Cape Verde
For more than 400 years, Portugal claimed the rocky, arid islands of Cape Verde. This long history of
Colonial rule permanently affected Cape Verdean culture, making the small country seem distinct from other African nations—“more European.” But such a view ignores the shared ancestries and political struggles that link the islands to the mainland. Cape Verde is home to a population descended from free people and West African slaves as well as a diverse mix of peoples: Fula,
Wolof, Papeis,
Balanta,
Bijagó, Jalofa, Fulupe, Mandingo,
Manjaco, Portuguese, Moroccan, Sephardic Jewish, Genoese, Lebanese, Chinese, Dutch, French, English, American, and Brazilian. The children of these settlers and passers-by forged a hybrid culture and language known as Crioulo (Portuguese for Creole), drawing upon the legacies brought to the islands by slavery and colonialism.
Portuguese Colonization and the Slave Trade
It is possible that the Cape Verde Islands were visited by Phoenician traders in the fifth or fourth centuries B.C.E., and even more likely that North African sailors in the
Salt Trade passed through during the tenth and eleventh centuries C.E.. Fishing folk from the region of modern-day
Senegal later landed in the area during their expeditions, but the islands were not permanently occupied until the Portuguese took possession of them in the fifteenth century. Exploration and slave trading had brought Portuguese ships past the southern islands for several years before Genoan Antonio de Noli and Portuguese Diogo Afonso claimed them for Portugal in 1455. Although the islands themselves offered limited natural resources, they were strategically located on what were soon to be busy transatlantic trade routes. Having recently settled the Madeira Islands, Portugal next moved to settle Cape Verde, intending to use the islands both as an entrepôt for its merchant ships and a site for producing tropical-climate crops, such as sugar and cotton.
The expansion of the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixteenth century soon brought business and settlement to Cape Verde. Portugal made the islands its headquarters for its holdings on the Upper Guinea Coast, and by the sixteenth century was also using the region as a penal colony for convicts and political exiles. The islands were originally governed by the companhia system, a sort of feudal system in which individuals or the church oversaw small plantations where slaves, brought from mainland West Africa, cultivated cotton, sugarcane, and food crops. Early Cape Verdean society enjoyed considerable autonomy from the Portuguese monarchy, making it an attractive base to generations of traders and smugglers.
Despite efforts to develop plantation agriculture, little besides the population grew on the drought-prone islands, and the economy relied heavily on the commerce provided by passing ships, first those traveling to and from West Africa, and later, those crossing the Atlantic. Portugal’s merchant ships exchanged rum, cloth, and other commodities for slaves acquired at ports all along the Upper Guinea Coast, and many of the goods and slaves passed at least briefly through Cape Verde. As a result, the islands’ ports became targets for plunder by pirate ships sailing under the flags of France, Holland, and England. In 1656 Portugal sent a governor general to oversee more directly the protection and governance of Cape Verde and the Portuguese-controlled Guinea Coast, and to crack down on the smuggling that was eroding Portuguese control over the region’s lucrative trades. But with the many free agents operating along the West African coasts—including both “official” European traders and independent smugglers—Portugual had little success controlling trade of slaves or other articles of commerce.
In 1750 the prime minister of Portugal, the marquis of Pombal, declared a trade monopoly for slaves and certain other commodities between Cape Verde,
Guinea, and Brazil. Portugal’s goal was to increase and streamline the export of slaves from West Africa to its American colony via Cape Verde, using the forty-one ships of the royal
Campanhia Geral which the marquis controlled. Some of the slaves routed through the islands were also sold in Britain’s North American colonies. Even after the fall of the marquis, Cape Verde remained a favored entrepôt among slave traders—it was closer to the Americas and considered safer than the ports of call on the Africa mainland, which were often controlled by powerful and well-armed African kings and merchants.
Not all African slaves brought to the islands went on to the Americas. Besides working on the cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations, slaves worked as domestic servants, as laborers in the islands’ small salt-production enterprises, and as gatherers of plants used for dyes, including orchil and urzella. These dyes were in turn used by slave Wolof spinners and weavers to produce the colorful pano clothes that served as one of the main currencies in the slave trade. In addition, some freed or runaway slaves cultivated land in the hills of the interior.
Over the years, a heterogeneous Creole population developed, comprised of convicts, exiles, Portuguese merchants, social outcasts, and Catholic clerics as well as slaves and migrants from the Upper Guinea Coast. Cape Verdean society made distinctions among the races and the classes, as well as between slaves who lived on the islands and those who simply passed through. At the same time, however, interracial unions between white masters and slave women, who made up more than half of the slave population, created a sizeable mestiço (of indigenous and European descent) population. Over time, this mixed population came to include the children of mixed marriages between renegade traders (lacondos) and their African wives. Some of these traders were Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when Portugal was under the rule of the Spanish Crown. Crioulo, a hybrid of Portuguese and various African languages, became the lingua franca of the
mestiços. Crioulo was also spoken on the Guinea Coast, an indication of the ongoing multiethnic migration and trade between the islands and mainland.
