São Tomé and Príncipe's history: islands peopled by the plantations

Who settled islands that had no people

São Tomé and Príncipe were uninhabited when Portuguese navigators found them, and the sources do not agree on the day. The main Wikipedia account dates the landing of João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar to 21 December 1470, and adds that 21 December 1471, St Thomas's Day, is also given for São Tomé, with 17 January 1472, St Antony's Day, for Príncipe. DW's account of the National Museum in São Tomé gives 21 December 1470 for São Tomé and 17 January 1471 for Príncipe. The saints explain the names. Príncipe was first called Santo Antão and became Ilha do Príncipe in 1502, after the Prince of Portugal to whom the duties on its sugar were paid.

Settlement came slowly. Álvaro Caminha founded the first lasting settlement on São Tomé in 1493 on a grant from the crown, and Príncipe followed in 1500 on similar terms. Volunteers stayed away because of disease and food shortages, so the crown sent people it wanted out of Portugal. Britannica lists convicts among the first settlers, and Jewish children who had been separated from their parents and expelled; Wikipedia puts the number of those children at 2,000 in the late fifteenth century, all aged eight or under, taken from the Iberian peninsula to work on the sugar plantations.

The crown took over the administration of São Tomé in 1522 and of Príncipe in 1573.

The consequence is stated in one line of the Wikipedia demographic summary: nearly all citizens are descended from people the Portuguese took to the islands from 1470 onwards. There was no older population to displace. Every later argument on the islands was about the people who had been brought, and about the legal category each of them was placed in.

How sugar turned São Tomé into a slave depot

By 1515 the islands were depots for the coastal slave trade centred on Elmina, and in the same year a water-powered sugar mill was introduced on São Tomé. A contemporary account quoted by Wikipedia counts two mills working and three being built, and describes the canes as the biggest the writer had ever seen. Sugar needed far more hands than the settlers had, and the Portuguese enslaved them on the mainland: from the Slave Coast, the Niger Delta and Fernando Po at first, and later from Kongo and Angola.

São Tomé was a market as well as a plantation. Portugal reportedly imported 10,000 to 12,000 slaves in 1510, and in 1516 São Tomé received 4,072 for re-export. From 1519 to 1540 the island was the centre of the trade between Elmina and the Niger Delta, and from 1525 it shipped captives to the Spanish Americas, an average of 342 a year to the Antilles between 1532 and 1536. Before 1580 the island accounted for 75% of Brazil's imports, most of them enslaved people.

Why free mulattos held office in the colony

The colony was short of settlers and the crown legislated to produce them. A royal decree of 1515 freed the African wives of white settlers and their children of mixed descent; another, in 1517, freed the male slaves who had arrived with the first colonists. After 1520 a royal charter allowed free mulattos who were married and owned property to hold public office, and a decree of 1546 gave them civil equality with white settlers. Wikipedia describes the outcome as town councils in constant dispute with the governor and the bishop, and long stretches of political instability.

One planter of that class, Ana de Chaves, appears in the record in 1549. Two men brought in from the maroon settlements claimed to have been born free, and with her support they petitioned the king and were declared free.

What the plantations did to the first arrangement

An anonymous Portuguese pilot of the mid-sixteenth century described enslaved people on São Tomé working in couples, building their own houses and working one day a week on their own food. That looser regime ended as the plantations spread. Between 1514 and 1527, 5% of the slaves imported to São Tomé escaped into the mountain forest of the interior, many of them to starve. Those who survived founded settlements there known as macambos.

Why Amador's revolt is still remembered

Maroon bands were attacking plantations by the 1530s. Local officials complained in 1531 that so many settlers and black citizens were being killed that the island would be lost. A militia campaign in 1533 went after the maroons, another between 1587 and 1590 defeated many of them, and in 1593 the governor declared them almost extinguished. They kept settlers out of the south and west of the island all the same.

In July 1595, while the bishop and the governor were in dispute, an enslaved man named Amador recruited 5,000 slaves to attack the plantations. Wikipedia records three raids on the town and 60 of the island's 85 sugar mills destroyed before the militia defeated the rising after three weeks. Two hundred of the rebels died in combat; Amador and the other leaders were executed, and the rest were amnestied and sent back to their plantations. Britannica calls him the self-proclaimed king of the enslaved who nearly overran the whole island, and records that many now regard him as a national hero. The National Museum, in the Fort of São Sebastião, gives him a room under the name Amador Vieira, and his statue stands in the centre of the capital.

