Africa’s smallest Portuguese-speaking country is on the world heritage map at last. In late July, at the 48th session of the Committee held in Busan, South Korea, UNESCO inscribed six roças of São Tomé and Príncipe under the title « The Roças of São Tomé and Príncipe: Colonial Agricultural System and Forced Migration ». The archipelago had never had a single site listed. As recently as January 2023 it was one of only three African states with nothing on their tentative list.
Four of the chosen estates stand on the island of São Tomé: Monte Café, Água Izé, Diogo Vaz and São João. The other two, Sundy and Belo Monte, are on Príncipe.
A roça was far more than a farm. Each one ran like a small closed town, with its master’s house, workers’ quarters, hospital, chapel, workshops, drying terraces and sometimes a railway of its own. They are the reason the islands became one of the world’s leading cocoa producers in the early twentieth century.
That wealth came at a cost, and the cost is what UNESCO set out to recognise. The organisation describes a large-scale colonial agro-industrial system built on migration and forced labour, from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Slavery had been abolished, yet production had to go on. Thousands of so-called contract workers were shipped in from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. They lived under a rigid hierarchy, and a system of papers controlled their movements and tied them to the estate.
Some of these plantations carry other stories too. At Sundy, founded in 1822, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington watched the 1919 solar eclipse that gave Einstein’s general theory of relativity its first experimental confirmation.
What is left of all this today? Around 200 roças survive across the two islands, many of them crumbling and often lived in by descendants of the former workers. A few have found a second life. Diogo Vaz makes organic chocolate, Belo Monte has been restored as a hotel, and Sundy is undergoing a major refurbishment that includes the old workers’ dwellings.
For a country of just over 200,000 people that is betting on ecotourism, the label opens obvious doors. It brings duties as well: maintaining the buildings, paying for their protection and involving the families who live there. The listing says what these places were. It does not yet guarantee they will stay standing.