomé and Príncipe published in late 1952 proposed the settlement of 2,500 Cabo Verdean families, some 15,000 persons, in eight distinct locations in the archipelago.40 At that time, the total population on the islands was about 62,000, of which 1,200 were whites and 24,000 contract labourers.41 The investments projected for this development plan required higher future local government revenues, and thus a higher output of cash crops. On January 8, 1953, the head of the Plantation Labour Inspectorate,42 José Franco Rodrigues, suggested in an interview given to the local weekly A Voz de S. Tomé, distributing plots of subsistence land to all blacks on the archipelago irrespective of their legal status, and obliging them all to work for the local planters for six to nine months a year.43 Along the same line was a proposal from the Corporate Chamber, a consultative body, submitted to the National Assembly in November 1952, to extend the Estatuto dos Indígenas of 1926 to São Tomé and Príncipe as part of a revision of the Organic Law of the Portuguese Overseas. On January 17, 1953, during the debate on the revision in the National Assembly, the MP Ricardo Vaz Monteiro, a former governor in São Tomé (1933-41), rejected the proposal, arguing that the status was not applicable to the archipelago’s population since it was more evolved and even Christianised.44 Nevertheless, the Corporate Chamber’s proposal confirmed that at least in part the Salazar regime supported the indigenisation of São Tomé and Príncipe’s Creole population. Faced with the prospect of losing their free status and being subject to the contract regime on the roças, the Forros, already troubled by the roundups and forced labour on the construction sites, became increasingly worried. Rumours circulated that the government wanted to arrest all Forros for Public Works and to seize their glebas in order to hand them over to Cabo Verdeans.45 The tension continued all month. On the night of January 31, the theatre group at the Sporting Club, a recreative association of the

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local population founded in 1912, performed a play in the Cinema Império. The attempt by a group of whites to enter without tickets resulted in a fight at the entrance.46 On the same night, during one of the raids, an Angolan policeman suffered a blow from a machete in the location Caixão Grande.

Terror, violence, and killings Then, on February 2, a few anonymous hand-written posters appeared on walls in São Tomé saying that anyone who even considered contracting Forros would be killed. In response, the government distributed a notice offering a reward of 5,000$00 escudos to anyone who could identify the author of this threat.47 The same day, the colonial government posted the following official declaration all over the island:

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The government has been informed that individuals who are hostile towards the present policy, known as communists, are spreading tendentious rumours to the effect that the Creoles are to be obliged to contract themselves for the work on the roças as serviçais. The government declares that no Creole should give credit to these rumours but should report such individuals to the police. Thus, the government which has the obligation to protect the Creoles, as it has always demonstrated, guarantees them that it will never agree to authorise such contracts.48

Reportedly people in Trindade tore up several bills posted in the streets. Consequently, the next day, Gorgulho ordered lieutenant Fernando Ferreira, Zé Mulato and three Angolan policemen, in a jeep driven by the white corporal Manuel Francisco Casaca, to go to Trindade to detain the Forros removing the official declarations. When the group arrived in Trindade around 11 pm on February 3, they encountered a group of men carrying machetes. Zé Mulato ordered a man called Manuel da Conceição Júnior, nicknamed Pontes, to lay his machete on the ground. However, the man refused and insulted him, whereupon Zé Mulato shot the man. Supposedly, on February 4, at 5 am furious at the death of Pontes, a rebellious crowd of some 200 people armed with assegais and machetes came to Trindade from nearby Batepá and to the sound of horns and whistles approached the police post. At that moment, the post was occupied by only eight policemen under the command of corporal Casaca, who called for reinforcements from the city.49 A corporal stopped the crowd with volleys into the air of a machinegun mounted on a Public Works lorry, which forced the protesters to seek refuge in the forest. There have been doubts as to whether the siege of the police post actually occurred or if it was invented by Gorgulho to serve as a pretext to attack the local population.50

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In the town, Governor Gorgulho, who claimed that widespread rebellion was occurring, called a number of prominent colonists to his office and told them that there was a communist conspiracy in Trindade to install Salustino Graça as king, José de Alva Ribeiro51 as Prime Minister, José Rodrigues Pedronho52 as Interior Minister, and Manuel Gomes53 as leader of the council. He asserted that the rebels wanted to kill all white men and to seize their women. Further he maintained that a common grave had been prepared by the rebels to bury the dead whites.54 Gorgulho called up all whites who had done military service and exhorted all others to take up arms to defend themselves. The appeal was well received by the white community and by some mestizos and Cabo Verdeans. Armed to the teeth, the hastily formed militia drove in jeeps through the streets shouting: “Vamos caçar macacos! Vamos caçar macacos!”55 At about 8 am, when the reinforcements reached Trindade, the town was deserted. Having assumed command of the operations, Gorgulho organised the soldiers and volunteers into three platoons to pursue and capture the Forros who had escaped into the forest. One of the platoons was led by the twenty-eight-year-old ensign Jorge Luís Amaral Marquês Lopes, a customs officer. At about 10 am, in the region of Uba Flor, in the ravine of Cangá-Umbanqua, after having discovered a group of refugees, Amaral gave the order to shoot. A fourteen-year-old boy, Manuel Domingos Afonso, nicknamed Justino, was killed, and another boy called Manuel Pedro, commonly known as Angelino, was seriously wounded.56 When the ensign had finished his ammunition, José Sacramento known as Zé Cangolo and Manuel dos Ramos called Agostinho attacked him and stabbed him to death with their machetes. An Angolan policeman called Sauima, soldier no. 725, was also killed in the confrontation. On February 4 still, Gorgulho himself commanded a charge against people on the road between Madalena and Santo Amaro.57 Simultaneously, twenty-four persons considered by Gorgulho as “well-known for their revolutionary activities,”, among them Salustino Graça, the whites Virgílio de Almeida Lima, Carlos da Cunha Soares, Eduardo António de Oliveira, and their wives were detained, and on the same and the following day deported by air to Príncipe. As there was no prison in Príncipe, they were left to themselves for ten days and thereafter detained on the first floor of the local police station.58 Due to the curfew imposed on February 4, the local population was not allowed to leave their houses after 9 pm without prior permission. When the next day ten inhabitants went to the chief magistrate of the parish José dos Santos in Trindade to ask for such permission, they were brought in a pick-up to São Tomé.59 There they were locked up with others, allegedly involved in the death of Amaral, in a small cell in the headquarters of the C.P.I. Altogether, forty-seven people were pressed into

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the small room intended for fewer than ten persons. When the people cried out in desperation for air and water, lieutenant Raúl Monteiro Simões Dias, São Tomé's mayor, Gorgulho’s aide-de-camp, and the editor of A Voz de S.Tomé, who had been made commander of the police when the unrest began, jeered: “To hell with you. Didn't you want to kill whites?”60 When the cell was opened the next day, February 6, twenty-eight detainees had died of suffocation; only nineteen had survived. On February 5, the military command presided over by Gorgulho had prohibited the sale of knifes, machetes and other sharp instruments to the Forros. By the same proclamation, under penalty of closure, the owners of the plantations were urged to arrest and disarm the Forros sheltering there and hand them over to the military command. In addition, Gorgulho ordered the mobilisation of 200 Angolan and Mozambican contract labourers who had done military service to reinforce the remaining ninety men of the C.P.I., including ten Portuguese officers and eighty Angolans, since he had disarmed and dismissed the hundred Sãotomean soldiers of the unit arguing that “they were not to be trusted”61 and “at the first opportunity they would join the rebels and kill their Angolan comrades.”62 The colonial administration incited the serviçais by saying that they had to labour under poor conditions, because the Creoles did not want to get their hands dirty. After the death of Amaral, the population in and around Trindade was exposed to extreme violence as part of so-called cleansing operations. For days, the militia, the C.P.I. and the serviçais unleashed a wave of murder, rape, burning, and looting in the Forro communities. In the region of Cangá and Folha Fede thirty-five houses were destroyed by arson.63 On the Java estate about twenty people were burnt to death in the cocoa dryer where they had tried to hide from their persecutors.64

Mass imprisonment and torture Lorries and ambulances loaded with the dead, the wounded and hundreds of detainees arrived frequently in the city. From February 5 on, creole civil servants, considered by Gorgulho as “the leaders responsible for the grave events,”65 were also jailed en masse in the local prison and the cells of the Captaincy of the Ports,66 housed in the sixteenth-century fort São Sebastião, and other improvised dungeons. The people from Trindade who had signed the petition against Gorgulho in September 1950 were among the first to be imprisoned. According to Gorgulho, more than 1,000 people were imprisoned, which “constituted a serious problem for their accommodation.”67 All prisoners were identified and received numbers, by which they were called in prison. Each of the prison cells was filled with

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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200 to 300 people. When the prisoners entered the cells, they were robbed and ill-treated by the soldiers and volunteers, with blows and strokes from canes and rifle-butts. Every morning, accompanied by two corporals, the prisoners were compelled to empty the tub full of faeces and to go to the stream Água Grande to fetch water with tubs at the Ponte Tavares. Frequently the detainees were prevented from communicating with their families.68 The food beggared description:

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The meals which they gave us were rotten beans, maize meal, sticklebacks, a horn-stew, cow eyes and tripes, and the receptacle for each meal was a tub from which twenty people ate with their fingers, as they had not even given us a spoon.69

From 5 pm, when the labourers left the works of the uncompleted prison building, until 5 am the prisoners were interrogated and tortured in the electric chair by the provisional investigator António Luís Coelho, an X-ray assistant, assisted by Corporal Carlos Silva, Corporal Carlos da Silva Fernandes, the volunteer Décio Gaspar de Souto Maior, and others. The victims were forced to admit that they were part of a revolt aimed at killing Gorgulho, that the rebels had intended to decapitate all male colonists during a show in the Cinema Império on February 7, that the white women were to be distributed among themselves, and furthermore that they had established radio contact with the French Congo, from where they would receive arms and ammunition.70 Names were regularly called out and the people were told that they could go home; instead, they were taken to the various construction sites on the island and to the forced labour camp at the beach of Fernão Dias, an outlet of the Roça Rio do Ouro,71 where a quay was being constructed. Even 165 inhabitants of Santo Amaro, who on February 10 had arrived in the town with white flags asking for peace at the recommendation of their chief magistrate, were detained in the prison and subsequently several were sent to Fernão Dias.72 As soon as they arrived in Fernão Dias the bare-footed prisoners were tied in pairs with a 1.5-metre-long cable and submitted to forced labour. Under the ill-treatments of the foremen of the forced labour gangs, the prisoners had to break stones with hammers, to carry tubs full of sand mixed with clay to a swamp, carry stones on their heads and to carry sea water in a tub up a lane. In an interrogation room in Fernão Dias, Zé Mulato and the foremen Chico, a Tonga sentenced for murder, Alves Françones Matias, a condemned Angolan, Frederico Trigueiros, a mestizo, Cachinda, an Angolan serviçal, and Damião, a Forro, tortured the prisoners by beating them with clubs, rubber tyres, and whips. Zé Mulato and the others interrogated the prisoners accusing them of having co-operated with

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Salustino Graça, José Rodrigues Pedronho, João Couxo,73 and other prominent Forros in an attempt to kill Governor Gorgulho. On February 13, in this room, the X-ray assistant António Luís Coelho shot a Forro from Santo Amaro known as Inglês,74 who was held tight by the foremen Chico and Matias. On February 16, the former superintendent of São Tomé's town council, Joaquim da Trindade Tiny, died after having been punished by blows with a club and strokes with the whip, given by the foremen and a volunteer called Manuel de Carvalho, because he could not stand the harsh labour. The governor himself frequently appeared at Fernão Dias and forced the prisoners to admit that they had plotted a coup. After they had confessed the false accusations under intimidation and torture, he himself chose the type of punishment to which they would be subjected. One of these punishments was “to empty the sea.” When ordered “to empty the sea” the prisoner chained at his neck, waist, and feet - had to put a barrel on his head, walk into the sea up to his neck, and fill the barrel with water. Then he had to return to the beach and walk another 50 metres before he was allowed to pour out the water in the sand. Many prisoners did not survive the forced labour and the cruelties in Fernão Dias. According to the declarations of the prisoners at the time, to which I had access, the number of prisoners who died in Fernão Dias or as a consequence of the injuries suffered there was twenty.75 When the dead bodies were thrown into the sea, Gorgulho used to say “Deita essa merda ao mar para evitar chatice.”76 Most prisoners were people from the Trindade area, civil servants from the small capital, but a few people from other places. According to official sources at the time, no incidents occurred in Neves, Santana or the south of the island.77 However, according to eyewitnesses, at least in Santana in early February several people were arbitrarily detained and taken to the prison in the city.78 Between February 4 and 6, all the shops remained closed. Subsequently, the white shop assistants voluntarily offered their service to the headquarters of the C.P.I., where they were armed before being sent to the Trindade region. On February 7, the shops were reopened, and the colonial government announced the end of the revolt, however, the cruelties continued. The authorities praised the serviçais of the Roça Java who, under the command of the administrator, one sergeant António Pinto, had distinguished themselves in disarming and arresting the rebels.79 Almost the entire white population backed the governor. Gorgulho reported the Overseas Minister that the services rendered by the Europeans had been remarkable and could be considered decisive.80 Further he stressed that: the conduct of all mobilised whites was exceptional, and they acted with a dedication that does not belie the value of our race.81

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Besides the three white planters deported to Príncipe, there were a few other whites who were openly opposed to Gorgulho's actions, including the ex-commander of the C.P.I., captain Salgueiro Rêgo, and the popular priest Martinho Pinto da Rocha (1884-1961).82 During the persecutions, Father Pinto da Rocha had given refuge to hundreds of people in his parish church Nossa Senhora da Conceição. It was he, who, through a pilot leaving for Lisbon, sent a message addressed to the Minister of Overseas Territories, Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues, informing him of the events and asking for an official inquiry.83 The commander of the C.P.I. since 1951, Salgueiro Rego, who had previously directed the raids ordered by Gorgulho, was sacked by the governor nine days before massacre began and put under house arrest, because he had been critical of the governor's decisions.84 On February 11 he left for Lisbon in the same ship that transported the coffin with Amaral’s corpse.85 When the official memorial service was held for Amaral on February 5 in São Tomé, all public servants had to attend the ceremony. After Gorgulho’s first report of the supposed revolt, described by him as “the first communist movement” in Portuguese Africa, had reached the central government in Lisbon, Minister Sarmento Rodrigues, sent him a cable stating that:

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the uncommon uprising, which does not correspond to the admirable tranquillity of our overseas provinces, deserves a strong response and must be serenely and vigorously repressed.86

Only five days after the beginning of the events, the Portuguese papers published the first news of the revolt on São Tomé, but without giving any details. It was not until February 13 that the Lisbon paper Diário de Notícias reported the death of the Portuguese customs officer, who was buried in his home Mangualde with full military honours on February 20. On February 22, the colonial government in São Tomé held a demonstration in the Sarmento Rodrigues sports stadium. In his address, Governor Gorgulho expressed his pride at the examples of great patriotism demonstrated during the revolt. He praised all those who had contributed to the re-establishment of public order by risking their own lives. Then various orators representing the colonial community gave nationalist speeches, which were widely applauded by the audience.87 Finally, the C.P.I., two companies of volunteers, the serviçais of the Roça Java, and a company of marines from the warship Afonso de Albuquerque that had been sent from Cabo Verde and was anchored in the local harbour, paraded in front of the governor.88 On February 27, Gorgulho officially honoured Manuel Ferreira Rosa, the inspector of overseas education, Alfredo Correira Nobre, his deputy, Raúl

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Monteiro Simões Dias, who had been appointed commander of the C.P.I., and Fernando dos Santos Ferreira, the prison governor, all of them officers in the reserves. The following day, Gorgulho suspended twenty-eight Creole civil servants without pay until their trial for having participated in the alleged revolt.89

The end of the violence On March 4, due to Father Pinto da Rocha's letter, a nine-member delegation of the secret police PIDE arrived on São Tomé on the orders of Minister Sarmento Rodrigues to investigate the alleged communist revolt.90 The investigators quickly discovered that there had never been any such revolt as claimed by Gorgulho. Then, on March 14, António Luís Coelho was detained by the PIDE and sent by boat to Lisbon the following day. He had helped Gorgulho invent the communist conspiracy and acted as an agent provocateur by asserting that he belonged to a communist cell.91 Zé Mulato, Carlos da Silva Fernandes, and António Pinto of the Java estate were also interrogated by the PIDE and detained. One of the imprisoned Forros, after having been interrogated by the PIDE, declared:

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There everything was rather different. They were without doubt, different people, different men, men who had heart, who put their duty above everything and excelled in justice, only, I repeat, in justice. You breathed another atmosphere of confidence.92

A few days after the PIDE investigators had arrived, the detention conditions improved somewhat. The prisoners were allowed to receive visitors and to wash themselves daily. Nevertheless, the detentions, illtreatments, electric shocks and forced labour continued in March and April. On March 5, one day after the arrival of the PIDE, Gorgulho met with the chief magistrates and instructed them to destroy the houses located far from the settlements, allegedly in order to impede the flight and the re-grouping of the Forros. From March 25 to May 17, the case was investigated by the Portuguese lawyer Manuel João da Palma Carlos (1915-2001), a known opponent of the Salazar regime. He had come to São Tomé at the request of Américo Graça in Lisbon who had received a message from his uncle Salustino Graça. Despite great difficulties, the latter had succeeded in sending this message clandestinely from Príncipe. Shortly after his arrival, Palma Carlos set up his office in a room made available by a local resident. Due to his presence the prison conditions further improved. Many prisoners entrusted him with their defence.93 He carried out his inquiries, assisted by the twenty-

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seven-year-old teacher Alda Graça Espírito Santo (1926-2010), a niece of Salustino Graça. After some initial problems, Palma Carlos was allowed to speak to the prisoners for one hour every Wednesday morning. From this time on, the prisoners could also be visited by their relatives. However, on April 7, a total of 120 prisoners were deported on the mail-boat António Carlos to the sister island of Príncipe to prevent them from being interrogated by Palma Carlos.94 Many deportees were afraid that the intention was to throw them into the sea.95 On Príncipe the prisoners were received by the administrator of the council, Custódio Abel Fernandes Ramos, who told them that they had to render services to local masters to earn their living. In fact, many deportees largely depended on the generous support of Príncipe’s local inhabitants.96 Finally, during May, all remaining detainees were released from custody, while the last deportees in Príncipe returned to São Tomé on June 10. When the PIDE discovered that there had not been any communist conspiracy at all, they reported their findings to the Lisbon government. Subsequently, on April 17, the Minister of Overseas Territories, Sarmento Rodrigues, sent a secret telegram to Gorgulho asking him to return to Lisbon.97 Three days later, accompanied by the police commander and his aide-de-camp lieutenant Raúl Simões Dias, Gorgulho boarded the plane for Lisbon. On the same day a group of Sãotomeans sent a letter to Sarmento Rodrigues to avoid Gorgulho’s return to São Tomé. In turn, worried about the possible consequences for themselves, on April 24 a group of Gorgulho’s white supporters sent a petition to the Lisbon government asking for the governor’s return.98 On June 5 the governor was honoured by Minister Sarmento Rodrigues and the Minister of the Army, General Adolfo Abranches Pinto (1950-54), for important services provided for the development of São Tomé and Príncipe and for the way he had reestablished the public order respectively.99 Nevertheless, Gorgulho was forced to resign that day from his post. The same month a court martial was constituted in São Tomé to try the seven people who had been accused of involvement in the killing of Amaral and Sauima. On June 27, José do Sacramento, known as José Cangolo, and Manuel “Agostinho” dos Ramos were found guilty of homicide, and each sentenced to twenty-eight years imprisonment. Tomé Pedroso, known as “Mé Novo,” and Manuel Pedro, called “Angelino,” received a prison term of two years each for not having denounced the crime. Three defendants, António dos Ramos called “Conceição,” a brother of Agostinho, Alexandre Nazaré Filipe, known as “Mário,” and Justino do Sacramento da Trindade, commonly called “Galhardo,” who were all workers of the Santa Fé estate, were absolved by the court martial.100 Coincidentally, on the same day in

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Portugal the revised Organic Law of the Portuguese Overseas Territories was published.101 It formally excluded the Sãotomeans from the Estatuto dos Indígenas, which in the case of Cabo Verde had already been done in 1947. On July 7, the arbitrarily suspended Sãotomean civil servants were reinstated into the service and paid their salaries. In late September, the new governor, colonel Francisco António Pires Barata (1953-56), who had been appointed in early July, arrived in São Tomé. In 1955, he banned the circulation of the memoirs of the former police commander Captain Salgueiro Rêgo, on the grounds that the book would open old wounds and further divide the white and Creole population.102 In his book, Rêgo compared the methods of Gorgulho with those of “a dictator in the manner of the Gestapo [Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police] at the time of Hitler in Germany.”103 That same year, Zé Mulato and the X-ray assistant António Luís Coelho were tried and sentenced to twenty-two and sixteen years in prison respectively.104 Corporal Carlos da Silva Fernandes was sentenced to two years of prison, but shortly after he was released on the payment of a bail of 30,000$00 escudos, because he had filed an appeal.105 Two other defendants, Rufino Rodrigues, the administrator of the Roça Santa Margarida, and Carlos Pereira, accused of arson and theft, were condemned to prison terms of three and two years respectively by the Court of Appeal in Luanda.106 However, thanks to influential figures within the central government, Carlos Gorgulho, lieutenant Fernando dos Santos Ferreira107 and lieutenant Raúl Simões Dias were never tried.108 On December 7, 1956, the Minister of Defence and interim Minister of the Army Fernando dos Santos Costa (1944-58) ordered the proceedings instituted against Gorgulho to be stayed. In his dispatch of October 5, 1956, the minister argued: The orders and instructions received by the Minister of Overseas Territories prove overwhelmingly that Colonel Gorgulho did not misuse the authority invested in him as governor. The functions of Military Commander were exercised in a manner deserving honourable praise by the Minister of the Army published in Ordem do Exército, a glory that is only owed to exceptional military personnel. In my turn, I want to state explicitly that all actions committed by the governor in his capacity as Military Commander during the events that broke out on the island of S.Tomé in the month of February 1953, have my approval and deserve my wholehearted applause.109

Several Sãotomeans who had been imprisoned innocently tried in vain to receive indemnities from the Portuguese state for the physical and material damages suffered.110 On the occasion of the visit of the Portuguese president, Admiral Américo Tomás (1958-74), to São Tomé in 1970, all

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convicts sentenced in connection with the massacre were pardoned and released from prison. Shortly before independence, on the advice of the Portuguese High Commissioner António Pires Veloso (1974-75), who expected the population to seek revenge, the notorious Zé Mulato left for Angola.111 At that time, a large photo of Gorgulho still hung on the wall in his residence.112 Gorgulho, promoted to coronel in 1957 and to brigadiergeneral in 1957, had been retired on December 12, 1968. He died in Lisbon on November 15, 1972.113

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The causes of the massacre and the number of victims The reluctance of the Forros to abandon their dignity as free men, or put differently, their scorn towards manual labour on the roças, was considered by Gorgulho as “abominable ungratefulness,” since he “had supported them indefatigably during seven years.”114 In January 1953, it was announced that he would remain for another mandate in São Tomé. Given the decreasing production of coffee and cocoa at that time, while their world prices remained high, Gorgulho was determined to resolve the labour problem.115 It was his own brutal policy of labour recruitment which had created a spirit of revolt among the Forros. Therefore, it is most likely that clandestine meetings were held, where the Sãotomeans conspired against the governor’s arbitrary rule. Interestingly enough, after so many years of recruitment roundups for the Public Works, only in the presence of the threat of the contract labour system on the plantations, which would have meant the abolition of the distinction between Sãotomeans and serviçais, were the former ready to revolt against the local colonial regime.116 The massacre also clearly revealed the strength of the Forro disdain towards labour on the plantations. If there really was a spontaneous insurrection of the Forro population in Trindade it had been provoked by the accomplices of the governor who assassinated Pontes. The death of the ensign Amaral constituted merely the convenient pretext for the excesses of violence unleashed against the Forros. Capitalising on the political fears of the Cold War period, Gorgulho justified his “cleansing operations” with the threat of a communist coup. In his revenge against the Forros, Gorgulho could easily take advantage of the existing resentments between them, the whites, and the indentured labourers. In fact, the willing participation of both the white population and parts of the Angolan, Cabo Verdean, and Mozambican contract workers in the violence and cruelties against the Forros mirrored the racial and ethnic cleavages within the islands' society at that time. Besides the impressive construction works realised in a short time and without great expenditures for the state, Gorgulho intended to please Salazar

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by repressing a supposed communist revolt, in the hope of being appointed governor-general of Angola, a post that he desired very much. It is an irony of history that it was in fact the notorious PIDE who discovered that Gorgulho's accusations were false and rehabilitated the Sãotomeans. When Salustino Graça, the great adversary of Gorgulho, died in 1965, the same PIDE commented:

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He was without doubt the Sãotomean with the greatest prestige in his country, the man who all wanted to hear for the solution of any grave problem of their life. Politically, he was also a leader, but a cautious leader, little inclined to adventures, he was responsible, in part, for the peace in which the Province has lived.117

The figures given for the number of victims of the massacre differ greatly. On the fifth day of the massacre Gorgulho reported to the Overseas Minister that during the “cleansing operations” forty-two rebels were killed, but he added that “it was not possible to know the number of dead buried by the enemy.”118 The lawyer who defended the accused Portuguese in 1955 wrote in a letter to Salazar that at Praia Fernão Dias “hundreds of natives were massacred and thrown into the sea.”119 In his book, the former police commander captain Salgueiro Rêgo claimed that he had observed in the prison “the masquerade which cost dozens of lives of the negroes.”120 Edwin Munger wrote in his field report dated February 12, 1955, that “there were over 2,000 casualties, civil war for a month, and ensuing bitterness.”121 Basil Davidson quoted a letter from an American missionary who reported a figure of about 200 dead men.122 In September 1962, when Miguel Trovoada (1936-), then leader of the country's first liberation movement CLSTP (Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe) and later head of state from 1991-2001, addressed the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration, he spoke of “more than 1,000 Africans killed.”123 In 1968 the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) in Algiers published a booklet titled L’île de São Tomé where the anonymous author claims that “in less than a week 1,032 natives were killed.”124 In 1969, the Havana-based periodical Tricontinental published an anonymous article repeating exactly the same claim.125 This figure, which has also been employed by the nationalists and adopted by innumerable authors,126 corresponds to almost 3 percent of the Creole population at the time. Pélissier, who visited São Tomé in 1966, questioned this figure and estimated the number of victims at between fifty and hundred.127 The lawyer Víctor Pereira de Castro, who investigated the massacre in 1974 on the request of the Portuguese government estimated the number of deaths between thirty and forty.128 In 1974, a member of the

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PIDE in São Tomé asserted that the number was under 500. At the same time, however, other well-informed sources asserted that no more than a hundred people had been killed during the events.129 Eyzaguirre, who did anthropological fieldwork on the island in 1981, believes that in the light of the duration of the attacks, the mobilisation of groups hostile towards the forros, and the conditions of the forced labour camps, the figure of 1,032 deaths during the Batepá troubles is entirely possible.130

In 1994 the Sãotomean anthropologist Nazaré Ceita even claimed that the repressive actions culminated in the death of thousands of islanders.131 Implicitly contradicting such claims, in 2018 the government inaugurated six plagues at the memorial in Fernão Dias with the names of 474 “freedom heroes.” However, this number, the result of exhaustive research, does not only include fatalities, but also victims of torture, mistreatments, rape, and other atrocities. It may well never be possible to establish the real number of dead victims. In my opinion, the number 1,032 is rather symbolic, for it is certainly no coincidence that the last two digits 3 and 2 also indicate the day and month in 1953 when the massacre began.

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Interpretation and commemoration of the Massacre Retrospectively, São Tomé’s nationalists viewed the traumatic experience of the massacre in 1953 as the beginning of a new period which in 1960 led to the creation of the CLSTP, the country’s first anti-colonial organisation. An official historiography compiled in 1985 claims that For the people of São Tomé and Príncipe, the tragedy of 1953 became a great, but painful lesson and consequently an important stage in the formation of national consciousness.132

In fact, many parents and relatives of the nationalists and postindependence leaders were persecuted and tortured during the troubles. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that in the aftermath of the events some twenty young Sãotomeans left the island to study abroad to strengthen their political consciousness. The local élite had realised that Gorgulho's modernisation programme was intended to attract white settlers, which would marginalise the Forros by reducing their job opportunities in the colonial administration. Moreover, they had understood the attempt to merge the Creole population into a single category of Africans who would serve as a labour resource for the whites. This was a serious threat since the distinction between the native Creoles and African immigrant workers was at the heart of Forro identity and culture.

