A bittersweet inheritance: the cocoa islands of São Tomé and Príncipe from colonial hegemony to developing microstate

! ! A bittersweet inheritance: the cocoa islands of São Tomé and Príncipe from colonial hegemony to developing microstate Ana Silva Fernandes, Manuel Fernandes de Sá, Rui Fernandes Póvoas Centro de Estudos de Arquitectura e Urbanismo, Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto (Research Centre on Architecture and Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto) Rua do Gólgota 215, 4150-755 Porto, PORTUGAL. Telephone/fax: 00 351 226057144 - 00 351 226057199 ! [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ! ! Abstract ! This paper focuses on the context of São Tomé and Príncipe, discussing the specificity of postcolonial territories, to analyse how colonisation strategies induced specific socioeconomic structures and territorial organisation systems, and how these factors still have impact in contemporaneity. Two aspects will be analysed: on the one hand, the factors that throughout time have strongly ! contributed to the specific conformation of São Tomé, and on the other hand the challenges that these and the current situation pose for the integrated development of an inclusive territory. Therefore, the analysis will include features such as in the impact of the geostrategic location, the role of the city as an irradiation point, the specialisation of this territory as a plantation colony, land distribution or the interaction between social groups. These will provide the basis for understanding legacy and current challenges, such as contemporary land use and property, the urbanisation process and the mutation of the rural environment, the spatial repercussion of income disparities, intervention stakeholders, or the inheritance of structures and their potential as catalysers for development. Through the case-study of the bittersweet legacy of the cocoa empire, it is intended to contribute to a wider discussion over postcolonial inheritance and current challenges. ! ! Keywords ! Postcolonialism, developing country, São Tomé and Príncipe, urban growth, informal settlements ! ! ! ! The idea of postcolonialism takes the role of motto and framework for understanding the context that is to be here presented - the small African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe -, the legacy it inherited and the characteristics that were perpetuated or assimilated throughout time. This idea encompasses several notions: on the one hand, the manipulation undertaken within the colonial project, as well as the peripherization and submissive role of the overseas territories within the interests of the colonial metropolis. On the other hand, the radical changes in the socioeconomic 475 ! ! structures undertaken with the independence and the reconstruction of the several operative systems. These young nations face the process of urbanization within a setting of intense political convulsions, economic difficulties and fresh creation of regulatory systems, translating into additional development challenges in comparison with their western counterparts, where this urbanization process took place over a longer period of time and more consolidated structures. The choice for a small-scale case study was intended at studying these issues in detail, understanding this context as a laboratory that allows a fine analysis, in order to detect tendencies that might be identified in other contexts, beyond this specific one. This choice is also based in the strong belief that smaller numbers don’t necessarily mean simpler mutation processes nor advantages in the development challenges. The goal of this research1, besides analysing the specificity of postcolonial contexts and its inheritance, is to understand how these have perpetuated in time, either aggravating specific situations or favouring others. Additionally, it is also intended to approach this theme through an operative perspective, discussing the constraints of formal planning tools and the State’s role of provision of welfare within a context of scarce resources, in order to assess intervention capacities and potentials of different stakeholders. ! ! São Tomé and Príncipe - mutations throughout time ! The archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, located in the Gulf of Guinea over the Equator line, is formed by two islands and some islets, and sums a total of one thousand square kilometres, being the second smallest African nation, with around a hundred and seventy thousand people. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! d ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! a b c ! Figure 1. Localion of the archipelago: (a, b) the Gulf of Guinea, (c) São Tomé island, (d) Príncipe island. ! 1 This paper is part of an ongoing PhD research of the first author within the Doctoral Programme of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal, having the supervision of the second and third authors, being supported by a scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. This research aims at studying the settlement patterns and the impact of the inheritances in the built environment, focusing on two components: the first being the built heritage and its adaptation into responding to contemporary needs, and the second is the dwelling panorama, namely the areas of informal construction. 