Globalizing violence and resistance in São Tomé and Príncipe

Abstract

São Tomé and Príncipe is a small two-island nation in the Gulf of Guinea. The archipelago was uninhabited until the late fifteenth century when the Portuguese gradually occupied and colonized the territory with settlers and enslaved Africans. The islands served as a sugar producer and a crucial outpost for the transatlantic slave traffic. After the formal abolition of slavery in São Tomé in 1875, the Portuguese brought in – with different levels of coercion – ‘contract workers’ (contratados) from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde, to work in the re-established plantation economy (of coffee and, later, cocoa). The so-called contract work (in practice, forced labour) in the plantations (roças) was comparable to slavery, due to its recruitment methods and severe labour conditions. This plantation system was already shaped by key transnational dimensions: on the one hand, the slave-like labour conditions of the contratados became the target of a British campaign against ‘slave cocoa’ that in 1909 culminated in a boycott of São Tomé’s cocoa; on the other, Portuguese planters capitalized on the expertise of foreign crop scientists to increase productivity. During the anticolonial struggle, São Tomé’s nationalists denounced the brutal plantation and labour system as part of a wider experience of colonial violence. This legacy played a central role in the state and nation-building process, informing, immediately after independence, the nationalization of the plantations.