StapleSão Tomé and Príncipe
Funge
also Angu
Cassava or maize flour cooked to a smooth stiff paste, eaten under calulu and every other sauce on the islands.
Serves 6 · 25 minutes
Cabo Verdeans of São Tomé
Islanders sent from a famine to a plantation — tens of thousands recruited from drought-stricken Cabo Verde to the cocoa estates, whose descendants form a distinct community that neither fully returned nor fully belonged.
Identity
Population: Estimated 8,000 to 12,000 of recognised Cabo Verdean descent
Location: The former roças of São Tomé, particularly in the north and centre, and the outskirts of the capital
Language: Cabo Verdean Kriolu alongside Portuguese and São Toméan Forro
Language family: Portuguese-lexifier creole (Kriolu); Indo-European → Romance → Portuguese
Traditional governance: Estate administration historically; today São Toméan citizenship for most, with a long-running question over land and status.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Roça-born descendants
Families born on the estates across three or four generations.
Recent Cabo Verdean migrants
Later arrivals with maintained links to the archipelago.
Mixed Forro-Cabo Verdean households
Families intermarried into the São Toméan majority.
Culture
Clothing: São Toméan dress; Cabo Verdean styles retained at festivals and in the older generation.
Food: Cachupa, the Cabo Verdean maize and bean stew, cooked on São Toméan islands with São Toméan ingredients, and the clearest surviving marker of the community.
Ceremonies: Morna and coladeira sung at gatherings; Catholic saints' days; the São Toméan calendar observed alongside remembered Cabo Verdean ones.
Marriage customs: Catholic and civil marriage; community endogamy strong in the first generations, extensively mixed since.
Initiation rites: Catholic sacraments; entry into estate work from adolescence in the plantation era.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for São Tomé and Príncipe and Cabo Verde, at national rather than community level — 16 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
São Tomé and Príncipe
9 dishes
National dishSão Tomé and Príncipe
Calulu
Dried and fresh fish stewed with okra, aubergine and forest greens in palm oil, the national dish of São Tomé and shared with Angola. Served with funge or angu.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
Street foodSão Tomé and Príncipe
Blá-Blá
Small fried fish or fritters sold in cones of paper at the market and the beach, eaten hot with chilli and lime.
Serves 4 · 30 minutes
Street foodSão Tomé and Príncipe
Banana Frita com Peixe
also Fried banana with fish
Fried plantain with a small grilled fish and a spoon of chilli, sold from stalls along São Tomé's waterfront and eaten standing up.
Serves 4 · 35 minutes
Festival & feastSão Tomé and Príncipe
Feijoada Santomense
Beans stewed with pork, smoked meat and palm oil, made for Sundays and festivals. The Portuguese dish rebuilt with island ingredients.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes, plus soaking
Regional specialitySão Tomé and Príncipe
Molho no Mundo
A slow-cooked mix of fish, meat and vegetables in one pot, whose name suggests everything in the world went into it. Cooked on the roças and at village gatherings.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Regional specialitySão Tomé and Príncipe
Izaquente
also Palm nut and fish stew
Fish stewed in palm nut sauce with island herbs, a São Toméan dish that sits between the Gulf of Guinea mainland and the Portuguese kitchen.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetSão Tomé and Príncipe
Chocolate Quente
Hot chocolate made from the islands' own cocoa, which once made São Tomé the world's largest producer. Ground with cinnamon and drunk thick.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes
Drink & sweetSão Tomé and Príncipe
Ponche de Cacau
also Cocoa punch
Sugarcane spirit steeped with cocoa nibs, cinnamon and condensed milk, from islands that once supplied a large share of the world's cocoa.
Serves Makes 1 litre · 20 minutes, plus 2 weeks steeping
Cabo Verde
7 dishes
StapleCabo Verde
Xerém
Coarsely ground maize cooked to a soft porridge, the everyday version of what cachupa does at length. Eaten with fish, sausage or simply oil and salt.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishCabo Verde
Cachupa
also Katxupa
Hominy corn and beans stewed for hours with whatever meat or fish there is, the dish that defines Cabo Verde. Left over and fried with an egg the next morning it becomes cachupa refogada.
