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Terra Natal

Early Childhood in Portuguese Guinea, 1924–32

Amílcar Lopes Cabral was born on 12 September 1924 in Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea, the mainland of which was finally conquered by Portugal only nine years earlier. The longstanding “pacification” campaigns that preceded the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and intensified after 1912 with the arrival of the conquistador Captain João Teixeira Pinto eventually ended with the conquest of the adjacent eighty-eight-island Bijagós archipelago in 1936.

Located in West Africa and wedged between Senegal to the north and east, the Republic of Guinea (also known as Guinea-Conakry) to the south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the area now known as Guinea-Bissau (36,130 square kilometers / 13,948 square miles) was the epicenter of the seven-hundred-year-old Mandinka Kingdom of Kaabu, which emerged after the collapse of the famous Mali Empire founded by the legendary Sundiata Keita in the thirteenth century. From its capital Kansala, near the modern city of Gabu in Guinea-Bissau, the mansas (rulers) of Kaabu exercised influence northward to the south bank of the Gambia River and southward to parts of northern Guinea-Conakry. During the transatlantic slave trade, Kaabu was engaged in numerous military campaigns that secured captives for the plantations of the Americas. The kingdom collapsed in 1867 as a result of domestic political crisis and increasing external pressure from three ambitious European maritime powers: the British on the Gambia River, the French on the Casamance and Nunez Rivers, and the Portuguese on the network of waterways known as the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde.

Map 1. Portuguese Guinea, ca. 1960. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Guinea-Bissau, with the landing of the explorer Alvaro Fernandes in Varela in 1446. Ten years later, some of the islands of the Cabo Verde archipelago were “discovered” by two Genoese sailors in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, Alvise Cadamosto and Antonio de Noli. Santiago and Fogo island were quickly settled by mainly Portuguese colonists and enslaved Africans from the adjacent coast. Claiming exclusive rights over her “lands of discoveries” in West Africa, Portugal was effectively challenged by her European rivals, resulting in her sphere of influence being reduced to the “Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde”—roughly corresponding to coastal Guinea-Bissau. From this network of waterways, the voracious activities of illegal Cabo Verdean slave traders called lançados facilitated the shipment of millions of African captives to Cabo Verde and the Americas. The lançados also became the pioneers of Portugal’s centuries-old entrenchment efforts in this area. In 1588, they founded one of the earliest Portuguese settlements on the West African mainland, the fortified town of Cacheu, in northwest Guinea-Bissau. Their attempts to undermine local sovereignties generated bloody conflicts. Nevertheless, over the centuries a constant flow of traders, missionaries, soldiers, colonial officials, and teachers from Cabo Verde continually descended on “Guinea of Cabo Verde,” which became “Portuguese Guinea” in 1879.

It was in search of gainful employment that Amílcar Cabral’s mother and father, Iva Pinhel Évora and Juvenal António da Costa Cabral, found themselves in Portuguese Guinea during the early decades of the twentieth century. Iva was born on 31 December 1893, the daughter of Maximiana Monteiro da Rocha and António Pinhel Évora, both of modest social backgrounds. She arrived in Portuguese Guinea in 1922 with her nine-month-old son, Ivo Carvalho Silva, and the baby’s father, João Carvalho Silva. Shortly afterwards, she and her son separated from João, who had become a minor colonial official in Bolama, the capital of a “possession” hastily proclaimed on 18 March 1879 but yet to be “effectively occupied.” Relocating to Bafatá around 1923, Iva met Juvenal Cabral, a primary school teacher in the nearby town of Geba.

The relationship between Iva and Juvenal produced four offspring: Amílcar, the twins Armanda and Arminda, and António. It lasted until 1929, during which time Amílcar lived two years in Bafatá without his father and three years in Geba with both parents.¹ Toward the end of 1929, Iva returned to Santiago, where, on Christmas Eve that year, Amílcar and his twin sisters were baptized at the Catholic Church of Nossa Senhora da Graça (Our Lady of Grace) in Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde.² Although she had intended to stay permanently, Iva was obliged to return with her children to Portuguese Guinea less than two years later due to difficulties in securing the basic needs of her family. They lived in Bissau, where Juvenal Cabral, recently married to Adelina Rodrigues Correia de Almeida (future mother of Luís Cabral), also resided. In 1932, Amílcar and his twin sisters returned to Cabo Verde with their father. Iva followed a year or so later and resumed care of her children.