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In his speech during the independence celebrations on July 12, 1975, São Tomé and Príncipe’s first president Manuel Pinto da Costa (1975-91) recalled the atrocities of 1953: Despite their repression and dividing manoeuvres, the Portuguese colonialists could never suffocate the spirit of revolt and the desire for freedom of the people of São Tomé and Príncipe. One example of this firm determination to be free is given us by the events of 1953 when our entire people preferred to succumb in front of the criminal bullets of the fascist Portuguese colonialists rather than accept forced labour.133

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Three year later the report of the first congress of the ruling party Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP) claimed that This brutal repression…also served as a catalyst for the adoption of the consciousness of a fundamental truth: the liquidation of the Portuguese colonial power and the proclamation of national independence were the basic indispensable conditions to end the humiliation and sufferings of the Sãotomean people…The colonial repression of February 1953 disclosed the true contradictions existing within the Sãotomean society and allowed to draw two great conclusions: First, that the small bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie and the urban elite, whose aspiration was in most cases the conquest of «social equality» with the colonists, stood objectively on the same side of the trench as the popular masses; second, that the «antagonisms» between «forros», «tongas», «angolares» on the one side, and between them and the indentured workers on the other, were no more than manoeuvres of the Portuguese dividers in order to impede a unity of action of all exploited against the exploiters.134

After independence, a National Museum was set up in the old São Sebastião fort. Ever since, photos of the mutilated faces and bodies of the victims of the killings, displayed in one room of the museum, remind visitors of the colonial violence. February 3 became a national holiday named “Day of the Martyrs of Colonialism” and renamed in 1980 “Day of the Heroes of Liberty.” Since 1976 this day has been officially commemorated with a “March of the Youth” from the capital’s Independence Square to Praia Fernão Dias which has become the lieu de mémoire of the traumatic events of 1953. Since 1984, three different memorials have been consecutively erected in Fernão Dias. The current memorial was inaugurated in 2016. There a ceremony is held with the participation of the head of state, government members, and the small resident diplomatic corps. A wreath of flowers is laid by the president at the memorial in Fernão Dias paying homage to the victims of the massacre. The massacre was frequently called Guerra de Batepá and together with previous slave uprisings was celebrated

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as an act of popular resistance to Portuguese colonialism. In 1976 the then socialist government declared February 3 a day of labour and militant action. In his address, President Pinto da Costa proclaimed that February 3 was no longer a day of mourning (luto) but a day of struggle (luta): By working hard to construct this country destroyed by five centuries of colonisation, we shall succeed in honouring the memory of the martyrs of February 1953.135

He therefore announced that the day would be a day of voluntary labour all over the country:

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Our entire people will demonstrate through voluntary work on the roças that their struggle is not directed against labour but against the colonial fascist system that wanted to transform them into slave workers.136

Reportedly hundreds of people responded enthusiastically to the appeal, cleaning the streets, and working on the plantations, which had been nationalised in September 1975. Pinto da Costa himself participated in the cocoa harvest on the Santa Margarida estate, one of the large fifteen stateowned plantations created after nationalisation.137 However, such attempts proved unable to really change the negative attitude of the Forros towards manual labour on the plantations although, according to official rhetoric, they now belonged to the people. In August 1979, a population census provoked violent anti-government demonstrations since the population had misperceived the measure as an attempt of the government to oblige them to work on the plantations. Since the country’s transition to multiparty democracy in 1991, as part of the commemoration of February 3, the Bishop of São Tomé and Príncipe, until 2022 a white Portuguese, has celebrated a memorial service at Fernão Dias. The annual ceremonies on the site of the former detention camp also include scenes of the massacre performed by a local theatre group. Meanwhile the annual commemoration in Fernão Dias has become the destination for a weekend trip. Hundreds of people usually crowd the site, where drinks and snacks are available. In his address on the fortieth anniversary of the massacre in 1993, President Miguel Trovoada (19912001) called February 3 a living mark of a historic past. He argued that remembering this date had to be a means to avoid situations arising within society that might lead to bloody repression of the civil liberties. To pay homage to February 3 meant to secure the great ideals of freedom and justice that had been the basis of the long struggle resulting in independence on July 12, 1975, and in the approval of the democratic constitution by popular referendum on August 22, 1990.138 As part of the commemoration on February

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3, 2002, the title of honorary citizen was posthumously conferred on Manuel João da Palma Carlos who had died at the age of eighty-six in November 2001 in Cascais, Portugal.139 During a ceremony held in Lisbon on the same day, the local Sãotomean migrant community likewise paid homage to the Portuguese lawyer who had come to São Tomé in 1953 to defend the local population against Gorgulho.140

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The São Tomé massacre in Portugal: concealed and withheld The commemoration in Lisbon could not deny that, except for a short period after April 25, 1975, until recently the history of the massacre of February 1953 in São Tomé has largely remained unknown in Portugal and the local government kept the above-mentioned investigation report of 1975 secret from the public for many years. Less than two months after the military coup in 1974, following a request of Sãotomean nationalists, who demanded a revision of the processes of the massacre, the then Minister of Inter-territorial Coordination, António de Almeida Santos (1974-75), entrusted the Lisbon lawyer Víctor Pereira de Castro with an inquiry into the bloody events of 1953. At the time, the Portuguese government expected this action to mitigate the nationalists’ political demands. The Sãotomeans had proposed Pereira de Castro as investigator since he had been a respected person when he was judge in the island in 1961. In July 1975 Pereira de Castro submitted his 450-page report to the ministry.141 Thereafter the findings of the document were never debated, and it remained classified for decades. In June 1995, I asked the Portuguese Secretary of State for Cooperation, José Briola e Gala (1992-95) for permission to consult the report kept in the Historical Diplomatic Archive (AHD) in Lisbon, but it took until July 1998 for the head of the Diplomatic Institute to reply that the report was not accessible for consultation because the legal period of thirty years after its conclusion had not ended. Curiously, only one month later the head of the Secretary’s office replied that, given the political delicacy of the report, the defence of the public interest justified keeping the report classified. Characteristic of this official position has been the above mentioned book A Economia de S.Tomé e Príncipe by the economist Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, written in 1960 and updated and published by the Portuguese Cooperation in 1993. The book does not contain a single word about the massacre, although it deals in detail with the labour problem in the 1950s. In Portugal, the first detailed research article on the history of the massacre in São Tomé was published only in 1996, by the author of this book.142

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In July 2006, when thirty-one years after the completion of the report had passed, I again asked the AHD for permission to consult it. Despite the expiry of the thirty-year period, in March 2007 the archive’s director replied that the reasons for classification of the report still applied. Nevertheless, I insisted and in February 2010, I submitted a special request for permission to consult the report. Finally, exactly one year later, sixteen years after my first request, the AHD gave me permission to read the 1975 report by Pereira de Castro. To my astonishment, the report contained little significant information which I had not found before in other available sources. In his report’s conclusions, Pereira de Castro declared that …it makes sense that the Portuguese state assumes the moral responsibility for the illicit and cruel acts that occurred in the shadow of the Portuguese flag in São Tomé Island in early 1953, pay the victims a tribute of respect and seek, as far as possible, to give them reparation, preferably not just symbolic.143

However, it was only forty-three years later in 2018 that President Marcelo Rebelo da Sousa became the first Portuguese state representative to publicly assume Portugal’s responsibility for the massacre when he paid a visit to the memorial in Fernão Dias. There he declared:

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The fact that it was a different time, with different attitudes, cannot exempt us from recognising all the intolerable and reprehensible burden of sacrifice of people and communities.144

Concluding remarks In São Tomé, the violence and humiliation of the bloody events of February 1953 have become part of collective memory and national history. With the departure of the Portuguese and the achievement of independence in 1975, the people no longer felt racially discriminated. Staying in power themselves, the Sãotomeans had no more to fear social downgrading or the loss of their cultural identity. In post-independence São Tomé and Príncipe, the various governments have interpreted the massacre according to the changing dominant ideological paradigms, but they have all claimed that local nationalism had emerged as response to Portuguese attempts to reduce the local population to slaves in their own country by creating a single category of blacks. While the leftist anti-colonialist rhetoric disappeared with the end of the socialist regime in 1990, the country’s official historiography continues to view the victims of the massacre as martyrs who died for the cause of independence.

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In Portugal, thanks to protection by the Salazar regime, Gorgulho and other major culprits of the massacre in São Tomé were never tried, despite damning evidence of their guilt. Subsequently, in Portugal the atrocities committed by the colonial regime in February 1953 were largely hushed up. Only in 1974, in the aftermath of the fall of the Salazar/Caetano dictatorship, the new Portuguese government ordered an inquiry into the tragic events. Nevertheless, the respective 450-page investigation report delivered in 1975 was immediately classified and kept secret from the public for many years. Apparently, the arbitrary killings of innocent people committed by the colonial regime in São Tomé have been seen as so distressing for the officially promoted image of a benign Portuguese colonialism that the authorities only in 2011 reluctantly allowed access to the 1975 report on the bloody events.

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CHAPTER FIVE ANTI-COLONIAL ACTIVISM AND INDEPENDENCE*

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Introduction Precursors of opposition to modern colonialism go back to the early twentieth century when Sãotomeans were prominently involved in PanAfricanist activities in Portugal and political associations in defence of civil rights at home.1 After World War II, a few Sãotomean students participated in anti-colonial initiatives in the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (1944-65). From the early 1950s, the Lisbon twelve-room residence of São Tomé’s prominent Graça Espírito Santo family became a preferential meeting point of nationalist-minded African students. From 1951-53, this residence accommodated the Centro de Estudos Africanos, an anti-colonial debating club founded by Amílcar Cabral (1924-73), Francisco Tenreiro (1921-63), Marcelino dos Santos (1929-2020), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-90), Agostinho Neto (1922-79), and Alda Graça Espírito Santo (1926-2010), a student from São Tomé who would become a prominent nationalist politician in her country. Inspired by the anti-colonial activism in Portugal’s other African colonies, in 1960, Sãotomean students created the Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (CLSTP), the first nationalist group demanding the archipelago’s political independence. The CLSTP was exiled in Accra and Libreville, where its few activists waged a modest political struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following the coup against Nkrumah in 1966 and the consequent expulsion of the CLSTP from Ghana, the small group was dispersed and became largely inactive. In 1972, in Malabo, the CLSTP was reconstituted by eight nationalists as Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP). As in Cabo Verde, there was no armed liberation struggle in São Tomé and Príncipe, since in the archipelagos the Portuguese *

Previously published as “’Independencia total, ça quá pôvô mêcê’: Anti-Colonial Activism and Independence in São Tomé and Príncipe,” e-journal of Portuguese History 21, no. 2 (2023).

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easily maintained complete control. However, unlike some Cabo Verdean nationalists who participated in the PAIGC’s (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde) armed struggle in Portuguese Guinea, MLSTP activists did not participate in any liberation war elsewhere. Claiming the insignificance of São Tomé’s nationalists’ actions in exile regarding their scope and impact, Nascimento puts the term struggle in quotation marks (“luta”). This author argues that militancy would be the appropriate term to qualify the group’s activities rather than struggle.2 While this view is debatable, it is uncontested that, like in Cabo Verde, it was the Portuguese Revolution of April 25, 1974, that created space for a political struggle for independence within the archipelago. The scarce scholarly literature dealing in varying degrees with São Tomé and Príncipe’s independence agrees that before 1974 there was not any organised action or spontaneous public manifestation in favour of independence in the two islands.3 Notwithstanding, there were a few isolated incidents of civil disobedience and racial tensions after the Batepá Massacre in São Tomé in February 1953 when dozens of innocent and defenceless Sãotomeans were killed on the orders of the Portuguese governor Carlos Gorgulho (1945-53).4 In August 1965, a group of fifteen students in Portugal, while on holidays in São Tomé, demonstratively did not greet the local governor, although it was a habit at the time.5 In February 1966, a Sãotomean soldier accused of having attacked and seriously wounded a Portuguese sergeant died in custody of the military police, supposedly of a cardiac syncope. To prevent unrest by the local population, who believed that the soldier was killed in detention, the Portuguese authorities patrolled the streets and set up roadblocks.6 In October 1972, during a soccer match between a Sãotomean and a Portuguese team, a player of the former was expelled by a white arbiter, which provoked protests by the black spectators who consequently were maltreated by the military police.7 Although initially the MLSTP was widely unknown in São Tomé, following a few months of political campaigning in the islands, in October 1974, the revolutionary Portuguese government recognised the MLSTP as the only legitimate representative of the Sãotomean people and promised full independence. The fact that São Tomé and Príncipe finally achieved total independence was largely owed to both the national and international context of Portugal’s decolonisation process during the bipolarisation of the Cold War period. It is entirely conceivable that under significantly different political circumstances, São Tomé and Príncipe as well as Cabo Verde would have maintained a status as Portuguese overseas territories like that

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of the French creole islands of Martinique and Guadalupe in the Caribbean, and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The first section of this chapter deals with the activities of São Tomé’s first pro-independence organisation in exile between 1960 and 1972. The second section provides information on the short period from the reorganisation of São Tomé’s exiled nationalists until the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in 1974. The third part examines in detail the turbulent events in São Tomé in the first five months after the military coup in Portugal, while the final section focuses on the period from the negotiations for decolonisation with Portugal until the country’s independence on July 12, 1975. As far as primary sources are concerned, the author collected many original documents and personally interviewed most of the protagonists of these events during research done in the 1990s, both in São Tomé and Príncipe and Portugal.8

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The Exiled Nationalists in the 1960s In September 1960, while on holidays at home in the island, two Sãotomean students in Portugal, Miguel Trovoada (1936-) and João Guadalupe de Ceita (1929-2021), together with local friends Leonel d'Alva (1935-), António “Oné” Pires dos Santos (1931-), and a few others, agreed to create the CLSTP.9 They and subsequent nationalists all belonged to the educated elite of São Tomé’s autochthonous Creole population known as Forros. Subsequently, the founders claimed that the 1953 Batepá Massacre had provided the first notion of collective consciousness and affirmed the CLSTP had been established to translate the local people’s desire to freely determine their destiny.10 Eyzaguirre believes that there are reasons to support the claim that Batepá marked the beginning of the independence struggle, since Gorgulho’s project to reduce the social distance between Forros and African contract workers was a threat to the core of Forro identity.11 When the CLSTP was created, São Tomé and Príncipe had a population of only about 63,700 inhabitants, of whom 22,600 were plantation workers from Angola, Mozambique, and Cabo Verde. The CLSTP’s programme demanded the abolition of privileges for whites, the establishment of a republican, democratic, secular, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialistic regime, as well as the abolition of forced labour, the introduction of an eight-hour workday, free medical care, the gradual abolition of unemployment, literacy campaigns, and compulsory primary education. Concerning the plantation economy, the programme called for an agrarian reform, the gradual development of planning, the end of agricultural monoculture, and the

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mechanisation of agriculture. Finally, the programme advocated the principles of an independent foreign policy committed to African unity and non-alignment to the military blocks.12 This document was largely for external consumption, since in São Tomé, the Portuguese authorities could easily suppress any anti-colonial endeavor. In April 1961 in Casablanca, Trovoada represented the CLSTP in the foundational meeting of the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP). Paraphrasing the British Prime Minister Macmillan (1957-63), Trovoada claimed that the winds of change blowing in Africa had also touched the two islands.13 Concerning São Tomé and Príncipe, the CONCP’s final resolution demanded Portugal’s expulsion from the ILO and denounced maneuvers to create a hostile climate between the Sãotomeans and the African plantation workers to impede their unity of action against the common enemy.14 In fact, the Sãotomeans who occupied an intermediate position in the archipelago’s colonial hierarchy had always dissociated themselves from the African contract workers since they considered plantation work as slave labour and beneath their status as free Africans. Later in 1961, Trovoada and Carlos Graça (1931-2013) represented the CLSTP in Libreville where they had found employment as language teacher and physician, respectively. The following year, at the invitation of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah (1960-66), who had established a Bureau of African Affairs that hosted several African liberation movements, another group of the CLSTP settled in Accra.15 The group that enjoyed diplomatic status included Virgílio Sousa de Carvalho (1938-2006) as official representative, António “Oné” Pires dos Santos, and Hugo Azancot de Menezes (1928-2000). Menezes, a physician who spent his infancy in Angola, was founding member of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola). Pires dos Santos and Menezes were employed as presenters of the Portuguese-language programme Combatentes pela Liberdade (Freedom Fighters) at Radio Ghana that disseminated the propaganda of MPLA, PAIGC, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), and CLSTP. In 1964, after having concluded his medicine studies in Lisbon, Guadalupe de Ceita joined the Accra faction. Unlike the liberation movements in the other Portuguese African colonies, the CLSTP never had any rival organisation. However, its two geographically separated factions were constantly involved in personal quarrels, and also argued about whether the CLSTP headquarters should be based in Accra or Libreville. The better material conditions and political support provided by Nkrumah’s government were in favour of Accra, while the only advantage of Libreville was the geographic proximity to the islands.

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Irrespective of the CLSTP’s cleavages and the lack of a following at home, in 1962, thanks to the support of the other CONCP members, the United Nations General Assembly officially recognised the group as the sole legitimate representative of the Sãotomean people. In September of that year, Trovoada addressed the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration where he denounced Portuguese colonial rule and forced plantation labour. He claimed that during the Batepá Massacre in February 1953, more than 1,000 Africans had been killed by the Portuguese. Nevertheless, he declared that the CLSTP was seeking a peaceful solution to end colonialism.16 In May 1963 in Addis Ababa, Trovoada and Graça attended as observers the foundation of the OAU. Subsequently, the OAU recognised the CLSTP as a liberation movement, and its Liberation Committee provided the CLSTP in Libreville with financial aid. In August of that year, in a report sent to Lisbon, the secret police PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) in São Tomé mentioned by name eight presumable CLSTP activists in exile.17 Trovoada formally inaugurated the CLSTP office in Libreville in the presence of Gabon’s foreign minister only in August 1964. Between late 1962 and February 1963, the CLSTP in Libreville managed to send four information bulletins to São Tomé. However, the Gabonese government did not authorise any radio broadcasts.18 In contrast, the faction in Accra regularly broadcast its propaganda on Radio Ghana to the islands. In these radio programmes, Trovoada was repeatedly accused of embezzling financial support received for the CLSTP and of leading an extravagant life, considered incompatible with a leader of a liberation movement. Moreover, the Accra faction accused Trovoada of not having tried to establish contacts in the islands.19 Eventually, a general meeting to solve the problems was called for June 1965 in Accra. Besides Trovoada and Graça, the Accra group invited from abroad Francisco da Mata (1893-1976), José Fret Lau Chong (1934-), Leonel Mário d’Alva, Manuel Pinto da Costa (1937-), and António Tomaz de Medeiros (19312019), who stayed with the MPLA in Cabinda at that time. The MPLA leaders Agostinho Neto and Lúcio Lara (1929-2016) had urged Medeiros to participate, since they distrusted Trovoada because of his persistent relationship with Holden Roberto (1923-2007), leader of the MPLA’s rival organisation Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA).20 D’Alva failed to arrive due to passport problems, while both Trovoada and Graça did not come alleging that the date was inconvenient. In fact, they probably feared negative consequences in Libreville, since at the time, the prowestern Gabonese regime considered Ghana a communist country.

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At the meeting, Trovoada was dismissed as CLSTP president and replaced by Medeiros as secretary-general.21 To mislead the PIDE in São Tomé and to provide international credibility for the CLSTP, the group affirmed to have appointed a president resident in São Tomé.22 This claim made the PIDE in São Tomé believe that the local lawyer Gastão d’Alva Torres (1929-) would be the new leader.23 In a declaration, the new leadership stressed the necessity of a land reform arguing that the independence struggle was closely tied to the struggle to liberate the land and its consequent redistribution. At the second CONCP conference in Dar-es-Salaam in October 1965, Medeiros and Guadalupe de Ceita represented the CLSTP. The CONCP formally recognised the group’s new leadership. In his address, Medeiros claimed that despite the difficult geographical factor, the transition to armed struggle on the islands was not impossible.24 In November of that year, the PIDE delegation in São Tomé attributed the absence of nationalist agitation to the insular situation and the lack of organisation of those who advocated nationalist thought.25 In fact, during the summer holidays of that year, the Accra faction had tried to establish a local CLSTP cell in São Tomé, however, at a meeting the participants failed to do so due to mutual distrust. Apparently, the PIDE had been informed about that meeting.26 On December 4, 1965, eighteen Sãotomeans were arrested in Lisbon under the accusation of having been involved in the activities and organisation of a separatist movement and were imprisoned in the notorious PIDE prison in Caxias, near Lisbon. They all denied any involvement in nationalist activities.27 Three of them belonged to the fifteen students who in August of that year had refused to greet the governor in São Tomé. Eight of the detainees were women, including Alda Graça Espírito Santo, at the time on holiday in Lisbon, and Andreza Graça do Espírito Santo (1905-89), known as tia (aunt) Andreza, the landlady of the Graça Espírito Santo family residence in Lisbon.28 The arrests had also been triggered by the CLSTP’s claims of a leader resident in São Tomé. Following the detentions in Lisbon, in São Tomé Governor António Jorge da Silva Sebastião (1963-71) placed the local security forces on alert, since he feared a reaction by the local population. However, there was not any public sign of protest in the island. Due to a lack of evidence, the detainees were all released from custody between mid-January and late February 1966. Thereafter, the PIDE in São Tomé strengthened the surveillance of Alda Graça Espírito Santo and the few other nationalist-minded individuals impeding any activity beyond private discussion circles.29 The PIDE considered Alda Graça as “one of the most dangerous individuals among the Sãotomeans.”30

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At the same time, the military coup in Ghana in February 1966 that toppled Nkrumah put an end to the CLSTP in Accra. The new military leaders expelled the African freedom fighters hosted by Nkrumah’s regime forcing the CLSTP members to look for new host countries. Consequently, they remained dispersed over several countries in Africa and Eastern Europe. When Equatorial Guinea became independent in October 1968, the PIDE in São Tomé expected that future subversive actions in São Tomé could be launched from there. Until then, the local secret police had not noticed any political activity in the islands. As the Salazar regime considered São Tomé a safe place, it exiled there the prominent regime opponent Mário Soares (1924-2017) from March to November 1968 when Salazar’s successor Marcello Caetano (1968-74) allowed him to return to Portugal.31 The PIDE did not deny the presence of followers of the liberation movements in São Tomé but considered their number completely insignificant.32 In fact, in 1969, after having been accepted as exiles by Equatorial Guinea’s President Macías Nguema (1968-79), Guadalupe de Ceita and Pires dos Santos established a CLSTP cell in Fernando Pó (Bioko) where at the time existed a large Sãotomean community. In São Tomé, the Direcção-Geral de Segurança (DGS), the PIDE’s successor since 1969, was informed about their meetings held with Sãotomean immigrants that remained largely irrelevant in terms of political action.33 The following year, Gabon’s pro-western government threatened Trovoada and Graça with expulsion should they engage in political activities. As a result, they were even impeded to participate in international conferences abroad, as they had done before.34 Consequently, Guadalupe de Ceita and Pires dos Santos represented the CLSTP at the International Conference of Solidarity with the People of the Portuguese Colonies in Rome in June 1970.35 In 1971, the two men made a trip to North Korea and the People’s Republic of China in search for support for the CLSTP. Such sporadic activities abroad could not conceal that, due to the consecutive setbacks, the CLSTP remained largely inactive for more than six years. In retrospect, after independence, the factional struggles within the CLSTP were explained by the absence of an armed struggle and of a movement of popular masses. Instead, the conditions of exile, secrecy, and a certain isolation had been a fertile ground for personal rivalries.36 Nevertheless, in recognition of their involvement in the early anti-colonial activities, in December 2019, São Tomé’s National Assembly paid homage to the CLSTP militants and their five African host countries.37

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The Reconstituted Liberation Movement in the 1970s Finally, the exiled nationalist who lived dispersed in different countries only met again in 1972. During the meeting held in Santa Isabel (now Malabo) from July 8-12, eight nationalists restored the CLSTP as Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP). Initially the idea had been to organise a larger gathering with the local Sãotomean community, however, Macías Nguema had asked to hold the meeting in Bata on the mainland. As there was no Sãotomean community in Bata, this proposal was not accepted and instead only a meeting with a small group was held secretly. The eight participants were Manuel Pinto da Costa, Leonel Mário d’Alva, Miguel Trovoada, Carlos Graça, José Fret Lau Chong, João Guadalupe de Ceita, Alexandrina Barros (1932-97), and António Pires dos Santos.38 As there was no majority willing to support Trovoada’s personal leadership aspirations, Pinto da Costa, who had earned a PhD in economics at the Hochschule für Ökonomie in East Berlin in 1971, emerged as a compromise candidate and was elected secretary-general of the MLSTP. All the others became members of the MLSTP’s Political Bureau that remained in Santa Isabel although, despite repeated requests, President Macías Nguema did not permit the opening of an official office. Nevertheless, the group considered the creation of the MLSTP as a successful reorganisation and a sign of reconciliation of the rival factions.39 Like that of the CLSTP the MLSTP’s political programme demanded, among others “immediate and total independence” and the establishment of a “republican, democratic, secular, anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic regime,” “equal rights for all citizens,” and the “abolition of forced labour.” Concerning the economy, the MLSTP wanted the “destruction of the colonial economic structure” and an “agrarian reform with the objective of a better distribution of land according to the necessities of the development of the national economy,” as well as a “gradual introduction of a planned economy.”40 Except this programme, the MLSTP did not produce any text to present its political-ideological orientation.41 In January 1973, the OUA Liberation Committee officially recognised the MLSTP. However, in São Tomé the local secret service was more concerned by a group of older grammar school students who sympathised with the American Black Power movement and socialist revolutions, while keeping in touch with a group of Sãotomean students at universities in Lisbon.42 The mentor of the students in São Tomé was the primary school teacher Alda Graça Espírito Santo. In late 1973, the secret police in São Tomé apparently did not even know about the creation of the MLSTP. At the time, the DGS’s fortnightly report stated that:

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The native people, indolent by nature, we do not consider having the capacity or the craft to take any initiative. Based on old prejudices, they believe blindly in witchcraft, which they qualify as an efficient weapon for the ruin or prosperity of any home…Although we do not have received much information from abroad, we have the impression that the CLSTP [sic] is inactive or disorganised.43

In fact, for two years, the MLSTP remained largely unknown in São Tomé and Príncipe. The MLSTP leaders were taken by surprise by the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 that created the space for the struggle for independence within the archipelago. At that time, all of them had been in exile abroad for more than ten years. In May, the MLSTP moved its office from Santa Isabel to Libreville, where Trovoada and Graça had remained since 1961. Gabon’s pro-western President Omar Bongo arranged employment for the newcomers and provided generous financial support for the MLSTP, but also tried to moderate the radical leftist tendencies within the group.44 On May 22, the MLSTP sent a telegram to Portugal’s President António Spinola (May 15–September 30, 1974) urging him to take immediate measures to end colonialism in São Tomé. Contrary to the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) that was in favour of independence, Spinola advocated a future federation of the colonies with Portugal. The MLSTP leadership in Libreville decided not to enter in São Tomé immediately, since they still considered possible a countercoup in Lisbon and that they might be arrested entering the island from foreign territory. Therefore, they instructed the MLSTP’s representative in Lisbon, the lawyer Gastão Torres to send the Sãotomean students in Portugal to São Tomé to mobilise the population in favour of total independence and the recognition of the MLSTP as the sole and legitimate representative of the Sãotomean people by the Portuguese government. Once recognised, the MLSTP wanted to negotiate with Portugal for the direct transfer of power, i.e., without any popular referendum.45 Torres’ home in Lisbon had been a meeting place of these students who had been politicised by the ideas of Pan-Africanism, Black Power, Marxism, and Maoism.

