São Tomé and Príncipe
Capital: São Tomé · Central Africa
Equatorial creole islands whose Forro, Angolar and Principense cultures preserve Afro-Portuguese theatre, music and language born of plantation history.
Ethnic communities
- ForrosDescendants of freed islanders; tchiloli theatre
- AngolaresMaroon-descended fishing communities
More communities of São Tomé and Príncipe
- Principense (Lung'Ie) · The smaller island's creole community
- Tonga · Plantation-contract descendants of the roças
- Cabo Verdean-descended · Drought-era migrant families
- Mestiço townsfolk · São Tomé city's mixed heritage
- Roça communities · Estate villages of cocoa's old empire
- Fisher lineages · South-coast canoe and net families
- Danço-Congo brotherhoods · Dramatic dance societies of the saints
- Auto de Floripes players · Príncipe's epic street-theatre keepers
- Portuguese-descended families · Planter-era lineages
- New diaspora returnees · Lisbon-linked families rebuilding
Languages
Major languages: Portuguese, Forro, Angolar, Principense
Language families: Portuguese-based Creoles
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Angolar maroon 'kingdom' of Amador
Heritage sites
- • Plantation roças heritage
- • Obo National Park
Cultural highlights
National heroes of São Tomé and Príncipe
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1926–2010
Alda do Espírito Santo
Poetry
Poet of the Batepá massacre and author of the national anthem's words, later a minister in the independent government.
- Politics & liberationdied 1596
King Amador
Slave revolt
Led the 1595 uprising of enslaved plantation workers against the Portuguese and was proclaimed king by his followers. Declared a national hero; his image appears on the currency.
Deep-dive community profiles
Angolares
The fishing people of São Tomé's southern shore — descendants, by their own account, of a sixteenth-century shipwreck or of escaped plantation workers, who kept a distinct creole, a king and the island's most skilled canoe fishery.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Forros
The freed — descendants of the enslaved liberated on São Tomé before abolition, who refused to return to the plantations, kept their own Creole and their own dance-drama, and became the island's landholding majority.
Open deep profile →Principense
The people of the smaller island — seven thousand of them under Príncipe's volcanic towers, keepers of a critically endangered creole, of the auto de floripes pageant, and of a biosphere reserve that covers their whole territory.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Tongas
Those born on the plantation — the children and grandchildren of contract workers brought from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde, who inherited the roça without inheriting land, and whose Portuguese-based speech and music are the sound of the cocoa century.
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