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Terra Ancestral

Schooling and Adolescence in Cabo Verde, 1932–45

Late in November 1932, after an exhausting two-day boat trip from Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar Cabral and his five-year-old twin sisters Armanda and Arminda, accompanied by their father Juvenal Cabral, disembarked in Praia. For about two years the children lived with their father in the interior of Santiago, in his big house at Achada Falcão, near Assomada, capital of the municipality of Santa Catarina and the second-largest city on the largest island in Cabo Verde. The house was built on extensive land, shadowed by the Serra da Malagueta mountain range, that Juvenal inherited from his godmother, Simoa dos Reis Borges.

Mountainous with relatively fertile valleys, Santiago was also the first island to be settled, initially by Portuguese migrants from the regions of Alentejo and Algarve and the Madeira Islands, as well as a sprinkling of Genoese and Spaniards. The island quickly became the heartbeat of the archipelago. In 1466, the Portuguese Crown granted the Santiago settlers special privileges to have their own administration and the right to trade on the adjacent West African coast. Six years later, a royal decree gave them the right “to have slaves, males and females, for their services, and to be occasion for their better livelihood and good settlement.”¹ But they were prohibited from trading in African captives, and for their defiance they became known as lançados (from the Portuguese word lançar—“to launch”—meaning those who defiantly “launched” themselves onto the West African mainland), with the Rivers of Guinea of Cabo Verde as their principal area of activity.

Map 2. Cabo Verde, ca. 1960. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

The enslaved Africans in Santiago and the other islands constructed the foundations of the new slave-based society with blood, sweat, and great toil. Theirs was a precarious existence that has been described as “hard, brutish and, in times of famine, short.”² They worked the sugar and cotton plantations, gathered the vegetable dyestuff urzela and the oil-producing nut purgueira, wove the highly esteemed cotton cloths called panos, and extracted salt, besides a host of other tasks. Furthermore, the enslaved African women were sexually exploited by their masters, which resulted in the creation of a mestiço (mixed-race) racial category that became, through paternal inheritance, a dominant landowning class occupying important positions in the social and political life of the archipelago. The tendency of Portuguese men in the tropics to “unashamedly” have sexual relations with enslaved and “free women of color” would later be conceptualized by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre as “lusotropicalism,” which theory equates “racial harmony” in the “world created by the Portuguese” with miscegenation. The Lisbon authorities would weaponize the concept to maintain the pax lusitana. Amílcar Cabral would dismiss Freyre as “confusing realities that are biological and necessary with realities that are socioeconomic and historical.”³

With recurring drought and famine, decline in the transshipment of African captives to the Americas, and the emigration of numerous white settlers, Cabo Verde became a penal colony where Portugal sent her convicts, known as degredados. Miscegenation increased substantially during the period 1802–82, when some 2,433 convicts (among them 81 women) were deported to the islands, with Santiago receiving the majority of them.⁴ This island would later host a concentration camp built by the Estado Novo in the town of Tarrafal in 1936, where Portugal sent her political dissidents and African nationalist agitators. By 1900, mestiços constituted 64 percent of the archipelago’s population, among them the rich, the poor, and the marginalized. The “whites” made up 3 percent of the inhabitants, while the “blacks” accounted for the remaining one-third.

Invariably characterized as brancos (whites), mestiços, and pretos (blacks), the population of Cabo Verde had, from the beginning of slavery to the end of the colonial period, also been a race- and color-conscious society. While these socially constructed categories may never have been fiery, contentious issues, the absence of overt racial conflict did not mean the absence of either race/color consciousness or racial prejudice. Historically, race and color have had social, cultural, and psychological significance in the archipelago. From the early days of settlement, the mestiço element was differentiated from the black population and generally given favored treatment. The sons and daughters of white men, or their descendants, they generally considered themselves “white, Portuguese, and civilized,” naturally superior to the blacks, and thus remained spiritually and psychologically amputated from Africa. Cabral would take issue with such self-perception, admonishing that “some, forgetting or ignoring how the people of Cape Verde were formed, think that Cape Verde is not Africa because it has many mestiços,” and insisting that “even if in Cabo Verde there was a majority white native population . . . Cape Verdeans would not stop being Africans.”⁵

At home in Achada Falcão, Cabral found himself once again among a people with a long tradition of resistance against brutal exploitation and oppression. The municipality of Santa Catarina had been the epicenter of revolts and rebellions by a people referred to as badius, the poor black and mestiço peasants of the island.⁶ Twenty-two years earlier, just a month after the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared (5 October 1910), the tenant farmers of Ribeirão Manuel revolted against the payment of rents, during a time of drought and famine, to the landowners known as morgados—a throwback to the latifundia-type system that emerged with the royal land grants of the early settlement period. The brutal response of the colonial authorities to the initial protests ignited a rebellion led by Nha Ana Veiga, popularly known as Nha’Ana Bombolom,⁷ who rallied the angry peasants with her legendary call to arms: “homi faca, mudjer matxado, mosinhos tudo ta djunta pedra” (men knives, women machetes, all children gather stones).⁸ According to Pedro Martins, a native of Santa Catarina and maternal relative of Cabral who, as a politically active high school student six decades after the Ribeirão Manuel rebellion became the youngest political prisoner in the notorious Tarrafal concentration camp, the defeated leaders were “handcuffed” and “paraded around the island”—much like Gungunhana, the defiant ruler of the Gaza kingdom in southern Mozambique, who was defeated by the Portuguese in 1895, was taken to Portugal and paraded through the streets of Lisbon.