476 ! ! Though this archipelago has been one of the world’s leaders in cocoa exportation at the outbreak of the twentieth century and still retains tangible potential and resources, nowadays half of its population stand beneath the poverty line, which places this country in the groups of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) and the Small Insular Developing States (SIDS), facing the challenges and the impact of the transition from plantation colony to developing Microstate. ! ! Colonisation, decolonisation and the independent Nation ! For five centuries, the Portuguese colonization of São Tomé and Príncipe was based mainly in two aspects: on the one hand, its role as important trading port for the African and Atlantic commercial routes provided by its privileged geostrategic location; and on the other hand, the favourable conditions for extensive plantation on its territory, created by fertile soil and humid climate. The cultivated products were mainly sugar-cane, coffee and cocoa, all of which relied heavily on extensive workforce - provided by slaves, and later contracted labour - which shaped profoundly the society, the relation between social groups and the spatial distribution of the population throughout history and its economic cycles. From the sugar cycle along the sixteenth century, to the coffee and cocoa period of the nineteenth ! and twentieth centuries, the territory has undergone intense manipulation - vegetation removal and radical changes in land use, implementation of infra-structures, the construction of production estates and the implemented social hierarchy - which shaped a built environment that reflected, and responded to, the specific purposes of the colonial project. Major investments, technology and the concentration of efforts in the maximization of the cocoa ! production, placed for a short period this small archipelago in an international hegemonic position. But this specialization soon showed side-effects as the production declined and the cocoa devaluation in international markets induced major economic difficulties in this territory. Additionally, this economic specialization also translated into a specific social organisation: as the ! crops demanded extensive labour, this workforce was achieved through large numbers of slaves for the sugar production throughout the sixteen century, and through contracted labour two centuries afterwards for the plantations of coffee, cocoa and other products. Between these two major economic cycles, both the lesser impact of the colonial administration in the territory (maintaining just the trading activities in the urban area) and the freedom granted to former slaves, allowed the emergence of a class of “new natives” (“forros”), which the subsequent colonial reinvestment didn’t suppress. Alongside, the flight of slaves from the former colonial estates had also created a new community (“angolares”)2. ! ! 2 Though it has been claimed that they might have been the survivors of a ship wreck off the coast, the most common position is the flight of slaves (Nascimento, 2008; Seibert, 1998; Tenreiro, 1961). 477 ! ! Parallel to the development of these social groups, the colonial reinvestment in the exploration of the territory for the plantation of coffee, cocoa and few other products, reintroduced a rigid labour and social relation within the estates, contributing to the creation of a highly hierarchical social structure3. Therefore, even though being a small territory with low demography, the present São Tomé and Príncipe has inherited the legacy of a fragmented society. The independence brought great socioeconomic changes, with the departure of most of the settlers, leaving many of the management positions vacant, to be newly occupied (Oliveira, 1993: 10). Alongside, territorial changes also took place: the nationalisation of great part of the land4, followed by an agrarian reform twelve years afterwards in which the land was distributed by former employees of the agricultural enterprises through small plots, introduced a radical mutation not only in the land division, but also in its role and function. ! ! The capital city of São Tomé - urban evolution ! These different periods are also reflected upon urban evolution: the capital city of São Tomé has grown from the first implantation spot to stretch along the bays and to the interior of the territory, accompanying the tendencies of the different periods into the current morphology of an extensive blur without clear limits [Figure 2]. From an older core, supported by a waterfront-parallel axis and its surrounding buildings, the city has expanded inwards through infiltration lanes, which have in turn thickened and extended to fill the in-between areas. Urban growth, though already visible from the sixteenth century ahead, has intensified halfway ! along the twentieth century, accompanying the expansion plans of colonial modernism and the urban attractiveness of the independent nation. Nevertheless, within the economic difficulties faced by the new nation, the provision of infrastructures was unable to reach a similar rhythm of growth, which has caused informal settlements to vastly increase, creating fragmentation and disparities between planned and unplanned areas. Nowadays, poverty affects more than half of the total population of São Tomé and Príncipe, fifteen per cent being under extreme poverty. In this context, informal settlements of basic housing units have grown both within the remainders of the colonial buildings and in recent peri-urban areas, as ! ! ! 