The history of São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe is a two-island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, about 250 kilometres off the coast of Gabon. The islands had no human inhabitants until the Portuguese arrived around 1470, and their whole society was created by colonisation and the slave trade. In the sixteenth century São Tomé was the first great sugar colony of the Atlantic world, worked by enslaved Africans, and later a busy depot for the slave trade to the Americas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries its cocoa plantations made it, briefly, the world's leading cocoa producer, using labour that was free in name only. Independent from Portugal since 1975, it has been a multiparty democracy since 1991.

The islands are the peaks of a chain of extinct volcanoes, covered in dense rainforest and rich in plants and birds found nowhere else. There is no evidence that anyone lived on them before Europeans arrived. Portuguese navigators, traditionally João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar, sighted São Tomé around December 1470 and Príncipe soon after, during the voyages down the African coast that formed part of the Age of Discovery. São Tomé was named after Saint Thomas, and Príncipe, the "prince's island", in honour of the heir to the Portuguese throne.

Early attempts at settlement failed, but in 1493 the crown granted the island to Álvaro Caminha, who founded the town of São Tomé. Many of his settlers were men exiled from Portugal as convicts or undesirables. Among them were children taken from Jewish families who had fled from Spain to Portugal, separated from their parents and sent to the island to be baptised; most died within a few years. Settlers were encouraged to take African wives, and their descendants, together with freed Africans, became the Forros, the islands' Creole population. Príncipe was settled from 1500.

The volcanic soil and abundant rain proved ideal for sugar cane, and from the early sixteenth century São Tomé developed one of the first plantation economies of the Atlantic, worked by enslaved people bought on the mainland, especially in the Niger Delta, the Kingdom of Kongo and Angola. By the middle of the century the island was Africa's leading sugar exporter, and the crown took direct control of São Tomé in 1522 and of Príncipe in 1573. The model of large estates, enslaved African labour and export of a single crop was later carried across the ocean to Colonial Brazil and the Caribbean.

The island was also a depot of the Atlantic slave trade, where captives from the mainland were held before being shipped onward to Elmina, Europe and the Americas. Resistance was constant. Escaped slaves formed maroon communities in the mountainous south, and the Angolares, a distinct community in the south of São Tomé with its own language, are often linked to these groups, although their exact origins are debated. In 1595 an enslaved man named Amador led a revolt that destroyed some sixty of the island's eighty-five sugar mills and briefly threatened the town itself, before he was captured and executed. He is now honoured as a national hero.

Revolts, raids by rival powers and competition from Brazil's far larger plantations ruined São Tomé's sugar industry during the seventeenth century. A force of the Dutch Republic under Cornelis Jol captured São Tomé in 1641 and held it for seven years, destroying many of the remaining mills, and French raiders attacked in later decades. For the next century and a half the islands were valued mainly as a provisioning and transit stop for slave ships of the Portuguese Empire. The capital was moved to Santo António on Príncipe in 1753 and did not return to São Tomé until 1852. Many Portuguese planters left, and the Forros came to dominate local landholding and politics.

The islands' second boom began in the nineteenth century, when coffee and then cocoa were introduced from Brazil. Large plantations called roças, owned by Portuguese companies and individuals, took over much of the land, often pushing out Forro smallholders. Portugal abolished slavery in 1876, but the planters replaced enslaved workers with serviçais, contract labourers recruited, often by force, in Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. Few ever returned home. By 1908 São Tomé was the largest cocoa producer in the world.

Investigations by British journalists and campaigners in the 1900s exposed the system as slavery in all but name, and in 1909 the major British chocolate firms, led by Cadbury, stopped buying cocoa from the islands. Conditions changed little. The Forros, meanwhile, refused to work on the roças, which they regarded as slave labour. In early 1953 the governor, Carlos Gorgulho, tried to force them into contract work, and rumours spread that their land would be seized. Beginning on 3 February 1953, colonial troops, police and armed Portuguese residents killed hundreds of Forros in what became known as the Batepá massacre, torturing and executing many and burning some alive. The anniversary is now a national holiday, the Day of the Martyrs of Liberty.

Batepá fed the growth of nationalism, and in the late 1950s exiles formed what became the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe (MLSTP), based in neighbouring Gabon. The islands were used in 1967 to 1970 as the main base for the airlift of food and medicine to Biafra during the civil war in Nigeria. After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 overthrew the dictatorship in Portugal, the new government agreed in Algiers that November to hand over power to the MLSTP, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. Independence came on 12 July 1975, and most Portuguese settlers left.

Manuel Pinto da Costa, the MLSTP leader, became president and ruled a one-party socialist state aligned with the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. The roças were nationalised, but cocoa production fell sharply, and by the late 1980s the government was turning to Western donors and economic reform.

A new constitution in 1990 permitted opposition parties, and in 1991 the country held free elections; the former prime minister Miguel Trovoada, who had returned from exile, became president, and the MLSTP gave up power peacefully. The young democracy proved turbulent. In August 1995 soldiers briefly detained Trovoada before he was restored within a week, and in July 2003, while President Fradique de Menezes was abroad, the army seized power for a week before an internationally brokered deal brought him back. Governments have changed frequently. Hopes of oil wealth, including a joint development zone shared with Nigeria from 2001, have so far brought licensing revenue but little production.

Evaristo Carvalho won the presidency in 2016, and Carlos Vila Nova in 2021. In September 2022 Patrice Trovoada's Independent Democratic Action (ADI) won the legislative elections, and on the night of 24 to 25 November 2022 a small group attacked the army headquarters in the capital; the government described it as a coup attempt, and four people were killed. On 6 January 2025 President Vila Nova dismissed Trovoada and his government, a decision Trovoada called unconstitutional, and Américo Ramos became prime minister later that month. Cocoa, increasingly grown organically on smallholdings, and tourism remain central to the economy of a country of a little over 200,000 people.