The Struggle for Independence in São Tomé Immediately after the military coup in Lisbon São Tomé’s governor colonel João Cecilio Gonçalves (1972-74) resigned and was replaced by a local Junta de Salvação Nacional (JSN), constituted by three Portuguese majors.46 On May 25 in São Tomé, a group of moderate local civil servants close to the Portuguese grammar-school teacher Álvaro Ferreira da Silva created the Frente Popular Livre (FPL) that was in favour of a project of

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progressive independence, similar to Spinola’s idea of a federation with Portugal. Among other claims, the FPL demanded that the archipelago’s future should not be negotiated by the Portuguese government but freely be chosen by its people. The FPL did not demand an agricultural reform, but rather that the head offices of the plantation-owning companies should be situated within the islands. Leaders of the FPL that was supported by the local Catholic Church were Maria do Carmo Bragança Neto (1939-), Manuel Pontífice (1930-), Marina da Graça Santiago de Sousa (1937-), and Orlando Graça (1936-).47 Social unrests in São Tomé began on June 11 when workers of the Public Works who were joined by other sectors went on strike demanding higher wages. Encouraged by the action, more than 200 plantation workers rallied in front of the governor’s palace and presented their demands to the JSN. Until the end of that month, the labour unrest spread to several large plantations, including Diogo Vaz, Bela Vista, Santa Margarida, and Rio do Ouro.48 On June 15, during a meeting of MLSTP sympathisers in São Tomé, Gastão Torres announced the creation of the Associação Cívica pró-MLSTP to support and disseminate the MLSTP’s programme in the islands.49 Torres had received the idea to create the Cívica from the jurist Jorge Campinos (1937-93), a co-founder of Portugal’s Socialist Party (PS) and secretary of state for foreign affairs (1974-75). In the same month, more than twenty students arrived from Lisbon to wage the struggle for total independence. Alda Graça Espírito Santo and Daniel Daio (1947-) constituted the Civica’s leadership, while the most influential students were Filinto Costa Alegre (1952-), Norberto Costa Alegre (1951-), Manuel Vaz Fernandes (19532021), Alda Bandeira (1949-), Fernanda Pontífice (1955-), António Ramos Dias (1948-), Olegário Tiny (1954-), and Carlos Tiny (1950-2022).50 Like the older nationalists, the students belonged to the same socioeconomic segment of the educated Forro elite. Thanks to their determination and militancy the radical students succeeded in mobilising the plantation workers and the local population alike by organising manifestations, strikes, and boycotts. To mobilise and politicise the population, they frequently used the political texts of MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO, which also served to link the archipelago’s political future to that of the other Portuguese colonies.51 They maintained regular radio contact with the MLSTP leaders in Libreville who had a plane at their disposal for flights to São Tomé made available by Omar Bongo.52 Nevertheless, due to the geographical distance, the MLSTP was not able to supervise and monitor all actions organised by the Cívica. Financially, the MLSTP remained largely dependent on the Gabonese president.

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On June 29, the Cívica held the first large rally in support of the MLSTP in the capital. In July, the activists began to extend their propaganda to schools, including the country’s only grammar school, which most of them had attended a few years before. On July 20, the Cívica initiated a boycott of the bakeries alleging that the whites had poisoned the bread. A week later, some 3,000 people protested the shortage of foodstuffs and alleged their hoarding in the plantations. In response to this affirmation, the trade inspection published a release threatening those hoarding essential products with severe sanctions. The plantation economy became increasingly affected by the turmoil and by the end of August, the cultivation and harvest of cocoa, coffee, and copra had almost come to a complete standstill. The successful mobilisation of the African plantation workers against a common adversary, despite the social and spatial separation between them and the local Creole population, was certainly a remarkable accomplishment of the Cívica. Except a few isolated protests, since the establishment of the contract labour system in 1876 the labour migrants from Angola, Mozambique, and Cabo Verde (who constituted the majority of the islands’ population between 1900 and 1940) never had organised any strike or other large-scale collective action.53 Despite their participation in the struggle for independence, the planation communities remained marginal to the true political process. On the diplomatic front, on behalf of the MLSTP Trovoada and Graça had made the first contacts with Portugal’s foreign minister Mário Soares (1974-75) in London in May 1974, during the Portuguese government’s talks with the PAIGC. Graça claims that there Soares declared that Portugal would grant independence to all its colonies.54 In July in Lisbon, Torres met Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves, Major Melo Antunes, and other members of the II Provisional Government (July–September 1974) who guaranteed him not to oppose São Tomé’s independence if this was the people’s preference.55 In July, President Spinola received in Lisbon a special envoy of Gabon’s President Bongo, who wanted to mediate between the MLSTP and the Portuguese government. On July 27, the Portuguese government practically invalided the federalist option by explicitly recognising by law the right of self-determination and independence of the overseas territories.56 When, on July 30, the newly appointed governor lieutenant-colonel António Pires Veloso (1974-75) arrived at São Tomé’s airport, he was received by thousands of people mobilised by the Cívica with the slogans “Independencia total, ça quá pôvô mêcê,” “A vitória é nossa,” and “Unidos venceremos.”57 Meanwhile, for most people independence had simply become a panacea to solve all problems and bring a prosperous future. After his arrival, the governor noticed “an atmosphere of great agitation,

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permanent political and social instability, without any structure which would guarantee a minimum of authority.”58 When he invited the about 1,200 white and black military members present in São Tomé to a dinner in the barracks, a Portuguese soldier jumped on the table and got all the men on their feet chanting “Avante Camarada,” the anthem of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). As he did not trust the 600 Portuguese soldiers, Pires Veloso ordered their return to Portugal, leaving the territory only with the about 400 Sãotomean soldiers.59 The decision was also aimed at gaining the trust of the black soldiers, but this trust would create suspicion of the Cívica towards them.60 In fact, during the entire period, the Sãotomean troops never rebelled against the Portuguese colonial authorities who would be outgoing from December 1974 when the transitional government assumed office. Meanwhile, in early August, Almeida Santos, Portuguese minister of interterritorial coordination (May 1974-August 1975), declared that in São Tomé independence was only desired by a minority. Besides the maintenance of the relationship with Portugal, he also considered possible a future union of the archipelago with Angola.61 When UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim (1972-81) ended a visit to Lisbon on August 5, the final communique stated that the Portuguese government recognised São Tomé’s right of self-determination and independence and was ready to apply the UN’s decisions in this regard. However, a recognition of the MLSTP, the modalities of the decolonisation process, and a timeframe were not mentioned at all. Apparently, Almeida Santos had misjudged the situation in São Tomé. Still in August, following a visit of the FPL leadership to the MLSTP direction in Libreville and a subsequent meeting with the Cívica, the FPL leaders decided to dissolve their party and to join the Cívica.62 Given the overwhelming popular support for total independence, the moderate FPL did not stand a chance in the dominant political climate at the time. The FPL was denounced as reactionary and neo-colonialist by their adversaries, and its leaders were intimidated and marginalised. Their radical adversaries claimed that they only wanted to replace the Portuguese colonialists to appropriate their properties.63 While the FPL had disappeared, the MLSTP leadership in Libreville suspected the radicalism of the Cívica and began to fear their possible claim to supremacy during the struggle. On August 28, MLSTP secretary-general Pinto da Costa spoke for the first time directly to the island population in the programme “The Voice of the People of São Tomé and Príncipe” broadcast through Radio Gabon. He said that the takeover in Portugal had created better conditions for the anticolonial struggle but had not brought independence. He stressed that the

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MLSTP would not struggle for jobs in the Portuguese colonial administration, but rather for total independence. Further, he praised the FPL´s dissolution and invoked the unity of all nationalist forces under MLSTP leadership, since a divided people could not defeat the enemy. He also declared that the struggle was directed against Portuguese colonial oppression, but not against the Portuguese people.64 Notwithstanding, troubled by the political unrest, many Portuguese residents left the plantations and villages and took shelter in the military police barracks and in the Quinta de Santo António in the city.65 Some Sãotomeans capitalised on this development by looting the abandoned estates. Eyzaguirre estimates that during the turmoil, over 3,000 heads of cattle were slaughtered and consumed by Forros and plantation workers or perished of disease due to abandonment and neglect.66 In early September, the unrest in São Tomé resulted in two incidents that provoked the accidental death of two Sãotomeans, the only fatalities during the struggle for independence. Following rumours that the Portuguese were hoarding foodstuffs, on September 5, people invaded shops and storehouses and threw the products on the streets. In response, the governor ordered the white military police to patrol the streets and take tough measures whenever necessary. The same day, the Cívica called for a general strike in all sectors. On September 6, Sãotomean soldiers, alarmed by demonstrators, discovered arms when they opened boxes which were loaded on a truck in front of a bakery in the city. When the agitation among the about 200 people present increased, the military police appeared on the scene and opened fire. Two people were wounded during the incident and the stevedore Manuel Rodrigues Pita known as Giovani was found dead hit by a stray bullet in a hollow some seventy meters distant from the bakery.67 Following this incident, Pires Veloso ordered that the military police should remain in the barracks and only the Sãotomean soldiers should patrol in the city.68 Two days later, a young Sãotomean soldier, Paulo Ferreira, overtired after a long operation, fell out of a moving jeep. He was immediately taken to the hospital but died there the next day because of the fall.69 Capitalising on Giovani’s death the MLSTP in Libreville claimed that the Portuguese colonists wanted to create a pretext to organise a massacre against the local population as had occurred in 1953.70 To refute such allegations, Pires Veloso joined the funeral procession for Giovani organised by the Cívica with the participation of thousands of people carrying posters with the slogans “Glória eterna aos mártires da liberdade,” “A vitória é nossa,” and “Unidos venceremos.”71 In turn, on September 6, about 300 infuriated Portuguese residents invaded the governor’s palace, scolded Pires Veloso as a coward, and urged

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him either to take tough measures to defend them or to arrange transport for their repatriation. They claimed to have information that the blacks wanted to kill them. To calm down the white residents Pires Veloso promised to personally patrol the streets in the city in his car the same night to demonstrate that their fears were completely ungrounded.72 On September 7, to intimidate the Cívica, Pires Veloso ordered the deployment of 150 marines who were airlifted from Angola. The governor, who feared further escalation by the Cívica, threatened that they would intervene if considered necessary. Two days later, the situation had calmed down. However, the activists continued demanding the immediate start of negotiations between the MLSTP and the Portuguese government. Notwithstanding, after eight days, Pires Veloso ordered the marines to return to Angola.73 On September 10, Pires Veloso was taken by surprise when, on the orders of Spinola and without his previous knowledge, lieutenant-coronel Ricardo Durão (1928-2021), military commander in São Tomé (1971-74) until the Carnation Revolution and considered close to Spinola, arrived on the island. Pires Veloso believed that his arrival had been provoked by resident Portuguese who had repeatedly denounced him in Lisbon as being a communist. As the governor was worried that Durão’s presence might worsen the crisis, he ordered his immediate return in the same plane to Lisbon. At the same time, Pires Veloso sent telegrams to Lisbon asking for direct negotiations with the MLSTP to avoid further escalation of the unrest in São Tomé.74 Durão’s expulsion provided Pires Veloso with some credit vis-à-vis the local population. Capitalising on this moment and to avoid armed violence, Pires Veloso asked the leaders of the Cívica to turn in the arms, including hand grenades and automatic weapons belonging to the Provincial Volunteers Organisation (OPV) that they had collected in the deserted estates.75 The existence of this arsenal of weapons had provoked rumours that the whites would accumulate arms to kill blacks. The Cívica handed over the arms the same day, and consecutively, other arms were collected in the plantations and shops owned by Portuguese and delivered to the governor.76 On September 11, the Cívica announced to lift the strike until the 16th, the date meanwhile fixed by the Portuguese government to announce concrete information on the beginning of negotiations with the MLSTP. Notwithstanding, on September 19, a large crowd of hundreds of women dressed in black headed by Alda Graça Espírito Santo protested in front of the governor’s palace alleging the poisoning of drinking water and salt by the Portuguese. At the time, spreading anti-Portuguese rumours was

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considered a legitimate weapon in the struggle for total independence.77 Pires Veloso received the women outside the palace and tried to convince them that their allegations were completely unfounded.78

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The Transitional Government and Internal Strife Eventually, on September 28 and October 3 in Libreville, the MLSTP and the Portuguese government held the first preliminary talks. The Portuguese were represented by Víctor Manuel Pereira de Castro, who in June 1974 had investigated on behalf of the Portuguese government the colonial violence committed in 1953, as well as Deodato de Azevedo Coutinho, and captain Armando Marques Ramos.79 Pinto da Costa headed the MLSTP delegation composed by the entire Political Bureau.80 As a result of the talks the Portuguese government recognised the MLSTP as the sole and legitimate representative of the Sãotomean people. In line with the MFA position in Portugal, on October 12 the local Portuguese army, navy and air force commanders in São Tomé followed this step.81 Formal negotiations on the archipelago’s decolonisation process began on November 23 in Algiers. The negotiation place was the villa Dar-Ali-Cherif, where in August the Portuguese had negotiated with the PAIGC the recognition of the in 1973 unilaterally declared independence of Guinea-Bissau. The MLSTP was officially represented by Miguel Trovoada, as leader, José Fret Lau Chong, Gastão Torres, and Pedro Umbelina, while Victor Correia and Evaristo Carvalho (1942-2022) participated as economic advisor and secretary respectively. The Portuguese delegation headed by Almeida Santos included Jorge Campinos, major José Maria Moreira de Azevedo, and captain Armando Marques Ramos.82 Arguing that the MLSTP had not been legitimised by an armed struggle, initially the Portuguese demanded holding a popular referendum on the independence option. The MLSTP argued that a poll contradicted their recognition as sole legitimate representative of the islanders.83 Eventually, the MLSTP accepted the Portuguese compromise proposal to hold elections for a constituent assembly, instead. In turn, the MLSTP demanded immediate control of the police and the nationalisation of the economy and other crucial sectors, which the Portuguese rejected. When the talks were deadlocked, the Portuguese delegation consulted President Costa Gomes (1974-75) and Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves (1974-75) in Lisbon by phone.84 In the last session, Torres had to substitute Trovoada as head of the MLSTP-delegation, because he had fallen ill with appendicitis. On November 26, after fifteen hours of negotiations, the two delegations signed the Algiers Agreement that determined the decolonisation process and set

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independence for July 12, 1975, the third anniversary of the MLSTP’s foundation. On behalf of the Portuguese delegation Campinos told the press:

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São Tomé and Príncipe was an abscess that has now been lanced. It was very difficult but the situation there is one of great tension, which demanded that an agreement be reached to avoid a further deterioration.85

Upon his return to Lisbon, Almeida Santos was optimistic about the economic prospects of the islands and defended the necessity of an agrarian reform. He opined that one reason for the successful talks in Algiers had been the fact that despite being small, São Tomé had a remarkable elite. Moreover, he declared to be reassured knowing that the MLSTP was equipped to face the task of reconstructing the islands.86 In the seventeen-article agreement, the Portuguese government again recognised the MLSTP as São Tomé’s people’s sole legitimate representative. A transitional government together with a Portuguese high commissioner would implement the agreement. The latter was in command of the armed forces deployed in São Tomé. Concerning the Sãotomean troops, the Lisbon government together with the MLSTP would take the administrative measures considered necessary. The prime minister would oversee the police. The legitimate interests of the resident Portuguese would be safeguarded. Elections for a constituent assembly would be held on July 7.87 In early December, “Oné” Pires dos Santos was the first MLSTP leader from Libreville to enter São Tomé.88 He was received at the airport by the largest crowd ever seen on the island, enthusiastically chanting the slogan “Oné já chegou total se avizinha.”89 Finally, on December 21, the feast day of Saint Thomas and memorial day of the arrival of the first Portuguese in the island in the late fifteenth century, the transitional government headed by Leonel d’Alva as prime minister assumed office. The other government ministers were Alda Graça Espírito Santo, education and culture; Carlos Graça, social affairs; Gastão Torres, justice and labour; Pedro Umbelina, communications, and major José Maria Moreira de Azevedo, the only Portuguese representative, social infrastructure and environment. The transitional government ended the turmoil on the streets, but not the struggle between opposing factions. Already during the government’s formation, Torres and the Cívica had fiercely opposed the participation of Carlos Graça, considered a conservative and close to Gabon’s pro-western President Omar Bongo. However, Pinto da Costa defended his appointment arguing that his exclusion could displease Bongo, which would deprive the country of significant economic aid expected from Gabon.90 The radical faction around Torres and Umbelina was in the minority, but they could count on the support of the Cívica students.91 During heated discussions at

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meetings, d’Alva and Graça were frequently framed as bourgeoises by the radical faction of Torres, Umbelina, and the Cívica. Graça felt so threatened by the radical faction that he carried a pistol in his pocket to the meetings.92 When the transitional government took office, the other MLSTP leaders remained in Libreville and intended to enter São Tomé only on the eve of independence. However, due to a conflict about the dissolution of the Sãotomean troops, Companhia de Caçadores 7, they anticipated their return to São Tomé for four months.93 On February 25, 1975, Pires Veloso, meanwhile high commissioner, asked Prime Minister d’Alva that the MLSTP should decide the future of the local troops.94 On March 3, Prime Minister d’Alva responded to Pires Veloso that the Political Bureau had unanimously decided on February 27 to dissolve the unit.95 This decision followed the Cívica’s position that the local soldiers were close to the extinct FPL, a reactionary and a potential threat for a future left-wing government and, therefore, their unit should be replaced by a police force and a people’s militia.96 In addition, it was argued that a small army of about 300 men was militarily incapable of defending the country.97 The following day, Pires Veloso demonstratively paid a visit to the unit to manifest his firm opposition against its dissolution and consecutively declared that as long he was in office, he never would accept the dissolution of the contingent. He feared that otherwise, São Tomé might develop into a brutal dictatorship like that of Macías Nguema in neighbouring Equatorial Guinea.98 Pires Veloso also wanted to impede the dissolution of the contingent as this would affect his own position as high commissioner.99 On March 7, Pires Veloso attended a military exercise of the Caçadores 7 with live ammunition. Five days later, he claimed that the people and the local soldiers were united, and the latter would act if necessary. To stress his determination, he announced that the Sãotomean contingent would hold another military exercise on March 15. In turn, furious about the requested dissolution, the Sãotomean soldiers sent a petition to d’Alva demanding the detention of the radical students close to Gastão Torres.100 Nevertheless, the Political Bureau unanimously insisted on the regiment’s dissolution and threatened to resort to the Portuguese government if Pires Veloso would not change his mind. Unimpressed, on March 13, the high commissioner threatened to leave for Lisbon on the 18th to propose that the Portuguese government anticipate independence in late March or April, repatriate all Portuguese residents by sea, and withdraw all promised Portuguese economic assistance. Troubled by the threats, in Libreville, the Political Bureau decided that to settle the crisis, all members should immediately leave for São Tomé, except Guadalupe de Ceita, Pires dos Santos and Trovoada, who would travel consecutively to Addis Ababa,

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Algiers, and Lisbon to alert the OAU and CONCP about the crisis and talk with the Portuguese government demanding the dissolution of the regiment respectively. Trovoada, however, alleged to be ill and did not travel. When the two others arrived in Lisbon on 26 March, they were not received by the Portuguese government since they were considered dissidents of the MLSTP. Pires Veloso who had arrived in Lisbon the day before had prompted minister Almeida Santos to only recognise interlocutors with credentials from Pinto da Costa.101 Meanwhile, on March 17, immediately upon arrival in São Tomé, Pinto da Costa accompanied by Prime Minister d’Alva and José Fret Lau Chong, met Pires Veloso who resolutely repeated his threats. Consequently, the majority of the MLSTP accepted maintaining the Caçadores 7, whereas the more radical ministers Torres and Umbelina and the militant Cívica students insisted on their dissolution. This change of position would inevitably result in the definitive rupture of the MLSTP leadership with the Cívica. Two days later, at Pires Veloso’s suggestion, the MLSTP presided by Pinto da Costa held a great rally in the city centre where representatives of both the moderate and the radical faction addressed the large crowd. In his address, Pinto da Costa accused the Cívica of being hostile to the local troops and civil servants, and of disrespecting members of the Political Bureau. During the rally, the Sãotomean soldiers actively agitated against the radical faction, some of them with megaphones chanting slogans against the Cívica.102 Before, during, and after the event, anonymous pamphlets were spread that accused Torres of wanting to become president and equal to Macías Nguema. One pamphlet even demanded “death to Torres, Umbelina, and their lackeys of the Cívica.”103 Rumours were launched that supposedly the Cívica had embezzled money, maintained a secret prison, and run a brothel.104 Now the radicals were fought with the same weapons that they had successfully used to mobilise the local population in favour of total independence. During the meeting, most people sided with Pinto da Costa and his faction, while Torres, Umbelina, and Cívica leader Filinto Costa Alegre were booed. Obviously, the radicalism of the young Cívica leaders around Torres had alienated the population benefitting the moderate faction supported by Pires Veloso. In addition, after the MLSTP had assumed office in the transitional government and independence was guaranteed, most people did not accept the necessity of further trouble.105 On March 20, Umbelina, the communications minister, was impeded by the police sent by d’Alva from entering the local radio station because Pires Veloso had ordered that only he, the prime minister, and Pinto da Costa were allowed to speak on the radio. The same day at night, after a discussion by the Political Bureau on the incident in d’Alva’s residence, Umbelina,

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accused of having insulted the prime minister, was put under house arrest, and two students who accompanied him were arrested under the suspicion of having fired two shots close to the residence. On March 21, Pinto da Costa prohibited any political activities that were not previously authorised by the government. The next day, the two students were released and Umbelina’s house arrest was lifted. Given these worrying events, Torres and Umbelina decided to leave for Lisbon to explain their position to the Portuguese government and to resign if it supported Pires Veloso’s position. On March 28, when they were already at the local airport, the two ministers heard on the radio that at a meeting that morning the Political Bureau had dismissed them from the transitional government and expelled them from the party.106 Upon arrival in Lisbon Torres and Umbelina were not received by the Portuguese authorities either since they lacked authorisation signed by Pinto da Costa. Intimidated and increasingly troubled by these events, most of the Cívica militants had left São Tomé together with the two ministers or shortly thereafter. Most of the young activists felt deeply betrayed by the MLSTP leaders who could assume power thanks to the pro-independence campaign they had carried out while the former had passively remained in Libreville. The Cívica had definitively ceased to exist as organisation. Within a few days, with the active support of Pires Veloso and the local military, the moderate faction headed by Pinto da Costa and Trovoada had successfully outmanoeuvred their more radical opponents, whom they suspected to have intended to usurp power. Contrary to Cabo Verde where the Portuguese helped to expel the moderate forces during the decolonisation process, in São Tomé they were actively involved in the expulsion of the radicals. In retrospect, the MLSTP leadership claimed that due to the lack of experience and patience of their main leaders, the Cívica had committed certain tactical errors motivated by a lack of profound and objective analysis of colonial society, the inapplicability in practice of certain theoretical concepts of the Portuguese revolutionary currents after the Carnation Revolution, and the ignorance of the international conjuncture and its effects on the evolution of an internal process.107 Of the four ousted MLSTP leaders, only Guadalupe de Ceita went back to São Tomé, whereas the three others remained permanently in exile abroad.108 Most of the students of the Cívica only returned home several years later after having concluded their studies abroad. A few of them later joined the MLSTP and even were appointed ministers by Pinto da Costa,109 while others were integrated into the public administration but would always remain outside MLSTP.110 On July 7 and 8, about 21,000 registered voters elected the sixteen deputies of the Constituent Assembly. The voters could choose between

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fifty-two competitors, however, not between opposite programmes since they had all been selected by the MLSTP. The last of the Portuguese military left São Tomé on July 11. On the eve of independence, the three big statues of the Portuguese fifteen-century navigators in the town centre and other symbols of Portugal’s permanence were removed to avoid their destruction.111 On July 12, admiral António Rosa Coutinho, member of the Council of the Revolution (March-November 1975), transferred sovereignty to the Constituent Assembly. Its president, Nuno Xavier Dias (1940-76), announced the proclamation of independence and inaugurated Pinto da Costa as president.112 In his speech, Pinto da Costa declared that the struggle for national liberation had been full of sacrifices. He claimed that the people’s long resistance against foreign oppression and exploration had begun with the implementation of slavery and gave as example the “compatriot Amador,” leader of São Tomé’s great slave revolt in 1595. He said decisive factors for the archipelago’s anti-colonial struggle had been the creation of the socialist camp after World War II that had internationally unfavourably affected the imperialist camp and encouraged the colonised peoples’ struggle and the conquest of independence of many African countries in the 1960s. He stressed that the MLSTP’s liberation struggle had been a struggle against the exploitation of man by man and invited the European population to live in the country to participate in its progress. Concerning future economic development, Pinto da Costa announced the maintenance of the large cocoa plantations and their nationalisation since experiences in various countries had demonstrated that agriculture based on small agrarian properties offered greatly reduced development perspectives. Further, he advocated the diversification of agricultural production and the creation of small industries.113 In his farewell address, Pires Veloso said that despite disturbances at a certain moment by the clash of opposing internal perspectives, which the people quickly had clarified, the decolonisation process had elapsed with honesty, exemption of violence, and without paternalism. In addition, using the political slogans of the time, he declared that he was aware that the exploitation of man by man would come to an end both in Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe.114 Immediately after the independence celebrations, Pires Veloso together with wife and daughter toured the country as tourists, and before their departure, Pinto da Costa and Trovoada offered them a farewell dinner.115 Despite this peaceful moment, at the time of independence, intimidated by the Cívica’s militancy and the anti-Portuguese agitation during the decolonisation process, most of the about 2,000 Portuguese residents had already returned home forever.116

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Concluding Remarks It is undeniable that before the Portuguese Revolution, the modest actions of CLSTP and MLSTP in exile were practically without any significant consequences for anti-colonial activities in the archipelago, where the Portuguese security forces easily maintained control and the population remained largely unaffected by the liberation struggles elsewhere.117 Consequently, the CLSTP/MLSTP was not legitimised by any liberation struggle at home, but rather externally, since the small group benefitted considerably from its membership of CONCP and, consequently, was recognised both by the UN and the OUA, which was indispensable for its international standing and ultimately for its recognition by Portugal. Despite the previous passivity and indifference of the population, within a few weeks, the young militants of the Civica succeeded in mobilising thousands of people in favour of total independence. As a result, the hitherto practically unknown MLSTP quickly became the principal local political player. To some extent, São Tomé and Príncipe’s independence was a byproduct of the liberation wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, however, local popular support cannot be underestimated in the process. Given the political climate and context of the Portuguese decolonisation in 1974/75, a federal option or political pluralism were impossible solutions. The Portuguese government, the UN, the OAU, and the entire international community were all in favour of total independence and, in addition, fully legitimised one-party rule that in Africa would only be questioned in the late 1980s. Consequently, the Cívica and the radicals struggled for power within the MLSTP rather than creating their own rival party. In addition to ideological motivations, this power struggle had also generational contours, since most left-wing radicals were considerably younger than the comparatively more moderate MLSTP leadership. Despite the unrest and instability from May to September 1974 and the internal conflict in March 1975, comparatively, São Tomé and Príncipe’s independence was a peaceful and orderly process, except for the Portuguese-run plantation economy that suffered considerably from the turmoil. After March 1975, the authority of the MLSTP remained largely uncontested until 1977 when internal strife and factionalism within the sole ruling party popped up again.

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CHAPTER SIX POLITICS AND ECONOMY SINCE 1975*

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Introduction As already noted, as a consequence of the political context of the liberation struggles and the decolonisation process in the Portuguese colonies during the Cold War period, after independence in 1975 the small two-island republic become a socialist one-party state ruled by the MLSTP. Within a few years, however, increasing authoritarian rule and economic failure discredited the socialist regime. Some fifteen years after independence, in a changed international context marked by the end of the Cold War, São Tomé and Príncipe became the first of the five Portuguese-speaking African countries to embark on the transition to multiparty democracy. The country´s socioeconomic and political development since independence has been shaped by a range of structural and conjunctural factors. The consequences of insularity and the small size of the economy, high transportation costs and extreme dependence on imports, in combination with a colonial legacy of a plantation economy based on cocoa monoculture have restricted options for economic development. Only over the past few years has the government attempted to turn insularity into a comparative advantage by promoting the archipelago as a potential logistics hub for the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea region, without a great deal of success, however. Thanks to the natural wealth and beauty of the islands, the development of tourism that only began in mid-2000s has been much more successful. Irrespective of the ideologically different political systems, local political culture has been characterised by personalistic politics, neopatrimonial relations, clientelist networks, corruption, and rent-seeking, to the detriment of economic rationality and administrative efficiency. Consequently, a significant share of state resources predominantly provided by foreign development partners has been used for redistribution, personal *

The chapter is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the author’s previously published article “São Tomé and Príncipe 1975-2015: Politics and economy in a former plantation colony,” Estudos Ibero-Americanos (Porto Alegre) 42, no. 3 (2016): 987-1012.