Peasant Farming and Maritime Trade
Britain’s 1804 edict banning slave trading spelled the end of an era for the local and regional economies, such as Cape Verde’s, that had developed around this commerce. Portugal officially abolished its own trade in 1836, though slavers continued to smuggle captives through Cape Verde for decades afterward. Meanwhile, the colony had become an entrepôt for other kinds of commodities from the mainland, including hides, ivory, wax, and dyewoods. With the invention of steam-powered boats, the islands also served as a refueling stop on the transatlantic passage.
The islands supported a growing Creole free peasantry, including manumitted slaves. Farmers cultivated grains, tended banana orchards, and raised livestock, especially goats, but the poor land made subsistence difficult, and a single season of drought often led quickly to famine. Many Cape Verdean farmers sought to bolster their economic security by seeking additional, if low-paid, work as sharecroppers or manual day-laborers, but many others signed onto American whaling ships and joined growing expatriate communities in New England.
In the late nineteenth century, even as Europeans were beginning to colonize most of Africa, opposition to Portuguese crown rule was growing in both Cape Verde and
Guinea-Bissau. In 1886 the Portuguese monarchy sent troops to quell unrest, as did the Portuguese republican government after 1910. A fascist government took control of Portugal in 1926, and wrote colonial policy into the constitution with the Colonial Act of 1933. The government cracked down on communist groups in Portugal who were, among other things, assisting the budding nationalist movements of Portuguese-speaking Africa. Dissidents from Guinea-Bissau and Portugal were sent to Cape Verdean prisons, which were known for their brutal conditions. Nevertheless, anticolonialist and antifascist revolts continued to rock Guinea-Bissau, and, to a lesser extent, the Cape Verde islands. In Cape Verde, nationalism found expression in the literary-cultural
Claridade movement. Using the literary journal
Claridade, founded in 1936, Cape Verdean intellectuals both on the islands and abroad gave voice to Cape Verdean Crioulo culture. They also wrote critically about the social and economic oppression of Portuguese colonialism.
Anticolonial Resistance
Many Cape Verdeans opposed the new fascist government as well as the strong-arm Portuguese tactics that had characterized relations with Cape Verde since the late nineteenth century. The colonial government believed it unnecessary to invest in land management and water conservation, and cheap labor made Cape Verde a profitable colony at little expense. Meanwhile, the people of the islands had suffered a series of droughts and bad harvests through the turn of the century. As people died daily from hunger while Portuguese troops landed on the island, Cape Verdeans prepared to revolt.
Fearing a growing nationalist sentiment, Portugal granted Cape Verde the status of overseas province. It also increased police powers in the colonies, and convicts and dissidents were sent to a notorious work camp on the Cape Verde island of São Tiago, where police used torture to quash resistance. Nationalists responded by rallying behind the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), a party founded in 1956 by Amílcar
Cabral, and staging a series of general strikes. The organization grew and became more militant in 1959, after Portuguese troops massacred striking dockworkers in Bissau. Four years later, PAIGC launched a full-out nationalist war, with fighting concentrated in Guinea-Bissau and clandestine operations based on the islands. Portugal, receiving military and economic assistance from NATO, also used Cape Verde to garrison its troops.
Independence
Following the assassination of Cabral in 1973, the PAIGC intensified attacks against an increasingly weakened Portuguese military, and a year later Guinea-Bissau achieved independence. But the struggle continued with massive protests in Cape Verde. Although Portugal had wished to maintain the islands as an overseas territory, Cape Verde ultimately won independence on July 5 1975, with PAIGC carrying the popular election. PAIGC leaders in both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau at first anticipated the unification of their two countries, but disagreements over socialist strategies as well as resentment about the perceived dominance of Cape Verdeans left the party divided. In 1980, the arrest of Guinea-Bissau president Luís Cabral split the ranks of the PAIGC, and shortly thereafter Pedro Verona Rodriques
Pires, Cape Verde’s prime minister and a prominent nationalist, helped found the Partido Africano da Independencia da Cabo Verde (PAICV). Pires moved quickly to silence any potential political opponents, thus insuring that he enjoyed a long term in office, though with little popular support.
Under Pires, the country followed a socialist path, with programs of nationalization and agrarian reform. Through the 1980s, Cape Verde’s close relationship with countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, and
Libya generated opposition from the Cape Verdean diaspora, particularly in the United States. Larger than the resident population of Cape Verde, these communities were not only an important source of economic aid for the homeland, but also an influential voice in Cape Verdean politics. In 1991, in the first multiparty elections since independence, opposition to the PAICV mobilized behind the Movimento para a Democracia (MpD). MpD candidate Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro was elected president, with an agenda of economic liberalization and human rights. For the next few years, the MpD moved forward with a program of privatization. The party won the majority in a 1995 election, though the PAICV accused the MpD of skewing the elections by buying votes and controlling the media. In 2001 the PAICV returned to power and Pires became president, winning the election by a narrow margin. With aid from the World Bank as well as the European Community (EC)—the largest per capita aid of nearly any nation in the world—Cape Verde has undertaken such infrastructural projects as road development on several islands, as well as electrification and urban development around the city of Praia, São Tiago. The country continues to depend heavily on tourism and foreign investment.
See also Cape Verde, Ethnicity in;
Colonial rule;
Slavery in Africa.
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