Juvenal Cabral was born on 2 January 1889, the son of Rufina Lopes Cabral, of humble origins, and António Lopes da Costa, a final-year student at the São José Seminary on the island of São Nicolau who was from a notable landowning family in Santiago. Juvenal’s paternal grandfather, Pedro Lopes da Costa, was one of the few Cabo Verdeans who “seriously cared about the education of children,” such that his family produced “distinguished priests, teachers and civil servants” who “served well and honored well” the patria (fatherland) of Portugal.³ With his father killed when Juvenal was only ten months old, the boy became the ward of his paternal grandfather Pedro and great-aunt Paula Lopes da Costa, and later his godmother, Simoa dos Reis Borges. Simoa inherited property upon the death of her brother in 1894, rented it, and four years later left for Portugal with her husband and eight-year-old godchild.

Juvenal Cabral attended primary school in Santiago de Cassurães, Beira Alta, Portugal, as the only black student “among forty young white boys.” Upon graduation he entered the nearby Catholic seminary in Viseu, where one of his contemporaries was António de Oliveira Salazar, later to become the architect and dictator of the Estado Novo established in the aftermath of the 1926 military coup d’état that ended sixteen years of liberal democracy in Portugal. In 1905, due to financial difficulties, Juvenal was forced to abandon the seminary and return to Cabo Verde. Still determined to become a priest, he entered the seminary in São Nicolau, but once again his ecclesiastical studies were short-lived, lasting about a year, due to a disciplinary action against him for fighting with a student from Portuguese Guinea. Rather than endure “shame for being punished, like a child,” he quit the seminary and returned to Santiago in July 1907.⁴ Four years later, after a brief stay in Praia, he embarked for Portuguese Guinea “in search of employment, through the rewards of which I can decently maintain myself.”⁵ It was at the end of the first decade of a new century that had been inaugurated in Cabo Verde by a severe drought (1900–1903) that killed sixteen thousand people, a tragedy an angry contemporary Cabo Verdean lawyer, Luiz Loff de Vasconcellos, denounced as “a perfect extermination of a people,” blaming Portugal for a “tremendous and horrific catastrophe” that the Lisbon authorities had dismissed with the callous excuse that “the government is not culpable that in Cabo Verde there have not been regular rains.”⁶

The “voluntary” emigration of Amílcar’s father and mother to Portuguese Guinea, in contrast to the “forced” exodus of Cabo Verdeans as contratados (contracted workers) to the notorious cacao plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe, occurred against the background of dire conditions in the archipelago. For more than three centuries, droughts and famines had regularly visited Cabo Verde, often lasting two to three years and causing spectacular death tolls, sometimes amounting to two-thirds of the inhabitants of some islands and up to half the population of the archipelago. These catastrophic natural and man-made disasters, together with brutal colonial exploitation and neglect, underlie the significant movements of the population, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Between 1902 and 1922, a total of 24,329 desperate Cabo Verdeans found themselves forced to become contracted migrant laborers, 98.5 percent ending up in São Tomé and Príncipe.⁷ On the other hand, during the period 1900–1920 an estimated 27,765 Cabo Verdeans “voluntarily” migrated, mainly to the United States (67 percent), Portuguese Guinea (8 percent), Brazil/Latin America (7 percent), and Senegal/Gambia (5 percent). The “voluntary” flow to the United States was effectively restricted in 1917, when a new immigration law required, among other things, literacy. Obviously, the prolonged harsh realities in the face of neglect and exploitation render redundant the categorization of migration from Cabo Verde as either forced or voluntary. Both were motivated by the specter of starvation and death.

