A carved bamboo flute trilled in a courtyard on Sao Tome before the percussion picked up the pace, and a troupe in flamboyant outfits, beards, wigs and top hats spent several hours performing a medieval European tragedy that Portuguese colonialists brought to the Gulf of Guinea archipelago more than 500 years ago. The open-air Tchiloli theatre, now UNESCO-listed, still draws crowds in Sao Tome and Principe. Old empire, new audience. Same script, different century.
Colonial Culture, Kept Alive
The performance took place surrounded by homes, with spectators watching as the Formiguinha da Boa Morte troupe danced to the orchestra's rhythm. The play's script is in Old Portuguese, and its inspiration comes from legends tied to the Carolingian dynasty, which ruled over much of western Europe from the eighth to the 10th centuries AD. At the centre of the story is a crime: the Emperor Charlemagne's heir, Charles the Younger, kills a knight during a hunting meet. The knight's uncle, the Marquis of Mantua, demands that the emperor bring his own son to trial, and Charles the Younger is convicted in public.
That public conviction is the point the performance keeps returning to. Marco Carvalho, who plays the traditional Pitu flute for the troupe, said: "People love this culture because it speaks to something very real: justice." He added: "Justice makes no distinction between the rich and the poor." Carvalho, who is 61 years old, said he has spent more than three of his decades alive in Tchiloli theatre. The line lands hard in a place where a colonial inheritance still fills the square with music.
Law, Order, and the Old Script
Sao Tome and Principe's culture ministry called Tchiloli theatre a "unifying art" that must be protected. The ministry said: "It reaffirms the primacy of law, the rule of law, the virtues of dialogue, and promotes living together and peaceful coexistence." It added that since the Portuguese brought Tchiloli's ancestor to the islands as early as the 16th century, the tradition "maintained itself in the archipelago across many years by taking the form it has today and by integrating (the archipelago's) cultural values".
That official language tries to smooth over the violence of origin with the usual state vocabulary: law, dialogue, coexistence, protection. But Carvalho cut through the ceremony with a simpler line. "Tchiloli in itself did not originate from the island," he said. "It is an art adapted from European culture." The ministry can call it unity. The record still says where it came from.
Maribel Borja, a 19-year-old spectator, said: "It spreads a very important message. Everything must be just. Who sows evil reaps evil." The story's moral is plain enough for anyone in the courtyard to hear. Power answers to power, even when it dresses itself in old cloth and calls it heritage.
Passing the Performance On
Jardel Moniz Fernandes, Carvalho's 35-year-old colleague, has spent a year fulfilling his childhood dream by taking on the character of Ganelon in the Formiguinha da Boa Morte troupe. In the tales, Ganelon betrays Charlemagne to the Saracens at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Fernandes said: "I love it all, really all of it: the dancing, the sound of the flute, the drum." He added: "I've two children, and soon enough I will start to prepare my eldest to act." The centuries-old tradition will then pass down to the generation to come.
So the old European court drama keeps moving through an African archipelago, carried by performers who have made it their own while the colonial origin remains impossible to scrub out. The state ministry wants the ritual framed as harmony and rule of law. The performers and spectators keep talking about justice. Those are not quite the same thing.