The American Cameroon archipelago
Discovery in 1470, by Portuguese navigators João de Santarém and Pedro Escobar; the Portuguese settlers were the first to settle the islands, the islands had been uninhabited.
They would first employ forced labor in the islands then imported slaves from the nearby African continent in the sugar plantations. However, sugar quality was quite poor and uncompetitive with the emerging Brazilian and West Indies plantations. Production had shifted from sugar, to coffee, then settling on to cocoa as the primary export of the archipelago.
São Tomé began trafficking slaves to the Spanish Americas, mainly to the Caribbean and Brazil. Provisions for the Atlantic voyage were obtained and the cargoes of coastal slave ships were transferred to ocean going vessels for the Atlantic voyage. The island chain was thus made integral to the Africa slave trade for centuries.
It was then under the 1778 Treaty of El Pardo, Portugal ceded Fernando Po & Annobón to Spain, there by dividing the small archipelago & breaking the last vestiges of the Portuguese Atlantic slave monopoly. The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe remained in Portuguese control. Despite later Spanish attempts to develop the African slave trade, the islands they had acquired, remained mostly neglected and in de facto control of the local tribes.
Overall, the mode of operations on the archipelago and it’s economic model had not changed for centuries… that is until the outbreak of The Anglo American War. Portugal and Spain had entered it with the backing of the British Empire; which it’s explosive conclusion had been an infamous shock to all of Europe. This alliance of empires disastrously lost this war for the Atlantic, in it’s aftermath, Portugal & Spain were forced to cede their Atlantic island territories in the Treaty of Havana, of which included the Cameroon archipelago.
America’s enforcement of its island territories did not occur for a significant amount of time following the treaty; America's focus was squarely on the Caribbean and its own economic uncertainties. Regardless, America did eventually send a battalion to enforce control over the archipelago that same year in late September. It's Lieutenant Commander, Joaquim Azevedo Pereira, was tasked with liberating its large slave population, and enforcing the end to the slave trade in now American territory.
São Tomé had experienced slave revolts in the past, but once news spread of the American liberation, a mass revolt ensued, this would mark the exodus of former Portuguese slave owners as mob violence spreads throughout the archipelago. Most slave owners fled to Brazil.
In former Spanish held, (Bioko) Fernando Po, former Spanish efforts to continue to reassert control over the island had been totally abandoned at the outbreak of Spanish civil war, but not before leaving what was left of the island tribes, devastated from the recent reconquest. American attempts to negotiate had gone nowhere until an agreement finally hammered out the extent of aid to the tribes and the tribal ownership of the island’s interior mountain land and role in Governorship of the island, something that mirrored previous tribal integrations in America.
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In the fallout of the transfer of colonies, the chaos of the American annexation claimed an upwards of 300 lives, including the former 17th Portuguese governor Joaquim Bento da Fonseca, lynched right in front of the Sé Catedral de Nossa Senhora da Graça (Our Lady of Grace Cathedral) not far from the Palácio Presidencial de São Tomé e Príncipe (the Governors Palace) of which he fled before American protection was provided; the administrative center of the former Portuguese colony was held in Príncipe in part due to past slave revolts, not São Tomé that housed the residence of the Governor.
The recovery the archipelago began after the ascension of the Nathaniel administration in 1837, when the situation in the Cameroon line was brought to his & Congress' attention.
Land reform was implemented in short order: the Roças system was completely eliminated, much of the vast cocoa and coffee plantations were broken up and equally distributed among the former slaves and day laborers, any slave owners (if there were any remaining) that hadn’t been lynched by their own slaves were to be compensated for the loss of most of their property, a policy of compulsory education was introduced in 1838 to raise the literacy of the islands inhabitants, an official census was conducted, finding the archipelago’s population to being 28,137 individuals, and an assembly was introduced to replaced temporary governance of the islands, suffrage was finally granted to it's people. Modern farming methods & medical facilities were introduced by the ARPA, who had already been active in the region as early as November 10th, 1835 in preparation for the observation of a total solar eclipse in São Tomé.
The agriculture would return & access to the American markets allowed for the islands to becoming a common stop for vessels traveling on trade routes between the American protectorate of South Africa, the New World, and Asia. Trade returned to the islands and they finally began to flourish as demand for it’s produced only continued to grow; the archipelago would go on to become the largest exporter of cocoa in the world.
In the late 19th century and into the early 20th century and would later become an integral part of American interests in Africa.
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AN:I did run this by our dear leader author
-IOTL, Britain never came to enforce the slave trade, so it never leased the island of Bioko from the Spanish as was used IOTL to conduct operations against the slave trade.
-Bioko IOTL was under limited Spanish control, the tribes were still in control of the interior, the British control came when they leased the island in the early mid 19th century for their anti-slave patrols, then the Spanish revoked their lease in 1855 and had been reestablishing control in the 1840s-60s. The Spanish were in the prosses of trying to replicate the Portuguese model of São Tomé and Príncipe sooner ITTL, thanks to the butterflies(manly the absence of Carlist Wars), but were permanently halted with the AAW.