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consumption, or enrichment, rather than for investments and production to sustain economic development.1 Besides, neo-patrimonial politics have frequently contributed to political instability, which in turn has also impaired government performance. In addition, the latter has been affected by limited human and institutional capacities.2 Despite its decline since the cocoa boom in the early twentieth century, in 1975 São Tomé´s plantation economy was still a considerable economic asset. Therefore, in comparison with drought-stricken Cabo Verde, at the time of independence, economically São Tomé and Príncipe had significantly better starting conditions. However, in terms of human resources the opposite was the case, since in Cabo Verde most positions in the public administration had already been occupied by locals before independence. In contrast, São Tomé and Príncipe, where senior positions used to be occupied by the Portuguese, lacked adequately skilled and experienced individuals to replace the departed colonisers. The difference in education was a legacy of modern Portuguese colonialism that invested more in schooling in Cabo Verde, whose predominantly mixed-race Creole society was considered culturally more akin to the metropolis than the black Creoles of the Gulf of Guinea islands. A case in point is the introduction of secondary education in the two archipelagos. In Cabo Verde, this occurred as early as 1866 when a Catholic seminary was founded in São Nicolau, while in São Tomé the first secondary school was only established in 1952.3 Consequently, the lack of adequately trained personnel in economy and administration has affected the country´s organisational and institutional capacities. While this problem was at its worst in the first years after independence, the problem has persisted due to a lack of adequate investments in education and professional training by consecutive governments. As already mentioned, divisions within São Tomé´s political leadership appeared already in the 1960s and again in March 1975, still before independence, when during a conflict about the dissolution of the native colonial troops, the comparatively moderate MLSTP leadership under Pinto da Costa (1937-) and Trovoada (1936-), with the support of the Portuguese High Commissioner António Pires Veloso (1974-75), purged the students of the Cívica and other more radically minded nationalists from the MLSTP. Since independence, factionalist struggles between competing interest groups and personalities, favoured by the personalistic and neo-patrimonial character of local politics, have continued to shape politics in the archipelago. While these disputes have frequently provoked considerable political instability, in São Tomé´s small and peaceful Creole society until recently they have never turned into violent conflicts.

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This chapter seeks to analyse São Tomé and Príncipe´s political and socioeconomic developments after independence in the light of these constraints. The first part traces national politics under the socialist party regime and multiparty democracy. The second (part) deals with three sectors of the economy focussing consecutively on cocoa, oil, and international development assistance.

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The socialist one-party regime (1975-1990) After independence São Tomé and Príncipe became in constitutional terms a socialist one-party state ruled by the MLSTP, with party leader Pinto da Costa as President and his long-time friend Trovoada as Prime Minister. The then socialist countries were considered natural allies and Cuba in particular was praised as a revolutionary example to follow. Moreover, the MLSTP established close ties with the MPLA regime in Angola, which supplied the archipelago with fuel at preferential prices. The regime's increasing left-turn contributed to new rifts within the party leadership surfacing soon after independence. In 1977, health minister Carlos Graça (1931-2013), considered a conservative, went into exile abroad to avoid detention. Subsequently, the MLSTP regime claimed to have discovered several alleged coup attempts to topple President Pinto da Costa. In 1978, Angola sent troops to São Tomé to protect the local regime against a supposed external imperialist threat.4 Meanwhile the erstwhile close relationship between Pinto da Costa and Trovoada became increasingly affected by the power struggle within the regime. In April 1979, Pinto da Costa dismissed Trovoada as Prime Minister. In September that year, Trovoada was detained under accusations of complicity in the so-called census riots that had taken place the previous month. For two days, people had protested the MLSTP regime, perceiving a population census as an attempt to oblige the local population that traditionally refused manual labour on the cocoa estates, to work on the nationalised plantations. Trovoada remained in prison without charge or trial until July 1981 when he was allowed to leave for Paris to go into exile.5 At the time, Pinto da Costa had reached the height of his personal power. He was at the same time head of state and government, party leader and commander of the armed forces. While politically his dictatorship had become indisputable, his regime´s economic policies had become a complete failure. As early as 1984, Pinto da Costa publicly admitted the severe problems the local economy was suffering.6 With the socialist countries unable to provide adequate support to overcome the crisis, and desperately in search of external aid, the MLSTP regime approached the

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International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. In exchange for their assistance, the government agreed to liberalise the economy and in 1987 signed an agreement with the IMF on a Structural Adjustment Programme.7 The signature revealed the political pragmatism of Pinto da Costa´s regime that now no longer considered Soviet-style socialism a suitable model for the country´s economic development and, instead, was willing to embrace multiparty democracy and a market economy.

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The performance of multiparty democracy (since 1991) The political transition to multiparty rule was largely dominated by the MLSTP. Despite the socialist rhetoric of earlier years, it was a smooth and peaceful process. As the regime opened the country to western support and influences, Portugal too was welcome to strengthen bilateral relations with its former colony. At the same time, to gain an image of a moderate party, the MLSTP opened its ranks to all citizens willing to cooperate, while Pinto da Costa invited Carlos Graça to return from exile to give additional credibility to his regime´s political reorientation. In 1988, Graça accepted the invitation to become foreign minister. The initial objective of the regime´s political reforms had been to allow some degree of political plurality within the framework of the one-party system. In December 1989, the MLSTP organised a National Conference to publicly discuss the country´s political reorganisation. It was the first National Conference of several organised as part of the democratisation processes in many African countries. One month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, domestic politics in São Tomé became increasingly influenced by international political developments. Consequently, the resolutions approved by the National Conference surprisingly recommended the introduction of multiparty democracy and a free market economy. Subsequently, the MLSTP leadership willingly approved the resolutions adopted by the participants.8 Shortly afterwards, during a summit of the five Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOP) in Praia, Cabo Verde, the leaders of the other four countries fiercely criticised Pinto da Costa for the MLSTP´s decision to abandon the one-party regime. However, as early as February 1990, Cabo Verde also announced the introduction of multiparty democracy, while the three others would follow a few years later. Immediately following the National Conference, the archipelago´s first organised opposition appeared publicly as the Grupo de Reflexão, formed by former activists of the Cívica and various dissidents of the MLSTP regime. The country´s democratisation process, including the adoption of the legal framework, occurred in the course of 1990. In May, Miguel

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Trovoada was welcomed by a huge crowd when he returned from his nineyear exile in France to run for the presidency. In August a new democratic constitution based on the Portuguese semi-presidential system was approved by public referendum.9 Under this constitution the Prime Minister was head of government; however, the president maintained an executive role in the areas of foreign affairs and defence. Besides, the president had the power to dismiss the Prime Minister and dissolve parliament whenever he wanted. In October 1990, the MLSTP was transformed into a liberal party by adding the designation Partido Social Democrata (PSD), the name of Portugal´s conservative liberal party, at the time quickly embraced by the MLSTP as the new external political patron. Pinto da Costa abandoned the party leadership to run for the presidential elections. In the following month, the Grupo de Reflexão was constituted as the Partido de Convergência Democrática (PCD), which initially also included the followers of Miguel Trovoada. Due to the increasing popular support for Trovoada, Pinto da Costa realised that he would lose the presidential elections. Consequently, in late 1990 he publicly declared his withdrawal from the contest. Although São Tomé and Príncipe had initiated the democratisation process first, due to the slow pace of the process, Cabo Verde became the first African country to hold free elections, on January 13, 1991.10 The overwhelming electoral victory of the opposition Movimento para a Democracia (MpD) in Cabo Verde caused consternation within the MLSTP/PSD. The legislative elections of January 20 confirmed these fears, when the PCD gained an absolute majority of thirty-three seats in the fiftyfive-member National Assembly, while the MLSTP/PSD obtained only twenty-one seats.11 In March, Miguel Trovoada was elected unopposed as president. The success of the opposition was due to the failures of fifteen years of one-party rule and to the constructive unity of the different forces opposed to the MLSTP.12 As in other former socialist African countries, despite the shift away from the Soviet model and the democratisation process, in São Tomé and Príncipe the principal political protagonists remained largely the same. Political leaders easily adopted and adjusted to the new political order, since what was at stake in the first place was power and personality rather than the legitimising political ideology. Soon after the formation of the PCD government in early 1991 the relations between the party leadership and President Trovoada (1991–2001) began to worsen. The PCD accused Trovoada of interfering in government affairs, while the president blamed the PCD for wanting to curb his executive powers. In fact, the PCD leaders and Trovoada had not trusted each other since the decolonisation process, when the latter had participated in the expulsion of the young leaders of the Cívica. As early as 1992,

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President Trovoada dismissed Prime Minister Daniel Daio (PCD, 1947-), alleging a lack of consensus with the government, although the ruling party had an absolute majority in parliament. In the process, five deputies close to Trovoada abandoned the PCD parliamentary group. In late 1992, Trovoada´s followers created their own party, the Acção Democrática Independente (ADI) to strengthen their patron´s position within the party landscape. Constitutionally, the president could not assume the party leadership, which, in fact Trovoada formally never did; however, at the time everybody considered the ADI his party. The second PCD government was also involved in a continuous power struggle with Trovoada, who after two years dismissed Prime Minister Norberto Costa Alegre (1951-) and dissolved the National Assembly. The various conflicts were predominantly triggered by disputes over external funds and the distribution of perks.13 In the early elections held in October 1994, the MLSTP/PSD won a majority and returned to power, while the ADI and the PCD each obtained fourteen seats, sealing the definitive split within the erstwhile united opposition. Since then, the MLSTP/PSD has led most of the archipelago´s governments. Immediately after his inauguration in September 2001, President Fradique de Menezes (1942-; President 2001-11)) also created his own party, the Movimento Democrático Força de Mudança (MDFM). Like Trovoada, Menezes never formally assumed the party leadership, but contrary to his predecessor, he never denied that he was the de facto party patron. As has already been pointed out, multiparty politics in São Tomé and Príncipe have been marked by political instability provoked by frequently changing governments. From 1991 to 2014 the country had seventeen different governments headed by fourteen different prime ministers. None of the governments ever reached the end of the four-year legislature. The absence of debates of substance, the struggle for access to state resources, and the weight of personal quarrels between principal politicians have contributed to the frequent changes of governments. What is noteworthy, however, is that while frequently triggered by personal quarrels and disputes over resources and perks, all political conflicts were resolved according to constitutional rules. Before 2014, the existence of four major parties in combination with the existing system of proportional representation has contributed to a situation which prevents single party majorities. Consequently, a stable two-party system like that in Cabo Verde could not develop. Most governments were weak coalitions with changing compositions, whereby former political allies became rivals, while erstwhile adversaries became partners. The fact that the parties do not differ from each other ideologically or programmatically has facilitated the formation of changing coalitions.

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So far, only four times a single party has succeeded in obtaining an absolute majority in parliament; however, two of these governments headed by the PCD, in 1991, and the MLSTP/PSD, in 1998, did not reach the end of their mandate either, since they were dismissed by President Trovoada and President Menezes respectively. Due to personal quarrels, the latter dismissed another two prime ministers, Gabriel Costa (independent, 1954), in 2002, and Maria das Neves (MLSTP/PSD, 1958-), in 2004. Frequently, the constitution’s ambiguous provisions regarding the executive powers within the semi-presidential regime were blamed for the outbreak of recurrent power struggles between president and government. During the Trovoada presidency, parliament never enjoyed a two-thirds majority to be able to readjust the semi-presidential system. Only following the controversial dismissal of Gabriel Costa, in 2002, was a majority in parliament willing to reduce the presidential powers. The necessary constitutional amendments were adopted in early 2003, but only became effective in 2006, after the end of Menezes´ first term. Under the new constitution, the president is no longer in charge of foreign affairs and defence. Moreover, he can now only dismiss the government or dissolve parliament under certain circumstances and only after consulting the newly created council of state.14 Constitutional revision, however, did not initially bring the expected political stability, for between 2006 and 2014 the country had six different governments, of which two, in 2008 and 2012, were headed by Patrice Trovoada (1961-), son of Miguel Trovoada and since 2001 uncontested leader of the ADI. Both in 2008 and 2012 Trovoada was ousted by a motion of no confidence in parliament, first as head of a coalition government and thereafter as leader of a minority government. For political and personal reasons, Patrice Trovoada, a wealthy businessman, who made his fortune abroad, has always been contested and mistrusted by his political adversaries, who have repeatedly accused him of corruption and running the country as his private property. Interestingly, after the implementation of the constitutional amendments, the focus of instability shifted from the presidency to parliament. Between 2006 and 2012, parliament dismissed the Prime Minister three times, while before the constitutional amendments this happened only once. The frequent changes of government have provoked a high turnover of ministers and other senior officeholders, which in turn has additionally debilitated the already fragile government institutions. In 2014, an IMF report on São Tomé complained that “institutions are weak, lack skilled human resources, are poorly managed, and corrupt.”15 Despite

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consecutive externally financed administrative reforms, these features have persisted and hampered the country´s development since independence. Finally, in October 2014, Trovoada´s ADI surprisingly succeeded in obtaining an absolute majority in parliament, only the third time since 1991 that a party managed to do so. Trovoada himself had only returned to São Tomé a few days before the elections from his voluntary exile in Portugal where he had remained after his dismissal in late 2012. Unlike the PCD and MLSTP/PSD majority governments before, thanks to the constitutional amendments, the ADI government was the first one ever to reach the end of the legislature in the country´s more than thirty-year democratic history. In the 2018 elections, the ADI remained the party with the most votes, but failed to achieve an absolute majority. Consequently, with the support of the votes of the small three-party coalition PCD-MDFM-UDD,16 the MLSTP/PSD managed to form a coalition government headed by party leader Jorge Bom Jesus (1962-). With his party in opposition, Trovoada returned to his voluntary exile in Portugal from where he controlled the ADI remotely. Although the Bom Jesus government was affected by the Covid19 pandemic and its performance was considered poor, his executive was São Tomé’s first coalition government since 1991 that completed its fouryear term. Nevertheless, as widely expected, in the legislative elections of September 2022 the ADI again won an absolute majority and returned to power with Trovoada as Prime Minister. Again, he returned from his almost four-year voluntary exile in Portugal only shortly before the elections. His long absence did not harm his popularity, but rather provided him with the image of a leader untouched by local political quarrels and machinations. Since 1990 more than ten new, small parties have appeared, but only the two major parties, the MLSTP/PSD and ADI, have enjoyed sustainable electoral support and dominated local politics over the last thirty years. From its foundation in 2001 until 2010, the MDFM was also a major player; however, after Menezes’ departure from the presidency he was no longer able to attract political support. Consequently, the MDFM practically disappeared after the 2010 elections. In turn, the PCD steadily lost seats in all consecutive elections after its landslide victory in 1991, except for the elections in 2002 and 2006 when it formed an alliance with the MDFM. In 2014 the PCD was reduced to five seats and in 2022 it did not even participate in the elections. As noted before, the four parties do not differ (significantly) in terms of political ideology or opposing programmes, but rather represent competing interest groups struggling for power and access to state resources. The parties have become an integral part of local neopatrimonial politics.17 One major difference between the MLSTP/PSD and PCD on the one side, and ADI and MDFM on the other, has been that

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competitive leadership elections exist in the former two, while the latter two are autocratic parties that were created on the initiative of presidents while in office. Their creation was also a consequence of neo-patrimonial politics since the presidents used the party as an instrument to secure access to resources and maintain clientelist networks. The ADI would be unthinkable without its patron Patrice Trovoada, while the MDFM was not viable without Menezes as president. In May 2019 a faction opposed to Trovoada capitalised on his absence and elected a new ADI leadership that, however, was not recognised by the faction loyal to Trovoada. In September that year Trovoada’s followers held a party congress where he was re-elected in absentia as party leader, unopposed, with 999 votes in favour and one abstention.18 The MDFM still exists, but it might disappear after it failed to obtain a seat in parliament both in the 2014 and the 2022 elections. Since 1991, human rights have largely been respected, while legislative and presidential elections have always been held regularly and peacefully. Seven times, in 1994, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 legislative elections resulted in a change of government, which is rather unique in African politics. However, outgoing ministers repeatedly removed office equipment and files to hinder the job of their successors. Election campaigns have been dominated by mutual accusations of corruption, mismanagement, and incompetence rather than by political issues of substance or programmatic alternatives. Notwithstanding, unlike in other African countries, there have not been accusations of vote rigging, except for the 2016 and 2021 presidential elections. In 2016, the incumbent, Pinto da Costa, who ran as an independent, refused to participate in the run-off against the ADI candidate Evaristo Carvalho (1942-2022) to protest alleged anomalies during the vote counting.19 In 2021 Delfim Neves (1965-), President of the National Assembly and the third most popular candidate in terms of votes alleged irregularities in several polling stations and demanded a recount. His claim provoked a stalemate in the constitutional court since in response to his claim the five judges issued two opposing verdicts, with both groups contesting the legality of the other’s decision. The crisis was only settled after four days when the court released a new single verdict with three against and two votes for a recount.20 Apart from the two exceptions, the losing parties and candidates have always recognised their electoral defeat, partly since in a small society where personal ties frequently supersede different party affiliation, electoral defeat did not necessarily mean total exclusion from patrimonial politics. From the voters’ perspective, electoral defeat reflected both a sanction against the failures of the government and a means to avoid resources always being controlled by the same faction.21 For the same reason, except twice, in 2006 and in 2022,

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the party of the incumbent president has never won the parliamentary elections.22 Until 2016, presidential elections were largely dominated by the personal rivalry between Pinto da Costa and the Trovoadas that goes back to the first years after independence when the former and Miguel Trovoada were involved in a personal power struggle. In 1996, President Miguel Trovoada was re-elected president when he defeated Pinto da Costa in the final ballot. In 2001, Menezes, supported by the Trovoadas, won against Pinto da Costa. He was re-elected in 2006 after having beaten by a wide margin his erstwhile mentor Patrice Trovoada, who at the time was supported by the MLSTP/PSD.23 Finally, in 2011, twenty years after his departure from the presidency, Pinto da Costa was democratically elected president after winning the run-off against Evaristo Carvalho, the ADI candidate. However, as already mentioned, in 2016 Carvalho won the runoff of the presidential elections uncontested after Pinto da Costa refused to participate in the final ballot due to alleged irregularities. In the 2021 presidential elections the ADI candidate, Carlos Vila Nova (1959-), defeated his adversary from the MLSTP/PSD, Guilherme Pósser da Costa (1953-), in the run-off. The country´s record of fair elections has been stained by the persistent phenomenon of vote-buying, locally called banho, literally meaning bath, which is another feature of venality in local politics. Like other forms of corruption, this practice has been condemned by the same parties which have practiced it. Venality in elections has not been restricted to vote-buying, but also comprises campaigners who are paid for their services and voters who ask personal favours in exchange for their vote.24 Nevertheless, the satisfaction of favours and vote-buying do not offer the contenders a secure guarantee for votes, because as voting is secret the voter can cast the ballot in favour of another party or candidate. Therefore, suspicions of irregularities during vote counting in polling station have increased in recent elections. The performance of multiparty democracy has also been overshadowed by two bloodless military coups, two police revolts, a coup attempt, and an assault on the barracks. The six incidents revealed both the fragility of local institutions and the weakness of the government. In August 1995, dissatisfied soldiers assaulted the presidential palace and detained President Trovoada. After one week of negotiations between government and the coup plotters, constitutional order was restored and the insurgents were granted amnesty.25 A second military coup occurred in July 2003, while President Menezes was abroad. The second coup was immediately associated with the archipelago´s supposed future oil wealth. One of the leaders was not a local military officer, but Arlécio Costa (1961-2022), one of several Sãotomeans who had

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served in Apartheid South Africa’s Buffalo Battalion until its dissolution in 1993. Again, the constitutional order was reinstated after one week of negotiations and the conspirators were pardoned. In exchange for their surrender, the government granted Arlécio Costa and his group concessions for state lands that they had demanded for their so-called social reintegration.26 In both cases, the coup plotters were primarily motivated by corporate grievances and had no ambitions to take over political power. The same applies to two consecutive revolts by the Rapid Deployment Police in January 2006 and October 2007, whose members claimed payment for additional subsidies supposedly promised by the government. Curiously, this special unit trained by Angolan security forces had been created after the 2003 coup to prevent future upheaval by the military. Eventually the unit was dissolved after the second revolt for being a source of instability. In August 2018 the Trovoada government claimed to have frustrated a coup. Five alleged plotters were detained, including Albertino Francisco, author of two critical books on the country’s political leaders and three Spanish ex-servicemen he had hired. The latter denied the accusations, claiming that Francisco had invited them to create a security service. In early November the public prosecutor formally accused twenty people of involvement in the coup attempt. Nevertheless, about three weeks later a judge released the five detained suspects from custody after the new government had declared that the ADI government had invented the attempted coup.27 The worst incident occurred on November 25, 2022, only two weeks after Trovoada had been sworn in as Prime Minister for the fourth time. At dawn a few civilians assaulted the military barracks with the help of soldiers inside to seize arms. However, after a gunfight the attackers were overwhelmed and detained by the security sources. Shortly afterwards, the security forces detained another two men suspected of having been involved in the action, Arlécio Costa, the leader of the 2003 coup, and Delfim Neves, the former National Assembly president. A few hours later Trovoada claimed that there had been a coup attempt, but the situation had been quickly under control and that nobody had been killed in the action. However, in the afternoon of the same day it was reported that four detainees were dead, including Arlécio Costa, apparently tortured to death by the military. Hours later images of brutal beatings and the four mutilated bodies circulated in the social media provoking widespread indignation and disgust in São Tomé’s peaceful society. The unprecedented violence provoked all sorts of speculations and conspiracy theories, including that Trovoada had orchestrated the assault to create a pretext to get rid of his opponents. Two days after his detention Neves, who immediately had

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claimed his innocence, was released from custody due to a lack of evidence for his involvement. On December 14, the public prosecutor announced that nine of the seventeen people initially arrested for their alleged involvement in the assault would remain in pre-trial detention. Six days later, the public prosecutor ordered the pretrial detention of six soldiers suspected of having participated in the extrajudicial execution of the four detainees.28 In February 2023, another five soldiers accused of have participated in the killings were put in pre-trial detention. In the same month, the public prosecutor released the investigation report, according to which twelve men had been actively involved in the failed assault, of whom four were killed. The eight others, of whom seven were young soldiers, were charged with attempting to violently change the rule of law, attempted homicide, mayhem, and the possession and use of prohibited arms. According to the report’s findings the mastermind of the assault had been Arlécio Costa, who wanted to take revenge for the loss of land concessions he had got in 2003 but had been withdrawn by the state because he failed to pay the annual rent. Even worse, in March 2021 the state conceded the 192 ha of Costa’ former concession area to a company owned by Delfim Neves, then president of the National Assembly.29 In turn, two months later, Neves sold 185 ha of this land concession for €1,387,500 to the Monaco-based German businessman Titus Gebel (1967-), whose company Tipolis wanted to establish a “Private City” there, an extraterritorial zone where the hosting country does not exercise sovereign rights, for 35,000 wealthy foreign tax refugees.30 Apparently, Neves used part of this money to finance his campaign for the 2021 presidential election. Finally, in March 2023, the public prosecutor charged twenty rank and file soldiers for their active participation in fourteen cases of torture and four cases of homicide, crimes committed in retaliation for the attack on the barracks when one lieutenant was taken hostage and seriously wounded. In addition, three high-ranking officers were charged with torture and homicide by omission since they failed to stop the crimes. However, in June the proceedings against one of them were dropped due to lack of evidence.

The precarious economy São Tomé and Príncipe is Africa´s smallest economy with a GDP of $ 546.7 million (2022).31 The country´s economic development over the last decades has been considerably less favourable than the performance of multiparty democracy since 1991. The local economy has been marked by a narrow export base and excessive dependence on imports. For 2023, the IMF has projected total export of goods income and import expenditure at

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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133

$26.1 million and $184.1 million respectively, resulting in a projected trade deficit of $158.1 million.32 Although cocoa is frequently mentioned as the country´s principal export, in fact, for many years tourism has surpassed cocoa as the principal export income earner. In 2019, the number of tourist arrivals reached a peak of 34,918, but due to the pandemic in 2020 the number of foreign tourists dropped by 70 percent to just 10,718. Accordingly, revenue from tourism dropped from $66.6 million in 2019 to $16.4 million in 2020 but recovered to $30.7 million in 2021. From 2021 to 2022 the number of foreign tourists increased from 15,100 to about 26,000. For 2023 the country expected to exceed the number of visitors achieved in 2019.33 In addition, in 2020 palm oil surpassed cocoa for the first time as the main agricultural export in volume and in 2022 also in value. Palm oil is produced by Agripalma, owned by the Belgian Socfin Group that since 2009 has developed 2,500 ha of oil palm plantation and in 2019 put a palm oil factory into operation.34 Nevertheless, for a long time São Tomé and Príncipe has been predominately dependent on foreign assistance. While politically a sovereign state, economically the country has not been viable without considerable inflows of external aid that finances about half of the country’s national budget and more than 90 percent of public investment projects. As noted above, by independence the archipelago´s colonial legacy of a plantation economy based on cocoa monoculture was considered an asset that would safeguard economic viability. Maintaining the plantation economy and its transformation into a diversified economy was considered crucial for the country´s sustainability as an independent nation. In fact, however, the cocoa sector proved a failure both under the socialist one-party regime and multiparty democracy. Two consecutive agricultural reforms devised by foreign experts and implemented by local governments failed. Finally, in the late 1990s, the plantation economy ceased to exist. The large state-owned plantations were dismantled, and their lands divided into small plots and medium-sized enterprises, which were distributed to former plantation workers and local merchants and politicians respectively.35 Guided by Soviet-style socialism and the tenets of a planned economy, after independence the MLSTP regime nationalised the Portuguese-owned plantations and regrouped them into fifteen large agricultural enterprises. Denounced as a symbol of colonial oppression, the nationalisation of the plantation economy was considered inevitable. The regime’s objective was to maintain the plantations to finance the successive diversification of the national economy. In a message of February 1975, the MLSTP leadership announced that “with cocoa money we shall be able to create hospitals, crèches and schools, and contribute to the establishment of certain

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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industries, which will not have any other objective than to serve the people, and, consequently the workers themselves.”36 Theoretically this was well thought out, yet in practice it would become a complete failure due to the regime’s incapacity to properly run the plantations. Despite the nationalisations, the nature of cocoa production after 1975 remained largely unchanged. The private Portuguese ownership was transformed into state property, while Portuguese managers were replaced by largely unskilled and inexperienced local staff. The state-owned plantations were frequently subjected to individual appropriation by the people in charge rather than state accumulation.37 Due to the same shortcomings, newly established public enterprises in other sectors in the attempt to diversify the economy were also doomed to fail and contributed to increasing public debts. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when São Tomé and Príncipe was actually the world’s largest cocoa producer in terms of quantity, until recently cocoa always remained by far the most important export of goods, although production has decreased dramatically over the last hundred years. In 1913 São Tomé's cocoa production had reached its peak with a production of 36,500 tons.38 By 1968, cocoa exports amounted to 11,086 tons, less than a third of the quantity produced in 1913.39 By independence in 1975, the total area planted with cocoa had dwindled from about 72,500 ha in 1913 to less than 25,000 ha, while cocoa production amounted to approximately 10,000 tons. Nevertheless, cocoa monoculture was still a significant source of income for the local economy. Due to a lack of adequately trained personnel, mismanagement, corruption, and insufficient investment, the MLSTP regime was unable to maintain infrastructure, keep production and productivity of the cocoa sector at pre-independence levels or to maintain the physical infrastructure of the plantations. Besides, the regime was unable to replace the colonial regime of coercive labour by a productive work ethic and incentives for the plantation workers, who were almost exclusively former Angolan and Cabo Verdean contract workers since the local Creole population used to refuse manual work on the estates. The negative attitude of the local population towards plantation work did not change after independence, although according to the socialist rhetoric of the time the nationalised plantations were no longer owned by Portuguese colonialists, but by the people. In fact, the country's political elite has never showed any affinity with tropical agriculture either. Generally, the local elite strives for white collar jobs in the public administration, which since the modern colonial period have enjoyed the highest esteem in the local society. Consequently, within a few years of independence the buildings and infrastructure on the plantations became dilapidated, while cocoa production gradually collapsed. By 1984

