Volunteers to colonise São Tomé were few. After the archipelago was claimed by the Portuguese in the late 15th century, plots of land were offered to settlers, on the condition that they were developed within the next five years. It was the same formula that had been used to populate Madeira Island, about 520km west of northern Morocco, earlier in the 15th century. São Tomé was a rather different prospect, though. Located in the Gulf of Guinea, about 300km from continental Africa, it quickly gained a reputation for being both distant and deadly. But it also displayed another, far more desirable quality. It was recognised as early as 1485 that São Tomé was immensely fertile and seemed perfectly suited to sugar production. As this development could not be accomplished willingly, the authorities changed tack and effectively turned the archipelago into a penal colony. In the early years, being transported there was viewed as a delayed death sentence, with convicts forced to choose between being hanged immediately in Portugal or eking out another couple of years on São Tomé. Those sent to the island were not left to work their plots alone. Instead, the convicts were given two enslaved people: one male, for working the land, and one female, for bearing children with the convict.
By 1506, the suitability of São Tomé for sugar production was being put to the test. It had become home to the first plantation system ever established in a tropical climate. Sure enough, the extraordinary fertility proved a boon by providing three harvests a year. This was a rather more generous bounty than the one or two crops achieved by the competing sugar-cane growers who were already established on Madeira. Even so, the industry initially grew gradually on São Tomé. In 1517, there were just two mills dedicated to sugar production in operation. But the picture looked markedly different in the 1530s, when São Tomé established itself as the world’s biggest supplier of sugar. By 1600, as many as perhaps 120 sugar mills had been built, and plantations covered most of the suitable land, an area amounting to almost half of the largest island. Huge numbers of enslaved Africans, taken from Angola, Benin, Congo, and Sierra Leone, worked on these plantations. Between 200 and 300 of these slave labourers were required to run the largest estate on São Tomé, at a place called Praia Melão. It is a site that has recently risen to prominence once more.
Forgotten heritage
‘I visited São Tomé in 2020’, says M Dores Cruz, of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Cologne and the Centre for African Studies at the University of Porto, ‘because I was hoping to start a project there. When I taught African Studies while I was at university as a graduate student, I became fascinated by the important role São Tomé played in the development of the plantation system. As this model was then exported to the Americas, it helped create the modern Atlantic world, whose legacy is still felt in relations of race and class, and structures of inherited wealth and inequality. But because no archaeology had previously been undertaken on São Tomé – and because there are no classified archaeological monuments – there wasn’t an obvious starting point. So I did a bit of scouting. It was during a visit to a local exhibition that I happened to see a tiny photograph showing some stones from a ruined sugar mill. I asked several people where it was, but no one knew, until eventually my colleague Nazaré Ceita said “Oh yes, that’s Praia Melão”. When I went and visited the site everything was covered in thick vegetation, but my reaction was “Holy mackerel!”, because those few stones in the photograph were part of a massive ruin. It was a combined mill and estate house, which covers about 23m by 16m, has walls standing up to 9m high, and dates to the 16th century. We’ve now completed two seasons of work there. The first year was essentially a survey of the structure, but this year we opened eight test units and had an archaeology field school with students from the University of São Tomé e Príncipe, who were participating in their first excavation.’
Redrawing the family tree