Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe

Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe
Flag Coat of arms
Capital and largest city	São Tomé
Official languages	Portuguese
Recognized languages	Forro Creole Angolar Creole Principense Creole
Demonym(s)	São Toméan Santomean
Government	Unitary semi-presidential republic
• President	Carlos Vila Nova
• Prime Minister	Patrice Trovoada
Area
• Total	964 km²
Population
• 2023 estimate	220,372

São Tomé and Príncipe, officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, is an island liberal democracy off the coast of Gabon in West Africa and in the Gulf of Guinea. The country is comprised of two archipelagos with the two main islands - São Tomé and Príncipe.

History

Colonization

São Tomé and Príncipe were supposedly uninhabited, though this is loosely debated, as São Tomé has seen barely any archaeological investigation before the arrival of Portuguese navigators. Those Portuguese navigators were João de Santarém and Pero Escobar, who came across the islands around 1470 and encountered São Tomé on December 21, 1470. The first successful Portuguese settlement was by Álvaro Caminha in 1493, who was granted the land by the Portuguese crown, and Príncipe was settled in 1500.

The islands were incorporated into European capitalism through violent processes of appropriation. What neoliberal sources call "discovery" masked the advance of Portuguese maritime capital seeking new sites for profitable monoculture.

Since the islands were isolated and malaria-prone, very few Portuguese wanted to settle there, and so the Portuguese crown sent its "undesirables" forcefully, which included enslaved Africans from the Kingdom of Kongo and Kingdom of Benin, alongside thousands of Sephardic Jewish children. John II of Portugal sent 2,000 Jewish children under the age of eight, torn from their parents, forcibly baptized, and shipped to the island.

"We are told by the well-known 16th-century Lisbon printer Valentim Fernandes that 1,400 (children) had already died by 1506." - Richard Zimler, citing manuscripts by Valentim Fernandes.

This was part of the violent process of primitive accumulation: land and labour were bodily expropriated and commodified to serve colonialist profit.

Sugar Boom

"Once they set foot on the islands of San Thomé and Principe, they are lost to the world as completely as if they had entered the grave." - Henry Nevinson, A Modern Slavery.

Plantation sugar production transformed São Tomé into an engine of early capitalist agricultural export. The volcanic soils and tropical climate made sugar economically attractive, but production required clearing rainforest and draining swamps; thus, enslaved Africans were forced to clear the rainforest while malaria and yellow fever infected and killed them.

As for the Sephardic Jewish children, upon arrival they were starved; contracting malaria and yellow fever, and unable to defend themselves, they were eaten by local wildlife such as crocodiles.

As the slaves cleared the forest, São Tomé became Africa's largest exporter of sugar, and so the Africans had to work in the sugar mills. There, they were worked to exhaustion in the searing heat of the boiling houses, leaving horrific burns on their bodies; their limbs were frequently crushed in the sugar presses. Death from disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion was so high that the Portuguese planters had to replenish their numbers continuously with slave ships.

The sugar economy on São Tomé is another example of the capitalist tendency to subordinate life to accumulation: the enslaved were treated as inputs to be consumed and replenished; hence, the continuous importation of new slaves and the development of the islands as a trans-shipment and holding point in the emerging trans-Atlantic slave trade. The cruelty of the Portuguese, the boiling houses, the presses, the long hours in dangerous conditions was not accidental but intrinsic to the commodity form under capitalism.

Enslaved Africans, pushed to the brink of survival by torture and starvation, revolted with Rei Amador leading the uprising. The enslaved population was able to control much of São Tomé until the capture of Rei Amador in 1596. To terrorize the enslaved population and deter resistance, they executed Amador; his body was drawn and quartered, cut into parts along the lines drawn, and displayed across the island.

Capitalism created extreme exploitation, and in so doing, it also created its own class resistance. The major revolt led by Rei Amador must be read as the class response of the enslaved masses to the property relations and terror instituted by Portuguese planters. Slave insurrections are political struggles by a dispossessed class seeking to end their exploitation and reassert their own human dignity. The brutal public execution of Amador in 1596 was an act of terror intended to reassert planter domination and discipline the enslaved, which is typical of counter-revolutionary violence used to defend property relations.

As the sugar boom declined by the late 16th century, the islands transitioned into a slave-trading hub and served as a massive, disease-ridden holding pen for enslaved African men, women, and children before they were loaded onto ships sent to the Americas. Things changed in the early 19th century, however, as cocoa and coffee were introduced by the Portuguese, thus thrusting the islands back into becoming the world's largest producers of cocoa.

As the sugar boom gave way, the islands shifted their role from sugar producers to places where enslaved people were concentrated and sold onward, again reflecting capitalist adjustments to profit conditions.

Coffee & Cocao

Rei Amador was a 16th-century leader who led a major slave revolt against Portuguese rule on the island of São Tomé in 1595. Today, he is celebrated as a national hero and a symbol of freedom, with his image appearing on the country's currency.

In the 19th century, the introduction of cocoa and coffee created a new export boom; the form may have shifted, but the underlying relations, land owned by a small capitalist class, labour extracted under coercion remained intact.

The economy was now dominated by company-owned plantations called roças, which operated as heavily guarded prisons controlled by the descendants of the slave-owning landlords. Despite Portugal abolishing slavery in 1876, the roças were a system of "contract laborers" in which people from Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique were coerced into contracts they could not read and from which they were never allowed to return home.

Even after formal abolition, capitalist property relations were preserved through new legal and extra-legal forms. Large company plantations (roças) functioned as closed systems where "contract labour" replaced slavery in form though not in substance: coercion, debt, movement control, and severe corporal punishment, such as the palmatoria, a wooden paddle designed to suck the flesh and inflict pain and blistering on the palms and soles.

Child mortality in São Tomé reached 20%, as children died due to malnutrition, maternal exhaustion, and disease; these conditions functioned as labour discipline. The roça system reproduced a racialised, hierarchical labour regime, enforced by the descendants of the planter class and protected by the Portuguese colonial state.

British journalist Henry W. Nevinson travelled to Angola in 1904 to document the supply of "contract laborers" feeding São Tomé's roças, where he discovered dead bodies across the Angolan interior.

"Human bones littered the sides of the trail, so many that it would take an army of sextons to bury all the poor bones which consecrate that path... (Upon lifting the head of a recently killed captive) the thick, woolly hair came off in my hand like a woven pad, leaving the skull bare, and revealing the deep gash made by the axe at the base of skull." - Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery.

Decolonization

As decolonization was spreading throughout Africa, the Portuguese responded with extreme violence, notably in February 1953, when Portuguese governor Carlos de Sousa Gorgulho ordered a mass killing of all forros (descendants of slaves) who refused to accept labor in the roças. After the massacre, thousands of people were rounded up, crammed into small cells, and sent to concentration camps in Fernão Dias. Any resistance was met with torture, electric shocks, and beatings with wooden clubs, alongside starvation; those who died had their bodies dumped into the sea to hide any evidence.

"They threw them into the sea... It was to kill, to kill without pity." - Survivor testimonies recorded in historical accounts of the Batepá Massacre, Massacres à São Tomé, Mário Pinto de Andrade.

The trauma of the Batepa massacre cemented the nationalist movement led by Manuel Pinto da Costa and his party ín the 1950s, the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe (MLSTP) was formed by São Toméans to achieve independence. Following the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal the new regime met with the MLSTP in late 1974 to work out a transfer of sovereignty and on July 12, 1975 São Tomé and Príncipe became independent.