São Tomé and Príncipe

Overview

São Tomé and Príncipe is Africa's second-smallest sovereign state: two volcanic islands and associated islets totalling 964 square kilometres in the Gulf of Guinea off Gabon, straddling the equator, with about 220,000 people and its capital at the city of São Tomé. The islands were uninhabited until Portuguese navigators João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar arrived in December 1470; settlement began in the 1490s, in part with deported Sephardic Jewish children.

History

In the 16th century São Tomé became Africa's foremost sugar exporter, its plantations worked by enslaved Africans — one of the Atlantic world's first slave-based plantation economies — and the islands served as a slave-trade entrepôt. Maroon communities waged long wars against the planters, culminating in the 1595 revolt led by Amador, which destroyed most of the island's sugar mills before being crushed. As sugar declined, the colony stagnated until the 19th-century introduction of coffee and cocoa; by 1905 São Tomé was the world's largest cocoa producer, the "Chocolate Islands," its roça plantations notorious for forced labour recruited from Angola and Mozambique — an international scandal that prompted a cocoa boycott. Colonial repression peaked with the Batepá Massacre of February 1953, in which Portuguese troops killed hundreds of native forros, galvanising nationalism.

The MLSTP liberation movement, founded in exile, took power at independence on 12 July 1975 under Manuel Pinto da Costa and built a one-party Marxist state, nationalising the roças. In 1990 the country adopted a new constitution — among Africa's first democratisations — and has held competitive elections since 1991, with peaceful alternations of power under presidents including Miguel Trovoada, Fradique de Menezes, Evaristo Carvalho and, since 2021, Carlos Vila Nova. Brief coup attempts in 2003, 2009 and 2022 all failed, and the country is now regarded as one of Africa's most stable democracies.

Later history and present status

The economy depends on cocoa exports, imports of around 90% of food, modest tourism and long-hoped-for offshore oil that has yet to materialise. Portuguese is the official language alongside the Forro, Angolar and Principense creoles, and about 81% of the population is Christian. A footnote of scientific fame: the 1919 Eddington expedition's eclipse observations on Príncipe helped confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity.