Museu Nacional and CACAU

Final post from our August 2016 visit to São Tomé and Príncipe with two places of interest in São Tomé town!

São Tomé and Príncipe's Museu Nacional is in the former fort San Sebastiao, built by the Portuguese in 1576 to fend off attacks by the French and Dutch. Outside the museum are three statues dedicated to three founders and/or discoverers of São Tomé, who arrived in 1470. The historical consensus is that the islands were deserted when the Portuguese arrived, and people were enslaved and brought over from Angola to grow sugar.

Fort San Sebastiao, site of the Museu Nacional
of Sao Tome and Principe.

After sugar production declined in favour of cultivation in Brazil's richer soil, the colony was largely left alone for a time, and escaped or freed slaves and their descendants were able to live relatively independently. Once cacao was introduced in the early 19^th century, Portuguese returned en masse and usurped the land of free São Toménse and imported more enslaved people from Portugal's other colonies and, once slavery officially ended in 1869, then roped freedmen into indentured servitude.

Interior buildings of the fort and museum.

We had an informative tour, particularly since the lady who showed us around spoke French. The museum included many liturgical artifacts, wooden furniture, images of the various plantations, and the turtle room displaying the several species that lay eggs on the islands as well as the threats they face. Set in the old fort, the museum also had nice views of the bay and São Tomé town.

The one with the Prince Valiant haircut is Pedro Escobar, among those who discovered
Sao Tome and Principe. Compared to most places that were "discovered," the
 islands actually seem to have been uninhabited when they arrived.

The most striking room of the museum was one devoted to the massacre of Batepa, reprisals in 1953 by the Portuguese against São Toménse who were protesting against forced labor on the plantations. As you can see from the pictures, photography was limited to outside the fort.

View of Ana Chaves Bay from the Museu Nacional.

We also visited CACAU, or Casa das Artes Criacao Ambiente Utopias (“House of Arts, Creation, Environment and Utopias”), an arts center that provides training, residences for artists, and exhibitions on the art, culture and history of São Tomé and Príncipe.

A principal exhibit during our visit focused on tchiloli, or “the tragedy,” which tells the tale of how Charlemagne's son Dom Carloto killed his best friend Valdevinos while they were out hunting as Carloto had designs on Valdevinos's wife Sibilla.

Further information on the tchiloli phenomenon in Sao Tome and Principe.

What apparently follows (we missed the main tchiloli peformance season by a few days) is a courtroom performance featuring many political intrigues amongst courtiers maneuvering for influence after the murder of Valdevinos.

The pictures on display at CACAU were of actors in tchiloli performances and their families. According to the exhibit, all characters are portrayed by men, in accordance with medieval tradition. It is a popular play in ST&P, and is performed by troupes on both islands.

The tchiloli roles are hereditary and passed down from one generation to the next.

Sao Tome town

Square on a corner in Sao Tome town.

Sao Tome's coat of arms with a falcon on the left and a parrot on the right.

In August we travelled to São Tomé and Príncipe for 10 days. Two small islands, they were the site of sugar and later cocoa plantations. These days São Tomé is a rather sleepy place, but with quite a lot to see both in the capital and around the island (we did not make it to Principe, which is expensive and/or time-consuming to reach and features mostly high-end tourist accommodation). São Tomé and Principe were formed by a volcanic mountain range that includes the extinct Pico Basile of Bioko Island (Equatorial Guinea), Mt. Manengouba, Mt. Oku and the dormant Mt. Cameroon (still on the list to climb!).

(Top) Buildings in Sao Tome; (bottom) Ana Chaves Bay.

Our trip was bookended by a few days in São Tomé town, and we enjoyed walking around and admiring the old housing, Ana Chaves Bay and bits of public art and murals, as well as trying out unfamiliar fruits (sap sap, jackfruit, breadfruit, etc.). São Toméans on the whole were very friendly, and many spoke a bit of French which helped as our Portuguese is very poor.

Jackfruit: tasty and extremely sticky.

Educate children so that it is not necessary to punish adults.

Sao Tome traffic.