3 Nevertheless, this rigid class division didn’t necessarily correspond to a racial distinction: there are descriptions of “white slaves”, “free Africans” and “wealthy creoles” (Henriques, 2000; Clarence-Smith, 1989), inducing the interpretation of a society in which social classes were not strictly related to the racial background. Clarence-Smith (1989: 496) adds “that class lines cut across racial ones, and that the black creoles were often allies of the white planters in a struggle which pitted both groups against African peasants.” 4 The nationalization of estates owned by colonial settlers reached around eighty-six percent of the total surface of the country (UNDP, 2008: 54). 478 ! ! the number of total urban dwellings considered to lack the minimum living conditions gets close to ! three quarters of the total existing constructions. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! a b c d e f Figure 2. Diagram of the evolution of the city of São Tomé along five hundred years: (a) discovery and settling, XVth century (b) sugar and slave cycle, XVIth century (c) slave cycle, XVIIth-beg.XVIIIth (d) coffee and cocoa cycle, XXth-beg.XXth, (e) from modernisation to independence, mid-XXth century, and (f) from independence onwards, 1975-2010 [ASF, based on the Plan of 1646, Leote (1788-1796),IGC-JIU-MU (1958) and GoogleEarth (2010). ! ! A bittersweet inheritance - the postcolonial legacy ! The post-colonial territory gathers therefore constraints and potentials that are strongly related to the socioeconomic evolution process that it has witnessed, resulting both from the colonial legacy and the independency process that followed. From the extensive influences of the inheritance to form the contemporary context, five significant ! aspects will be highlighted here. ! The first is related to the impact of the geo-strategic position of this small archipelago which, in a context of expansion and maritime trade, became an important outpost of established routes. This territory also acquired a specific role in the colonial empire, the later being articulated as a system in which each part played a specific role to the whole and especially to the metropolis. This purpose is related not only to the specialization of the production (relying heavily on cocoa, though not being strictly a monoculture) but also to the transport, outflow and sale in international markets, which was essential for the success of the whole trade chain and a favourable economic outcome. Nevertheless, this condition changed profoundly up to the present globalised economy, as production and commerce are performed through very different mechanisms, and a micro-scale state like the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe faces difficulties in finding sustaining tools. The second aspect is related to the insularity and its impact: the physic heterogeneity and the radial organisation of the territory, in which the capital city takes the role of sole connection to the exterior, and therefore of the filter through which everything must pass. This position was important not only during the process of the occupation of the territory - from the first settlers on, used as basecamp for exploration of the interior and as product/services agglomeration - but also until nowadays, for maintaining this condition of central node of concentration of goods and information. Focusing on the first aspect as basis for land occupation, Tenreiro (1961) describes the city as having an "ideal 479 ! ! location, if not in all aspects, at least in two: a large bay which sheltered the ships and wide open land that, gently and without a rugged terrain, lead to the interior", therefore becoming the "centre of radiation of settlement". The city would thus assume "a double role of core that attracted settlers to the island's interior and drained products to the exterior". This condition holds up to the present: being an insular context and thus extremely dependent on the exterior, the interface where import and export relations take place reaches this character of attraction and radiation spot. Furthermore, the smaller island of Príncipe is dependent on its bigger counterpart, thus suffering the constraints of double insularity. Though the condition of insularity by itself establishes already a great impact in the socioeconomic and geographic structures of a territory, colonial occupation also contributes to amplifying its effect, both by the strategies implemented and the relation to the metropolis. A third aspect is related to São Tomé and Príncipe as a "plantation-colony", meaning the inheritance of an agricultural economy relying on extensive crops, and thus extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the value of these few products and dependent on imports for all the other. Additionally, it is also important to understand that the built environment was designed for the specific purpose of the colonial projects and strategies, meaning that the settlements patterns, the infrastructures and all the inherited