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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135

annual cocoa production had dropped to 3,400 tons, but still represented more than 90 percent of agricultural exports. As mentioned above, the resulting economic crisis prompted the regime to shift away from the socialist allies and to approach the IMF and the World Bank. The MLSTP regime and the international financial institutions agreed to rehabilitate the cocoa sector by conceding private management contracts to foreign investors, while state ownership of the estates was maintained. From 1986 to 1990, the management of five state-owned estates was conceded to private foreign companies under renewable contracts with a fixed term of between ten and fifteen years. The remaining ten plantations failed to attract foreign investors. The management contracts, agricultural inputs, and machinery for the five enterprises under rehabilitation were financed by international financial institutions with funds of some $40 million. The main objective of the cocoa rehabilitation project was to increase cocoa output to assist the country to achieve quick economic recovery. Once again, on paper this was a sensible programme, but in practice it did not work either. Although overall cocoa production increased to 4,560 tons in 1988, it again dropped to 3,640 in 1990. Due to decreasing cocoa prices on the world market, the initial increase in annual production did not result in higher export incomes either. Following the failure of the cocoa rehabilitation under private management, the World Bank issued a recommendation to São Tomé to dismantle the estates. Soon after the country's democratic transition in 1991, the PCD government initiated a land reform intended to transform the plantation economy into a new agrarian structure dominated by small and medium-sized farmers. The former were mainly former African contract workers and their descendants. The latter were local merchants and politicians mostly without any agricultural expertise. The project financed by the World Bank aimed at diversifying and increasing food and cash crop production to considerably reduce food imports and increase exports. Between 1993 and 2003 a total 43,522 ha were distributed to a total of 8,735 small farmers on a usufruct basis. The average size of their plots was 3.2 ha. For the first time ever, former plantation workers received land rights. Before, only the native islanders were entitled to own private plots of land. Many of the new owners were constrained by several shortcomings including a lack of training, a shortage of tools and credit, and poor access to markets due to deficient transport. One objective of the privatisation of agriculture had been to increase the output of cocoa to 8,000–10,000 tons, the production level prior to independence. However, the privatisation of agriculture largely failed to increase cash crop production: cocoa exports stagnated at 3,200 tons in 1996, less than the low 1984 output of 3,400 tons

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that had prompted the cocoa rehabilitation programme. Thereafter, cocoa production fluctuated between 3,161 tons in 1999 and 3,820 tons in 2003 and only occasionally exceeded 3,000 tons. Low yields were partly provoked by insect infection of Heliothrips rubrocinctus, which, due to the government´s poor provision of agricultural services had affected almost half of the cocoa crops. Cocoa exports have varied between 2,413 tons in 2005 and 2,229 tons in 2012. In 2013 cocoa exports stood at 2,617 tons, equivalent to export revenue of $5.5 million and 92.4 percent of agricultural exports.40 Thereafter annual cocoa export income ranged between $6.7 million and $8.6 million, until 2019 always representing more than 90 percent of agricultural exports. These figures indicate the failure of the land distribution programme to boost cocoa production and diversify agricultural exports. Instead, the setbacks in agricultural reform further accelerated the rural migration that had begun as a result of the downfall of the plantations after independence. Consequently, the urban population continuously increased from 33 percent in 1991 to 54.5 percent in 2001 and to 67 percent in 2012.41 Table 6-1 Cocoa, annual production in tons, 1988–2003.42 Year Quantity

1988 4,560

1990 3,640

1992 3,688

1994 3,392

1996 3,500

1998 3,928

2000 2,883

2002 3,462

2003 3,820

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Table 6-2 Cocoa, annual exports in tons, 2005–13.43 Year Quantity

2005 2,413

2006 2,434

2009 2,728

2010 2,413

2011 2,208

2012 2,229

2013 2,617

Table 6-3 Cocoa, annual exports in millions of US$, 2015-20.44 Year Amount

2015 7.9

2016 8.6

2017 8.6

2018 8.2

2019 6.9

2020 6.7

The oil saga Given the failure of tropical agriculture and the initially low pace of tourism development since the end of the twentieth century, São Tomé and Príncipe has placed high hopes in the development of offshore oil. Despite the consequences of the oil curse in Angola and other neighbouring oil producers, oil was expected to quickly end mass poverty and turn São Tomé and Príncipe into a wealthy nation.45 The local political elite were enthusiastic, since off-shore oil production did not depend on government

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.

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137

policies and matched with widespread rent-seeking attitudes. However, after a few years the initial enthusiasm was replaced by increasing frustration due to consecutive failures to discover commercially viable oil in the country's ultra-deep offshore oil blocks. São Tomé's oil saga began in 1997 when the government signed the first oil agreement with the small and unknown company Environmental Remediation Holding Corporation (ERHC). Initially US-owned, in 2001 the company was taken over by the Nigerian business tycoon Emeka Offor (1959-) and renamed ERHC Energy. In 1998 and 2001, the government signed two other oil contracts with ExxonMobil and the Norwegian company Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS). Meanwhile, São Tomé and Príncipe had signed treaties with Gabon and Equatorial Guinea on the delimitation of the maritime borders. Similar negotiations with Nigeria failed, since the two governments could not agree on the terms of the demarcations. Consequently, in 2001 they established a Joint Development Zone (JDZ) in the disputed maritime area, in which expenditures and profits were divided in the ratio of 60 percent and 40 percent between Nigeria and São Tomé and Príncipe. The JDZ was to be managed by an Abuja-based Joint Development Authority (JDA) staffed by personnel from both countries. From the beginning, the three oil agreements were surrounded by suspicions of irregularities and excessive concessions in favour of ERHC, Mobil and PGS. Consequently, the three contracts were all renegotiated in early 2003. However, experts still considered the second agreement with ERHC Energy excessively generous. In exchange for support provided for the development of the country's oil sector, ERHC Energy received working interests ranging from 15 percent to 30 percent in six blocks of the JDZ. Four of these blocks were exempted from the payment of signature bonuses. In addition, ERHC Energy received interests in the archipelago's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The renegotiated agreements paved the way for the first licensing round for blocks in the JDZ. The JDA fixed the minimum bid per block at $30 million. When the bids were publicly opened during a solemn ceremony in São Tomé in October 2003 a wave of enthusiasm swept the country. The highest bids offered for seven blocks totalled $500 million, then about eight times the country's GDP. Chevron offered the highest bid of $125 million for Block 1, considered the most promising acreage. Finally, however, in April 2004, the JDA only awarded exploration rights for Block 1, while five blocks were put into another auction held in December that year, since the JDA did not trust the financial and technical capacities of many bidding companies. Block 1 was awarded jointly to ChevronTexaco (51 percent), ExxonMobil (40 percent) and Dangote Equity Energy Resources – DEER

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(9 percent), a company owned by Nigerian business tycoon Aliko Dangote (1957-). Block 1 entitled São Tomé to a signature bonus share of $49 million, a considerably amount, but only a quarter of the $200 million share initially expected when the bids were opened. The outcome of the second licensing round was disappointing since no major oil company participated and only one bid of $175 million for Block 4 was considerably higher than the previous one of $100 million. The announcement of the five block awards by the JDA in April 2005 provoked fierce accusations of irregularities, which caused a political crisis in São Tomé. Despite the contestations, the governments in São Tomé and Abuja approved the decisions taken by the JDA. Due to ERHC Energy's bonusfree options, São Tomé only received signature bonuses of $28.6 million when the production-sharing contracts (PSC) were signed for Blocks 2–4 in early 2006. The signature of PSCs for Blocks 5 and 6 was postponed. Only in 2012 was a PSC for Block 5 signed with an Iranian company. Between 2005 and 2009, the ownership of Blocks 2–4 changed when the Swiss company Addax and the Chinese Sinopec acquired the majority shares from the original bidders. Furthermore, Addax took over ExxonMobil´s 40percent stake in Block 1. In 2006, Chevron provoked widespread consternation in São Tomé by announcing that the exploration drilling carried out in JDZ Block 1 had not discovered commercially viable oil in the acreage. In late 2009 Sinopec and Addax, which had been taken over by Sinopec in October that year, started exploration drilling in JDZ Blocks 2–4. Finally, in March 2012, the two companies also reported not to have discovered commercially viable oil. Consequently, still in 2012 Sinopec, its subsidiary Addax, and other investors abandoned the three oil blocks, leaving ERHC Energy as the only stakeholder.46 In late 2011, the French company Total, which meanwhile had acquired Chevron´s majority stake in Block 1, triggered renewed expectations by announcing an investment of $200 million in exploration drilling in 2012. Finally, in September 2013, Total caused shock in São Tomé when it decided to abandon Block 1 on the grounds that the hydrocarbon reserves discovered were too limited to justify further investments. Subsequently, Addax also withdrew from Block 1, leaving DEER as the only remaining investor. During a debate in the Nigerian parliament in March 2014, the JDZ was blamed for being a loss-making enterprise, and the possibility of revoking the treaty signed with São Tomé in 2001 was even discussed. To create at least a glimmer of new hope, in June 2015, the JDA signed a new PSC for Block 1 with two Nigerian companies to replace the 91 percent of shares returned by Total and Addax. One month later, DEER, stakeholder

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of the remaining 9 percent abandoned the block. In September 2016 the ownership of Block 1 was again restructured when another two investors were included. However, exploration activities have apparently not been carried out since then. Unexpectedly, in March 2019 Total returned to the JDZ when it signed a PSC for the Blocks 7, 8, and 11 in exchange for a signature bonus of $5 million. At the time, the French company announced it would invest more than $10 million in seismic surveys during the four-year exploration period.47 In October 2023, Total was in the final stage of the analysis of the survey results to assess the probability of the existence of commercially viable oil in the acreage.48 From 2001 to 2014, the JDZ has generated revenue of $303 million, of which $272 million are signature bonuses. However, in the same period, the operating costs of the JDA were $129 million (43 percent of total revenue). Although the JDA has not organised a licensing round since 2004, until 2015 it maintained an average annual budget of almost $12 million, equivalent to 8 percent of São Tomé and Príncipe´s state budget. Since 2008 São Tomé has not paid its 40 percent share of the JDA’s expensive operating costs resulting in a $27 million bilateral debt with Nigeria by 2015.49 Until recently, developments of the country's EEZ have not been promising either. The zone is managed by the National Oil Agency (ANP), created in 2004. The first licensing round for seven out of nineteen EEZ blocks held in 2010, after consecutive delays, proved to be a failure, since only six third-tier companies submitted bids. In the end, only one block was awarded to a Nigerian company for a signature bonus of $2 million. By February 2016, PSCs for another five blocks had been signed with different oil companies in exchange for signature bonuses of $11.5 million. In December that year the ANP rescinded the license of Sinoangol STP, owner of a 55 percent stake in Block 2, on the grounds that the company had failed to meet its obligations agreed in the PSC signed in 2013. By 2019, PSCs for another three blocks were signed for which the ANP received signature bonuses of $12.5 million. In all nine blocks the ANP maintained working interests of between 10 percent and 15 percent. Between 2015 and 2019, the US company Kosmos was the major investor in the nine EEZ blocks. In 2017 Kosmos carried out seismic surveys in four EEZ blocks. However, by September 2020 Royal Dutch Shell had become the major investor in the EEZ after having acquired Kosmos’ interests in four blocks, while the latter only kept its stake in one block. New hopes of oil - but much more cautious ones than in 2003 - emerged in São Tomé when between April and July 2022, Shell and the Portuguese Galp Energia carried out exploratory drillings in Block 6, the first at all in the EEZ.50 However, in October that

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year the ANP declared that the initial testing results had not been conclusive as to the existence of commercially explorable oil in the acreage and, therefore, further analyses were necessary.51 While there is still a glimmer of hope for oil discovery in the EEZ, the prospects for the JDZ have become increasingly uncertain for the future. Oddly, despite the absence of any oil production, São Tomé and Príncipe has had eighteen different oil ministers since 1999. Regardless of the consecutive setbacks in São Tomé's oil sector, for many years international financial institutions maintained optimistic economic growth forecasts. In 2006 an IMF economist expected annual oil revenues to start with $26 million in 2012, reaching a peak of $396 million in 2015 and gradually declining thereafter.52 In a report published in 2012, the African Development Bank (AfDB) even asserted that “A key event in STP´s recent history was the discovery of commercially exploitable offshore oil reserves….large-scale oil production is expected to start as of 2016.”53 Based on such erroneous oil production forecasts, in October of the same year, the US online business news site Business Insider even predicted São Tomé and Príncipe as the world's fastest-growing economy over the period from 2013 to 2017.54 In July 2013 the IMF predicted GDP growth to jump from 5.5% in 2014 to 38.7% in 2015.55 However, the consecutive exits of Chevron, Addax, Sinopec and Total from the JDZ revealed such optimistic growth projections as sheer wishful thinking. In fact, it could not be taken for granted at all that São Tomé and Príncipe would become an oil producer in the near future. Finally, in a report released in January 2014, the IMF recognised that “Total’s withdrawal has diminished oil prospects for the foreseeable future.”56 As already mentioned, São Tomé and Príncipe’s oil prospects have entailed ideas to capitalise on the archipelago’s privileged geographic location by transforming it into a logistics hub for the entire oil-rich Gulf of Guinea region. In 1997 the government and a South African company signed an agreement on the construction of a large free-trade zone in Príncipe. However, as early as 2000 the company was forced to abandon the project due to a lack of investor interest. In 2008, a French shipping group reached an agreement with the government to construct a large deep-sea container port in São Tomé. The project has never got off the ground either since both parties failed to raise the necessary funds. In October 2015, the government entered into another agreement on the construction of a deepsea port with a Chinese company. As the company agreed to only finance $120 million of total investments of $800 million, São Tomé had to obtain the remainder elsewhere.57 Not surprisingly, there was nobody available to provide the considerable funds for the large project. Finally, in August 2022

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Politics and Economy since 1975

141

the government signed a third agreement on the construction of a deepwater port in São Tomé with the Ghanese company Safebond Africa. This time the construction was budgeted at $450 million. The agreement included a thirty-year management concession for the port authority ENAPORT. However, in December the new government announced it would revoke the agreement with Safebond, arguing that the company lacked international experience in ports management and had failed to provide the promised investments.58 For the time being, it seems highly unlikely that the deep-sea port will ever be constructed. Table 6-4. São Tomé e Príncipe: Official Development Assistance (ODA) conceded by members of DAC/OECD, annual average/annual amount in millions of US$ (2012 exchange rates), 1980-2013. 1980–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–13 2011 2012 2013 34 71 45 54 69 49 51 Source: OECD http://www.oecd.org/countries/saotomeandprincipe/aid-at-a-glance.htm

Table 6-5. São Tomé and Príncipe: net official development assistance received (current US$, in millions), 2014-21.

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2014 41.4

2015 49

2016 47

2017 40.2

2018 46.3

2019 50.8

2020 92

2021 69.8

Sources: Index Mundi (years 2014-18), OECD (years 2019-21) https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/s%C3%A3o-tom%C3%A9-andprincipe/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.CD https://www.oecd.org/development/financing-sustainabledevelopment/development-finance-data/aid-at-a-glance.htm

Table 6-6 São Tomé and Príncipe: ODA received, per capita in US$, 2006-21. Year Amount Year Amount

2006 139 2014 210

2007 301 2015 244

2008 272 2016 230

2009 171 2017 193

2010 276 2018 247

2011 395 2019 237

2012 267 2020 421

2013 277 2021 313

Source: World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.PC.ZS

Despite considerable flows of foreign aid in per capita terms and the adoption of a National Poverty Reduction Strategy in 2002, between 2000 and 2010 the proportion of the population living in poverty decreased only

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slightly, from 53.8 percent to 49.6 percent.59 In 2023 the World Bank announced a persistent high extreme poverty rate, with 15.6 percent of the population living on $2.15 per day.60 The decline in the plantations and the consecutive failures of agricultural development have contributed significantly to this scenario. Due to rural migration, urban poverty increased, while the share of the population engaged in agriculture has dropped accordingly. Urban poverty went up from 39.3 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2010.61 In 2012, the primary sector employed 24.2 percent of the population (30.2 percent in 2001), the secondary sector 17.0 percent (16.7 percent) and the tertiary sector 52.1 percent (53.1 percent). In 2021 the GDP share of the economic sectors was as follows: agriculture 13.95 percent; industry 11.86 percent, and services 72.25 percent.62 According to the World Bank, the unemployment rate fell from 17.6 percent in 2002 to 13.6 in 2012, but then increased again to 15.3 percent in 2022.63 However, usually a large section of the active population has been self-employed in the informal economy, mostly in precarious conditions. Poverty and unemployment have triggered an increase in emigration abroad, particularly to Angola, but also to Portugal and Gabon. According to official Portuguese figures, between 2000 and 2021 the Sãotomean immigrant community in Portugal increased from 5,437 to 11,234 people.64 However, emigration is not a possible outlet for all. Given the lack of economic opportunities and that about half of the population is younger than eighteen years old, “the country’s youth can transform from a potential demographic dividend to deeply entrenched social unrest.”65 In the last twenty years, São Tomé has successfully diversified the countries of origin of foreign assistance. In 1997, President Miguel Trovoada established diplomatic relations with Taipei in exchange for development assistance of $15 million annually. The decision was solely motivated by Taipei´s cheque-book diplomacy, rather than based on any genuine political considerations. In return, Beijing broke off the bilateral relations with São Tomé established in 1975. Thereafter, Taiwan was always one of the country's most important bilateral providers of development aid. In late 2013, following the reestablishment of commercial relations, China opened a trade mission in São Tomé. The Taiwanese became worried, but São Tomé's government denied any intentions of restoring full diplomatic relations with China and repeatedly assured Taiwan of their intention to maintain bilateral ties. At the time, São Tomé and Príncipe was one of only three African countries that maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan.66 Finally, three years later, in December 2016 São Tomé re-established diplomatic relations with Beijing recognising the “One China Principle”. Since then, China has replaced Taiwan as one

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of São Tomé’s main providers of development assistance. In December 2021 São Tomé joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative with the intention of attracting more Chinese investments in infrastructure. Other so-called non-traditional bilateral aid providers have been Angola, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Morocco, Rwanda, and India. Since 2015, Angola has surpassed Portugal as São Tomé´s principal bilateral creditor.67 Several donors provide direct budget support, either as grants or loans. Despite the intervention of many different aid providers, the government does not run any central agency to coordinate the inflow of development assistance. For São Tomé the priority is the multiplicity of aid flows, not necessarily their efficiency since they provide income opportunities. Neo-patrimonial politics and rent-seeking practices are thriving largely on external resources, while many donors are favouring their own bilateral interests.

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Concluding remarks The 2015 Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance placed São Tomé and Príncipe 13th out of 54 countries, while seven years later the country was ranked 11th. This relatively favourable position has largely been owed to safety, human rights, and human development indicators, while the country's economic scores are much less favourable.68 It is undisputed that since the introduction of multiparty democracy the country has largely enjoyed civil and political rights, except for the extrajudicial executions in November 2022. Legislative and presidential elections have been held regularly and so far, the government has changed seven times through the ballot box. However, democracy has not entailed strong governments, a sound economic policy, a more efficient administration, or a flourishing market economy. Rather, multiparty democracy has interacted with local political culture, which has been marked by neo-patrimonial politics and resource competition that contributed to political instability provoked by frequent changes of government until 2014. The resulting high turnover of ministers and senior officeholders has significantly affected government performance by frequent changes of priorities and interruption of previous projects. More stable governments in recent years have not fundamentally improved government performance, because the execution of projects and programmes has equally been affected by weak institutional capacities due to a lack of adequately skilled human resources and a bureaucratic culture characterised by inefficiency, mismanagement, sluggishness, and widespread corruption.

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Undoubtedly these features have contributed to the poor performance of the local economy, which in turn has perpetuated high levels of poverty. The plantation economy, once considered a valuable asset, has been dismantled due to its unviability. Consecutive reform programmes devised by foreign consultants have neither succeeded in raising cocoa outputs nor in diversifying agricultural exports. Tourism has performed relatively better, but until the 2010s the sector´s growth has lagged considerably behind government targets, and in 2020 tourism suffered a considerable setback due to the pandemic. While other alternative growth sectors have not materialised at all, in the 1990s oil suddenly appeared as a panacea for the country´s economic problems. However, at least so far, oil development has been another failure since several exploration drillings carried out between 2006 and 2012 in the JDZ did not discover commercially viable oil resources. The difference with other sectors of the economy is that the oil fiasco has been completely unrelated to local policy constraints. In any case, because of consecutive economic failures, for the time being, almost fifty years after independence, São Tomé and Príncipe´s economic viability will continue to depend almost entirely on foreign donors.

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NOTES

Chapter One

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1

Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470 -1655. The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992); Pablo B. Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers and Estates in São Tomé, West Africa (PhD thesis. New Haven: Yale University, 1986). 2 Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento no Arquipélago de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Séculos XV a XVII) (Lisbon: Grupo de Trabalho do Ministério da Educação para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1997). Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, Viagens de um piloto português do século XVI à costa de África e a São Tomé (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2000). Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “A estratégia inicial da colonização portuguesa no Golfo da Guiné” (paper presentation, V Congresso de Estudos Africanos no Mundo Ibérico, Covilhã, May 4-6, 2006). Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Mestiçagem, estratégicas de casamento e propriedade feminina no arquipélago de São Tomé e Príncipe nos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII,” Arquipélago 2, no. XIíXII (2007í2008): 49-72. Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Tráfico de escravos e conflitualidade: o arquipélago de São Tomé e Príncipe e o reino do Congo durante o século XVI,” Ciências & Letras. História da África: do continente à diáspora, no. 44 (2008): 55-76. Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Aprender os trópicos: plantações e trabalho escravo na Ilha de São Tomé,” in Para a história da escravatura insular nos séculos XV a XIX, eds. Margarida Vaz do Rego Machado, Rute Dias Gregoriano & Susana Serpa Silva (Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar - CHAM, 2013), 27-56. 3 Luís da Cunha Pinheiro, “O Povoamento. O Arquipélago do Golfo da Guiné: Fernando Pó, São Tomé, Príncipe e Ano Bom,” in A Colonização Atlântica. vol. 2, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2005). 4 Pedro José Paiva da Cunha, A Organização Económica em São Tomé (de início do povoamento a meados do século XVII) (MA diss., Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 2001) 5 Cristina Maria Seuanes Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé no século XVII (Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar - CHAM, 2000). 6 Caldeira, “A estratégia inicial,” 16. 7 Caldeira, “A estratégia inicial,” 22. 8 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 23; Iolanda Trovoada Aguiar, “São Tomé e Príncipe Plantas e Povos. Origens e Consequências,” in Actas do VI Congresso

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Notes

Luso-Africa-Brasileiro de Ciências Sociais. As Ciências Sociais nos Espaços de Língua Portuguesa, Balanços e Desafios (Porto: Faculdade de Letras, 2002), 361. 9 Catarina Madeira Santos, “A formação das estruturas fundiárias e a territorialização das tensões sociais: São Tomé, primeira metade do século XVI,” Studia, no. 54/55 (1996): 56. 10 Caldeira, “A estratégia inicial,” 23. 11 Caldeira, “Tráfico de escravos,” 75. 12 Luís de Albuquerque, A Ilha de São Tomé nos Séculos XV e XVI. Biblioteca da Expansão Portuguesa (Lisbon: Publicações Alfa, 1989), 47. 13 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 34. 14 Prior to January 1584 the ruler’s title was captain. 15 For an overview of the different contemporaneous Portuguese and Hebrew sources of this tragic event see Gerhard Seibert, “500 years of the manuscript of Valentim Fernandes, a Moravian book printer in Lisbon,” in Iberian and Slavonic Cultures: Contact and Comparison, ed. Beata ElĪbieta CieszyĔska (Lisbon: CompaRes, 2007), 85-86. 16 Albuquerque, A Ilha de São Tomé, 73 17 Forro, the majority Creole, and Angolar, the language spoken by descendants of a maroon community in São Tomé, Lung’Iê in Príncipe, and Fa d’Ambu in Annobón. See Tjerk Hagemeijer, “As Línguas de S. Tomé e Príncipe,” Revista de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola 1, no. 1 (2009): 1-27. 18 Isabel Castro Henriques, “Ser Escravo em S.Tomé no Século XVI: Uma outra Leitura de um Mesmo Quotidiano,” Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, nos. 6 & 7 (1987): 182. 19 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 49. 20 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 44. 21 The term is derived from the Portuguese carta de alforria, meaning letter of manumission. 22 Ramos Rui, “Rebelião e sociedade colonial: «alvoroços» e «levantamentos» em São Tomé (1545-1555),” Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, nos. 4 & 5 (1986): 24; Izequiel Batista de Sousa, São Tomé et Príncipe de 1485 à 1755: Une Société Coloniale Du Blanc au Noir (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 41. 23 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 52. 24 Teresa Madeira, “Estudo Morfológico da Cidade de São Tomé no Contexto Urbanístico das Cidades Insulares Atlânticas de Origem Portuguesa” (paper presentation, Colóquio Internacional Universo Urbanístico Português 1415-1822, Coimbra, March 2-6, 1999), 8. 25 Francisco C. Cunha Leão, “Cartografia e povoamento da ilha de São Tomé (14831510),” Revista do Instituto Geográfico e Cadastral, no. 5 (1985): 87. 26 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 33. 27 From 1522, when São Tomé reverted to the crown, the king’s factor exercised this right. 28 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 22. 29 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 29. 30 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 27.

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31 Hélder Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a Cultura do Café (Lisbon: Junta de Investigação do Ultramar, 1958), 54; 56. 32 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 57 ff. 33 There is no consensus about the origin of the coconut, as it might also have come from south-east Asia. See Aguiar, “Plantas e Povos,” 361. 34 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 18. 35 Pinheiro, “O Povoamento,” 258. 36 Madeira, “Estudo Morfológico,” 9. 37 Luís da Cunha Pinheiro, “As estruturas político-administrativas e os seus órgãos. O Arquipélago do Golfo da Guiné: Fernando Pó, São Tomé, Príncipe e Ano Bom,” in A Colonização Atlântica, vol. 2, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2005), 280. 38 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 85. 39 Ramos, “Rebelião,” 25. 40 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 42-43. 41 Garfield, A History, 107-109. 42 Before Van der Does came to São Tomé, he had attacked and looted Las Palmas (Grand Canary) and Gomera in the Canary Islands with an even larger fleet of seventy-three ships in late June / early July 1599. From Gomera, thirty-five ships returned to the Netherlands, while the others sailed via Cabo Verde and Angola to São Tomé. 43 Garfield, A History, 156. 44 Klaas Ratelband, “A Ilha de São Tomé segundo as fontes holandesas da primeira metade do Século XVII” (paper presentation, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, n.d.). 45 Johann von Luebelfing, Ein schön lustig Reiȕbuch (Ulm: Johann Meder, 1612 [facsimile]). 46 J.H.Abendanon, “De vlootaanval onder bevel van Jhr. Pieter van der Does op de Canarische Eilanden en het eiland Santo Thomé in 1599 volgens Nederlandsche en Spaansche Bronnen,” Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidskunde, 5th series, vol. 8 (1921): 19. 47 Abendanon, “De vlootaanval,“ 38. 48 Ratelband, “A Ilha de São Tomé,” 6. 49 Gerhard Seibert, Comrades, Clients and Cousins. Colonialism, Socialism and Democratization in São Tomé and Príncipe, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 29. 50 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 38. 51 For an English translation of the pilot’s report, see John William Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1942), 145 ff. 52 Ramos, “Rebelião,” 32. 53 Francisco José Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Junta de Investigação do Ultramar, 1961), 70. 54 Henriques, “Ser Escravo,” 55 Garfield, A History, 73; Cunha, A Organização Económica, 46; Abendanon, “De vlootaanval,” 38; Gaspar Barléu, História dos feitos recentemente praticados durante oito anos no Brasil (Belo Horizonte: Livraria Itatiaia Editora, 1974), 219. 56 Garfield, A History, 80.