Breakfast:yogurt, salami sandwich, sumo sap sap.

While most of the cacao crop is exported for refinement, some cocoa is used to produce chocolate on the islands. We went on a tour of one such chocolate factory owned by an Italian who runs Terreiro Velho, a plantation on Principe. Claudio Corallo was something of a cacao radical, very meticulous about his chocolate and indeed what should even be deigned chocolate. The presentation/diatribe was entertaining (and more comprehensible when he chatted with French speakers at the end) and the chocolate was very tasty. Of course, the old refrain about whether the workers who harvest the cacao can afford the final product is even more apt with non-industrially produced cocoa that serves a niche market.

Claudio Corallo, proselytizer for high-cacao chocolate.

While in town, we checked out the presidential palace and Parque Popular (the latter mainly known for its lunch establishments for government workers), considered taking a dip in the museum beach (it was a bit hectic so Blair took a swim further south), and visited the national museum and CACAU art space.

The main transport around town. Motorcycle taxis only accept one passenger -
quite different from Cameroon and other countries.

Transport around town was difficult later at night – with such a small population it seemed that motos turned in early. Restaurants serving dinner were not very plentiful either, at least outside of hotels (witness our ill-fated trek to O Pirata). But we usually found something good to eat (invariably seafood) and were offered several rides to our AirBnB lodgings outside the town centre (including a lift from Antonio who worked in the ministry of finance).

Delicious grilled fish and breadfruti lunch from a shipping on Ana Chaves Bay.

Food truck with painting of Cao Grande, a major landmark on
the road south to Porto Alegre.

School mural near our lodging: A book is like a window. Who does not read it is
like someone who was far from the window and can only see part of the landscape.
- Kahlil Gibran

Murals at Liceu Nacional, showing the importance of cacao, and safe sex.

Wherever there are women and men, there is always something to do,
there is always something to teach, there is always something to learn.

Home of an art gallery and bar, Pico Mocambo.

Our stay for the last few days was in a recently renovated house south of downton. Our
host, Edmin, had a birthday to celebrate so we were able to join the festivities.

Edmin's friend Rui arranged our stay, and we had a nice time chatting to him about São Tomé, London (where he has spent half his life), and central Africa. The party had an eclectic mix of boiled plantains, boiled snails (as opposed to the grilled “Congo meat” variety in Cameroon), birthday cake, and a large slab of prosciutto.

Prosciutto and birthday cake.

Interior and garden of our lodgings in Sao Tome town.

Sao Tome and Principe is among the small client-states that Taiwan
has turned to to argue their case in the United Nations. The Gambia
left the fold a few years ago in favor of China's largesse.

Poster for a recent art festival; colonial architecture in town.

On our last day in São Tomé we visited the Museo Nacional (forthcoming post), did a little shopping for tea, then went to check out Asas de Aviao. Unfortunately, this multi-faceted attraction was closed.

Asas de Aviao is a bar/restaurant/etc. built around two abandoned planes that were used by the Portuguese to supply the independence fighters during the Biafran War in the late 1960s. For reasons unclear to me, the Portuguese opposed the British and the USSR, and defied the embargo enforced against Biafra, with São Tomé as their waypoint and supply centre. The long-abandoned planes eventually were converted for use as a bar.

 The lunch spot we ended up going to instead was quite pleasantly arranged around a central tree, although the stray dogs were bothersome at times. (While Cameroon and other countries have stray dogs around, all with the same light brown hue, São Tomé has legions of them.) We enjoyed one more grilled fish meal, then headed to the airport.

We were promptly pronounced late for check-in, which ended 5 hours earlier with the incoming (perhaps inappropriately named as it's banned from flying to Europe) CEIBA Intercontinental flight, but were still allowed to board the outgoing flight. In some fortuitous timing, we were able to get a couple of Rosemas (referred to throughout STP as Nacional) to tide us over at the gate before the staff left for their respective breaks.

As backup lunch spots go, one could do worse (stray dogs not pictured).

Advisory in the men's room at Sao Tome International Airport.