Yams, Slaving, and the Rise of Free Black Society in São Tomé, c. 1525

Often considered the birthplace of American plantation slavery, the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe also played a key role in the early transatlantic slave trade. In addition to offering new information on the traffic of enslaved Africans in the Gulf of Guinea and the Spanish Caribbean, this presentation calls attention to the importance of yams as slave ship provisions, and to the cultivation and marketing of yams by free women and men of African origin in São Tomé during the first decades of the sixteenth century.