constructions followed these particular aims, which have drastically changed in time and need proper adaptation to the present needs and uses. A fourth idea, closely related to the preceding, consists of the land, its structure and property. The coexistence of two different scales through the cocoa cycle - the extensive agricultural estates and the small yards of the "natives" - is followed by the nationalization of the large plantation areas (which constitute about eighty-six per cent of the total land area) and its subsequent division into small plots and distribution, leading to radical changes not only in the land but also in the economic capacities of its inhabitants. Finally, the last factor to be presented is the inherited social structure, that sets off from an unoccupied territory to the "invention of a society” (Henriques, 2000), where settlers, “new natives”, and hired labour, from several locations and cultures, are introduced in the region and interact through different power relations that change throughout time but leave traces in the collective memory. Today's society, despite its small scale, has inherited this condition of fragmentation and still retains some stigmas that hinder social cohesion and the strengthening of civil society and common identity. ! ! Contemporary challenges and potentials ! The contemporary challenges to the development of this territory are, therefore, extensive and interconnected throughout scales and themes of focus. From the impacts of the macroeconomic background to the inherited structures and the dwelling panorama, the former legacy is crucial in 480 ! ! dictating the present-day reality, creating the specificity of a postcolonial territory and its particular challenges. São Tomé and Príncipe is paradigmatic in this cause-effect relation, in which the traces of its past legacy still impact greatly in the contemporary setting. ! ! Socioeconomic challenges ! Though not thoroughly addressing macroeconomic issues, their reference is essential for understanding widespread impacts. As mentioned before, the change in the influence of the geostrategic location of this small archipelago, along with the investment mainly in the agricultural sector, have been relevant factors in dictating its current condition of economic fragility. Nowadays, following the great cocoa decline, a major part of the national income is achieved through the service sector, in which the tourism plays the key role (Cardoso, 2007). Nonetheless, with constraints such as the overall costs or the lack of infrastructures, this tourist destination is hardly competing with other offers and remains beneath the desired numbers. Alongside, the discovery of oil banks ashore has raised the hopes on major revenues, situation that even though still in process of negotiation, has already raised expectations that induced impact on prices (Weszkalnys, 2008). This situation has not only produced a mismatch between reality and expectations, but also risks inducing the ‘oil curse’, meaning to contribute to the accentuation of economic and social disparities between a small elite and the prevalent deprived population (Frynas, Wood, Oliveira, 2003; Weszkalnys, 2009). Poverty is indeed the major issue to be tackled, as more than half of the population of São Tomé and Príncipe stand beneath the poverty line. Addressing this problem means not only to urgently fulfil immediate needs but also to urge empowerment and future chances of improvement, meaning to induce the escape from the poverty trap, the dependency cycle and the social disparities. Tackling poverty and informality relies, naturally, also on other fields of intervention, such as the production of income and the access to social assistance, which translates into an allencompassing long-term process. It involves also large-scale efforts such as the provision of basic infrastructural networks, which tend to demand big investments that are only partially, or insufficiently, assumed by the State or by external funding. ! ! State, stakeholders and governance ! In a developing nation, the constraints on the resources and capacities of the State often lead to the role of ensuring the welfare being assumed by different agents, from donating international agencies to other stakeholders such as non-governmental organisations. The idea of a welfare State is not only an unachieved goal and an on-going strive, but also a multi-agent task, forming a 481 ! ! fragmentation which often lacks articulation, and in which agents are not complementary to a main system but almost its substitute. Furthermore, intervention relies greatly on external funding, which has a massive proportion of the ! total action capacities - “By 1997, a staggering 97.3 percent of STP’s public investment programme was funded from external sources” (Frynas, Wood, Oliveira, 2003: 52) - and also a major influence in the decision-making process. Another issue within this theme is the patchwork of initiatives - meaning the action through projects or limited-term investments - which creates difficulties in ensuring planning strategies, articulation and continuity of intervention. For the donors, their agenda - or the visibility of the actions where their investment is applied - also tends to achieve importance in the choice of the intervention, which often