Calulu of São Tomé: An Interview with Conceição Lima

HAMILTON: How long have you been making the dish?

LIMA: Since I was a teenager. As a matter of fact, at a certain level of São-Tomean culture, knowing how to make calulu represents a female's having come of age. One hears the following comment: "She is a girl who knows how to keep house and is capable of making calulu on her own." This means that in the eyes of grown-ups she has attained a certain adult status. On the other hand, when I say that I learned to make calulu when I was an adolescent, I should note that I used to do the preparations under my mother's strict supervision. I prepared and chopped the vegetable leaves, boned the fish, and peeled the eggplant and the makeke fruits. But combining the ingredients and the preparing the accompaniments was always my mother's responsibility. Calulu and izaquente [the latter is the name of a fruit, also native to São Tomé e Príncipe] are delicacies that we take very seriously. At home, we had to take turns doing thecooking for the week and I had no choice but to learn.

At this point I should give a bit of socio-historical information. In São Tomé e Príncipe the Forros constitute the predominant social group. The term forro means "liberated," and it now designates the descendents of slaves who gained their freedom starting as early as the 16^th century. The Forros are currently the majority of a population that totals no more than 160,000 on the two islands. It should be noted that calulu is São Tomé's, the country's larger island, most typical dish. But calulu is also much appreciated by the Forros who live on Príncipe, the smaller island.

HAMILTON: Please give a little more information about the socio-economic and racial/ethnic groups of the two islands.

LIMA: The Forro's predominance is not only numerical, it is also cultural. On the island of São Tomé there is also a community of the descendents of Cape Verdean indentured servants and forced laborers. And there are also inhabitants known as Tongas (the latter comes from Angola's Kimbundu language, and it derives from a word meaning "farm- lands"), descendents of workers, some of them salaried, from Angola and Mozambique during the colonial period in the first decades of the 20^th century. They were brought to São Tomé e Príncipe to work on the cacao and coffee plantations owned by white settlers, most being Portuguese. Although São Tomé e Príncipe's political independence in 1975 officially established equality for all citizens, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants, including most Forros, are low on the economic scale. Many descendents of Cape Verdeans and Tongas still live, in aggravated social conditions, on plantations. On the other hand, today in São Tomé e Príncipe upward social mobility is much more possible now than it was during colonial times. By force of language and culture the Forros'influence has spread among all ethnic groups. Thus the offspring of unions between Forros, Cape Verdeans, and Tongas are, in effect, Forros. The archipelago now lives in a time of great expectation in large part because of the imminence of the exploration of oil reserves that could place the tiny two-island country among Africa's major petroleum producers.

HAMILTON: Thank you for that useful account. Turning again to the place of calulu in your home island's culinary culture, is it also a family tradition? Is so, tell me about your family's tradition with respect to calulu.

LIMA: You can say it's a family tradition, yes. On certain special occasions, including the days coming up to Easter Sunday when you're not supposed to eat meat, fish calulu was confectioned with particular care and in abundance in case relatives would show up. I remember that in the past, when I was a little girl, people did not cook on Good...