Serviçais
Contract labourers shipped to the cocoa estates from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde after slavery was abolished, on contracts almost nobody was permitted to complete, in a system a British chocolate company was eventually sued for calling free.
Identity
Population: Tens of thousands over a century; their descendants are a substantial part of the modern population
Location: The roças, the plantation estates of São Tomé and Príncipe, each a self-contained town
Language: Portuguese and the island creoles; Angolan and Mozambican languages carried and largely lost
Language family: Indo-European → Romance → Portuguese; Portuguese-lexifier creoles
Traditional governance: The estate administrator held effectively total authority: housing, rations, medical care, movement and discipline were all matters for the roça, not for any court.
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.
Angolares by contract
Labourers recruited from Angola, the largest single source.
Mozambican serviçais
Recruited across the continent, arriving after long sea passages.
Cabo Verdean serviçais
Sent in large numbers during the famines, and the source of a lasting island community.
Culture
Clothing: Estate-issue cloth and working dress; ceremonial dress for the dances that survived the crossings.
Food: Estate rations of maize meal and dried fish, supplemented by cassava and banana grown on plots the roça permitted; malnutrition was endemic and recorded.
Ceremonies: The dança congo and other performances carried from Angola; funerals, which were the community's own occasions; Catholic observance imposed by the estate chapel.
Marriage customs: Unions within the roça, often unregistered; recruiters were required to send women as well as men, which they did in numbers that never matched.
Initiation rites: None formal. Arrival, allocation to a roça and the first season's work was the passage, and mortality in that first year was extremely high.
Stories & Oral Literature
The Contract Nobody FinishedHistorical account
Portugal abolished slavery in its colonies in 1875 and replaced it with contract labour. Serviçais signed for five years, at the end of which repatriation was in theory guaranteed. In practice contracts were renewed on the labourer's behalf, often without their knowledge, and the return voyage almost never happened. The Portuguese word for the system was serviçal; the word used by everyone else was slavery.
Cadbury's Libel TrialLegal history
The British firm Cadbury bought São Toméan cocoa for years while reports of conditions accumulated. When a journalist wrote that the company's chocolate was made with slave labour, Cadbury sued for libel in 1909. The jury found for Cadbury and awarded one farthing in damages, the smallest coin in circulation. Britain's chocolate firms boycotted the islands the following year.
Proverbs
“The contract is five years and the ship never comes.”
The central fact of the system.
“Cocoa is sweet where it is drunk.”
Distance between production and consumption.
“A farthing is what the truth was worth.”
The 1909 verdict, as remembered on the islands.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Catholic cosmology imposed through the estate chapel; Angolan and Mozambican ancestral practice surviving in dance, in healing and in the treatment of the dead.
Beliefs: Roman Catholicism alongside retained African practice; the dead of the roças are held to remain there, and abandoned estates carry a reputation accordingly.
Ancestors: Genealogies were broken by recruitment and rarely recorded by the estates; descendants trace origin to a roça rather than to a village of departure.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The Christian God
Worshipped in the chapel every roça was required to build
Ancestral spirits
Carried from Angola and Mozambique, addressed in healing and in dance
The dead of the roças
Held to remain on the estates where they were buried, often without markers
Architecture
Traditional settlements: The roça as a complete town: hospital, chapel, narrow-gauge railway, administrator's house on a rise and labour lines (sanzalas) below it.
Building techniques: Portuguese colonial masonry and ironwork, much of it prefabricated in Europe and shipped out; drying terraces and cocoa sheds on an industrial scale.
Village layout: A deliberate hierarchy in stone: the administrator's house looking down a formal court, the sanzala rooms in ranks, the hospital and cemetery at the edge.
Artifacts
Roça Água Izé and Roça Agostinho Neto
Heritage site
The great estates, their hospitals and railways now ruined and still inhabited.
Sanzala labour lines
Architecture
Ranks of single rooms in which serviçais families were housed.
Dança congo
Performance
Masked dance-drama of Angolan origin, still performed on the islands.
Estate ledgers
Archive
Contract registers recording recruitment, renewal and death.
Historical Timeline
1875
Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies and introduces the serviçal contract system.
1880s–1900s
São Tomé becomes the world's largest cocoa producer on contract labour.
1906
Henry Nevinson's A Modern Slavery documents the recruitment routes from Angola.
1909
Cadbury wins its libel action and is awarded one farthing; a British boycott follows in 1910.
1953
The Batepá massacre: colonial forces kill hundreds of Forros resisting forced labour recruitment.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: Sao Tome and PrincipeEncyclopaedia Britannica
- A Modern Slavery — Henry W. NevinsonProject Gutenberg
Premium & scholarly sources