People & Culture

Cabo Verde is ten volcanic islands scattered in the Atlantic roughly 570 kilometres off the coast of Senegal, split by sailors into two groups named for the wind: Barlavento, the windward islands to the north, holding Santo Antao, Sao Vicente, Santa Luzia, Sao Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista, and Sotavento, the leeward islands to the south, holding Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava. The archipelago sits atop the Cape Verde Rise, a bathymetric swell formed by volcanic activity beginning some forty to fifty million years ago, with the islands generally younger toward the west as the African plate has drifted over the hotspot beneath it. Pico do Fogo, on the island of Fogo, rises to 2,829 metres and remains the region's only active volcano, still capable of the violence that shaped every island beneath it. What makes Cabo Verde different from every other country in this guide is a simple and almost startling fact: nobody was here. Every stretch of coast the Portuguese found across the rest of Africa had people on it already, kingdoms, fishing villages, trade networks centuries deep. Cabo Verde had none of that. When Portuguese and Genoese navigators began sighting the islands, the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto among them recording a sighting on 25 July 1456 and the Genoese Antonio da Noli credited with the more formal discovery around 1460, they found the archipelago uninhabited, without any evidence of prior human settlement. The first permanent colonists landed on Santiago in 1462 and founded Ribeira Grande. There was no conquest here and no indigenous population displaced or absorbed, because the society that exists on these islands today was built entirely from people who arrived, by choice or in chains, after that date. Ribeira Grande, renamed Cidade Velha in the late eighteenth century once Praia took over as capital in 1770, became the first European colonial town built anywhere in the tropics. Portuguese traders used its harbour as a staging post for ships crossing to Brazil and running down the African coast toward the Cape of Good Hope, and by the sixteenth century it had become the first Atlantic entrepot for the trade in enslaved people, a clearing house through which captives taken from the Upper Guinea coast passed before being shipped onward across the ocean. The town still holds the Nossa Senhora do Rosario church, begun in 1493 and finished two years later, which makes it among the oldest colonial churches standing anywhere, along with the Forte Real de Sao Filipe built between 1587 and 1593 to fend off privateers, and the Pelourinho, the marble whipping post raised around 1512 to 1520 where enslaved people were publicly punished. UNESCO inscribed Cidade Velha as a World Heritage Site in 2009, the only site in the country to carry that designation. The society that formed around that trade was new in a way nothing else on this coast was. Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans, brought mostly from the Guinea coast, intermarried and mixed on islands with no prior population to draw a line against, and Cabo Verde became, functionally, the first Creole nation in the Atlantic world. The traders who made that mixing possible were the lancados, Portuguese and part-Portuguese settlers who moved beyond colonial control to live and trade directly with African communities on the mainland, and the tangomaos, their mixed-race children and associates who grew up bilingual and served as interpreters and brokers in the trade in slaves and goods along the coast. Out of that contact, beginning on Santiago as early as the fifteenth century and spreading island by island over subsequent waves of settlement, came Kriolu, a language built mostly from Portuguese vocabulary carried on African grammar, rhythm and pronunciation drawn from Mandinka, Wolof and Fula. Linguists regard it as the oldest living creole language, and it remains the mother tongue of virtually every Cabo Verdean today, spoken alongside official Portuguese in a diglossia that has held for more than five centuries. The same isolation that made the islands a useful staging post also made them dangerously exposed to drought, and the twentieth century delivered catastrophe on a scale that reshaped the population. Famines struck from 1941 to 1943 and again from 1947 to 1948, and the death toll from that decade alone is estimated at roughly 45,000 people, with the islands of Sao Nicolau and Fogo losing something near three in ten residents and Santiago losing more than half its population between 1946 and 1948 by some accounts. Portugal's Estado Novo government, more interested in extraction than in the welfare of a colony it treated as marginal, was slow to ship food or improve water infrastructure, and thousands who survived were pushed into forced or semi-forced labour migration to Sao Tome and Principe and to Angola. The lesson those years taught an entire people was that the islands themselves could not always sustain them, and emigration became, and remains, a structural feature of Cabo Verdean life rather than an exception to it. The result is a nation whose diaspora outnumbers the population still living on the islands. Against a resident population of roughly 490,000, well over a million people of Cabo Verdean descent live abroad, and there is barely a family on the archipelago without relatives overseas. The