Serves 8 · 3 hours 30 minutes, plus overnight soaking
Street foodCabo Verde
Pastel com o Diabo Dentro
A fried sweet potato pastry with a spicy tuna filling, whose name means pastry with the devil inside. Sold from baskets on the street in Praia and Mindelo.
Serves Makes 12 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Festival & feastCabo Verde
Búzio Guisado
Sea snails or conch stewed in tomato, wine and garlic, prepared for saints' days and family Sundays on the coastal islands. Tenderising them is a matter of hours, not minutes.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Regional specialityCabo Verde
Caldo de Peixe
A clear fish broth with cassava, sweet potato and green banana, eaten on every island where a boat goes out. Simple, and judged entirely on the freshness of the fish.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Regional specialityCabo Verde
Djagacida
also Jagacida, Rice and beans
Rice and beans cooked together with onion and bay, the Cabo Verdean everyday plate and a quicker cousin of cachupa.
Serves 6 · 1 hour, plus soaking
Drink & sweetCabo Verde
Grogue and Ponche
Sugarcane spirit distilled in the valleys of Santo Antão, drunk neat as grogue or sweetened with honey and lime as ponche. Poured at every morna session and every funeral.
Serves Makes 700ml ponche · 20 minutes, plus a week resting
Stories & Oral Literature
Recruited Out of a FamineHistorical account
Cabo Verde's droughts in the 1900s, 1920s and above all the 1940s killed tens of thousands. Portuguese administrators offered contracts on São Tomé's cocoa estates as the alternative to starvation, and shipped people out in large numbers. It was voluntary in the sense that the other option was death, and Cabo Verdean writers have said so ever since.
The Return That Was Not ArrangedContemporary account
Repatriation was promised and largely not delivered. When São Tomé became independent in 1975 the estates were nationalised and then collapsed, leaving communities on land they did not own, in a country not their own, with no passage home. The status of Cabo Verdean descendants and their land claims has been raised repeatedly and settled only partially.
Proverbs
“Sodadi ta matâ.”
“Longing kills.”
The sodade at the centre of Cabo Verdean emotional life.
“We came for rain and found cocoa.”
What the recruitment actually offered.
“Cachupa cooks the same in any island.”
The dish as portable identity.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Catholic cosmology carried from Cabo Verde, itself layered over West African elements; sodade, the untranslatable longing, functions almost as a cosmology of its own.
Beliefs: Roman Catholicism with strong saint devotion; Cabo Verdean festas transplanted; São Toméan practice absorbed over generations.
Ancestors: Families trace descent to a named island of origin — Santiago, Fogo, Santo Antão — and often to the ship and year of departure.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The Christian God
Worshipped in the estate chapels and parish churches
Nossa Senhora
Marian devotion carried from the archipelago
Sodade
Not a deity, but the organising sentiment of Cabo Verdean life abroad
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Sanzala rooms on the roças, later extended and subdivided by families; self-built housing on estate margins after nationalisation.
Building techniques: Estate masonry inherited rather than built; incremental self-building in block and sheet since the 1980s.
Village layout: Communities occupying the old labour quarters of estates whose administrative buildings are ruined, on land whose ownership is unresolved.
Artifacts
Cachupa
Foodway
The maize and bean stew that remains the community's clearest marker.
Morna recordings
Music
Cabo Verde's melancholy song form, sung on São Toméan estates.
Contract and shipping registers
Archive
Records of recruitment from famine-struck islands.
Roça sanzalas
Architecture
Estate labour rooms still occupied by descendants.
Historical Timeline
1900s–1920s
Drought and famine in Cabo Verde; recruitment to São Tomé's cocoa estates begins in scale.
1941–1948
The worst famines kill tens of thousands; recruitment peaks.
1960s
Contract labour continues under international criticism until Portuguese decolonisation.
1975
São Toméan independence; the estates are nationalised and then decline.
1990s–present
Land distribution schemes address estate ownership; the status of Cabo Verdean descendants remains partly unresolved.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: Cabo VerdeEncyclopaedia Britannica
- IOM: migration in the Gulf of GuineaInternational Organization for Migration
Premium & scholarly sources