Edsiley da Encarnação’s wooden stilt house stands mere steps from the ruins of an old sugar plantation on the African island of São Tomé. What remains of the 16th-century building, strategically built near a freshwater source and the sea, lies hidden among trees. Vines encircle stone walls.
“Everyone always says that people died there and that it’s haunted,” said Da Encarnação, 24, who studies business at the University of São Tomé and Príncipe. “There were slaves there, and so people believe that the colonists brutally killed the slaves and their spirits remained, wandering around the place.” Some neighbors avoid the site. Others visit to pick mangoes in the middle of the night from surrounding trees; youngsters sometimes prank the foragers, drifting through the grounds while dressed in ghostly white or black.
The former agricultural complex is now the site of the first archaeological excavation to take place in São Tomé and Príncipe, a two-island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, almost five centuries after the island’s “discovery” by Europeans.
The ruins played a pivotal role in the origin of plantation slavery and the rise of race-based slavery. That’s exactly what Portuguese historical archaeologist M Dores Cruz is hoping to illuminate by excavating the Praia Melão complex next to Da Encarnação’s home. It was once the country’s largest sugar mill and operated as a farm for nearly 400 years.
“What is not recognized is how fundamental what happened in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 16th and 17th century is in shaping the plantation system in Brazil and the Caribbean,” said Cruz, who specializes in African archaeology at the University of Cologne in Germany. The sugar economy in São Tomé and Príncipe was critical to the construction of a modern world built on Black bondage. As Cruz put it, it’s the “first time that you have slaves who were enslaved Africans. It’s the beginning of the concept of slaves being Black,” though slavery itself is an age-old practice.
The archipelago nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is near the equator, geographically almost the center of the world. For a brief moment in time, the two tiny islands were at the literal center of the emerging transatlantic slave trade. But the island’s remote location off Gabon’s coast and low population (just over 230,000 people) have obscured the nation’s significance in creating a new world order.
When Portuguese mariners arrived in the 1470s, they found the twin islands with no humans, but teeming with giant lizards, lush forests and rushing streams. Claiming the islands for their empire, the Portuguese saw the potential to grow the sugar business they’d stewarded elsewhere.
“They had lots of wood. They had lots of water. The only thing they didn’t have was the people to produce it because [sugar cultivation] is very labor-intensive,” said Cruz.
Living in this wilderness often amounted to a death sentence due to tropical diseases and a poor food supply, and almost no one came to the islands of their own will. The Portuguese settled the island with convicts expelled from the Iberian peninsula, an uncertain number of Jewish children taken from their families (legend has it that some were eaten by those huge lizards), and captive Africans, many trafficked to and from the slave castle Elmina in present-day Ghana.
“São Tomé became an island of experimentation,” said Maria Nazaré de Ceita, a São Toméan university professor who works with Cruz on the Praia Melão excavation.
As the sugar plantations multiplied across the island, more and more captives from west and central Africa were forced to work in them and in mills. This inhumane experiment proved so lucrative that São Tomé became the world’s largest sugar supplier in the early 1500s.
Sugar cultivation and processing were particularly brutal. During the long harvest season, sugar was processed day and night. Sugarcane had to be cut by hand and crushed to release its juices, and then the juice boiled – all within 24 hours. The burning-hot vats sometimes maimed enslaved workers, and habitual overwork condemned them to dismally short life expectancies.
But little is really known about the lives of the people who lived, toiled and died at Praia Melão. Most of the research on São Tomé’s plantations has focused on later estates, particularly 19th- and 20th-century cocoa and coffee plantations.
Cruz had wanted to launch a research project in São Tomé and Príncipe for years, but the country proved difficult to access until recently, when flight options expanded. When Cruz could finally travel easily to the islands, she visited the old cocoa and coffee plantations (roças) that now serve as tourist attractions. At the Cacau cultural center, an image sparked her curiosity: the ruins of a barely visible sugar mill – Praia Melão.
In partnership with the University of São Tomé and Príncipe and its faculty, Cruz launched the excavation in 2020, hiring local workers. Their collective goal is not only to bring more attention to São Tomé and Príncipe’s historical role in the proliferation of Black slavery but also to train the first generation of archaeologists on the island. The lack of an archaeological program in the country has meant telling the island’s varied stories “has mainly been in the hands of international scholars”, said Cruz.
Finding history in the ruins
The two-story Praia Melão ruins sit on a 23-by-16m plot. Of the three ground-floor rooms, the largest served as the mill, where juice was squeezed out of the fresh sugarcane. The Praia Melão estate owners occupied the cooler, more refined upper floor featuring stucco walls, built-in cabinets and more windows, which probably served as overlooks to monitor the work below. Neither the kitchen nor the slave quarters have yet to be located.
Cruz and her team have unearthed ceramic roof tiles and sugar molds that once held and hardened sugarcane juice for European export. The team also found a single cowrie shell, often used as currency in continental Africa.
In 1770, archival documents reported 150 enslaved people at Praia Melão producing sugarcane, cassava, coconuts and palm oil.
“We have good insight into the big picture of slavery in São Tomé,” said Christopher DeCorse, an anthropology professor at Syracuse University who is leading several archaeological projects on the coast of Ghana. But “we don’t know how these plantations functioned. You have records of the number of people. You have dates. But the lifeways of people on a day-to-day basis are not so much. That reveals the grittiness. This is interesting and key to [Cruz’s] work.”
São Tomé and Príncipe’s early 16th-century dominance of Europe’s sugar market didn’t last long, with the island’s European minority emigrating to Brazil and greener pastures elsewhere. The country’s high humidity resulted in low-quality sugar, its soils became depleted and raids by marauding European rivals disrupted trade.
The collapse was also helped along by enslaved people’s resistance. Many escaped to mountain camps called mocambos in São Tomé and Príncipe, similar to Brazil’s quilombos. In July 1595, an enslaved man known only as Amador started a three-week revolt. His force of 5,000 enslaved men destroyed so many sugar plantations and mills on the island that the industry never recovered. Before Amador was executed, he crowned himself rei, or king, of São Tomé. São Tomé and Príncipe honors Rei Amador every 4 January, and his imagined face now graces the country’s dobra currency.
Praia Melão may eventually add to this story. It’s already changing residents’ knowledge of their country’s history. When people pass by the ruins, Cruz invites them to see the team’s work and explains the sugar mill’s origins.
Da Encarnação himself sees the difference. His mother lived near the ruins all of her life, and she only ventured on to the grounds when Cruz started the excavation. But now he serves as the caretaker of the site, and most of his neighbors know more than just ghost stories.