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The Independence of São Tomé e Príncipe and Agrarian Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Pablo B. Eyzaguirre
Pablo B. Eyzaguirre
Affiliation:
Visiting Rockefeller Postgraduate Fellow at the International Service for National Agricultural Research, The Hague1.
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Extract

The Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Príncipe is the smallest country in lusophone Africa. The inhabitants of these two islands in the Gulf of Guinea just north of the Equator number approximately 115,000,2 of whom over 95 per cent live on São Tomé which has a total area of 857 sq. km. The smaller island of Príncipe, with only 140 sq. km, is inhabited primarily by Cape Verdeans whose ancestors migrated there during the colonial era. The economy has always been dominated by cocoa plantations, known as roças, which despite changes in organisation have been the fundamental sociopolitical foundation of this creole African society.3 The continuity of this unit of production in the national economy, and its attendant impact on the structure of society, remains the central problem facing the country's leaders.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 671 - 678
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 The research was made possible by the support of the Danforth Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Yale Concilium for International Studies, with the co-operation of the Government of São Toméncipe and its Ministry of Agriculture.

2 This estimate is based on the 1981 census which gave a population of 96,000, with a 2·8 per cent annual rate of growth. Further adjustments have been made for the considerable under-counted migration to Portugal and Angola.

3 See Tenreiro, Franciso, A Ilha de São Tomé (Lisbon, 1961), a monograph by a São Toméan geographer that provides an excellent synthesis of the history, ecology, and economy of the islands.Google Scholar

4 Degredados were persons who were deprived of all their property and political rights, either for crimes committed or religious reasons.

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17 During the 10-year period, 1977–87, although the annual average production of the roças has been under 5,000 tons of cocoa, the crop's share of the country's agricultural exports has actually increased. In 1982, there were peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of Cape Verdeans, who continue to provide the bulk of the field labour on the plantations, in the unrealistic hope that the Governments of São Tomé e Príncipe and Cape Verde would assist in their repatriation.

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20 When fieldwork was conducted in São Tomé during 1981–1982, labourers on the state plantations earned the equivalent of U.S. $50 a month at the then official exchange rate, or only approximately half that amount according to the unofficial parallel-exchange rate used to calculate the standard of living by development banks.

21 Eyzaguirre, Pablo B., ‘Competing Systems of Land Tenure in an African Plantation System’, in Downs, Richard and Reyna, Stephen (eds.), Land Concentration in Africa (Hanover, N.H., 1988).Google Scholar