The big picture: Nicola Lo Calzo’s villain of São Tomé

In the 16th-century Portuguese play The Tragedy of the Marquis of Mântua and the Emperor Charlemagne by Baltazar Dias, Prince Charles, son of the emperor, murders the nephew of the Marquis of Mântua in a crime of passion. The Mântuas appeal for justice and Charlemagne must decide whether to deny it or sign his own son’s death warrant.

For at least 150 years, this play has echoed around São Tomé, a former Portuguese colony off West Africa, where it is reinterpreted in a popular form of street theatre known as Tchiloli. Here, Braulio, an actor from the Tragédia da Formiguinha theatre group who is playing the murderous prince, prepares to perform the bloody deed onstage.

Why does this centuries-old text have such resonance in São Tomé? For photographer Nicola Lo Calzo, who has spent the last 15 years documenting “memories of resistance to slavery in the Atlantic world”, it’s because the fight for justice at its heart reflects a grander struggle. In his reading, the actor playing Charles “embodies the violence of colonial power and its claim to stand above morality”. The mask he’s wearing, made from wire and mosquito netting, “symbolises both the whiteness of the character and the figure of the coloniser”.

That figure has loomed large over this tiny island. Ruled by Portugal for more than 500 years, São Tomé was one of the world’s first plantation economies, where African and Creole enslaved peoples laboured to produce sugar cane, coffee and chocolate. Tchiloli was one of the few creative outlets that questioned the social order. Even after independence in 1975 (as part of São Tomé and Príncipe), the island remained poor. Now, some theatre groups are under threat of closure due to financial pressures.

At the end of Dias’s play, the emperor sentences his son to death. For São Toméans, justice after centuries of exploitation has proven far harder to come by.

Tragédia by Nicola Lo Calzo will be published by L’Artiere on 7 July