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Caldeira, “Aprender nos trópicos”. Caldeira, “A Estratégia inicial,” 17. 59 Michael Ediagbonya, “A study of the Portuguese-Benin Trade Relations: Ughoton as a Benin Port (1485 -1506),” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 214. 60 John L. Vogt, “The Early São Tomé-Príncipe Slave Trade with Mina, 1500-1540” International Journal of African Historical Studies VI, no. 3 (1973): 453. 61 Gabriel de Avilez Rocha and David Wheat, “The Uncertain Atlantic: African and European Transformations of São Tomé Island c. 1533,” Culture & History Digital Journal 12, no. 2 (2023): 11. 62 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 79. 63 Jorge Fonseca, Escravos e Senhores na Lisboa Quinhentista. (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2010), 89. 64 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 79. 65 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 67. 66 Vogt, “The Early São Tomé-Príncipe Slave Trade,” 456. 67 Vogt, “The Early São Tomé-Príncipe Slave Trade,” 457. 68 Rocha and Wheat, “The Uncertain Atlantic,” 3. 69 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 19. 70 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 88. 71 Vogt, “The Early São Tomé-Príncipe Slave Trade,” 466. 72 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 80. 73 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 82. 74 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 99. 75 Luís da Cunha Pinheiro, “O século XVI. Uma economia bem sucedida. A economia: a produção açucareira, o comércio e o regate. A fiscalidade e as finanças. O Arquipélago do Golfo da Guiné: Fernando Pó, São Tomé, Príncipe e Ano Bom,” in A Colonização Atlântica, vol. 2, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2005), 347. 76 Caldeira, “Mestiçagem,” 66. 77 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 100. 78 Vogt, “The Early São Tomé-Príncipe Slave Trade,” 466. 79 Pinheiro, “O século XVI,” 352. 80 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 20. 81 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 58. 82 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 22. 83 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 104. 84 Cristina Maria Seuanes Serafim & Lúcia M.L. Tomás, “Os séculos XVII-XVIII. O lento declinar da economia. A economia: a produção açucareira, o comércio e o regate. A fiscalidade e as finanças. O Arquipélago do Golfo da Guiné: Fernando Pó, São Tomé, Príncipe e Ano Bom,” in A Colonização Atlântica, vol. 2, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2005), 374. 85 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 93. 86 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 28.

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87 Virginia Rau, “O açúcar de S.Tomé no segundo quartel do século XVII,” in Elementos de História da Ilha de S.Tomé, ed. Centro de Estudos de Marinha (Lisbon, 1971), 7. 88 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 18. 89 Santos, “A formação das estruturas fundiárias,” 60. 90 Santos, “A formação das estruturas fundiárias,” 71. 91 Ramos, “Rebelião,” 33. 92 Luís da Cunha Pinheiro, “A conflitualidade social e institucional em S.Tomé ao longo do século XVI” (paper presentation, Congresso Internacional Espaço Atlântico de Antigo Regime: poderes e sociedades, Universidade de Lisboa, November 1-5, 2005). 93 Linda M. Heywood & John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), 69. See also John Thornton, “Early Kongo-Portuguese Relations: A New Interpretation,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 191. 94 Original text reproduced in Albuquerque, A Ilha de São Tomé, 33; See also Caldeira, Viagens de um piloto português, 119. 95 Heywood & Thornton, Central Africans, 68. 96 Caldeira, Viagens de um piloto português, 119. 97 Henriques, “Ser Escravo,” 183; Cunha, “A Organização Económica,” 45; Sousa, São Tomé et Príncipe de 1485 à 1755, 29. Isabel Castro Henriques, São Tomé e Príncipe. A Invenção de Uma Sociedade (Lisbon: Vega 2000), 42. 98 Albuquerque, A Ilha de São Tomé, 79. 99 Caldeira, “Tráfico de escravos,” 73. 100 Caldeira, “Tráfico de escravos,” 74. 101 Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé, 203; Jorge Fonseca, “Uma negra são-tomense na Lisboa quinhentista: Simoa Godinho, proprietária, negociante de açúcar e mecenas da Misericórdia,” Faces de Eva. Estudos sobre a Mulher, no. 42 (2020): 106. 102 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 83. 103 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 17. 104 Garfield, A History, 80. 105 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 60. 106 Garfield, A History, 73. 107 Stuart B. Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Tropical Babylons. Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 18. 108 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 47. 109 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 83. 110 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 17. 111 Brásio, “Relatione,” 523. 112 Serafim & Tomás, “Os séculos XVII-XVIII,” 358. 113 Garfield, A History, 70. 114 Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé, 225. 115 Rau, “O açúcar de S.Tomé,” 8-9. 116 Garfield, A History, 64. 117 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 117.

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Garfield, A History, 73. Rau, “O açúcar de S.Tomé,” 20. 120 Pinheiro, “O século XVI,” 337. 121 Rau, “O açúcar de S.Tomé,” 22. 122 Garfield, A History, 72. 123 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 84. 124 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 120. 125 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 62. 126 Lains e Silva. São Tomé e Príncipe, 84. 127 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 84. 128 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 84. 129 Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe, 85. 130 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 60. 131 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 60. 132 Cunha, A Organização Económica, 110. 133 João Lúcio de Azevedo, Épocas de Portugal Económico, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Livraria Clássica, 1947) quoted in Francisco José Tenreiro, “Descrição da ilha de S. Tomé no século XVI’,” Garcia de Orta 1, no. 2 (1953): 227. 134 Garfield, A History, 74. 135 Garfield, A History, 75. 136 Schwartz, “Introduction,” 18. 137 Ratelband, “A Ilha de São Tomé,”. 138 “Relatione Uenuta Dall’ Isola di S.Tomé,” in Monumenta Missionária Africana. África Ocidental (1570-1599), vol. 3, ed. António Brásio (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1953), 521-523. 139 Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé, 197. 140 Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé, 200. 141 Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé, 210. 142 Serafim, As Ilhas de São Tomé, 199. 143 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 85. 144 Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento, 27. 145 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 98.

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Luís de Albuquerque, A Ilha de São Tomé nos Séculos XV e XVI. Biblioteca da Expansão Portuguesa (Lisbon: Publicações Alfa, 1989), 66-91. 2 Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Uma ilha quase desconhecida. Notas para a história de Ano Bom,” Studia Africana, no. 17 (2006): 106, footnote 20. 3 Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência à Escravatura na Ilha São Tomé (Séculos XVI a XVIII),” Africana Studia, no. 7 (2004): 109. 4 Rui Ramos, “Rebelião e sociedade colonial: «alvoroços» e «levantamentos» em São Tomé (1545-1555),” Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, nos. 4/5 (1986): 35.

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5

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Catarina Madeira Santos, “A formação das estruturas fundiárias e a territorialização das tensões sociais: São Tomé, primeira metade do século XVI,” Studia, nos. 54/55 (1996): 77. 6 Ramos, “Rebelião,” 35. 7 Santos, “A formação,” 81. 8 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 109. 9 Fernando Ferreira da Costa, “A Ilha de S.Tomé. Um reino de escravos na linha do Equador,” História, no. 50 (1982): 67-68. 10 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 110. 11 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 111. 12 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 112. 13 Ramos, “Rebelião,” 35. 14 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 121. 15 Hélder Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a Cultura do Café (Lisbon: Junta de Investigação do Ultramar, 1958), 86. 16 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 111. 17 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras Formas de Resistência,” 113. 18 Klaas Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645-1647) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), 112. 19 Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Do refúgio nos picos da ilha de São Tomé à absorção colonial: a questão dos angolares,” Biblos. Revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, no. 4 (2018), 135. 20 Antônio de Almeida, “Da Origem dos angolares habitantes da Ilha de S. Tomé” Separata das "Memórias" (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, 1962), 10. 21 Caldeira, “Do refúgio nos picos,” 136. 22 Alfredo Gomes Dias & Augusto do Nascimento Diniz, “Os angolares: da autonomia à inserção na sociedade colonial (segunda metade do século XLX),” Ler História, no. 13 (1988): 53. 23 Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, Mulheres, Sexualidade e Casamento no Arquipélago de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Séculos XV a XVII) (Lisbon: Grupo de Trabalho do Ministério da Educação para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1997), 95. 24 Caldeira, “Rebelião e outras formas de resistência,” 123. 25 Dias & Diniz, “Os angolares,” 55. 26 Rodrigo de Aguiar Amaral, Sob o paradigma da diferença: Estratégias de negociação, submissão e rebeldia entre elite e subalternos no Rio de Janeiro e em São Tomé e Príncipe (c.1750-c.1850) (PhD diss., Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ, 2010): cxviii-cxix. 27 Amaral, Sob o paradigma da diferença, cxxi-cxxiii. 28 Dias & Diniz, “Os angolares,” 71. 29 Francisco Stockler, “Os Angolares,” Revista Illustrada As Colónias Portuguesas I, no. 10 (1883), 112. 30 Francisco Stockler, “O Povo dos Angolares,” Revista Illustrada As Colónias Portuguesas II, no. 4 (1884), 177. 31 Almada Negreiros, História Ethnographica da Ilha de S.Thomé (Lisbon: Antiga Casa Bertrand, 1895), 296.

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32 Manuel J.S. Gonçalves, “Angolares. Uma aproximação antropológica,” Revista da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa IX, no. 34 (1973): 79. 33 Maria Nazaré Ceita, Ensaio para uma reconstituição histórico-antropológica dos Angolares de S. Tomé (Postgraduate diss., Lisbon: CEA/ISCTE, 1991), 1. 34 António de Almeida, “Contribuição para o estudo da antropologia física dos «Angolares» (Ilha de São Tomé)” in Conferência Internacional dos Africanistas Ocidentais. Comunicações, 6ª sessão, vol. V (n.p.: CCTA/CSA, 1956), 11. 35 Instituto Nacional de Estatística, IV Recenseamento Geral da População e Habitação 2012 (São Tomé, 2013). 36 Ceita, Ensaio, 23. 37 Ceita, Ensaio, 26. 38 Ceita, Ensaio, 30. 39 Lucas Pereira de Araújo e Azevedo, Memórias da Ilha de Sam Thomé (São Tomé: Museu Nacional de São Tomé e Príncipe, 1978), 8. 40 António Ambrósio, Subsídios para a História de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1984), 37. 41 Carlos Filomeno Azevedo Agostinho das Neves, São Tomé na segunda metade do século XVIII (Funchal: Secretaria Regional do Turismo, Cultura e Emigração, 1989), 287. 42 Neves, São Tomé, 293. 43 Neves, São Tomé, 401-402; 408. 44 Caldeira, “Do refúgio nos picos,”130. 45 Raimundo José da Cunha Matos, Corographia Histórica das Ilhas de S. Thomé, Príncipe, Anno Bom e Fernando Pó 4th ed. (São Tomé: Imprensa Nacional, 1916 [1815]). 46 Raimundo José da Cunha Matos, Compêndio Histórico das Possessões de Portugal na África (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Justiça e Negócios Interiores, 1963), 104. 47 Quoted by Francisco Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1961), 72. 48 A.F. Nogueira, A Ilha de S.Thomé. A Questão Bancária no Ultramar e o Nosso Problema Colonial (Lisbon: Typ. do jornal As Colónias Portuguezas, 1893), 36. 49 Richard Greef, “Die Angolares-Neger der Insel São Thomé,“ Globus. lllustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XLII, no. 24 (1882): 377. 50 Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé,73; Gonçalves, “Angolares”, 78; Costa, “Um reino de escravos,” História, 66-78. Ferreira da Costa, “A política portuguesa em face do ‘reino angolar’ de S.Tomé,” Diário de Notícias, February 1, 1983. 51 He was father of the famous Portuguese painter and writer José de Almada Negreiros (1893-1970), who was born in São Tomé. 52 Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 296; 302. 53 Mendes Corrêa, Separata do Jornal do Médico, 1945, quoted by Ceita, “Ensaio,” 11. 54 Antônio de Almeida, “Da origem dos angolares,” 17. 55 Quoted by Fernando Castelo-Branco, “Subsídios para o estudo dos «angolares» de S.Tomé,” Studia, no. 33 (1971): 149-159. 56 Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé, 70.

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57 Drawn in ca. 1660 by Johann Vingboons (1617-70), cartographer of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). 58 Azevedo, Memórias. 59 Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé, 120. 60 Castelo-Branco, “Subsídios,” 158. 61 Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993), 120. 62 Tony Hodges & Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe. From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988), 60. 63 Hodges & Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe, 28. 64 Isabel Castro Henriques, Os Pilares da Diferença. Relações Portugal-África. Séculos XV-XX (Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2004), 204. 65 Henriques, Os Pilares, 218. 66 Jan Vansina, “Quilombos on São Tomé, or in Search of original sources,” History in África, no. 23 (1996): 457. 67 Isabel Castro Henriques, São Tomé e Príncipe. A Invenção de Uma Sociedade (Lisbon: Vega 2000), 59. 68 Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina. Sugestões de uma viagem à procura dos constantes portugueses de caracter e acção (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora/MEC, 1980 [1953]), 311. 69 Ministério de Exército, interrogation report of Filipe Pereira da Costa, p. 230 ff, October 25, 1956. 70 Sobreviver no Mar dos Tornados. 38 Dias numa Piroga. Jorge Trabulo Marques, Padrão dos Descobrimentos, 10 de Março a 10 de Abril de 1999 (Lisbon: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 1999). 71 Esboço Histórico das Ilhas de S.Tomé e Príncipe (São Tomé: Imprensa Nacional, 1975), 23. 72 Esboço Histórico, 22. 73 Carlos Benigno da Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe: do Colonialismo à Independência (Lisbon: Moraes Editores, 1975), 19-20. 74 Carlos Neves, “História de S.Tomé e Príncipe,” Revolução, no. 30, January 21, 1977. 75 História da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe. Esboço do desenvolvimento social, económico, político e cultural (unpublished manuscript n.p., 1985), 274. 76 Odair Baía, “O Estado Angolar - (Utopia vs. Realidade),” Téla Nón, December 19, 2011, accessed October 8, 2023, https://www.telanon.info/cultura/2011/12/19/9306/o-estado-angolar-utopia-vsrealidade/. 77 Luiz Ivens Ferraz, “A Linguistic Appraisal of Angolar,” in In Memoriam Antônio Jorge Dias vol. II (Lisbon: Instituto de Alta Cultura, 1974), 80. 78 Luiz Ivens Ferraz, The Creole of São Tomé (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1979), 9. 79 Philippe Maurer, “L'apport lexical bantou en angolar,“ Afrikanische Arbeitspapiere (AAP) 29 (1992): 163.

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80

Gerardo A. Lorenzino, “Linguistic, Historical and Ethnographic Evidence on the Formation of the Angolares, a Maroon-Descendant Community in São Tomé (West Africa),” Portuguese Studies Review 16, nos. 1-2 (2007): 221. 81Gerardo A. Lorenzino, The Angolar Creole Portuguese of São Tomé: its Grammar and Sociolinguistic History (PhD diss., New York: The City University of New York, 1998), 69; Lorenzino, “Linguistic,” 225. 82 The other two Creole languages are Lung’ie on Príncipe and Fa d’Ambô on Annobón Island (Equatorial Guinea). 83 Tjerk Hagemeijer, “As Línguas de S. Tomé e Príncipe,” Revista de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola 1, no. 1 (2009): 5; Marie-Eve Bouchard, “The vitality of Angolar. A study of attitudes on São Tomé Island,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 37, no. 1 (2022): 164. 84 The local designation of children of Angolan, Mozambican, and Cabo Verdean contract workers born in São Tomé. 85 Gil Tomás, Gil et al., “The Peopling of São Tomé (Gulf of Guinea): Origins of Slave Settlers and Admixture with the Portuguese,” Human Biology 74, no.5 (2002): 397-411; M.J. Trovoada et al., “Evidence for population sub-structuring in São Tomé e Príncipe as inferred from Y-chromosome STP analysis,” Annals of Human Genetics, no. 65 (2001): 271-83. 86 M.J. Trovoada et al., “Pattern of mtDNA Variation in Three Populations from São Tomé e Príncipe,” Annals of Human Genetics, no. 68 (2003): 50. 87 João Almeida, Anne-Maria Fehn, Margarida Ferreira, Teresa Machado, Tjerk Hagemeijer, Jorge Rocha, and Magdalena Gayá-Vidal, “The Genes of Freedom: Genome-Wide Insights into Marronage, Admixture and Ethnogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea,” Genes 12, no. 6 (2021): 3; 13. 88 Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470 -1655. The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 141. 89 Garfield, A History, 137. 90 Fondo Confalonieri, vol. 33, fls. 372-372 v. The document was first published by António Brásio, Monumenta Missionária Africana. África Ocidental (1570-1599) III (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1953), 521-523. See also Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, Relação do Descobrimento da Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar – CHAM, 2006), 277-79. 91 See Caldeira, Relação, 71-78. 92 Caldeira, Relação, 72, footnote 86. 93 Crioulos cativos in the original, meaning slaves born in the island. 94 According to the Vatican document Amador belonged to Don Fernando. 95 This number is only given in the Vatican document. 96 These figures are only indicated in the Vatican document. 97 This could mean that the maroons participated in the fighting, since elsewhere in his manuscript Pinto refers to the runaway slaves as ‘negros Angola’ (Caldeira, Relação, 66). The Vatican document does not mention Angola Negroes at all. 98 According to the Vatican report, whereas Pinto does not give any information of the numbers of slaves and reports only one dead defendant, a slave called António Carvalho, belonging to Leonor Luís.

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99

This date appears only in the Vatican document. No date at all is given in Pinto’s account of the revolt. 100 According to the Vatican document. Pinto’s account claims more than seventy mills were destroyed. In a letter of the town council to the king dated December 23, 1599, the number of destroyed sugar mills given is also “more than seventy.” 101 Luiz Felipe de Alencastro. O Trato dos Viventes. Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. Séculos XVI e XVII 6th ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010), 67-68. 102 Caldeira, Relação, 34. 103 Matos, Corographia Histórica, 16. 104 Matos, Compêndio Histórico, 110. 105 José Joaquim Lopes de Lima, Ensaios sobre a statistica das possessões portuguezas na Africa occidental e oriental (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1844), XI. 106 Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 61 107 Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé, 73. 108 Ernesto J. de C. e Vasconcellos, São Tomé e Principe: estudo elementar de geografia física, económica e politica (Lisbon: Tip. da Cooperativa Militar, 1918), 9. 109 O Manual do Pioneiro (São Tomé: Ministério de Informação e Cultura de São Tomé e Príncipe, s.d.) 110 “Amador” (2003) published in Alda Espírito Santo, O Coral das Ilhas (São Tomé: UNEAS, 2006), 43-44. 111 Law no. 6 of June 14, 2004.

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Chapter Three 1

Francisco Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Junta das Investigações do Ultramar, 1961), 75. 2 António Ambrósio, Subsídios para a História de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1984), 15. 3 Patrícia Gomes Lucas, “The demography of São Tomé and Príncipe (1758-1922): preliminary approaches to an insular slave society,” Anais de História de Além-Mar XVI (2015): 64. 4 Carlos Agostinho das Neves & Maria Nazaré de Ceita, História de S.Tomé e Príncipe. Breve Síntese (São Tomé: n.p., 2004), 50. 5 Almada Negreiros, História Ethnographica da Ilha de S.Thomé (Lisbon: Antiga Casa Bertrand, 1895); Augusto Nascimento, “Relações entre o Brasil e S.Tomé e Príncipe: declínio e Esquecimento,” in As Ilhas e o Brasil, ed. Região Autónoma da Madeira (Funchal: Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico - CEHA, 2000), 377. 6 Tony Hodges & Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe. From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988), 27. 7 Hodges & Newitt, From Plantation Economy, 28. 8 Augusto Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano nas Roças de S.Tomé e Príncipe. De finais de oitocentos a meados de novecentos (Lisbon: self-published, 2002), 59.

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9

Manuel Ferreira Ribeiro, A Província de S. Thomé e Príncipe e suas Dependência (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1877), 448-49. 10 Ambrósio, Subsídios, 14-16. 11 A.F. Nogueira, A Ilha de S.Thomé. A Questão Bancária no Ultramar e o Nosso Problema Colonial (Lisbon: Typ. do jornal As Colónias Portuguezas, 1893), 45. 12 Nogueira, A Ilha de S.Thomé, 28-29. 13 Ribeiro, A Província, 484-48. 14 Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 83. 15 Ribeiro, A Província, 529-30. 16 In comparison, in 1950 São Tomé town had a total population of only 2,605, 434 of whom were white (Tenreiro, A Ilha, 209). 17 Ribeiro, A Província, 394-96; 524. 18 Ambrósio, Subsídios, 212. 19 Francisco Mantero, A Mão d’ Obra em São Thomé e Príncipe (Lisbon, 1910), 11. 20 Jorge Forjaz, Genealogias de São Tomé e Príncipe. Subsídios (Lisbon: Dislivro, 2011). 21 Forjaz, Genealogias, 524-25. 22 José Brandão Pereira de Melo, Maria Correira. A Princesa Negra do Príncipe (1788-1861) (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1944), 12. 23 Forjaz, Genealogias, 525-30. 24 Manuel Ferreira Ribeiro, I.º Barão d’Água Izé João Maria de Sousa e Almeida. Traços Bibliographicos (Lisbon: Pap. Estevão Nunes & Filhos, 1901), 23. 25 Forjaz, Genealogias, 530-34. 26 Conde de Sousa e Faro, A Ilha de S.Thomé e a Roça Agua-Izé (Lisbon: Annuário Commercial, 1908), 163. 27 Forjaz, Genealogias, 535-38. 28 In 1912 the company was renamed Sociedade Agrícola Valle Flôr. 29 Forjaz, Genealogias, 584-86. 30 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 75. 31 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 81. 32 Ribeiro, A Província, 415. 33 William-Gervase Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs of Labour on the Cocoa Plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1875-1914,” Portuguese Studies 6 (1990): 157. 34 António Pinto de Miranda Guedes, “Viação em S.Thomé,” Boletim da Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa, 20, nos. 1-6 (1902): 302; 305; 331. 35 Salomão Vieira, Caminhos-de-Ferro em S.Tomé e Príncipe. O Caminho-de-Ferro do Estado e os Caminhos-de-Ferro das Roças (São Tomé: UNEAS, 2005), 229-30. 36 Vieira, Caminhos-de-Ferro, 214; 315-16. 37 Hodges & Newitt, From Plantation Colony, 32-33. 38 José Eduardo Mendes Ferrão, “O cacau em São Tomé e Príncipe,” in São Tomé. Ponto de Partida, ed. Instituto Marquês de Valle Flôr (IMVF) (Lisbon: Caves Ferreira Publicações, 2008), 70. 39 História da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe. Esboço do desenvolvimento social, económico, político e cultural, unpublished manuscript (n.p.: 1985), 133.

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Ferrão, “O cacau,” 71. Hodges & Newitt, From Plantation Economy, 30. 42 Hodges & Newitt, From Plantation Economy, 36. 43 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 19. 44 Augusto Nascimento, Atlas da Lusofonia. São Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Prefácio, 2008), 35. 45 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 152. 46 Ricardo Vaz Monteiro, “A Província de São Tomé e Príncipe na Colonização Portuguesa,” in Conferência Internacional dos Africanistas Ocidentais: 6ª sessão. 5º volume. Comunicações (n.p.: CCTA/CSA, 1956), 310. 47 Ferrão, “O cacau,” 91. 48 História, 129-30. 49 Ribeiro, A Província, 421. 50 Augusto Nascimento, “São Tomé e Príncipe” in O Império Africano 1825-1890, eds. Valentim Alexandre & Jill Dias (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 304. 51 Mantero, A Mão d’Obra. 52 Abel Augusto Mendes da Costa Neves, “A mão de obra para S.Tomé e Príncipe,” Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, no. 43 (1929): 75. 53 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 103. 54 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 151. 55 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 172. 56 Augusto Nascimento, Atlas da Lusofonia, 32. 57 Nascimento, “São Tome e Príncipe,” 285. 58 Robert Nii Nartey, From Slave to Serviçal: Labor in the plantation economy of São Tomé and Príncipe: 1876-1932 (Ph.D. diss., Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois, 1986), 75. 59 Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S. Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993), 89. 60 Pablo B. Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers and Estates in São Tomé, West Africa (PhD diss., New Haven: Yale University, 1986), 155. 61 Archer Philip Crouch, Glimpses of Feverland: or A Cruise in West African Waters (London: Sampson Low, 1889), 175. 62 Crouch, Glimpses of Feverland, 176. 63 Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 108. 64 Mantero, Mão d’Obra, 8. 65 José Duarte Junqueira Rato, “Como foi feita a Província de S.Tomé e Príncipe – Os campinhos para o futoro,” Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, no. 43 (1929), 18-19. 66 Oliveira, A Economia, 121. 67 San Thomé and Príncipe (London: Historical Section of the Foreign Office, 1919), 21. 68 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 570. Ricardo Vaz Monteiro, Colónia de S. Tomé e Príncipe. Relatório Anual do Governador (São Tomé: Imprensa Nacional, 1935), 33. 69 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 164. 41

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70

Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 168. Maria Nazaré de Ceita. A Curadoria Geral dos Serviçais e Colonos (S. Tomé e Príncipe 1875/1926) (Vila Nova de Famalicão: Editorial Novembro, 2021), 138. 72 Augusto Nascimento, “A Liga dos Interesses Indígenas de S. Tomé e Príncipe (1910-1926),” Arquipélago – História III (1999): 422. 73 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 113. 74 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 102-03. 75 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 191. 76 For Príncipe Island, there are no figures available regarding Angolans from 190220, Cabo Verdeans from 1903-15, and Mozambicans from 1915-20. Before 1915, Mozambicans were not recruited for Príncipe. 77 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 154. 78 Neves, “A mão de obra,” 42. 79 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 113. 80 Oliveira, A Economia, 250. 81 Oliveira, A Economia, 244. 82 Nascimento, “São Tomé e Príncipe,” 300. 83 Nogueira, A Ilha de S. Thomé, 97; Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 164. 84 Nogueira, A Ilha de S. Thomé, 36-37. 85 Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 11; 70; 260. 86 Neves, “A mão de obra,” 64. 87 Faro, A Ilha de S. Thomé, 118-23. 88 Nartey, From Slave to Serviçal, 173. 89 Ceita, A Curadoria Geral, 87. 90 Ferrão, “O cacau,” 989. 91 Mantero, A Mão d’Obra, 179. 92 Mário Pinto de Andrade, Origens do Nacionalismo Africano, (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1997), 172; Pedro Varela & José Augusto Pereira, “As origens do movimento negro em Portugal (1911-1933): uma geração pan-Africanista e antiracista,” Revista História (São Paulo), no. 179 (2020): 23. 93 Forjaz, Genealogias, 478. 94 Jerónimo Paiva de Carvalho, Alma Negra! Depoimento sobre a questão dos serviçais de S.Tomé (Porto: Tipografia Progresso, 1912). 95 For more details on this anti-slavery campaign, see Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012). 96 S. Thomé and Príncipe Emigration Society, Native Labour in West Africa (Lisbon: Papelaria Luso-Brasileira, 1921). 97 Oliveira, A Economia, 109. 98 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Labour Conditions in the Plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. 1875-1914,” Slavery & Abolition 14, no. 1 (1993): 156. 99 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 240. 100 Joaquim Pedro Vieira Judice Biker, “Ilha de S.Tomé,” Revista Portuguesa Colonial e Marítima 1, no. 5 (1897), 309. 101 Oliveira, A Economia, 257. 102 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 156. 103 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,”163; Nartey, From Slave to Serviçal, 124.

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Carvalho, Alma Negra!, 9. Negreiros, História Ethnographica, 261. 106 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 157. 107 Rato, “Como foi feita,” 18. 108 Oliveira, A Economia, 257. 109 Neves, “A mão de obra,” 75. 110 Armindo Ceita de Espírito Santo, História de São Tomé e Príncipe. De meados do século XIX ao fim do regime colonial (1852-1974). As plantações, economia, cultura e religião (Lisbon: Nimba Edições, 2023), 234. 111 Oliveira, A Economia, 244-45. 112 Clarence-Smith, “Labour Conditions,” 157. 113 Oliveira, A Economia, 246; 248. 114 Ceita, A Curadoria Geral, 161. 115 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,”167-68. 116 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 208. 117 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 419. 118 Carvalho, Alma Negra!, 11. 119 Carvalho, Alma Negra!, 26. 120 Ceita, A Curadoria Geral, 139. 121 Carvalho, Alma Negra!, 25. 122 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 306. 123 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 312. 124 Clarence-Smith, “Labour Conditions,”153. 125 Nartey, From Slave to Serviçal, 113-14. 126 Oliveira, A Economia, 137. 127 Clarence-Smith, “The Hidden Costs,” 166. 128 Clarence-Smith, “Labour Conditions,” 155. 129 Nascimento, Poderes e Quotidiano, 250. 130 Tenreiro, A Ilha, 191. 131 Carvalho, Alma Negra!, 14. 132 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 314.

