Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe

Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe was the Portuguese island colony in the Gulf of Guinea, held from 1470 to 1975. Explorers João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar found the two islands uninhabited around 1470; São Tomé was named for Saint Thomas on whose feast day it was sighted, and Príncipe for the crown prince of Portugal. An early settlement failed against hunger and fever, and only in 1493 did Álvaro Caminha plant a colony that survived. Sugar made the islands rich and cruel: by the sixteenth century great plantations worked by enslaved Africans shipped sugar to Europe, and São Tomé became a way station of the Atlantic slave trade. When Brazilian sugar outcompeted it, the islands dozed for two centuries until coffee and cocoa revived them in the nineteenth. The colony lived quietly through the age of decolonisation until the fall of the Lisbon dictatorship in 1974; Portugal granted independence the next year, and the two-island state entered the world as the smallest country in Africa.