William Vivour

1830-1890) was the single most successful 19th-century planter in Africa[1][2][3] due to his substantial and flourishing cocoa plantation in Fernando Po (Equatorial Guinea).

They became the leaders and developers of the western area of Africa, and above all they looked at the white man as equals and expected to be so treated in turn.

[4] "About the middle of last century, my father’s eldest uncle, William Allen Vivour, returned to Nigeria (Lagos) and set up his business in Fernando Po.

[7] The following year Holt's assistant W. J. Jones wrote that the black merchant was thriving: "Vivour has come back, he looks first rate and is going to ship his oil direct if he can...

A. Vivour's interest in palm oil grew so significant that it brought him into direct conflict with King Jaja of Opobo in the time leading up to the Jaja-Ibeno War.

Jaja himself knew this and said, "Although I had no claim to the territory near the mouth of the Qua Eboe River, Mr. Vivour would still have no right to trade there, for any oil which he could get would either be bought in or drawn from my markets".

In major centers like Opobo, exports declined and by the 1880s settlers began to secure land from the indigenous Bubi and invest in cocoa farming on the island.

Vivour was the Fernandino with the most land, 202 hectares in all[11] The combined effort of the Creole and the Spaniards so quickened the pace of agricultural development in Fernando Po that by 1909, the island was the tenth-largest producer of cocoa in the world.

By the mid-1880s, he was the largest landowner on the island,[13] and employed a massive labor force of men from diverse ethnic origins recruited from the Biafra and beyond.

Situated on the Bay of San Carlos is the flourishing cocoa plantation of W.A.Vivour, a Sierra Leone negro, which is of such importance that English steamers call there several times in the course of the year.[15]W.

William Allen Vivour, a wealthy Creole planter born in Sierra Leone, greeted the Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann in Korth West Bay (San Carlos, Luba) in 1886 as the local representative of the Spanish crown.

He echoes Mary Kingsley's verdict that the Creoles spent 'most of their money in the giddy whirl of Santa Isabel, but this does not fit with Baumann's intimate and detailed portrait of Vivour as an archetypal miser, saving every penny.

His evidence is backed up by Bravo Carbonel, writing seven years later, who noted admiringly the luxurious lifestyles of the leading Creoles, notably their consumption of the best champagne, cognac, and whisky.

At his death, his widow, Amelia Barleycorn Vivour, owned the largest cocoa plantation on the island – four hundred hectares in San Carlos.