Equator
SynopsisPlot
It is 1905 and Luis Bernardo Valenca, a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and owner of a small shipping company, is revelling in Lisbon's luxurious high society. But his life is turned upside down when King Dom Carlos invites him to become governor of Portugal's smallest colony, the island of São Tomé e Principe. Luis Bernardo is ill-prepared for the challenges of plantation life – used to a softer urban existence, he is shocked by the conditions under which the workers labor. But with the English closing in on São Tomé's cocoa plantations, the island's main means of survival, Luis Bernardo must endeavour to protect the island and its community.
Story
About this book
In 1905, Luís Bernardo Valença is a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor living comfortably in Lisbon. He runs a small shipping company and moves easily through the city's upper social circles. His settled life changes abruptly when King Dom Carlos asks him to serve as governor of São Tomé e Príncipe, Portugal's smallest colonial territory, a pair of islands in the Gulf of Guinea near the equator.
Luís Bernardo arrives to find a society built around cocoa plantations and the labor that sustains them. Accustomed to an urban existence, he is unprepared for what he encounters on the estates, where working conditions disturb his sense of justice. At the same time, British attention is turning toward the islands. Britain, a major buyer of São Tomé cocoa, is raising questions about how that cocoa is produced, and the pressure threatens the economic survival of the colony.
The novel places its protagonist between competing demands: the expectations of the plantation owners, the diplomatic threat from Britain, and his own developing awareness of the system he has been sent to manage. Miguel Sousa Tavares sets this tension against the specific geography and politics of early twentieth-century Portuguese colonial rule.
