São Tomé Still Stages a Portuguese Play It Rewrote Five Centuries Ago

SÃO TOMÉ · CULTURE

On a small island in the Gulf of Guinea, amateur companies still perform a Portuguese courtroom drama older than Brazil’s carnival, in white masks, to bamboo flutes and drums, for audiences who talk back. The play is about whether the powerful ever judge their own. São Tomé has been asking that question in public for centuries — and UNESCO has just agreed the answer is world heritage.

What Tchiloli actually is

Everything starts with one play. ‘The Tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua and the Emperor Charlemagne’ was written around 1540 by Baltasar Dias, a blind poet from the Portuguese island of Madeira, who stitched it together from Spanish ballads of the medieval Charlemagne cycle — the same story world that produced the Song of Roland.

The plot is a prosecutor’s dream and a father’s nightmare. During a hunt, Don Carloto, the emperor’s son and heir, kills his best friend Valdevinos, nephew of the Marquis of Mantua, because he desires the man’s wife. The Mantua family demands justice. Charlemagne must choose between the reasons of state and his love for his son — and in the end he condemns the boy, who is executed.

On São Tomé this is not performed in a theatre. The stage is beaten earth in a yard or a public square, open on every side. On one side rises the ‘high court’, a platform on wooden stilts roofed with palm branches, for the emperor. Opposite stands the ‘low court’, a hut of green branches, for the mourning family. Between the two, on a chair, sits a small coffin: Valdevinos, present throughout his own trial.

The actors wear oval white masks made of painted mosquito netting, smaller than the face, and by custom may lift them only after sunset. Flutes and drums mark the movements between scenes. The audience is not expected to be quiet; it comments, laughs and argues back. A full performance runs about six hours, sometimes longer.

A colonial script, an island’s question

São Tomé and Príncipe were empty islands when Portuguese sailors reached them around 1470. The society that grew there was assembled by force and by mixing: settlers, deported children and, above all, enslaved Africans brought to work the sugar and later the cocoa plantations. Their descendants, the forros, are the community that keeps Tchiloli.

What the forros kept was not reverence for a Frankish emperor. It was the trial: the spectacle of a powerful family forced to decide, in public, whether one of its own will answer for a killing. Performed by the descendants of enslaved people on a plantation island, that plot stops being courtly entertainment. It becomes the question of whether power ever really judges itself.

The companies that perform it, called tragédias, belong to particular neighbourhoods and families. Roles, costumes and handwritten texts pass down through generations, and one actor keeps the same character for life. Traditionally all roles, including the women, are played by men — though the island adapts: since 2018 an all-female troupe, the Txiloli Feminino de Cachoeira, has performed its own version.

Five centuries, with an asterisk

Ask on the island and you will hear that Madeiran sugar masters brought the play in the sixteenth century, and that Tchiloli has been performed ever since. That is the memory the tradition carries about itself, and it is the version embedded in its UNESCO file.

Scholars who have hunted the paper trail, among them the anthropologist Gerhard Seibert, tell a more recent story. The first written mentions of Tchiloli date from the 1890s, and the text the troupes use closely matches Portuguese printed editions of the play from the 1840s. The likely arrival, they argue, was the cocoa boom of the late nineteenth century — which would make the tradition about 150 years old rather than 500.

The honest telling keeps both. However the script crossed the ocean, the island’s answer to it is genuinely old, and genuinely its own: a European text kept, and its meaning replaced.

UNESCO noticed in December

In December 2025 the United Nations cultural agency inscribed ‘Tchiloli, living theatre of Sao Tome and Principe in the quest of justice’ on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It is the first inscription of any kind for the two-island state, and UNESCO’s committee commended the country simply for persevering with the paperwork.

The listing does not pay for costumes or stop emigration. What it does is oblige documentation and safeguarding plans, and it puts the tradition on the world’s cultural map under its own name — not as a curiosity of Portuguese theatre, but as a Santomean art form whose theme, in UNESCO’s words, is equality before the law.

The parallel our readers already know

Brazil did the same thing with the same colonial library. The folk dramas of the Brazilian Northeast rework Iberian stories of Christians and Moors; the congadas of Minas Gerais still stage Charlemagne’s twelve peers; and the samba schools turned European pageantry into a narrative machine that tells Brazilian history back to Brazil.

The mechanism is identical on both sides of the Atlantic: an imposed European form, taken up by people with no reason to revere it, and reworked until it says what they need it to say. São Tomé’s version is smaller, older in its claims, and far less known. It is also performed in verse, at full length, by candlelight of community patience rather than sponsor money.

What keeps it alive, and what thins it

Tchiloli runs on volunteer labour, inherited costume and the calendar of patron-saint feasts, mostly in the gravana, the dry season from about June to September. None of it is reliably funded. The troupes rehearse for months to stage a play their audience already knows by heart.

The pressures are ordinary and relentless. São Tomé and Príncipe has fewer than a quarter of a million people, and its young leave in numbers for Portugal, Angola and Gabon. A form that depends on roles inherited within families is fragile in a place with that demography, and costumes age faster than they are replaced.

Tourism is the obvious funding answer and the obvious risk. Shortened performances of about ninety minutes already exist for visitors, and some troupes offer them willingly. The full form, though, belongs to the feast days and runs to its own length, in its own square, for neighbours who treat the trial of Charlemagne’s son as local news with a very long memory.

Across the channel, a cousin play

Príncipe, the smaller island, keeps the sibling tradition. Every August 15, the feast of Saint Lawrence, the town of Santo António fills with the Auto de Floripes: a day of street theatre drawn from the same Charlemagne story cycle, in which Christian and Moorish knights wheel, fight and negotiate through the streets.

Where Tchiloli is a trial, Floripes is a battle — but the gesture is the same. Two tiny islands took the founding epics of the empire that settled them and turned them into a mirror held up to power. UNESCO has now certified what the islands always knew: the mirror is the masterpiece.

This feature is based on UNESCO’s nomination file and December 2025 inscription decision, the published research of Gerhard Seibert and colleagues on Tchiloli’s history, and the standard literature on Santomean popular theatre.

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