The Ribeirão Manuel revolt was preceded by uprisings in Ribeira de Engenhos in January 1822 and Achada Falcão in January 1841, both motivated by high rents and a highly exploitative land-tenure system dominated by a handful of mostly absentee landlords. The dependence of the majority of Cabo Verdeans on eking out a precarious living from an agriculture conditioned by soil erosion and cyclical droughts would later influence the decision of Cabral to study agronomy.

The struggles of poor peasant farmers in Cabo Verde were paralleled by those of urban workers, especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries when the number of strikes and demonstrations increased in Mindelo, capital of São Vincente Island, where workers at the port, the coaling stations, and the shipping agencies demanded better wages and working conditions.

Resistance in the context of periodic droughts and famines has been a salient feature of the history of Cabo Verde, a history that is also embedded in the various facets of Cabo Verdean culture, including folklore, music, song, and dance. Young Amílcar, like most young Cabo Verdeans, was conscious of this sad trajectory of his ancestral country, but as an adult he would change such static consciousness to active engagement in social transformation, thus reconciling memory and action. As in the case of Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar would later regard the numerous revolts during slavery and the many acts of defiance in the colonial period as sources of inspiration for his anticolonial activism.

Life in Achada Falcão for Amílcar and his sisters was but short-lived, less than two years. Little is known about this brief period when Amílcar intimately lived part of his age of innocence with his father. The family house was big, made of brick with red roof tiles imported from Portugal. The air of opulence it exuded was reinforced by Juvenal’s “proverbial generosity” in the face of ubiquitous poverty and misery, a generosity that included “lending money without guarantees.”⁹ With the severe drought and deadly famine of the early 1940s, having borrowed money against his property as collateral, Juvenal was forced to vacate the house and move with his family to Praia. Amílcar and his sisters had already moved out, when their mother finally reassumed responsibility for them shortly after her return from Portuguese Guinea in late 1933 or early 1934.

In Praia, Amílcar was enrolled at the Escolar Primária Oliveira Salazar, with his mother bearing the full cost of his upkeep and education.¹⁰ During this period the city was under enormous stress due to a slump in agricultural and commercial activities in Santiago and the other islands, a significant rural urban migration provoked by cyclical droughts and famines, the perennial neglect of Portuguese colonial rule, and a world at war. A safety valve for the accumulating socioeconomic crisis was the increased recruitment of contratados for the cacao plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. When two devastating famines (1941–43 and 1947–48) lasting five years officially killed 45,000 people (25 percent of the population), some 18,513 contratados, mostly poor badius from Santiago, “involuntarily” migrated south, mainly to São Tomé and Príncipe, while 6,898 more fortunate Cabo Verdeans “voluntarily” emigrated to Portugal (68 percent), Portuguese Guinea (20 percent), and the United States of America (5 percent).¹¹ Young Amílcar lived through the generalized hardships prevalent in the archipelago, where he “saw folk die of hunger” and witnessed the forced migration of “thousands . . . as contracted workers for the Portuguese plantations in other colonies,” an experience that later left him sufficiently revolted and determined to struggle for the end of Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa.¹²

At primary school, and later in high school, Cabral followed the same curricula as that of students in Portugal, since Cabo Verde was officially considered a “civilized” colony that was sufficiently assimilated to Portuguese culture, unlike the “uncivilized” mainland territories of Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. The educational system was broadly Eurocentric and narrowly Lusocentric, which meant total neglect of African history and culture. The education emphasized the learning of Portuguese language and culture and, besides basic mathematics and science, the celebration of the maritime “discoveries” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the “genius” of the “Father of Portuguese Literature,” Luís de Camões, the miracles of Nossa Senhora de Fatima (Our Lady of Fatima), and the “historical mission” of Portugal. As a graduate of this paternalistic education, Cabral later scathingly commented on its racist content and alienating impact.

All Portuguese education disparages the African, his culture and civilization. African languages are forbidden in schools. The white man is always presented as a superior being and the African as an inferior. The colonial “conquistadores” are shown as saints and heroes. As soon as African children enter elementary schools, they develop an inferiority complex. They learn to fear the white man and to feel ashamed of being Africans. African geography, history and culture are either ignored or distorted, and children are forced to study Portuguese geography and history.¹³

Thus, in such Eurocentric education, just as the children of the assimilés in France d’Outre-mer (Overseas France) were forced to recite “our forefathers the Gauls,” so, too, young Amílcar found himself obliged to read “who are we, the Portuguese who for many centuries have lived in this corner of Europe? History says that we are the descendants of many ancient peoples who intermixed and intermingled.”¹⁴ He would retrospectively acknowledge the effectiveness of this colonial socialization process: “There was a time in my life when I was convinced that I was Portuguese.” But he would also later realize that he was not Portuguese because of his consciousness of “my people, the history of Africa, even the color of my skin.”¹⁵ Such awareness was premised on the strong conviction that “the culture of the people of Cabo Verde is quintessentially African.”¹⁶

