Grove Koger

Although he studied law and worked for a dozen years as a lawyer, Miguel Sousa Tavares has made his name as a writer, particularly for the 2003 novel Equator, which became a best seller in Portugal and won the Times Literary Supplement / Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation prize for translation (in this case, by Peter Bush) in 2010.

Now an independent nation, the small African islands of São Tomé and Príncipe are part of the Cameroon line, a chain of volcanic peaks that stretches southwestward toward the equator from the mainland nation of Cameroon. They were uninhabited until discovered toward the end of the fifteenth century by Portuguese explorers, who anticipated that they would be handy posts for trading with the mainland. Over time, they also proved to be ideal for growing sugar cane and, beginning  in the early nineteenth century, coffee and cacao. Aside from fertile soil, these crops also required slave labor—and there lies the crux of the issue that Tavares explores.

Equator follows the experiences of newly appointed governor Luís Bernardo Valença, a well-meaning businessman who accepts the position from King Dom Carlos in late 1905 almost on a whim. Aside from his other duties, his job will be to convince newly appointed British consul David Jameson that slavery, which both Britain and Portugal have officially abolished, doesn’t exist on the islands. Since it certainly does exist, in the guise of “contract labor” involving workers forcibly “recruited” from the mainland, the job will be a challenging one. But if Valença doesn’t succeed, the British firm of Cadbury Brothers will boycott the islands’ cocoa beans, a step that would be a serious blow to the colony’s—and Portugal’s— tenuous economy.

Aside from the moral dilemma that Valença faces, he finds himself involved with Jameson and Jameson’s beautiful wife, Ann—a knot of relationships that he finds himself unable to untangle.

Although Equator is fiction and Luís Bernardo Valença never existed, Equator is based closely on fact. Reporting for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1905 and 1906, English journalist Henry Nevinson revealed how Africans from another of Portugal’s colonies, Angola, were taken from their homes to work on São Tomé, where conditions were so dreadful that twenty percent of them died each year. Nevinson’s account was subsequently published as A Modern Slavery. After further investigations, Cadbury finally stopped buying cocoa beans from São Tomé and Príncipe in 1909.

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