Principense

Population: ≈ 8,000

Location: Príncipe island, 150 kilometres north-east of São Tomé, with almost everyone in Santo António and the surrounding roças

Language: Lung'ie (Principense), critically endangered with a few dozen fluent speakers; Portuguese and Forro in daily use

Language family: Portuguese-lexified creole (Gulf of Guinea group)

Traditional governance: Autonomous region since 1995 with its own regional government and assembly within São Tomé and Príncipe.

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Clothing: Everyday tropical dress; for the auto de floripes, Moorish and Christian costume with masks, capes and wooden swords passed down within families.

Food: Fish, breadfruit, banana, palm oil and cocoa; the island's cocoa is now sold as single-origin and organic, its main export.

Ceremonies: The auto de floripes each August, a days-long pageant of Charlemagne and the Moors performed through the streets; saint days; wakes with sung lament.

Marriage customs: Consensual union widespread alongside church marriage, as on the larger island.

Initiation rites: Inheritance of a role in the floripes pageant is the closest thing to a formal passage, held within particular families across generations.

Every dish the Atlas publishes for São Tomé and Príncipe, at national rather than community level — 9 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.

“Small island, long memory.”

Everything is known and nothing forgotten in a community of eight thousand.

“The sea is the road and the wall.”

Isolation as both protection and constraint.

“A language dies in the mouth of the last child who refuses it.”

Used by Lung'ie campaigners.

Creation: Catholic cosmology from settlement in the 1490s, over West Central African beliefs carried by the enslaved and later the contracted.

Beliefs: Catholicism with saint devotion; forest spirits of the obô; curandeiro healing; the pageant itself functioning as a moral and religious drama.

Ancestors: Wakes and anniversary masses; the roça cemeteries hold the contracted dead of three continents.

Traditional settlements: Santo António's small colonial grid on the bay, roças scattered inland beneath the phonolite towers of Pico Papagaio and Pico de Príncipe.

Building techniques: Colonial masonry with tile roofs; timber stilt houses in the villages; the estate complexes of Sundy and Belo Monte with hospital, chapel and drying terraces.

Village layout: Town square, church and customs house at the water; estates laid out around a courtyard with the owner's house above and the labour lines below.

1. 1500

   Príncipe settled; sugar, then slaving, then cocoa shape its economy.

2. 1753–1852

   Santo António serves as capital of the whole colony.

3. 1919

   Eddington's eclipse expedition observes from Roça Sundy.

4. 1995

   Príncipe becomes an autonomous region with its own government.

5. 2012

   The whole island is designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.