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Chapter Four 1

The Portuguese missions abroad sent to the Foreign Ministry in Lisbon copies of the articles published by the following newspapers: The New York Times, February 9, 1953; News Chronical (UK), February 9, 1953; Daily Worker (UK), February 9, 1953; Daily Express (UK), February 9, 1953; El Dia (Montevideo), February 9, 1953; Le Peuple (Brussels), February 9, 1953; Combat (Paris), February 9, 1953; The Times (UK), February 10, 1953; The Hindu (Madras), February 10, 1953; and Le Monde (Paris), February 12, 1953. I owe these press cuttings to Carlos Pacheco of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil. 2 Basil Davidson, African Awakening (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), 224-32; Buanga Fele, “Massacres a São Tomé,” Présence Africaine, no. 1-2 (1955): 146-52. From 1955 to 1958 Mário Pinto de Andrade was secretary of the journal Présence

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Africaine. He was president and secretary general of the MPLA from 1959 to 1962 and from 1962 to 1972 respectively. 3 Edwin S. Munger, African Field Reports 1952-1961 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1961), 127-30. 4 René Pelissier, “La ‘guerre’ de Batepá (São Tomé – février 1953),” Revue française d'etudes africaines, no. 73 (1972): 74-88. Previously, he had mentioned the massacre in his small article “São Tomé: Outpost of Portuguese Colonialism and Lifeline to Biafra,” Africa Report 15, no. 1 (1970): 27. 5 L. M. Denny & Donald I. Ray, São Tomé and Príncipe. Politics, Economics and Society. Marxist Regimes (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), 184; Fernando Marques da Costa & Natália Falé, Guia Político dos PALOP (Lisbon: Fragmento, 1992), 189. This factual error probably stems from an article with the same assertion published in Africa Contemporary Record 1974-1975: B 598-B 601. 6 Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S.Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993). 7 Only civil servants and certain income groups could vote. 8 Pablo B. Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers and Estates in São Tomé, West Africa (PhD thesis, New Haven: Yale University, 1986), 325. 9 Francisco Tenreiro, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1961), 191. 10 William A. Cadbury, Os Serviçais de S. Tomé, trans. Alfredo Henrique da Silva (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand, 1910), 17-18. 11 He was promoted to major in July 1945 and to lieutenant-colonel in February 1951. 12 História da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe. Esboço do desenvolvimento social, económico, político e cultural (n.p.: unpublished manuscript, 1985), 205. 13 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 323. 14 According to Carlos de Sousa Gorgulho, Relatório do Governador da Colónia de S.Tomé e Príncipe. Referente aos anos de 1946 e 1947 (São Tomé: Imprensa Nacional, 1948), 30, the serviçais stole cash crops and exchanged them with the Forros for gin. 15 Carlos Espírito Santo, A Guerra da Trindade (Lisbon: Cooperação, 2003), 70-71. 16 James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 318. 17 História, 208. 18 Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina. Sugestões de uma viagem à procuradas constantes portuguesas de caráter e ação (Rio de Janeiro, 1980), 314. 19 Caixa de Aposentações e Pensões. 20 The number of apprentices increased from sixty-seven in 1950 to seventy-five in 1953. They were trained in the professions of carpenter-furniture maker, locksmithblacksmith, mechanic, electrician, and printer (Oliveira, A Economia, 171). 21 In that year it was attended by forty students (Oliveira, A Economia, 171).

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22 Arquivo Histórico Diplomático (AHD), Víctor Manuel Pereira de Castro, Inquérito aos Acontecimentos ocorridos em S.Tomé em Fevereiro de 1953. Relatório Final. Lisbon, July 1975, 259. 23 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 325. 24 Salustino da Graça do Espírito Santo (1894-1965) was a trained agronomist and married to Maria de Céu Figueiredo, a white Portuguese teacher. During his student life in Lisbon, he was the first secretary of the Liga Africana, a Pan-Africanist organisation created in December 1919 and associated with William Du Bois’ (1868-1962) National Association of the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), created in 1909. Due to his student activism the colonial government refused him a job in the bureaucracy. 25 He was the owner of the roças Santy and Santa Clara located close to Trindade. 26 The owner of the Roça Monte Alegre. 27 The owner of the Roça Mestre António near Santana. 28 A mestizo who owned the Roça Água Seca in the Trindade region. 29 Associação de Socorros Mútuos, founded by local Creoles in 1933. 30 He could return to São Tomé only in June 1953, after Gorgulho’s dismissal. 31 Castro, Inquérito, 357-78. 32 Gorgulho, Relatório, 232-33. 33 História, 211, Maria Nazaré Ceita, “Cidades, construção e hierarquização dos espaços e dos homens (o caso de S.Tomé e Príncipe),” in Actas do Colóquio ‘Construção e Ensino da História de África (Lisbon: Fundação Gulbenkian, 1994), 311. 34 Letter written by José dos Santos dated May 10, 1955, to the Minister of the Army. He complained that “when the functionary summoned them (the Forros) for duty they threatened him with death if he would return.” 35 José de Deus Lima, História do Massacre de 1953 em S.Tomé e Príncipe. Em Busca da Nossa Verdadeira História (São Tomé: self-publishing, 2002), 44. 36 Salgueiro Rêgo, Memórias de um Ajudante-de-Campo e Comandante da Polícia II (Lisbon: Tipografia Freitas,1967), 10. 37 Joaquim Moreira, “Ressuscitados os acontecimentos de Batepá,” Notícia (Luanda), August 3, 1974, 26. 38 On December 27, 1944, on the path between the Micondó estate, where he was employed, and the dependency Angobó, the then seventeen-year-old agricultural worker José Joaquim, stabbed the guard and serviçal Caivua to death with his machete. In October 1945 a court condemned him to ten years deportation in Forte Roçadas (Angola). 39 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 326. 40 I Plano de Fomento, law no. 2,058 of December 29, 1952. 41 In 1950 the total population was 61,159, of which 1,152 whites, 4,300 mestizos, 54,697 blacks, one Chinese, and nine Indians (Tenreiro, A Ilha, 103). On December 31, 1950, a total of 23,613 serviçais worked on the plantations, of which 2,696 were Tongas, 9,680 Angolans, 4,917 Mozambicans, and 6,320 Cabo Verdeans (Tenreiro, A Ilha, 191). 42 Curadoria dos Serviçais e Indígenas de São Tomé e Príncipe.

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43 “A colonização em S.Tomé. ‘A Voz de S.Tomé’ entrevista o Sr. Inspector Franco Rodrigues,” A Voz de S.Tomé IV, no. 91, January 8, 1953, 1; 4. 44 Diário da Sessões, no. 189, V Legislativa 1949-53, 4.ª Sessão legislativa, January 17, 1953, 491. 45 Moreira, “Ressuscitados,” 25. 46 História, 220. 47 Fele, “Massacres,” 150, maintains that it was Gorgulho himself who spread the pamphlets to provoke the unrest. The lawyer Pereira de Castro, who inquired into the case in 1974, also shares this opinion (personal communication, May 5, 1995). 48 “Nota Oficiosa,” A Voz de S.Tomé IV, no. 95, February 5, 1953, 1. 49 “Os Acontecimentos,” A Voz de S.Tomé IV, no. 96, February 12, 1953, 1. 50 Castro, O sistema colonial, 206; 427. 51 A civil servant in the treasury (Serviços de Fazenda e Contabilidade). 52 A civil servant and the president of the Sporting Club of São Tomé. 53 Manuel Guadalupe Pires dos Santos Gomes, head of the administrative staff. 54 Arquivo Histórico Militar (AHM), Lisbon, 2nd Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 21, 1953, 2. 55 Let's go hunt monkeys! (José Deus Lima, “As causas do massacre de 1953” [paper presented at Conferência sobre A História do Massacre de 1953, São Tomé, February 2, 1993]). 56 História, 224. 57 “Os Acontecimentos,” 1. 58 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 245. 59 Lima, “As causas”. 60 Lima, “As causas”. 61 AHM, Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 7, 1953, 11; 24. 62 AHM, 2nd Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 21, 1953, 3. 63 Lima, “As causas”. 64 Lima, “As causas”. 65 Proclamation of the Military Command of São Tomé of February 6, 1953. 66 Capitania dos Portos. 67 AHM, Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 7, 1953, 11 68 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 322. 69 Declaration of Jorge Baptista de Sousa of May 27, 1953. 70 ANTT (Arquivos Nacionais Torre de Tombo), sub-delegation of the PIDE/DGS in São Tomé, SCC1(2)-GU-DSI-2nd, no. 8969-8970, report no. 3 of May 31, 1955, in a letter from the Portuguese lawyer Manuel Pinho de Almeida of Lobito (Angola), dated June 2, 1955, to Prime Minister Salazar. In 1955, this lawyer defended some of the accused whites involved in the massacre and on that occasion he investigated the events on his own initiative. 71 In 1979 renamed Agostinho Neto to render homage to Angola's first head of state (1975-79). 72 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 209-10. 73 The nickname of João Viegas Manuel e Lima, a Forro shopkeeper from Trindade. 74 Manuel Quaresma Vaz Campos.

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75 Besides Inglês and Joaquim da Trindade Tiny: Victorino da Fonseca Aguiar, Manuel Curto Alberto dos Santos Cuna, José Ribeiro, Manuel do Sacramento Quintas da Graça, Manuel da Conceição Trovoada, Francisco Joaquim de Carvalho, Júlio Carlos Pereira Leal Bouças, João Luiz do Sacramento Rompão, João António Vaz de Almeida, Francisco António da Fonseca Aragão, Venâncio Monteiro de Carvalho “Chefe”, Quintas da Glória, Infante Vaz de Almeida, Lourenço David Nogueira Cravid, Venâncio Vera Cruz, Haja Vi Da, Manuel da Trindade, Paquete. 76 “Throw this shit into the sea to avoid troubles,” according to the letter from Manuel Pinho de Almeida dated June 2, 1955, to Salazar (ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 3, May 31, 1955). 77 “Os Acontecimentos,” 4. 78 Lima, A História do Massacre, 74-75. 79 “Os Acontecimentos,” 4. 80 AHM, Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 7, 1953, 9. 81 AHM, Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 7, 1953, 24. 82 He was a missionary of the Colégio de Cernache who came to São Tomé in 1907. He lived together in customary union with Ermelinda de Araujo Lima, better known as San Mélinda, a local creole woman with whom he had three daughters and a son. He fathered another daughter with a second woman. He used to compare his violation of celibacy with a smoker who smokes, although he knows that it is harmful to his health. Father Martinho was mayor of São Tomé, lawyer at the local court, and head of a school. 83 Víctor Manuel Pereira de Castro, personal communication to the author, Lisbon, May, 5 1995. 84 Rego, Memórias II, 12. 85 Salgueiro Rego, Memórias de um Ajudante-de-Campo e Comandante da Polícia (Lisbon: Neogravura, 1955), 151. 86 A Voz de S.Tomé, no. 98, February 26, 1953. 87 Diário de Notícias, February 23, 1953. 88 Le Monde, February 12, 1953; Voz de S.Tomé, no. 98, February 26, 1953. 89 Boletim Oficial de S.Tomé e Príncipe, no. 9, February 28, 1953. 90 Minister Sarmento Rodrigues appointed the PIDE delegation on February 24, 1953. 91 História, 237. 92 Report of Pascoal Ayres Pires dos Santos, June 1953. 93 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 367. 94 Manuel João da Palma Carlos, personal communication to the author, Carcavelos, August 3, 1995. 95 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 302. 96 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 250. 97 Carlos Benigno da Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe: do Colonialismo à Independência (Lisbon: Moraes Editores, 1975), 25. 98 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 382-4 99 Castro, Inquérito, 307. The head of Gorgulho's office and director of the local hospital, Dr Guilherme Abranches Pinto, a physician, was a brother of the minister.

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100 The court martial was composed of brigadier Eduardo Pires, military governor of Madeira, as president; lieutenant colonel of the artillery Artur Taveira Pereira, arms inspector in Angola; colonel Pinto Ribeiro from Lisbon; and major Macedo Pinto from Angola. 101 The National Assembly had adopted the law on February 26, 1953. 102 Rego, Memórias II, 35. 103 Rego, Memórias II, 9. In February 1953, Agostinho Neto, who later became Angola's first president, wrote a poem titled Massacre of São Tomé (Ministério da Educação. República Popular de Angola, Textos Africanos de Expressão Portuguesa, Luanda, 1978, 102) which he dedicated to his friend Alda Graça Espírito Santo, herself a well-known poet and politician. Between 1975 and 1991 she was consecutively Minister of Culture and Speaker of parliament. The bloody events were also reflected in her own poetry. Her first poem dealing with the massacre is Onde estão os homens caçados neste vento de loucura (Where are the men chased in this wind of madness; 1958), the second one is titled Trindade (1967), while a third is called 3 de Fevereiro de 1976 (1978). In 1977, the anonymous poem Os “Robots” do Massacre (The Robots of the Massacre) was published in an anthology of Santomean youth poetry (António Pinto Rodrigues, ed. Antologia Poética Juvenil de S.Tomé e Príncipe, Lisbon: Tipografia Macarlo, 1977). The following year, the poem Criminosos de Batepá (Criminals of Batepá) by Carlos Espírito Santo (1952-) appeared. In a textbook for the fourth form published in São Tomé in 1979, another two poems appeared dealing with the events of 1953: Nas praias de Fernão Dias (At the beach of Fernão Dias) by Carlos Neves (1953-) and Massacre de 53 by Ana Maria Deus Lima (1958-). In 1980 Ayres Veríssimo Major (1942-) published the poem Batepá com olhes de criança (Batepá with the eyes of the child). Amadeu Quintas da Graça is the author of the poem Fevereiro de Horror (February of Horror, 1989), while Conceição Lima (1961-) authored the poems Ignomínia (Ignominy, 2004) and 1953 (2006) respectively. 104 ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 5, July 12, 1955. 105 ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 3, May 31, 1955. 106 ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 5, July 12, 1955. 107 According to Rego, Memórias II, 10, he was a cousin of the Minister of the Army, General Adolfo Abranches Pinto. 108 Moreira, “Ressuscitados,”26; ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 5, July 12, 1955. 109 Cited from the respective document. 110 Espírito Santo, A Guerra, 395. 111 From there he went to Viseu (Portugal) where he lived unmolested util his death. 112 Moreira, “Ressuscitados,” 26. 113 Castro, Inquérito, 305. 114 Unofficial note of his office, February 8, 1953. 115 História, 214. 116 See also Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 327. 117 ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 18, September 15-30, 1965. 118 AHM, Report of Gorgulho to the Overseas Minister, February 7, 1953, 12-3.

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ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 3, May 31, 1955, letter from the lawyer Manuel Pinho de Almeida dated June 2, 1955. The official PIDE report no. 6, July 24, 1955, titled Acontecimentos ocorridos na Província de São Tomé no mês de Fevereiro de 1953 was transferred to the file no. 299-S.R./46 on June 19, 1956 in Lisbon. However, in December 1994, the document was not to be found under this reference in the National Archives (ANTT). Subsequently, the author asked the archivist in charge of the PIDE/DGS documents several times to look for the lost document, but without success. Finally, on September 18, 1995, Maria de Lurdes Henriques of the National Archives replied that despite all efforts it had been impossible to locate the report in question. 120 Rego, Memórias II,13. 121 Munger, African Field Reports, 128. 122 Davidson, African Awakening, 230; Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm (London: Longman, 1972), 176. This letter of March 30, 1953, was sent by an anonymous missionary in Angola to Rev. John Taylor Tucker (1883-1958) of the United Church of Canada in Toronto (Basil Davidson, personal communication to author, May 9, 1994). The same estimate is given by Castro, Inquérito, 219. 123 Ronald H. Chilcote, Emerging Nationalism in Portuguese Africa. Documents (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,1972), 325. The Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade (Fele, “Massacres,” 150; Mário Pinto de Andrade, A geração de Cabral [Bissau: Instituto Amizade, 1973], 20) and the article “S.Tomé e Príncipe. Da escravatura à libertação',” cadernos do terceiro mundo no.44 (May 1982): 40 also maintain that over 1,000 persons had been massacred in the bloody events. The figure 1,000 is given in Africa Contemporary Record 1984-5: B159. 124 CONCP, L’île de São Tomé (Algiers, 1968), 65. The author was probably António Tomáz de Medeiros (1931-2019), the only Sãotomean nationalist in Algiers at the time. 125 “St. Thomas and Prince: the people’s resistance to the Portuguese presence,” Tricontinental 4, no. 40 (1969): 41. The bi-monthly magazine of the Executive Secretariat of the Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) published in Havana, Cuba. The author might also be Mário Pinto de Andrade. 126 Among others, Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements. Contemporary struggles against white minority rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 296; Laurie S. Wiseberg & Gary F. Nelson, “Africa’s New Island Republics and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Africa Today 24, no.1 (1977):17; Denny & Ray, São Tomé, 134; Costa & Falé, Guia Político, 18; “Pequena Cronologia de São Tomé,” História, no. 81 (July 1985), 55; Afrique-Asie nº 72 (December 16, 1974), 17. 127 Pélissier, “São Tomé,” 27; Pélissier, “La ‘guerre’,” 87. René Pélissier visited the island from July 21-28, 1966, on the invitation of the Minister for Overseas Territories. During his stay Pélissier asked his local informant, a functionary of the treasury, if it was true that in February 1953, 500 people had died in a concentration camp at Fernão Dias. This informant was a collaborator of the local PIDE delegation (ANTT, Subdelegation of the PIDE in São Tomé, report no. 14, August 4, 1966). 128 Víctor Pereira de Castro, personal communication to the author, Lisbon, May 5, 1995.

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129

Moreira, “Ressucitados,” 26. Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 333. 131 Ceita, “Cidades,” 312 132 História, 242. 133 Mensagem do Chefe do Estado á Nação por ocasião da proclamação da Independência nacional, July 12, 1975. 134 Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP), 1.ª Assembleia do M.L.S.T.P. Relatório do Bureau Político. 7 a 12 de Julho (São Tomé, 1978), 13. 135 “Mensagem do Camarada Presidente Manuel Pinto da Costa por Ocasião da Celebração do Vigésimo Terceiro Aniversário dos Acontecimentos de Três de Fevereiro de 1953,” Revolução I, no. 16, February 3, 1976, 8. 136 “Mensagem,” 8. 137 “O 3 de Fevereiro em S.Tomé,” Revolução I, no. 16, February 3, 1976, 7. 138 “40.º Aniversário. São-tomenses recordam massacre de 1953,” Notícias (São Tomé), no. 42, February 5, 1993, 11. 139 On the Day of Portugal, June 10, 2002, the Lisbon government honoured him posthumously with the Grã-Cruz da Ordem da Liberdade, a national award to distinguish relevant services provided in favor of the dignity of the human person and the cause of freedom. 140 Nuno Sá Lourenco, “’Não são só os alemães capazes de fazer isto’,” Público, February 4, 2002, 13. 141 The official title is: Inquérito aos Acontecimentos ocorridos em S.Tomé em Fevereiro de 1953. Relatório Final. July 1975. 142 A historical novel titled Cronica de uma guerra inventada by Sum Marky (literary pseudonym of the Portuguese writer José Ferreira Marques, 1921-2003) was published in 1999. Almost forty years earlier Sum Marky had published another two historical romances related to the massacre, No Altar da Lei (1962) and Vila Flogá (1963). Manuel Teles Neto and Sacramento Neto, both from São Tomé, published the historical novels Retalhes do Massacre de Batepá (2008) and A Grande Opressão (2008) respectively. A poorly researched article on the massacre by the Portuguese journalist Felícia Cabrita appeared in the supplement Revista of the weekly Expresso (June 15, 2002). Cabrita also included a chapter on the massacre in her book Massacres em África (2008). Another two accounts of Batepá were authored by Sãotomean writers: José Deus Lima, História do Massacre de 1953 em S. Tomé e Príncipe: em busca da nossa verdadeira História (2002) and Carlos Espírito Santo, A Guerra da Trindade (2003) respectively. TV documentaries on the tragic events were produced in São Tomé by Conceição Deus Lima titled 1953 – Memória e Testemunho (2009) and in Portugal by Fernando Rosas titled O Massacre de Batepá (2017). The Angolan filmmaker Orlando Fortunato de Oliveira produced a feature film with the title Batepá (2010). 143 Castro, Inquérito, 456. 144 Leonete Botelho, “Portugal ‘assume a responsabilidade’ pelo massacre de Batepá,” Público, February 21, 2018.

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Chapter Five 1 Mário Pinto de Andrade, Origens do Nacionalismo Africano (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1997); Gerhard Seibert, Comrades, Clients and Cousins. Colonialism, Socialism and Democratization in São Tomé and Príncipe, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Carlos Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político São-Tomense, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2012); Cristina Roldão, José Augusto Pereira, Pedro Varela, Tribuna Negra. Origens do Movimento Negro em Portugal (1911-1933) (Lisbon: Tinta-da-China, 2023). 2 Augusto Nascimento, “A ‘luta’ e as (in)verdades de conjuntura, a independência de São Tomé e Príncipe e a amputação das liberdades dos são-tomenses,” Tempo e Argumento 13, no. 34 (2021): 8. 3 Pablo B. Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers and Estates in São Tomé, West Africa (PhD thesis, New Heaven: Yale University, 1986); Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe. From Plantation Colony to Microstate. (Boulder, Col. and London: Westview Press, 1988); L.M. Denny and Donald I. Ray, São Tomé & Príncipe. Politics, Economics and Society (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1989); Gerhard Seibert, “A política num micro-Estado: São Tomé e Príncipe, ou os conflitos pessoais e políticos na génese dos partidos políticos,” Lusotopie. Enjeux contemporains dans les espaces lusophones. Transitions libérales en Afrique lusophone II (1995): 239-50; Seibert, Comrades; Hilda Varela, “Entre Sueños Efímeros y Despertares: La História Colonial de São Tomé y Príncipe (14851975),” Estudios de Asia y África XXXII, no. 2 (1997): 289-321; Norrie MacQueen, A Decolonização da África Portuguesa. A revolução metropolitana e a dissolução do Império, trans. Mário Matos e Lemos (Mem Martins: Editorial Inquérito, 1998); Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político; Augusto Nascimento, “A inelutável independência ou os (in)esperados ventos de mudança em São Tomé e Príncipe,” in O Adeus ao Império. 40 Anos de Descolonização Portuguesa, eds. Fernando Rosas, Mário Machaqueiro & Pedro Aires Oliveira (Lisbon: Vega, 2015), 175-90; Nascimento, “A ‘luta’.” Espírito Santo was also an active participant in the decolonisation process, as member of the Associação Cívica pró-MLSTP. 4 Gerhard Seibert, “The February 1953 Massacre in São Tomé: Crack in the Salazarist Image of Multiracial Harmony and Impetus for Nationalist Demands for Independence,” Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2002): 52-77; José de Deus Lima, História do Massacre de 1953 em S.Tomé e Príncipe. Em Busca da Nossa Verdadeira História (São Tomé: self-publishing, 2002); Carlos Espírito Santo, A Guerra da Trindade (Lisbon: Cooperação, 2003). 5 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 178-79. 6 Seibert, Comrades, 97; Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 183. 7 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 186-89. 8 Seibert, Comrades, 88-119. 9 Seibert, Comrades, 89; Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 222. Forty years later, Medeiros claimed that the initiative to create the CLSTP had come from Mário Pinto de Andrade (Michel Laban, S.Tomé e Príncipe. Encontro com Escritores (Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida, 2002).

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CONCP, Libération des Colonies Portugaises. L’île de São Tomé (Algiers, 1968), 65. 11 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 335-36. 12 História da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe. Esboço do desenvolvimento social, económico, político e cultural (n.p: unpublished manuscript, 1985), 308. 13 Ronald H. Chilcote, Emerging Nationalism in Portuguese Africa (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University, 1972), 503. 14 Chilcote, Emerging Nationalism, 511. 15 The CLSTP had been invited during the Conference of African Freedom Fighters held in Accra in June 1962. At this conference the CLSTP was represented by Miguel Trovoada, Carlos Graça, and Sigismundo da Mata (Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Africano, 367). 16 Chilcote, Emerging Nationalism, 325. 17 Their names were Miguel Trovoada, José Fret Lau Chong, Carlos Graça, António “Oné” Pires dos Santos, Virgílio Carvalho, Manuel Pinto da Costa, Hugo Azancot de Menezes, and António Tomaz Medeiros (Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 229-31). 18 Carlos Graça, Memórias Políticas de um Nacionalista Santomense Sui Generis (São Tomé: UNEAS, 2011), 41. 19 Seibert, Comrades, 92. 20 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 235. 21 The other appointments were: Hugo Azancot de Menezes, deputy secretarygeneral; António Pires dos Santos, external relations; Guadalupe de Ceita, economy and finance; and Virgílio Carvalho, secretary (João Guadalupe Viegas de Ceita, Memórias e Sonhos Perdidos de um Combatente pela Libertação e Progresso de São Tomé e Príncipe (São Tomé: self-publishing, 2012), 102. 22 The PIDE was created in 1945. Its subdelegation in São Tomé began operations on April 21, 1955, and was formally created in October 1956. In 1958, the PIDE established a post in Príncipe. In the 1960s, the PIDE subdelegation in São Tomé was staffed by six officials. 23 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 239. 24 Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements. Contemporary struggles against white minority rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 296. 25 ANTT, PIDE subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 21, November 1-15, 1965. 26 História, 326. 27 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 212; 244. 28 Carlos Espírito Santo, Mulheres Históricas de São Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2014), 81.The other prisoners, mostly students, were António Afonso Pires Lombá, Arnaldo Pereira, Ema Oliveira Batista de Sousa, Henrique Pinto da Costa, José Narciso Neves Faleiro, Pedro de Barros Umbelina, Maria do Espírito Santo da Graça, Odete Quaresma Soares de Barros, Otília Sobral Sequeira Bragança, Maria de Lurdes d’Alva Bragança Gomes Torres, Maria da Piedade Marques d’Alva, Flávio Quaresma Pires dos Santos, Alberto Jorge Cardoso de Menezes, Higino Baptista de Sousa, Pedro Rita Vaz Alcântara, and Humberto Tavares da Graça do Espírito Santo.