doesn’t correspond to more urgent needs nor to an articulated strategy. ! ! Territory, settlements and the urbanisation process ! The built environment reflects therefore not only the specific legacy of the past contributions, but also this current collage of initiatives and actions. The change from plantation estates to new settlements has created major mutations in their roles ! and uses: from centrally (or hierarchically) organised agricultural companies relying on large numbers of workers, they have been transformed into villages, in which the relations between inhabitants themselves and to the land became different. Though some roças maintain some agricultural production of extensive crops (mainly cocoa, or other in smaller numbers, like coconut), most of them have changed to small-scale subsistence production. ! ! ! settling along roads ! ! ! ! area of the estate subdivided into plots ! ! ! ! roça’s main buildings ! Figure 3. Example of the different scales and strategies of land division and occupation, Roça Santo André, São Tomé [ASF, based on GoogleEarth imagery, 2010]. ! The built structures show these mutations and ongoing research has been trying to identify them: ! one important aspect is naturally the change in the functions of existing buildings, with the units that 482 ! ! were originally dedicated to agricultural purposes being vacant or adapted to other uses such as housing. Another important aspect, due to the transformation of the social context, is the change of the collective functions (such as communal kitchens) into family-scale uses, causing these facilities to become obsolete (Fernandes, Sá, Póvoas, 2011). Furthermore and in many settlements, common infrastructures (like water or sanitation networks) have been discarded, not only due to the lack of maintenance and ambiguous shared responsibility, but also owing in part to an increasing inadequacy of inherited facilities (Cardoso, 2007). Nonetheless, and even though deriving from a shift in needs and socioeconomic setting, most of these changes have also represented a loss of facilities or capacities essential for basic living conditions, and thus need to be urgently provided. ! Figure 4. Diagram of the functions of the buildings in the Roça Boa Entrada, in the beginning of the XXth century and in 2010 – red: housing, brown: production, yellow: services and assistance, grey: vacant [ASF]. ! ! A – airport H – hospital M – military headquarters A A C – centre F – fo r t P – port R – ‘roça’ (estate) R R A – airport H – hospital M – military headquarters C – centre F – fort P – port R – ‘roça’ (estate) ! ! ! H H R M R M P F F ! C P C ! R F F R ! ! ! R R ! ! ! ! ! Figure 5. City of São Tomé: constructions in the late 1950s [ASF, based on the plan of 1958 IGC-JIU-UM]. Figure 6. City of São Tomé: constructions in 2010, [ASF, based on the images from GoogleEarthPro]. 483 Nascimento, A. (2002) Órfãos da Raça - Europeus entre a Fortuna e a Desventura no S. Tomé e ! Príncipe Colonial (Instituto Camões - Centro Cultural Português em S. Tomé e Príncipe, ! ! ! São Tomé). ! Nascimento, A. (2008) ‘As ONG em São Tomé e Príncipe: entre a afirmação da sociedade civil e a emulação do clientelismo nas práticas políticas’, CODESRIA: XII General Assembly, Yaoundé, Cameroun. Nascimento, A. and Cardoso, P. (2008) Atlas da Lusofonia: São Tomé e Príncipe (Prefácio & ! Instituto Português da Conjuntura e Estratégia, Lisbon). ! Oliveira, J. E. C. (1993) A economia de S. Tomé e Príncipe (Cooperação Portuguesa, Lisbon). Santo, A. C. E. (2009) São Tomé e Príncipe: problemas e perspectivas para o seu desenvolvimento (Edições Colibri, Lisbon). ! Seibert, G. (2002) Camaradas, clientes e compadres: colonialismo, socialismo e democratização em São Tomé e Príncipe (Vega, Lisbon). Tenreiro, F. (1961) A ilha de São Tomé (Memórias da Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Lisbon). ! 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Tomé. Escala 1:75.000. Centro de Geografia do Ultramar, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Ministério do Ultramar. Papelaria Fernandes, Lisboa. ! HMS - Hugo Machado da Silva, co-author of the architectonic surveys of the Roças of STP. ! IGC-JIU-MU (1958) Carta de S. Tomé. Levantamento Aerofotogramétrico. Folha nº 2. Escala 1:25.000. Instituto Geográfico e Cadastral, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Ministério do Ultramar, Lisboa. 490 IMVF, CEGOT-UC (2010) Sistema de Informação Geográfica. São Tomé e Príncipe. Versão 1. Instituto Marquês de Valle Flôr e Centro de Estudos em Geografia e Ordenamento do Território da ! ! Universidade de Coimbra. ! JIU-UM (1962) Carta do Príncipe. Levantamento Aerofotogramétrico. Escala 1:25.000. Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Ministério do Ultramar, Lisboa. ! Leote J R T (1788-1796) Plano da Baia de Ana Chaves, compreendendo a Planta da cidade de S. Tomé e a perspectiva e planta da Fortaleza de S. Sebastião, 440x670mm, nº176, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisboa. ! TN - Téla Non, online newspaper of São Tomé and Príncipe, available at http://www.telanon.info/. ! ! Acknowledgements ! This research is being undertaken with the support of a scholarship from FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, without which this investigation would not be possible. 491