Origins of Slavery in Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe
Authors: Ribeiro da Silva Filipa 
Published: March 2024

Enslaved Africans and the institution of slavery were part of the societies of Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe from their onset in the 15th century. In both archipelagos, enslaved Africans were regarded as manpower, either to supply the international labor markets, to be employed locally in the production of foodstuffs and export crops, or as soldiers organized into state sponsored militias or masters’ private armies.

Within this social group there was a clear distinction between enslaved domestic servants, artisans, traders, and commercial agents or representatives living mainly in urban areas, rural workers employed on farms, plantations, and sugar mills, and enslaved people to be traded and transported elsewhere. The latter group was part of the local societies only temporarily, since their stay was limited to the time required to board the vessels sailing to Europe, the other Atlantic islands, Brazil, and Spanish America.

Many enslaved people escaped from the farms and plantations or from the warehouses where they awaited embarkation and were forced to hide in the hills or the bush. This was a common situation in Santiago, Fogo, São Tomé, and Príncipe. However, it was only in São Tomé that marronage became a widespread phenomenon in the 16th and 17th centuries. There, marronage was, to a great extent, a consequence of the fear enslaved Africans had of being embarked and displaced to other territories and of the harsh living and working conditions.

However, in Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, as later in other colonial slave societies, enslaved Africans were sometimes manumitted by their masters in their wills. In general, most of them stayed under the protection of their previous masters’ households. Hence, enslaved and manumitted Africans were essential for populating, promoting the economic development, and guaranteeing the military defense of Cabo Verde and São Tomé. In both archipelagos, Africans played a key role in the formation and development of the first Creole societies in the Atlantic world with distinct languages and cultures with implications until the present day (21st century). But, in the long-term the trajectory of slavery in the two archipelagos followed different paths. While Cabo Verdean society witnessed a gradual demise due to droughts and the difficulties of developing a plantation economy, in São Tomé and Príncipe, this institution stayed alive, flourished until its abolition, and gave place to other oppressive and coercive forms of labor extraction in the 19th and 20th centuries. These two different paths were, to a great extent, a consequence of the differences between the two archipelagos in terms of climate, soil, patterns of settlement, and economic activities developed. By the early 16th century, São Tomé had become the world’s largest sugar producer relying on enslaved labor and the plantation system, and therefore, the first plantation slave society in the tropics; conversely, Cabo Verde had emerged mainly as an entrepot for transatlantic slave and commodity trades, relying on a rather close relationship with the Luso-African communities in Senegambia and the Upper Guinea.