Sugar did not recover. The Dutch took São Tomé in 1641 and held it for seven years, and the History of São Tomé and Príncipe article says they razed more than 70 mills. Britannica puts the collapse down to Brazilian competition and to São Tomé's poorly dried product, with flight and raiding on top. By the middle of the seventeenth century the island had become a transit point: small slave ships transferred their cargoes to larger vessels for the Atlantic crossing, took on water, and bought food the islanders grew.

The seat of the colony followed the trade. Unrest on São Tomé moved the capital to Santo António on Príncipe in 1753; in 1778 Portugal ceded Fernando Pó and Annobón, the islands on either side, to Spain; and São Tomé city became the capital again in 1852.

How cocoa replaced the slave with the contract

Coffee was introduced in 1780 and cocoa in 1819, as seedlings brought from Brazil, and the first cocoa tree to grow to full size did so on Príncipe in 1824. Brazil's independence in 1822 and the suppression of the slave trade shifted the colony's centre of gravity back to São Tomé. Cocoa overtook coffee as the main cash crop in the 1890s, and plantations called roças, owned by Portuguese companies and absentee landlords, came to occupy almost all of the good farmland.

The sources give three different years for the end of slavery. The cocoa article, Åkesson and an AFP report of August 2026 give 1869; Britannica gives 1875; the main and history Wikipedia articles give 1876. They agree on what followed. Europeans and most forros refused plantation work, and Portugal turned to its mainland colonies for labour. Between 1888 and 1908 an estimated 67,000 Africans were hired for the cocoa plantations, nearly all of them from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. The anthropologist Lisa Åkesson, writing in 2016 and citing the Cape Verdean historian António Carreira, puts the number who left Cape Verde for the islands between 1900 and 1970 at about 80,000. They were called serviçais.

What a contract meant on a roça

A roça was a company town: a chapel, a hospital, a school, a store and workers' housing arranged around a plaza that served for the daily roll call and for drying the beans. In the early 1900s a male serviçal was paid around 2,500 reis a month, about US$2.50, and a woman 1,800 reis. Every store on the islands belonged to a company, so nearly all of those wages returned to the planters. Britannica's judgement is that until 1910 the conditions of these indentured labourers were often little different from enslavement.

A Cape Verdean who worked on São Tomé from 1952 to 1960, interviewed by Åkesson, described a working day that began at four in the morning and rules that reached beyond it: free persons could run small businesses, and contract workers were not allowed to. In his account, beatings fell less often on Cape Verdeans than on the Angolans and Mozambicans.

How the labour reports reached Cadbury

In August 1906 Arthur Nightingale, investigating for the British Foreign Office, concluded that the "slaves had been renamed serviçias". Portugal replied that there was no direct evidence of continued slavery. Around 1905 the three main British chocolate makers, J. S. Fry and Sons, Rowntree's and Cadbury Brothers, all drew their cocoa mainly from the islands, which were then known as the Chocolate Islands. The journalist Henry Nevinson pressed for a boycott, and Cadbury began one on 9 March 1909, after nearly a decade of protest. Other British manufacturers and the German firm Stollwerck joined it.

The planters had their own difficulties by then. In 1906 they borrowed 600,000 British pounds from Portuguese banks to hold 50,000 bags of cocoa in Lisbon and keep the price up, and Brazilian and Ecuadorian competition broke the scheme in 1908. A plague of thrips in 1919 did more harm to that year's harvest than the boycott had, and by 1935 most roça buildings and machinery had been abandoned or turned over to food crops.

Who counted as free on the islands

Forro is the Portuguese for a free man, and the definitions of the people who carry the name differ by source. Wikipedia describes the forros as descendants of slaves freed at abolition; Britannica describes them as descendants of immigrant Europeans and enslaved Africans. What the sources agree on is their position. The forros refused manual field work on the estates because they held it to be slave labour, and the Museu do Aljube in Lisbon records that they formed part of the local political and economic elite and were not covered by the Indigenato Statute, under which people from the mainland colonies were classed as indígenas. Complaints that forros were seized in raids for forced labour, on public works or in the fields, recur in that account all the same.

The serviçais sat on the other side of the line. Åkesson notes that the Angolans and Mozambicans had no choice about signing: as indígenas they were subject to vagrancy laws that left them open to labour conscription. Cape Verdeans were, at least in theory, Portuguese citizens. On the estates they were paid the same, fed the same and punished the same as everyone else, which is the point Carreira made in 1983, and planters complained that Cape Verdeans insisted on their rights.

The Angolares are the one group whose arrival the record attributes to accident. Britannica records that they stayed apart in the isolated south of São Tomé until the late nineteenth century and were later largely assimilated, and their creole, Angolar, is still spoken on the southern tip of the island.

