Empty Cameroon Line peaks became a slave-trade sugar hub
São Tomé and Príncipe, a Gulf of Guinea island republic off Central Africa, pairs two main islands about 150 kilometres apart and roughly 250 and 224 kilometres from Gabon’s coast. Uninhabited until João de Santarém and Pedro Escobar landed on 21 December 1470, the volcanic pair later fed the Atlantic slave trade.
With about 201,800 people in 2018, it is Africa's second-smallest and second-least-populous sovereign state, behind only Seychelles. The islands rose from deep-water eruptions on the Cameroon Line some 30 million years ago. Príncipe first bore the name Santo Antão and was renamed Prince's Island in 1502, after the Portuguese prince who collected duties on its sugar. Early settlers were largely people Portugal considered undesirable, among them some 2,000 Jewish children aged eight or younger taken from Iberia to work the cane fields.
A water-powered mill introduced in 1515 set off a boom, and by the mid-sixteenth century São Tomé was Africa's leading sugar exporter, worked by enslaved people from the Slave Coast, the Niger Delta, Kongo and Angola. From 1519 to 1540 it was the hub linking slaving at Elmina with the Niger Delta, and before 1580 it supplied three-quarters of Brazil's imports. Unusually, royal decrees let free people of mixed descent hold office from 1520 and granted them civil equality in 1546.
Runaways formed interior settlements called macambos and raided plantations from the 1530s. In July 1595 an enslaved man named Amador rallied 5,000 people and wrecked 60 of 85 mills on the island before militia crushed the revolt three weeks later. Competition from the Americas then eroded sugar, and by the mid-seventeenth century the island was mainly a slaving waystation.
Coffee and cocoa arrived in the early nineteenth century, and by 1905 São Tomé was the world's top cocoa producer. Slavery was abolished in 1876, yet forced labour persisted, and in 1953 several hundred African workers were killed in the Batepá Massacre, still officially commemorated. On Príncipe in 1919, Arthur Eddington's eclipse observations gave an early confirmation of Einstein's general relativity. Independence came peacefully in 1975 under a one-party state that lasted until 1990.
Source: São Tomé and Príncipe
