Medical Practices in Early 20th Century São Tomé’s Cocoa Plantations

This paper aims to discuss the medical practices in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé, a Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea. As in other contexts, São Tomé’s plantations were dependent on large contingents of displaced black laborers, framed by different institutions from slavery to indentureship. When in the early 1900s the territory became the world’s most important cocoa producer, local mortality rates reached 20% and the island’s coercive and deadly labour system caught international attention. By then, white physicians came to occupy a prominent position. Framing plantations as specific repertoires of imperial power, this text argues that those experts were important actors in the maintenance of its racial politics of difference. Attributing the persistence of and susceptivity to diseases to degenerated black bodies and black cultures became a common trope. Physicians established a correlation between specific diseases, such as pneumonia and dysentery, and black’s “immoderate habits”, such as alcoholism and dirt eating. Also “nostalgia for the motherland” was framed as a pathological condition leading to suicide. Medical authority over what were conceived as racial constituted diseases, deviant behaviors and psychological weakness demanded institutions and spaces of surveillance and confinement. Along with hospitals, the redesign of plantation housing quarters became part of these professionals tasks. As such, I will try to show how physicians brought together a focus on bodies and on the plantation built environment, connecting racialized biological and spatial practices in a single narrative.