Why the forros were killed at Batepá

Carlos Gorgulho became governor in 1945. His aim, as the Wikipedia account sets it out, was to end the colony's dependence on contract labour from overseas by making local people take plantation wages: he made it easier for serviçais to go home, banned the sale of palm wine and the local gin, and raised the poll tax from 30 to 90 escudos. His public works ran on forced labour gangs, filled by police raids. In 1952 the administration proposed settling 15,000 people from Cape Verde on São Tomé, and in January 1953 a rumour spread that forro land would go to the newcomers and the forros would be put under contract.

On 2 February 1953 handwritten pamphlets appeared threatening to kill anyone who contracted forros as labourers. The government answered with an official note that blamed "communists" for the rumour and promised that no creole would be made to sign. The two main accounts of what followed differ in their detail. Wikipedia records that police killed a protester, Manuel da Conceição Soares, on 3 February and that his death set off a larger protest in Trindade the next day. The Museu do Aljube records that forros in Trindade tore the official note from the walls on the night of 2 to 3 February, that the authorities met the protests with gunfire, and that the death of a white ensign set the repression going.

Gorgulho called on white colonists to arm, militias formed, and planters mobilised Angolan and Mozambican workers. Wikipedia records 28 people suffocated in a cell of the native police corps and 20 burned to death on one estate; prisoners were tortured with electricity, and bodies were thrown into the sea on the governor's order. Neither account offers a firm total. Wikipedia says hundreds of forros died, and the Museu do Aljube, writing in 2023, says there is no certainty as to the number.

The Portuguese political police arrived on 4 March 1953 and found no communist conspiracy. Gorgulho was recalled in April and then praised; the Museu do Aljube records a commendation in February 1954 and the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Avis in 1956. Seven forros were convicted of killing two police officers, and the opposition lawyer Manuel João da Palma Carlos secured the release of many of the prisoners. The day is now a national holiday, the Day of the Martyrs of Freedom, on 3 February.

How the islands left Portugal without a war

The independence movement was small and abroad. Britannica and the preamble of the constitution date the Committee for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe to 1960 and its renaming as the MLSTP to 1972, while the Wikipedia history places the movement's formation in the late 1950s. It was based in Gabon. Britannica records that it was too small to mount a guerrilla campaign on the islands. In the meantime the islands served a different war: from 1967 to 1970 São Tomé was the main base of the Biafran airlift, which flew food and medicine into eastern Nigeria during its civil war.

What ended Portuguese rule happened in Lisbon. The overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship in April 1974 brought in a government committed to giving up the colonies, its representatives met the MLSTP in Algiers in November 1974 to agree the transfer of sovereignty, and independence followed on 12 July 1975, with the movement's secretary general, Manuel Pinto da Costa, as the first president. Most of the islands' 4,000 Portuguese residents left in the 1970s, and several hundred Santomean refugees arrived from Angola. The statues of Santarém, Escobar and João de Paiva were taken down from the capital's squares and gardens just after independence; they now stand at the entrance to the National Museum.

The new state took over the land the planters had held. At independence Portuguese-owned plantations occupied 90% of the cultivated area, and control of them passed to state agricultural enterprises. The Fundamental Law of 1975 gave the MLSTP Political Bureau the leadership of society and state, and the government followed eastern European models. Experienced managers left the nationalised roças and cocoa output fell from 10,000 tonnes a year in 1975 to 3,900 in 1987.

What the republic made of the plantation past

The one-party system ended from within. Liberalisation began in 1985, and the MLSTP's Central Committee, meeting in December 1989 after a national conference, agreed to open politics to other organised forces. A new constitution, ratified by referendum, took effect in 1990, and Miguel Trovoada won the presidency unopposed in the first free elections in 1991. The army has seized power twice since, each time for about a week: in August 1995, when the threat of losing foreign aid brought Trovoada back, and in July 2003, when officers complained of corruption and of how future oil revenue would be shared. Coup attempts followed in February 2009 and November 2022. Príncipe has governed itself as an autonomous region since 29 April 1995.

The roças were privatised in the 1990s and most failed. On Príncipe an investment group bought the roça of Sundy, turned the owner's residence into a hotel and in 2019 built a chocolate factory on the site. In July 2026 UNESCO inscribed six roças on the World Heritage List as one property: Monte Café, Água Izé, Diogo Vaz, São João, Sundy and Belo Monte. The inscription describes them as a large-scale colonial agro-industrial system based on forced migration and labour, kept running from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth to sustain commodity production after slavery was abolished.

The culture ministry told AFP in August 2026 that around a hundred roças survive, and that the country has a ten-year plan to restore them. Some are still lived in by former workers and their descendants. One of them is a member of the National Assembly whose forebears were serviçais shipped from Cape Verde to Sundy, and who was born on the estate where his father and grandmother had lived.