São Tomé and Príncipe

Two volcanic islands that invented the plantation, and then had it done to them twice. Portuguese navigators found them uninhabited around 1470, and the colony established on Sao Tome in the 1490s combined a single export crop, enslaved African labour and absentee ownership into a model that was then exported to Brazil and the Caribbean - this is where the sugar plantation system was worked out. Jewish children forcibly taken from their parents in Portugal were deported here as settlers in 1493. Slave revolts and maroon communities followed, and Amador's rising in 1595 briefly took most of the island. Sugar failed against Brazilian competition and the islands became a way-station, then revived in the nineteenth century with cocoa, worked by contract labourers from Angola and Mozambique under conditions a 1909 British investigation found to be slavery in all but name, prompting a chocolate boycott. The Batepa massacre of 1953, in which colonial forces killed a large number of Forros, is the founding national grievance. Independence came in July 1975. The country is the second smallest African state and one of the least visited countries in the world. The country has about 230 thousand people on two main islands. Portuguese is official, with three local creoles spoken. The islands sit almost exactly on the equator. Obo national park covers a large share of the territory and holds many endemic bird species. Cocoa remains the principal export, and the islands were briefly the largest producer in the world. Rolas island is crossed by the equator itself.

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