OUR NEW BEST FRIEND.(Sao Tome)(Brief Article)

Until recently, the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, was significant only to stamp collectors and a few wealthy sportfishermen. Sao Tome, which is the collective name most outsiders use to refer to the two islands that make up the republic, produces more Marilyn Monroe stamps than any other country--nine versions--and it has one of the two best tarpon-fishing waters on the planet. Some people might also recognize Sao Tome from their phone bills, since the Portuguese telecommunications company that controls the state telephone business allows phone-sex services to route calls through Sao Tome. A small amount of high-quality cocoa is also produced there. But none of these enterprises bring in much money. Sao Tome is one of the world's most indebted and most impoverished nations.

The islands lie in the Gulf of Guinea, pretty much on the equator. They have a combined land mass of three hundred and seventy-two square miles, more or less the size of metropolitan Indianapolis. They were discovered by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, when they were essentially rain forests, uninhabited by humans but full of crocodiles, venomous cobras, many unique species of plants, and more kinds of ferns than anywhere else on the planet. The Portuguese used the islands as a transshipment base for slaves on their way from Africa to Brazil, and slave owners cut down trees and developed plantations that produced sugar and then, early in the nineteenth century, coffee and cocoa. In 1907, British chocolate-makers protested the use of slave labor in Sao Tome, and the Portuguese colonists were pressured into adopting supposedly fairer policies, although forced labor continued in one form or another right up until the islands gained their independence, in 1975.

Unlike most of Europe's colonial dependencies in Africa, Sao Tome became a republic without bloodshed, following the ascension in Lisbon of a left-wing military junta and the end of the dictatorship established by Antonio Salazar. Most of the Portuguese colonists who were still living in Sao Tome, two or three thousand people, simply packed up and went home, leaving behind more than a hundred thousand blacks and mestizos. Nothing very much has happened there since then. Even during the late nineteen-seventies and the eighties, when the country was aligned with the Soviet bloc and was full of Angolan troops and Russian, Chinese, and Cuban advisers, it barely registered on the geopolitical radar. In 1991, there was a peaceful transition from one-party rule to democracy. Much like its independence from Portugal, Sao Tome's official shedding of Marxism was managed without commotion.

The President of Sao Tome, Fradique de Menezes, a cocoa trader known to nearly everyone by his first name, came to the United States a few weeks ago. He addressed the U.N. during the international commemoration of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the next morning he and ten other African heads of state had breakfast with President Bush at the Waldorf-Astoria. Afterward, there was a meeting at which the African leaders gave five-minute speeches, most of them in French. Bush tapped his pencil and looked bored. Then Fradique, who was seated next to Bush, rose and spoke eloquently, in beautiful, lightly accented English, of the common interests of Sao Tome and the United States. Bush perked up. The pencil-tapping ceased. "Long before the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, energy security was a world concern," Fradique said. He mentioned the importance of "alternative sources of oil outside the politically volatile Middle East," and reminded his listeners that Sao Tome "is strategically situated on the most important petroleum area in the world today: the deep water off the western coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea." It is a place, Fradique said, that was referred to in Vice-President Cheney's National Energy Policy report as "the fastest-growing source of oil and gas for the American market."

In fact, Sao Tome is sitting on reserves of perhaps four billion barrels of crude oil. Even if one uses a conservative number for the price of a barrel, say twenty dollars, it is clear that Sao Tome and the United States do indeed have common interests.

"This is the thinking," a State Department official said to me. "We import fifty per cent of our oil. Supplier number one is Canada, two is Saudi Arabia, three is Venezuela, four is Mexico, and five is Nigeria. Folks have finally figured out that we don't need to rely on the Middle East for oil. African oil is less sticky than the stuff you get in the Middle East, and much of it is in deep water far offshore, so the natives don't notice it being taken, whereas in the Middle East it's pumped out of the ground under the noses of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Then you have Sao Tome, which is basically the only stable democracy in West Africa. It's perfect."

Nigeria, which is Sao Tome's neighbor to the north, now produces about two million barrels of oil a day, more than half of which goes to the United States. Seismic studies made of Sao Tome's waters that are closest to the Niger River delta, where the river sediments in the sea create rich oil beds, indicate that several "significant deposits" of oil lie under the ocean floor in depths ranging from twenty-four hundred to nine thousand feet. "In oil-industry jargon, 'significant' means at least a billion barrels in place," William Brumbaugh, an oil consultant who has worked for several American oil companies, explained to me. The technology for extracting oil from deep offshore reserves has improved considerably in the last few years. There is talk, probably exaggerated, of Sao Tome's having two hundred years' worth of oil reserves at production levels of five hundred thousand barrels a day. Most of its waters have not yet been mapped, but Brumbaugh reckoned that Sao Tome would soon be a very rich little country. "Sao Tome has the potential to be another Brunei," a U.S. government official said. "Dividing up billions of dollars of oil money among a hundred and forty thousand people"--the current population of the islands--"will make them all very comfortable one day. If they manage to pull it off, and keep the bad guys at bay, it'll be a first in Africa. Otherwise, they'll end up like Angola, Part II."