During the mid-nineteenth century, Portugal enacted a series of decrees gradually abolishing slavery in its African colonies. In 1854, Marquis Sá da Bandeira, then President of the Overseas Council, decreed that all slave owners had to register their slaves within 30 days, and that those who failed to comply could see their slaves become “libertos” (freed people), an intermediary status between slavery and freedom.¹ On July 24, 1856, Sá da Bandeira then passed another law granting freedom to the children of enslaved women born after the law’s publication, with the condition that they serve their mothers’ owners until the age of 20. In 1858, Sá da Bandeira finally legislated that slavery would be abolished within twenty years.

By 1869, all slaves in Portugal’s African colonies had become libertos, until Portugal abolished this status in 1875 and replaced it with that of the serviçal. In 1875, Portugal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs João de Andrade Corvo published a labour code outlining the rules around the recruitment of serviçais, which was refined in 1878. Under the 1878 labour code, serviçais were to receive five-year contracts, an increase from the two outlined in 1875, to work within or in another Portuguese colony with guaranteed repatriation. During this period, their employers had to provide them with food, clothing, and a monthly salary.

Faced with labour shortages, plantation owners took advantage of these labour codes and recruited thousands of indentured servants for coffee and cocoa plantations on the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe. While some serviçais were later drawn from Mozambique and Cape Verde, the majority in the nineteenth century came from Angola.² Between 1876 and 1900, almost 60,000 serviçais were shipped from Angola to São Tomé and Príncipe.³ Most had been enslaved on Angola’s central plateau. In the late nineteenth century, this region was outside of Portuguese colonial control, which was largely limited to the coastal enclaves of Luanda, Benguela, Moçâmedes, and a few presídios (outposts) in their hinterlands. At the coast, they were then “redeemed” by agents representing planters. From there, they were kept locally within Angola or shipped to the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe as serviçais.⁴

¹ These libertos should not be confused with the libertos who were rescued from illegal slave ships. See for example: Samuël Coeghe, “The Problem of Freedom in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Society: The Liberated Africans of the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda (1844-1870),” Slavery & Abolition, v. 33, n. 3 (2012): 479-500; José C. Curto, “Producing ‘Liberated’Africans in Mid-Nineteenth Century Angola,” in Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896, eds. Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 238-256.

² See for example: Augusto Nascimento, “Representações sociais e arbítrio nas roças as primeiras levas de Caboverdianos em S. Tomé e Príncipe nos primórdios de novecentos,” Arquipelago História, v. 2, n. 5 (2001): 325-370; Zachary Kagan-Guthrie, “Repression and Migration: Forced Labour Exile of Mozambicans to São Tomé, 1948-1955,” Journal of Southern African Studies, v. 37, n. 3 (2011): 449-462.

³ Augusto Nascimento, Poderes e quotidiano nas roças de S. Thomé e Prínicipe: De finais de oitocentos a meados de novecentos (Lousã: Tipografia Lousanense, 2002), 132.

⁴ Maria da Conceição Neto, “In Town and Out of Town: A Social History of Huambo (Angola), 1902?1961” (PhD diss., SOAS University of London, 2012).