Plantation afterlives in São Tomé and Príncipe: Tourism and the coloniality of leisure

In São Tomé and Príncipe, colonial plantation complexes known as roças are increasingly marketed as heritage sites and restful retreats, even as they remain shaped by unresolved histories of slavery, indenture and racialised extraction. Drawing on thematic analysis of 28 travel features, alongside corporate materials, tourism policy documents and archival sources, this article asks how places made through coercion come to circulate as landscapes of leisure. It develops the term coloniality of leisure to describe how the material and aesthetic traces of these histories are reorganised into appealing experiences, while the violence that produced them is softened, deflected or ethically reframed. Two complementary strategies do this work: ruinous nostalgia , which renders plantation decay as atmosphere, and colonial reenchantment , which turns the restoration of plantation buildings into a setting of refinement and comfort. These strategies intersect with concrete spatial arrangements (land concessions, community displacement and foreign investment circuits) through which colonial patterns are reproduced rather than undone. The article argues that leisure functions as a contemporary terrain of postcolonial spatial governance, where memory, value and inequality are managed without being overcome, and asks what it would mean to treat plantation tourism as a field of historical accountability.