On February 3, 1953, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe witnessed one of the bloodiest episodes of Portuguese colonial rule, the Batepá massacre. What began as tensions over forced labour quickly turned into a campaign of mass violence in which hundreds, and possibly thousands, of local people were killed.
When the Portuguese first settled São Tomé and Príncipe in the late 15th century, they turned the islands into a hub of sugar production and later into one of the most important waypoints in the Atlantic slave trade. For centuries, enslaved Africans were brought to the islands to work cocoa and coffee plantations, while countless others were shipped across the ocean from its ports.
Slavery was formally abolished in the 19th century, but its shadow never disappeared. The Portuguese replaced it with systems of contract labour that were little different in practice. Workers were often imported from their colonies in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique under harsh conditions that resembled servitude.
Amid this system, one group stood apart, the forros. Descendants of freed slaves, the forros clung fiercely to their independence. They refused plantation work, seeing it as slavery in another form. Instead, they turned to small-scale farming, fishing, and trade, holding on to the dignity their ancestors had won. Their refusal to work in cocoa and coffee plantations frustrated landowners, who constantly complained of labour shortages.
This refusal created ongoing conflict with plantation owners and colonial administrators who believed the estates could not survive without local labour. By late 1952, rumours began to spread that the government planned to pass new colonial policies which would strip the forros of their independence and compel them into plantation work. To many, it seemed that slavery, abolished in name but not in memory, was about to return under a different disguise.
In late 1952 and early 1953, unrest grew across the islands. The governor at the time, Carlos Gorgulho responded by publicly accusing the forros of being manipulated by communists and treated their protest as a threat to colonial order. He mobilized Portuguese troops, police forces, and even local settlers, and a campaign of terror set in motion.
On February 3, the wave of organized terror began. Villages were raided, civilians arrested, and groups of men and women executed in public spaces. Some were killed in fields and along roadsides, while others disappeared into detention.
The exact number of victims remains uncertain. Portuguese colonial authorities downplayed the killings, while survivors’ testimonies and later research suggest that the death toll reached well into the thousands.
In the aftermath of the massacre, Lisbon sent members of the International and State Defense Police to investigate claims of a communist conspiracy. By March 1953, they concluded that no such conspiracy existed. Rather than holding Governor Carlos Gorgulho accountable for the massacre, the colonial administration protected him.
Gorgulho was recalled to Lisbon, where instead of facing punishment, he was promoted to the rank of general and publicly praised by the Minister of the Army, General Abranches Pinto, for his “actions.”
The only people who faced trial were seven forros, convicted for the deaths of two police officers during the unrest. While the governor who oversaw the massacre was rewarded, the victims and their families were left with grief and injustice.
For years, the Portuguese regime silenced discussion of the massacre, portraying it as a necessary response to “subversion.” But among the Santomeans, the events of February 1953 lived on through memory and oral history.
As nationalist movements grew across Africa in the 1960s, São Tomé and Príncipe drew strength from this collective memory. The massacre became a rallying cry for independence, which they eventually achieved in 1975.
Today, the victims are honoured with monuments and memorials across the islands, most notably the Monument to the Martyrs of Freedom in Fernão Dias. And every year on February 3, the nation pauses to remember those who died, keeping their memory alive at the heart of São Tomé and Príncipe’s history and identity.
Sources:
https://www.museudoaljube.pt/en/2023/02/03/batepa-massacre/
https://nationaltoday.com/commemoration-of-the-batepa-massacre/
https://amp.expresso.pt/revista/2023-02-01-Massacre-de-Batepa-historia-de-uma-das-paginas-mais-brutais-da-historia-portuguesa-do-seculo-XX-598d463d