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Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 216. ANTT, PIDE, subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 17, September 1-15, 1966. 31 Later Mário Soares was successively Portugal’s foreign minister (1974-75), prime minister (1976-78; 1983-85), and president (1986-96). 32 ANTT, PIDE subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 57, December 1-15, 1968. 33 ANTT, DGS subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 12, June 16-30, 1970. 34 ANTT, DGS subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 10, May 16-31, 1970. 35 Ceita, Memórias, 132. It was on the sidelines of this conference that Pope Paul VI (1963-78) received Amílcar Cabral (PAIGC), Agostinho Neto (MPLA), and Marcelino dos Santos (FRELIMO) in a private audience. 36 História, 324. 37 Diário da Assembleia Nacional, II série, no. 12, December 18, 2019. 38 Ceita, Memórias, 154. Meanwhile, Menezes, who had passed his infancy in Angola, had joined the MPLA in Brazzaville, while Medeiros did not participate because he arrived too late. Thirty years later, Medeiros alleged that the others had impeded his participation because he had a very large international projection that would have jeopardised their future political aspirations (Laban, Encontro, 205). Whatever it was, Medeiros never returned to São Tomé, but remained in Portugal after the Carnation Revolution. 39 Ceita, Memórias, 154. 40 Carlos Benigno da Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe: do Colonialismo à Independência (Lisbon: Moraes Editoras), 79-82. 41 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 112. 42 ANTT, DGS subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 22, November 16-30, 197. 43 ANTT, DGS subdelegation in São Tomé, report no. 23, December 1-15, 1973. 44 Ceita, Memórias, 220-21. 45 MLSTP, 1.ª Assembleia do M.L.S.T.P. 7 a 12 de Julho de 1978. Relatório do Bureau Político (São Tomé, 1978), 20. 46 António José Cavaleiro Ferreira (navy), António Caldas (air force), and José Maria Moreira de Azevedo (army). 47 The latter two were cousins of Carlos Graça. 48 Espírito Santo, Nacionalismo Político, 283. 49 After that, Torres returned immediately to Lisbon and only came back to São Tomé in early September when the governor called him to help prevent further escalation of the unrest (Gastão d’Alva Torres, “Associação Cívica – Pró Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Principe,” Téla Nón, July 5, 2012. https://www.telanon.info/politica/2012/07/05/10767/associacao-civica-promovimento-de-libertacao-de-sao-tome-e-principe/ Accessed October 18, 2022). 50 Seibert, Comrades, 102; Pires Veloso, Vice-Rei do Norte. Memórias e Revelações (Lisbon: Âncora Editora, 2008), 116; Graça, Memórias Políticas, 69; Ceita, Memórias, 224). At the same time, the MLSTP Political Bureau was enlarged by Alda Graça, António Espírito Santo (1930-2000), Pedro Umbelina (1948-), and Gastão Torres, all from the Civica. Other known activists were Amadeu da Graça Espírito Santo, Arlindo Gomes (1950-), Armindo Vaz d’Almeida (1953- 2016), Camélia Barros (1957-), Carlos do Espírito Santo (1952-), Elsa da Mata (1953-), Ivone dos Santos Trovoada (1951-), Manuel Quaresma Jacinto (1951-), Milú Aguiar 30

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(1954-), Teotónio d’Alva Torres (1953-), Carlos Agostinho das Neves (1953-), Albertino Sequeira Bragança (1944-), and António Pires Lombá (1937-2012). 51 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 342; Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 112-13) 52 História, 354. 53 The CLSTP claimed to have successfully organised a general strike of the plantation workers in August 1963 (CONCP 1968: 67). However, it is highly unlikely that this strike ever occurred because it is not mentioned at all in the PIDE reports of that time. Therefore, it seems more likely that the strike was invented for external consumption to create the idea that the CLSTP was active in the archipelago. 54 Graça, Memórias Políticas, 64. 55 Torres, “Associação Cívica;” Ceita, Memórias, 217-18. The other government members were Álvaro Cunhal (1913-2005), leader of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), Francisco Salgado Zenha (1923-93), and Jorge Campinos, both from the Socialist Party (PS). 56 Law 7/1974 of July 27. 57 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 114. “Total independence is what the people deserve.” “The victory is ours,” “United we will win.” 58 Pires Veloso, “S.Tomé e Príncipe (Descolonização)” (paper presented at Universidade do Porto, April 25, 1986), 2. 59 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 126-27; 137. Pires Veloso provides different information on the number of Sãotomean soldiers; 600 vs. 400. 60 Augusto Nascimento, “A Farsa da Tropa Nativa na Transição para a Independência em São Tomé e Príncipe,” Revista Tempo Espaço Linguagem (TEL) 7, no. 2 (2016): 238. 61 Interview in Expresso, August 3, 1974. Tomáz Medeiros affirms that in the 1960s, he, José Fret Lau Chong, Hugo de Menezes, and the entire MPLA had been in favour of São Tomé’s federation with Angola since the islands lacked conditions to survive as independent country (Laban, Encontro, 199) 62 Reportedly a few FPL leaders had asked to join the MLSTP for their personal security (MLSTP, 1.ª Assembleia, 23). 63 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 118. 64 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 86-89. 65 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Politico, 298. 66 Eyzaguirre, Small Farmers, 344. 67 Seibert, Comrades, 107. 68 Espírito Santo, Nacionalismo Político, 309. 69 Espírito Santo, Nacionalismo Político, 323. 70 “Manifestantes mortos em São Tomé—segundo o M.L.S.T.P.,” Primeiro de Janeiro, September 9, 1974. 71 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 132-33. “Eternal Glory to the Martyrs of Liberty,” “The victory is ours,” “United we will win.” 72 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 139. 73 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 315. 74 Nascimento, “A Farsa,” 241.

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75 This organisation subordinated to the governor was set up in all Portuguese colonies in 1961 to defend the resident white population. 76 Veloso, “S.Tomé e Príncipe,” 7. 77 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 316. 78 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 123-25. Since independence, September 19 has been commemorated as Day of Sãotomean Women. Afterwards, the official version of the manifestation was that the women had demanded total independence (Gerhard Seibert, “Dia da Mulher de São Tomé e Príncipe (1974),” in As Voltas do Passado. A Guerra Colonial e as Lutas de Libertação, eds. Miguel Cardina & Bruno Sena Martins (Lisbon: Tinta-da-China, 2018), 304-310. 79 Ceita, Memórias, 227. In the 1960s, Pereira de Castro and Coutinho had been judges at the local court in São Tomé. At the time, Coutinho was secretary of state at the Ministry of Territorial Coordination. Ramos had participated in the Caldas Revolt on March 16, 1974, a failed coup attempt that paved the way for the Revolution of April 25 that year. 80 Ceita, Memórias, 227. Diário de Notícias, November 20, 1974. 81 História, 363. 82 Boletim Oficial de S. Tomé e Príncipe, no. 51, December 21, 1974. Major Azevedo was assistant secretary of the government of São Tomé and Príncipe and one of the three members of the JSN in São Tomé after the Carnation Revolution. 83 Diário de Notícias, November 25, 1974. 84 Diário de Notícias, November 26, 1974. 85 Diário de Notícias, November 27, 1974. 86 Diário de Notícias, November 27, 1974. 87 Boletim Oficial de S.Tomé e Príncipe, no. 51, December 21, 1974. 88 He had been appointed political commissioner in September 1974 (Ceita, Memórias, 232). 89 Meaning “Oné has already arrived, total (independence) comes close.” 90 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 116. 91 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 113. 92 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 136; Graça, Memórias Políticas, 80-81. Graça was also distrusted due to his family ties with FPL leaders. 93 On this conflict, see also the documentary film São Tomé e Príncipe: Retalhos de uma História by Nilton Medeiros & Jerónimo Moniz, 2015. 94 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 156. 95 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 157. 96 The local commander of the Sãotomean soldiers was sergeant Albertino Neto (1934-), the husband of Maria do Carmo Bragança Neto, leader of the extinct FPL. 97 Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 118. 98 “Coronel Pires Veloso: ‘A tropa evitará a ditadura em S.Tomé’,” Expresso, March 28, 1975. 99 Nascimento, “A Farsa,” 249. 100 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 415. 101 Ceita, Memórias, 279. 102 Espírito Santo, O Nacionalismo Político, 416.

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Titled “Aos Naturais de São Tomé e Príncipe. Chegou a Hora da Verdade e só Verdade.” In the author’s possession. 104 Ceita, Memórias, 277. 105 Nascimento, “A Farsa,” 245. 106 Nine of the thirteen members of the Political Bureau participated in this meeting. After their dismissal from the transitional government, Carlos Graça additionally assumed the communications portfolio, while João Torres (1925-77) and Manuel Quaresma da Costa were appointed ministers of labour and justice, respectively. 107 MLSTP, 1.ª Assembleia, 21-22. 108 On April 9, 1975, Torres, Umbelina, and Pires dos Santos presented their own account of the events and the background. Amazingly, their account does not mention the March 19 rally at all, while other events are reported in detail. For this document see Cruz, S.Tomé e Príncipe, 111-39. 109 In 1979, Arlindo Gomes, aged 29 years, was appointed minister of agriculture. In 1982, Carlos Tiny, at the age of thirty-two, became minister of health and in 1983, Armindo Vaz d’Almeida and Manuel Vaz Fernandes, both twenty-nine years old, were appointed minister of labour and social security and minister of justice respectively (Seibert, Comrades, 577-79). 110 They would only return to politics during the democratic transition when, in November 1990, they were among the founders of the Partido de Convergência Democrática (PCD), the country’s first opposition party that won the first multiparty elections in January 1991. 111 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 140. 112 Dias, an aeronautical engineer for the Portuguese air force before independence, was minister of infrastructure of São Tomé’s first government. He died in a helicopter crash during a visit in Portugal in 1976. In July 2022, forty-seven years after independence, São Tomé’s international airport was named after him. 113 Manuel Pinto da Costa, Discursos I (São Tomé: Arquivo Histórico, 1978), 6581. 114 “Mensagem de despedida do Alto Comissário,” Revolução, July 12, 1975. 115 Veloso, Vice-Rei, 143. 116 Contrary to Angola and Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe was not a settler colony. Generally, the Portuguese remained there only temporarily during their period of service, some for a considerably long time. 117 Nascimento, “A inelutável independência;” Augusto Nascimento, “Silêncios, opacidades e regimes de verdade em São Tomé e Príncipe: os contornos da história recente,” AbeÁfrica: revista da associação brasileira de estudos africanos 1, no. 1 (2018): 66-84; Nascimento, “A ‘luta’”.

Chapter Six 1

Patrick Chabal et al. eds., A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 40.

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World Bank Group, Prosperity for all Saotomeans. Priorities to end poverty, promote growt, and build resilience in São Tomé and Príncipe. Systematic Country Diagnostic (Washington DC, 2021), 5. 3 Jorge Eduardo da Costa Oliveira, A Economia de S. Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Instituto para a Cooperação Económica & Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1993), 117. 4 Angolan troops remained in São Tomé until 1991. 5 Gerhard Seibert, Comrades, Clients and Cousins. Colonialism, Socialism and Democratization in São Tomé and Príncipe (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 147. 6 Revolução, no. 425, July 28, 1984. 7 Seibert, Comrades, 195. 8 Rafael Branco & Afonso Varela, Os Caminhos da Democracia (Amadora: selfpublishing, 1998), 66. 9 The Portuguese-style semi-presidential regime was also adopted by Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau. However, only Cabo Verde has enjoyed political stability under the system. 10 Frequently, Benin, where multiparty elections were held on February 17, 1991, erroneously appears as the pioneer of the democratisation process in Africa in the early 1990s. 11 Coligação Democrática de Oposição (CODO), a small opposition party obtained one seat. 12 On the 1991 elections see Seibert, Comrades, 219-24. 13 Seibert, Comrades, 250. 14 Seibert, Comrades, 277-78. 15 International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. National Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper II, 2012-2016. Country Report 14/9 (Washington DC, 2014), 47. 16 União para a Democracia e Desenvolvimento (Union for Democracy and Development), in 2005 created as a splinter of the ADI. 17 Chabal, A History, 128. 18 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara in 2019, eds. Albert Awedoba, Benedikt Kamski, Andreas Mehler and David Sebudubudu (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 277. 19 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara in 2016, eds. Jon Abbink, Sebastian Elischer, Andreas Mehler and Henning Melber (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 253. 20 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara in 2021, eds. Albert Awedoba, Benedikt Kamski, Andreas Mehler and David Sebudubudu (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 272. 21 Chabal, A History, 95. 22 In the 2018 elections the ADI was the party with the most votes; however, it was unable to form a government. 23 Augusto Nascimento, São Tomé e Príncipe. As Tramas da Política e a Emancipação do Saber Histórico (São Tomé: BISTP, 2019), 291.

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24 Nascimento, As Tramas, 294; European Union Election Observation Mission, São Tomé e Príncipe 2022. Final Report. Legislative, Local and Regional Elections 25 September 2022 (n.p.: 2022), 24. 25 Seibert, Comrades, 257-69. 26 Gerhard Seibert “The Bloodless Coup of July 16 in São Tomé e Príncipe,” LUSOTOPIE. Enjeux contemporains dans les espaces lusophones (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 245-60. 27 Seibert, “São Tomé’s failed coup of August 2018: invented by the government?” (paper presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA), Boston, MA, November 21-23, 2019). 28 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara in 2022, eds. Seidu M. Alidu, Benedikt Kamski, Andreas Mehler and David Sebudubudu (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 281. 29 Polícia Judiciária, Processo 767/2022. Relatório Final, São Tomé, February 22, 2023. 30 In late 2022, the Trovoada government rejected the dubious project. 31 World Development Indicators, accessed October 15, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=ST. 32 International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. Country Report 22/306 (Washington DC, 2022), 26, accessed October 15, 2023, file:///C:/Users/mails/Downloads/1STPEA2022003.pdf. 33 Abel Veiga, “São Tomé e Príncipe pode atingir o record de fluxo turístico em 2023,” Téla Nón, September 27, 2023, accessed September 28, 2023, https://www.telanon.info/turismo/2023/09/27/41859/sao-tome-e-principe-podeatingir-o-record-de-fluxo-turistico-em-2023/.. 34 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa South of the Sahara 2023, 52nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2022), 1019. 35 On the land reform project see Seibert, Comrades, 339-54. 36 João Guadalupe Viegas de Ceita, Memórias e Sonhos Perdidos de um Combatente pela Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (São Tomé: self-publishing, 2012), 249. 37 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé e Príncipe,” in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, eds. Patrick Cabal et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 301. 38 Hélder Lains e Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a Cultura do Café (Lisbon: Junta de Investigação do Ultramar, 1958), 106. 39 Francisco Manuel Carvalho Rodrigues, S. Tomé e Príncipe sob o ponto de vista agrícola (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, 1974), 70. 40 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa South of the Sahara 2015 (London: Routledge, 2014), 1014. 41 See the 2012 Census data available at Instituto Nacional de Estatística www.ine.st 42 Seibert, Comrades, 601. 43 Seibert, Africa South of the Sahara 2015, 1014. 44 Banco Central S. Tomé e Príncipe (BCSTP), Relatório sobre a Economia Santomense 2020 (São Tomé, 2022), 103, accessed October 17, 2023, https://bcstp.st/Upload/New_DOC/EE/Relatorio%20Anual%202020.pdf. 45 On São Tomé and Príncipe's oil developments in the period from 1997 to 2007 see Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe: The Troubles of Oil in an Aid-

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Dependent Micro-State,” in Extractive Economies and Conflicts in the Global South: Multi-regional Perspectives on Rentier Politics, ed. Kenneth Omeje (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); for the period thereafter until 2013 see Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe: The End of the Oil Dream?” IPRIS Viewpoints, no. 134 (2013). 46 Due to its controversial preferential rights, the Nigerian company owns working interests in Block 2 (22 percent), Block 3 (10 percent), and Block 4 (19.5 percent). 47 Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe,” in Africa South of the Sahara 2023 (London: Routledge, 2022), 1021. 48 Eugénio Tenjua, E-mail message to author, October 19, 2023. 49 PrincewaterhouseCoopers & Associates, São Tomé and Príncipe Second EITI Report 2014 (Lisbon, 2015), 17. 50 Seibert, Africa South of the Sahara 2023, 1021. 51 Seibert, Africa Yearbook 2022, 283. 52 Alonso Segura, Management of Oil Wealth Under the Permanent Income Hypothesis: The Case of São Tomé and Príncipe. IMF Working Paper 183 (Washington DC: IMF, 2006), 20. 53 African Development Bank Group (AfDB), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. Country Strategy Paper 2012-2016 (Abidjan, 2012), vii. 54 Lucas Kawa, “The 20 Fastest Growing Economies In The World,” Business Insider, October 24, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-fastest-economies-2012-10?op=1 55 International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe Country Report 13/208 (Washington DC, 2013), 15. 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe Country Report 14/2, (Washington DC, 2014), 24. 57 “China Harbour Engineering will co-finance and build deep water port in São Tomé,” Macauhub, October 13, 2015, http://www.macauhub.com.mo. 58 Seibert, Africa Yearbook 2022, 284. 59 IMF, Country Report 14/9, 20. 60 The World Bank, “Sao Tome and Principe At-A-Glance,” accessed October 16, 2023, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/saotome/overview. 61 IMF, Country Report 14/9, 20. 62 Statista, “São Tomé and Príncipe: Share of economic sectors in the gross domestic product (GDP) from 2011 to 2021,” accessed October 17, 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/729432/share-of-economic-sectors-in-the-gdpin-s%25C3%25A3o-tome-and-principe/. 63 The World Bank, “Unemployment, total (% of total labor force) (modeled ILO estimate) – Sao Tome and Principe,” accessed October 17, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?locations=ST. 64 Gabinete de Estratégia e Estudos, “Resident Foreign Population in Portugal - Sao Tome and Principe,” accessed October 17, 2023, https://www.gee.gov.pt/pt/publicacoes/estatisticas-tematicas/estatisticas-deimigrantes-em-portugal-por-nacionalidade. 65 World Bank Group, Prosperity for all Saotomeans, 22. 66 The two others were Burkina Faso and Eswatini (Swaziland).

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176

Notes

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67 International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. Country Report 15/196 (Washington DC, 2015). 68 Mo Ibrahim Foundation at http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/iiag/.

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INDEX

Abolition of slavery, xi, 47, 49, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 76 ADI (Acção Democrática Independente), 126, 128, 129 Alegre, Filinto Costa, 109, 117 Alegre, Norberto Costa, 109, 126 Almeida, João Maria de Sousa e, 51, 52 Almeida, Jacinto Carneiro de Sousa e, 52, 53 Alva, Leonel Mário de, 102, 104, 107, 115, 116, 117 Amador, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 119 Andrade, Mário Pinto de, 41, 75, 100 Angola, xi, 10, 11, 12, 13, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 48, 52, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 72, 76, 80, 82, 92, 93, 102, 103, 110, 111, 113, 120, 123, 136, 142, 143 Angolares, xi, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 54, 59, 76, 77, 95 Annobón, 1 ANP (Agência Nacional de Petróleo), 139, 140 anti-colonial activism, 100 activities, xi, 106, 120 initiatives, 100 organisation, 94 struggle, 41, 42, 111, 119 anti-slavery activists, 66, 68 Azores, 3, 20 Bahia, 12, 13, 46, 47, 51 Bandeira, Alda, 109

Batepá, 75, 83, 94, 95, 101, 102, 104 Benin (kingdom), 10 Bioko (Fernando Po), 1, 23, 34, 43, 48, 55, 71, 106 Boletim Oficial, 48, 52 Bongo, Omar, 108, 109, 115 BNU (Banco Nacional Ultramarino), 29, 49, 50, 52, 53, 61, 64 Brazil, x, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 32, 34, 40, 44, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 58 brotherhood, 7, 61 Burtt, Joseph, 66, 67 bush war, 24 Cabo Verde, ix, xi, 3, 4, 5, 8, 20, 43, 62, 64, 65, 73, 76, 77, 88, 91, 100, 101, 102, 110, 118, 122, 124, 125, 126 Cabral, Amílcar, 42, 100 Cadbury, William, 66, 67, 77 Caldeira, Arlindo, 1, 12, 14, 25, 37 Caminha, Álvaro de, 4 Campinos, Jorge, 109, 114, 115 Carlos, Manuel João da Palma, 89, 90, 97 Carnation Revolution, 76, 102, 108, 113, 118 Carvalho, Evaristo, 42, 114, 129, 130 Carvalho, Virgílio Sousa de, 103 Casa dos Estudantes do Império, 100 cash crops, 48, 76, 79, 82 Castro, Víctor Pereira de, 93, 97, 98, 114 Catholic Church, 4, 7, 8, 109

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178 Ceita, João Guadalupe de, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 116, 118 Centro de Estudos Africanos, 100 China, 107, 142, 143 Chinese coolies, 63 Chong, José Fret Lau, 104, 107, 114, 117 Cívica (Associação Cívica PróMLSTP), 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125 CLSTP (Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe), 93, 94, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 120 cocoa cultivation, 52 estates, 123 exports, 56, 68, 134, 135, 136 plantations, 56, 60, 119 production, 53, 55, 134, 135, 136 coffee, xi, 29, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 92, 110 colonisation, ix, x, xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 34, 44, 46, 47, 48 Companhia de Caçadores 7, 116, 117 Companhia União Mercantil, 48, 51, 52 CONCP (Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas), 93, 103, 104, 105, 117, 120 contract workers, xi, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 92, 102, 103, 134, 135 convicts, 4, 5, 6, 49, 50, 65, 92 Costa, Gabriel, 127 Costa, Guilherme Pósser da, 130 Costa, Manuel Pinto da, 95, 96, 104, 107, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130

Index Corrêa, António Augusto Mendes, 30, 43 corruption, 4, 121, 127, 129, 130, 134, 143 coup, 87, 92, 97, 100, 102, 106, 108, 123, 130, 131 C.P.I. (Corpo da Polícia Indígena), 75, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89 Creole language(s), 5, 27, 36, 73, 74 population, xi, 57, 59, 61, 75, 78, 79, 82, 91, 93, 94, 102, 110, 134 society, ix, x, 2, 5, 9, 44, 122 Creoles, 9, 27, 49, 56, 58, 76, 79, 84, 85, 94, 122 creolisation, 5 Curadoria Geral dos Serviçais e Colonos de São Tomé e Príncipe, 61 Dahomey, 62, 63 Daio, Daniel, 109, 126 Davidson, Basil, 75, 93 DGS (Direcção-Geral de Segurança), 106, 107 Dias, Antonio Ramos, 109 Dias, José Luís Constantino (Marquis of Valle-Flôr), 53 Dias, Nuno Xavier, 119 Dutch West India Company (WIC), 9 EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), 137, 139, 140 Elmina, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 25 Escobar, Pedro, 3 estates, 2, 10, 13, 14, 15, 26, 40, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 112, 113, 134, 135 Estatuto dos Indígenas, 73, 76, 82, 91 Eyzaguirre, Pablo, x, 1, 15, 31, 94, 102, 112 Fernandes, Manuel Vaz, 109 Fernandes, Valentim, 6

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The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe Fernão Dias, 86, 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98 Ferraz, Luiz Ivens, 35, 36 Ferreira, Maria Correia Salema, 51 FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola), 104 forced labour, 42, 46, 66, 68, 71, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95, 102, 107 Forros, 5, 7, 20, 36, 58, 59, 60, 61, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 102, 112 FPL (Frente Popular Livre), 108, 109, 111, 112, 116 freedmen, 52, 58, 59 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), 103, 109 Freyre, Gilberto, 33, 41, 42, 44, 79 Gabon, ix, 12, 34, 57, 58, 62, 104, 106, 108, 110, 115, 137, 142, 143 Garfield, Robert, x, 1, 10, 15, 31 Godinho, Simoa, 14 Gold Coast, 3, 62, 63, 68 Gomes, Fernando, 3 Gomes, José Ferreira, 51 Gorgulho, Carlos, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102 Graça, Carlos, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 115, 116, 123, 124 Graça, Januário, 79, 80 Graça, Salustino, 79, 80, 84, 87, 89, 90, 93 grand marronage, 22, 24 Gulf of Guinea, xix, 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 20, 33, 34, 36, 43, 121, 122, 140 Hagemeijer, Tjerk, 36 Heliothrips rubrocinctus (insect infection), 55, 136 Henriques, Isabel Castro, 32, 33 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 124, 127, 132, 135, 140 independence, ix, x, xi, 1, 26, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 47, 61, 73, 74,

179

92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 144 JDZ (Joint Development Zone), 137, 138, 139, 140, 144 Jesus, Jorge Bom, 128 Jewish children, 4 King João II, 3, 13 King João III, 7, 12 Kongo, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 30 Lagos, João Baptista e Silva, 29, 48 landowners, 53, 56, 61 Liberia, 7, 62, 63 Liga dos Interesses Indígenas, 57 Lopes, Jorge Luís Amaral Marquês, 84, 88, 90, 92 Luanda, 12, 31, 52, 58, 63, 91 lusotropicalism, 41, 42, 44 macambos, 24, 40, 43 Madeira, 2, 3, 7, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21 Manteiro, Francisco, 51, 52, 60, 67 marrons 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 35, 36, 44, 45 Massacre (of February 1953), xi, 75, 76, 78, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 112 Matos, Raimundo José da Cunha, 26, 29, 40, 41, 42 MDFM (Movimento Democrático Força de Mudança), 126, 128, 129 Medeiros, António Tomáz de, 104, 105 Menezes, Fradique, 126, 127, 128, 129 Menezes, Hugo Azancot de, 103 mestizos, 5, 44, 84 miscegenation, 4, 5 Misericórdia (Santa Casa de), 7, 13, 15 missionaries, 7, 26, 40, 49, 66, 70

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180 MLSTP (Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe), 95, 100, 101, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 134, 135 MLSTP/PSD (Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe/Partido Social Democrata), 126, 127, 128, 130 mortality rate, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 50, 69, 70 Mozambique, xi, 48, 62, 64, 65, 76, 80, 102, 110, 120 MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), 103, 104, 109, 123 multiparty democracy, xi, 42, 96, 121, 123, 124, 126, 130, 132, 133, 142 Munger, Edwin, 75, 93 Nascimento, Augusto, 101 National Assembly, 42, 82, 106, 125, 126, 129, 131, 132 nationalisation, 96, 114, 119, 133, 134 Negreiros, Almada, 30, 41, 60, 65 Neto, Agostinho, 100, 104 Neto, Maria do Carmo Bragança, 109 Neves, Delfim, 129, 131, 132 Neves, Maria das, 127 Nevinson, Henry, 66 Nguema, Macías, 106, 107, 116, 117 Niger Delta, 3, 5, 10, 11, 14 Nkrumah, Kwame, 100, 103, 106 Nova, Carlos Vila, 130 OAU (Organisation of African Unity), 104, 117, 120 oil, x, xi, 130, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144 Oliveira, Jorge Eduardo da Costa, 76, 97 PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde), 101, 103, 109, 110, 114

Index palm oil, 20, 52, 73, 133 Pan-Africanism, 61, 68, 100, 108 PCD (Partido de Convergência Democrática), 125, 126, 127, 128, 135 Pélissier, René, 75, 93 PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado), 89, 90, 93, 94, 104, 105, 106 Pinto, Manuel do Rosário, 28, 29, 37 plantation economy, x, xi, 1, 2, 10, 19, 20, 21, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 57, 73, 75, 76, 101, 110, 120, 121, 122, 133, 135, 144 planters, 2, 10, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 79, 82, 88 political instability, 2, 6, 18, 21, 44, 48, 122, 126, 143 Pontífice, Fernanda, 109 Portugal, ix, xi, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 29, 30, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 58, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 76, 80, 81, 91, 97, 90, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 119, 120, 124, 125, 128, 142, 143 Portuguese Revolution, 101, 120 Public Works, 62, 71, 81, 82, 83, 92, 109 punishment, 65, 70, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 87 railway, 53, 54 recolonisation, xi, 32, 46, 47, 48, 73 repatriation, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 78, 113 Rio do Ouro (estate), 53, 70, 86, 109 Rocha, Martinho Pinto de, 88, 89 Rodrigues, Manuel Sarmento, 80, 81, 88, 89, 90 roças, 53, 54, 57, 59, 66, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 92, 96 Salazar, António, xi, 41, 79, 82, 89, 92, 93, 99, 106

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The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe Santarém, João de, 3 Santo, Alda Graça Espírito, 42, 90, 100, 105, 107, 109, 113, 115 Santos, António “Oné” Pires dos, 102, 103, 106, 107, 115, 116 Santos, António de Almeida, 97, 111, 114, 115, 117 sanzalas, 10, 54, 72 São Jorge da Mina, 3, 7 São Sebastião fort, 8, 50, 95 São Tomé town, 4, 9, 27, 50, 52, 53, 76 serviçais, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 83, 85, 87, 88, 92 slave labour, x, 2, 4, 13, 14, 20, 59, 79, 103 revolt, xi, 2, 18, 19, 21, 23, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 119 society, 2, 47 trade, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11. 12, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 46, 47, 48, 52, 58, 63, 65, 66 slavery, ix, xi, 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 20, 22, 41, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 119 sleeping sickness, 63, 70 Soares, Mário, 106, 110 socialist one-party state (regime), xi, 121, 123, 133 Sociedade de Emigração para S.Thomé e Príncipe (Emigration Society), 64, 68 Spinola, António, 108, 109, 110, 113

181

Stockler, Francisco, 26 sugar estates, 10, 19 exports, 19, 21 industry, 2, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25, 37, 44, 46, 47 mills, 10, 13, 23, 40, 53 plantations, 10, 13, 23, 40, 53 production, 2, 4, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Tenreiro, Francisco, 10, 31, 41, 44, 45, 46, 62, 100 Tiny, Carlos, 109 Tiny, Olegário, 109 Tongas, 36, 61, 62, 69, 72, 95 Torres, Gastão, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116 tourism, 121, 133, 136, 144 transatlantic slave trade, 2, 12, 46, 47, 58 Trovoada, Miguel, 93, 96, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 141 Trovoada, Patrice, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 Umbelina, Pedro, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Veloso, António Pires, 92, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122 white population, 19, 46, 47, 49, 50, 80, 87, 92 World Bank, 124, 135, 142 Zé Mulato, 82, 83, 86, 89, 91, 92

Seibert, Gerhard. The Wealth of History of the Small African Twin-Island State São Tomé and Príncipe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=31136545. Created from wisc on 2024-04-11 00:52:51.