The relatively high literacy rate in Cabo Verde (22 percent in 1950) provided Portugal with a reservoir of willing collaborators—a collaboration conditioned by the prevalent poverty and limited employment opportunities. With a seminary established in 1866, a secular high school opened in 1917 (the first in Portuguese Africa), and several primary schools, Cabo Verdeans were indeed the main beneficiaries of Portuguese colonial education. This factor largely accounted for their significant presence in the colonial administration of Portuguese Guinea—about 75 percent of the colonial officials before the beginning of the armed struggle. Such preponderance gave rise to their pseudo-status as “co-colonizers” or “proxy colonizers,” notwithstanding the fact that Cabo Verde was a colony and Cabo Verdeans a colonized people with a history of brutal exploitation and callous abandonment to recurrent droughts and famines. With the Cabo Verdeans arbitrarily classified as civilizados (civilized), the colonial authorities endeavored to ensure that “to Guiné go only those with literacy skills who are going to fill public and business appointments.”⁸ For poor Cabo Verdeans, the main attraction to Portuguese Guinea was the territory’s reliable agriculture and enhanced food security. As one Cabo Verdean writer and colonial official noted, the colony was the “blessed land of rice and nuts and palm oil, where hunger is unknown and there are no beggars.”⁹

Portuguese Guinea was (and remains) a multiethnic and multicultural country inhabited by Balantas and Biafadas, Brames and Bijagós, Fulas and Felupes, Mandinkas and Manjacos, Pepels, Nalus, Susus, and several other minor groups that, altogether, have more in common than the sum total of their differences. Desperate to establish the pax lusitana, the Portuguese exploited the differences of language and culture and played off one group against the other, constantly making a distinction between the Islamized “neo-Sudanese” Fulas and Mandinkas of the interior, the “builders of strong states,” and the “animist paleo-Sudanese” of the coastal region, the “more backward peoples.”¹⁰ Applying a racist anthropology, colonial officials-cum-social scientists considered the neo-Sudanese to be of Hamitic/Semitic racial origins, which supposedly made them superior to all the other groups regarded as paleo-Sudanese. This strategy of divide and conquer would constitute a formidable challenge facing Amílcar Cabral as he and his comrades embarked on mobilizing the people for the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial domination.

Juvenal Cabral first worked as a clerk at the Bolama city hall, followed by two other low-level clerical positions in the colony’s treasury department and the office of the secretary-general of the colonial government. In January 1913, he became a primary school teacher in Cacine, in the southern region of Tombali, where he taught half a dozen children in a one-room school. He also taught in Buba, Bambadinca, Bafatá, and Geba. Forming the background to his teaching trajectory were the brutal “pacification” campaigns waged by Captain Teixeira Pinto’s mercenary soldiers, led by Senegalese warlord Abdul Injai. Juvenal supported the war against the Pepels of Bissau in 1915 and regarded Captain Pinto as “a great Portuguese” whose “patriotic work” was for “the good of civilization.”¹¹ Such sentiment outraged the members of the Liga Guineense (Guinean League), founded on 25 December 1910 as “an assembly of the natives of Guinea.” Reacting to the antiwar position of the Liga, the colonial authorities dissolved the emergent protonationalist organization in 1915.

The wanton brutality meted out to the Pepels of Biombo, one of the petty kingdoms on the island then known as Bissau, resulted in thousands of deaths and the capture of hundreds of fighters, including the ruler, N’Kanande Ká. Defiant in captivity, the king reportedly told Teixeira Pinto that he would never surrender, that as long as he was alive he would always fight to expel the Portuguese from his realm, and that “if he should die, and there in the other world he should meet whites, he would wage war on them.”¹² Captain Pinto proudly reported that the Pepel king was promptly condemned to death, then “tied up, mutilated, his eyes plucked out, and buried alive.” Luiz Loff de Vasconcellos, the outraged defense lawyer of the victims of the Bissau war, pointed out that after the defeat of the Pepels “the real carnage started,” as “men, women, old people, children, and the crippled” were “mercilessly killed,” their dwellings sacked and burned and their livestock looted, resulting in their homeland being “in the greatest desolation and misery.”¹³ That was just nine years before Amílcar Cabral was born. It would take two more brutal pacification campaigns, in 1925 and 1936, to subjugate the last resisters, the people of the Bijagós Islands.