largest and oldest community sits along the New England coast of the United States, concentrated between Providence in Rhode Island and New Bedford in Massachusetts, built up over more than a century of whaling-era and later labour migration. Portugal absorbed roughly half of all emigrants leaving in the late 1990s and remains the single largest destination, while smaller but well-established communities have grown in the Netherlands and France. Cabo Verdeans speak of this as one nation stretched across several countries, and the islands' politics, remittance economy and culture are shaped as much by Boston or Rotterdam as by Praia. Independence, when it came, arrived bound to a struggle fought mostly on another country's soil. Amilcar Cabral, born in Guinea-Bissau to Cabo Verdean parents, founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the PAIGC, in Bissau on 19 September 1956, and led its guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule from 1963 onward on the strength of a vision that treated the two territories as one people with one liberation movement. He did not live to see it through, since on 20 January 1973 he was shot dead at PAIGC headquarters in Conakry, killed in a plot involving a PAIGC naval commander and, by most accounts, cooperation from Portuguese intelligence. Guinea-Bissau declared independence later that year and was formally recognised in 1974, and Cabo Verde followed on 5 July 1975, when Portugal's transitional government handed power to the new National Assembly in Praia. For five years the two nations kept a single ruling party and a shared dream of eventual union. That dream ended in November 1980, when a coup in Bissau overthrew Cabral's half-brother Luis, and Cabo Verde's branch of the PAIGC split away to become its own party, the PAICV, the following year. Out of loss and distance came the islands' most enduring export, music built almost entirely around the ache of being somewhere else. Morna, a slow melancholic form sung in Kriolu and often compared to Portuguese fado, carries themes of parting, longing and the hope of return, while its livelier cousin coladeira picks up the tempo without losing the same emotional register. No single voice carried that sound further than Cesaria Evora, the singer from Mindelo known as the Barefoot Diva, whose 1992 album Miss Perfumado and its signature track Sodade turned a word considered nearly untranslatable, a longing rooted in the old Portuguese saudade, into something the rest of the world could recognise on first hearing. Sodade is not really a song title so much as the emotional key the whole culture is written in, the ache of an archipelago whose people have spent five centuries leaving it. The volcano that built these islands is still working. Pico do Fogo erupted for eighty-eight days between 23 November 2014 and 8 February 2015, sending lava flows through the villages of Portela and Bangaeira inside the Cha das Caldeiras crater, destroying roughly three-quarters of the buildings there and forcing the evacuation of nearly a thousand people. Rather than abandon the crater, most residents rebuilt on top of the cooled lava within a few years, often literally raising new walls over the roofs of the houses the flow had buried, and the vineyards that give Cha das Caldeiras its distinctive volcanic-soil wine are back in production. It is one of the clearer pictures available anywhere of a community choosing to live inside the risk that made its home possible in the first place. What a visitor stands in front of today carries every layer of that story. Cidade Velha still holds its fort, its church and its pillory within walking distance of each other, the physical geography of the slave trade laid out with nothing to soften it. Fogo offers the climb up Pico do Fogo itself and a night in Cha das Caldeiras among vineyards planted in ash. Santo Antao's ribeiras, the deep terraced valleys of Paul and Ribeira Grande do Norte, hold hiking trails hand-paved during the colonial era through sugarcane, coffee and banana plantations clinging to near-vertical slopes. Mindelo, on Sao Vicente, keeps a carnival tradition running back to 1916, its Entrudo-derived parades folding in dance styles carried from the Bijagos islands of Guinea-Bissau more than a century ago. Sal and Boa Vista draw travellers for their white sand and wind, and Boa Vista in particular ranks among the world's most important nesting sites for loggerhead turtles, with patrols running most nights between June and October. And on Santiago, the former Tarrafal camp at Chao Bom, opened in 1936 to hold Portuguese political prisoners and reopened after 1961 to detain African independence fighters from across the empire, stands preserved as a museum of resistance. None of these places are backdrops. Cidade Velha and Tarrafal in particular sit on ground where real people were bought, sold or held against their will, and the appropriate way to walk through them is slowly, without treating the fort walls or the isolation cells as photo opportunities first and history second. The same goes for Cha das Caldeiras, since the families living there rebuilt their homes on buried ruins and a visitor is a guest in that decision rather than a spectator of a natural disaster. Cabo Verde asks to be understood as a place that was made rather than simply found, by people who mostly did not choose to be there and by their descendants who mostly did.