Although Sacadura Botte saw most of his property taken or destroyed and most of his family and friends exiled, he remained in Mozambique and acknowledged the new regime, thus earning the respect of the new leaders and of the Mozambican people, who mostly left him in peace.
After finishing his studies, he considered the diplomatic career, but could not follow this idea due to the republican nature of the Portuguese regime at the time, with which he profoundly disagreed.
Accepting the invitation, and against his family's wishes, Sacadura Botte left for the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, boarding the Angola steamship, in Lisbon, on 31 May 1926.
He took over his job as bookkeeper for the Lourenço Marques factory of the Colonial Tobacco Society, and moved into the Cardoso Hotel, where he lived during his first tenure in Mozambique.
Little before Moura Forjaz de Gusmão's return, Sacadura Botte decided to leave the tobacco industry for a career in public administration.
Although he was highly regarded within the Tobacco Society, both Figueiredo e Lemos and Moura Forjaz de Gusmão were young and bound to stay on as managers for a long time, and Sacadura Botte felt he should move beyond his bookkeeper position, so he decided to try a different career.
During his many years in Africa, he hunted alongside famous hunters like German aristocrat Baron Werner von Alvensleben, as well as many figures of the Portuguese society of that time: future Governor of Angola Manuel de Gusmão de Mascarenhas Gaivão [pt] and his brother José Diogo Mascarenhas Gaivão, future Minister of Public Works José Frederico Ulrich [pt], industrialist Hermínio Madeira Leitão (whose daughter Isabel would become Sacadura Botte's daughter-in-law), and businessman Maximiano Cotta, among many others.
They agreed to play a tennis doubles match, and Sacadura Botte was paired with Leila Newman's sister Sheila May Younger.
After this first encounter, Sacadura Botte began courting Sheila May, and after her conversion to Catholicism, they were eventually married by Father Alfredo Corrêa de Lima, in Magude.
His often unorthodox methods in fighting inequality and his refusal to accommodate existing lobbies, especially those which attempted to corrupt him or his officials, garnered him some enemies during that period.
After some time being unable to buy cattle, the businessmen accepted the fair prices proposed by Sacadura Botte and commerce resumed as usual.
Sacadura Botte wrote a three-volume set of memoirs, called "Memórias e Autobiografia", which have been considered an insightful look at the final years of the Portuguese Colonial Empire through the eyes of one of its last colonialists, with "gems of information (...) much of which is unavailable elsewhere".
[5] He was also the inspiration for a poem, titled simply T.S.B., written by Portuguese ambassador to Mozambique José Cutileiro, in which he is compared to Prospero, from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the new Mozambican regime to Caliban, from the same play.