Thus, when Cabral was born, Portuguese Guinea was simultaneously undergoing a brutal war of conquest and the consolidation of colonial domination by a weak imperial power that itself was experiencing tumultuous political upheavals following a bloody revolution that abolished the monarchy in 1910 and established a liberal republic, which was overthrown sixteen years later. In 1932, when eight-year-old Amílcar moved to Cabo Verde, António de Oliveira Salazar became prime minister of Portugal. As the effective dictator of the established New State he would maintain a brutal, repressive regime in the African colonies until his incapacitation by a stroke thirty-six years later. Cabral would devote his life to breaking the stranglehold of this harsh colonial order on the lives of the millions of Africans it subjugated.

Meanwhile, in Bafatá, two years before his son Amílcar was born, Juvenal made a passionate plea to the visiting governor for the provision of more schools for the natives, who were “still wrapped up in the plain cloak of their primitive ignorance.”¹⁴ Juvenal was indeed an outspoken advocate of the expansion of education in the territory, pleading strongly in 1915 for “the light of education to be shed on this people so desirous of lights” and insisting that, “as is already proven, the gentio is not devoid of intelligence, needing on our part to know only how to encourage him to love education.”¹⁵ His son Amílcar would inherit such passion for education, but as a weapon for liberation, “to combat fear and ignorance, to stamp out little by little submissiveness before nature and natural forces.”¹⁶

When Amílcar was born, his father registered his first name as Hamilcar, to honor the great Carthaginian general whose son Hannibal was also a famous general. Bafatá was then a relatively new settlement, elevated to the status of a town in 1917, but would soon after become the second most important trading center (after Bissau) in the territory. Of the population of about 1,500 residents, half were Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, and numerous civilizados—mostly Cabo Verdeans. The local economy was dominated by the production of export crops such as peanuts, cotton, and rubber, which were exported to Portugal and France by Portuguese and French trading companies including the Union Manufacturing Company (CUF), Casa Gouveia, Barbosa e Comandita Limitada, and the French West Africa Company (CFAO).

Notwithstanding his strong emotional and spiritual attachment to Cabo Verde and Portugal, Juvenal nevertheless recognized Portuguese Guinea as “the land where the genealogical tree of my ancestors grew and flourished,” and declared that since his youth he had struggled for the “dignification of the black race to which I belong.”¹⁷ This firm identification with Portuguese Guinea and his ready recognition of his black African ancestry undoubtedly had an influence on his offspring, particularly Amílcar and his brother Luís Severino de Almeida Cabral (born in Bissau on 10 April 1931), who would later embrace their dualities of birthplace and ancestral home and subsequently adopt binationalism as a strategy for the liberation of their two countries.

In November 1932, Juvenal retired to Santiago, taking with him Amílcar and his twin sisters. Iva stayed in Bissau to recover the loss she suffered from a burglary, returning a year later to take custody of her children. Thus, Amílcar Cabral only spent about seven years in Portuguese Guinea before returning, for the second time, to Cabo Verde. Very little is known about his life during those tender years he lived in his terra natal. Neither he nor his father—whose autobiography, Memorias e reflexões (Memories and reflections), was written when Amílcar was a second-year agronomy student in Portugal—has left any written account of those early formative years.

Amílcar was conscious of the hard life his mother had, of the long hours she had to work to ensure that her four children did not go to bed hungry. The sacrifices, which grew bigger as the children became young adults, and especially in order for Amílcar to complete his high school education in Cabo Verde, would be appreciated by a grateful son. Amílcar would later express his gratitude by describing his mother in a dedicatory poem as “the star of my infancy,” with the acknowledgment, “Without you, I am nobody.”¹⁸

Thus, notwithstanding the affirmations of Cabral’s notable biographers, particularly Mário de Andrade and Patrick Chabal, that Juvenal played a pivotal role in his son’s development of critical political consciousness, it would appear that Iva was the central figure. The radical political consciousness of Amílcar fundamentally challenged his father’s core political beliefs. Ironically, although Juvenal was a primary school teacher in Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar was not enrolled in any educational establishment in the territory, in spite of being of school age. It is probable that he was home-schooled, given the importance of education among Cabo Verdeans. Nevertheless, in Cabo Verde, Iva’s determination for her children to be educated would be realized. Life in the archipelago would be critical in the molding of Amílcar’s character.