In July 1937, Cabral graduated from primary school at the top of his class and passed his high school entrance examination with distinction. Together with his mother and siblings, he moved to Mindelo, São Vincente, and became one of the 372 enrolled students at the Liceu Infante Dom Henrique during the academic year that started on 21 October 1937. At age thirteen, he was two years older than the average enrolled first-year high school student. Five days after his enrollment (for courses that included Portuguese and French languages, mathematics, science, art, and physical education), the high school was closed by order of the minister of the colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, who requested its transformation into a vocational school. The closure provoked strong protests from the enrolled students, who were supported by their families and the general public, resulting in the reopening of the school three months later as the Liceu Gil Eannes. A participant in the demonstrations, the effectiveness of organized protest left an enduring impression on young Amílcar, a valuable learning experience and useful teachable moment that he would invoke three decades later in a seminar for the cadres of the PAIGC, pointing out, “I waited three months without going to classes at secondary school, because they [the colonial authorities] had closed it. For them what they had done was enough, no more was needed. From then on only training centres for fishermen and carpenters. The population rose and protested, and the secondary school began operating once more.”¹⁷

The seven years Cabral spent in Mindelo were, as in Praia, extended days and months of hardships and deprivations made bearable by the sacrifices of his mother and older half-brother Ivo, each of whom worked daily many hours for very little pay. Cabral’s mother labored in the local fish cannery, earning fifty cents an hour, where she worked eight hours a day when fish was plentiful and only an hour a day when fish was scarce. To supplement her meager income, she also worked as a laundress for Portuguese soldiers stationed on the island, since, despite her old craft as seamstress, “she made nothing from sewing.” Amílcar’s brother Ivo, who trained as a carpenter, did all kinds of odd jobs to contribute toward the upkeep of the household. Cabral himself helped by tutoring primary school and fellow liceu students.

Yet, in spite of the austere conditions he endured with his family in Mindelo, Cabral remained focused on his schoolwork and strove to surpass his classmates in all subjects. He quickly displayed the initiative and determination for which he would become well known. As class president throughout his high school years, his charismatic leadership won him numerous friends and admirers at the same time as it developed and refined his interpersonal skills and negotiating capabilities. The good impression he made on students and faculty lingered for years, as Manuel “Manecas” dos Santos, a later alumnus of the same high school and his comrade-in-arms in Portuguese Guinea, recalls.¹⁸ Cabral was also involved in extracurricular activities in and around Mindelo, including the founding of a high school sports club, the Associação Desportiva do Liceu de Cabo Verde (Sports Association of the High School of Cabo Verde), of which he was not only president but also an active member, being an adept soccer player and a keen sportsman. The honing of his organizing and leadership skills would also include the staging and directing of plays for both high school students and the youth of Mindelo, plays in which he sometimes also performed as actor.

Cabral’s extracurricular activities in Mindelo—where the Claridade literary movement, aimed at defining and affirming Cabo Verde’s specific Crioulu identity, emerged a year or so before his arrival—also included the writing of poetry and prose. The Cabo Verdean identity that came to be known as Caboverdianidade had, as its organ of expression, the journal Claridade: Revista de Arte e Letras, which was first published in 1936 and last appeared (the ninth edition) in 1960. Led by Jorge Barbosa, Manuel Lopes, and Baltasar Lopes da Silva, the proponents of this concept came to be called the Claridosos. They initially set the tone for a nativist literature that focused on the existential crises generated by drought, famine, poverty, isolation, and migration. They did not challenge the colonial order, but instead framed the literary renaissance in a regional setting considered part of Western Europe rather than Western Africa.

Nevertheless, this new literature was a radical departure from the previous Eurocentric focus of the earlier poets and prose writers who were educated at the seminary in São Nicolau. Steeped in the Greco-Roman classics, these pre-Claridade literati were later criticized by Cabral for producing a literature in which “they forget the land and the people.”¹⁹ In particular, they composed poetry characterized by the themes of love, personal pain, exalted patriotism, and profound nostalgia. Some of the poems were written and/or translated into Crioulu and song as morna, the quintessential Cabo Verdean music and dance genre made famous worldwide by Cesária Évora (1941–2011), a native of Mindelo commemorated by the name of the international airport on São Vincente.

The main factors accounting for the emergence of the Claridosos generation include the archipelago’s recurring drama of drought, famine, death, and emigration and the establishment of a secular coeducational high school with largely Cabo Verdean faculty and staff (unprecedented in Portuguese Africa) in Mindelo, the most cosmopolitan city in the archipelago, where the resident educated elite had easier access to foreign literature reflecting the perspectives of realism and impressionism as artistic movements. Significant also was the installation of the fascist Estado Novo and its increasingly suffocating stranglehold on the colonized and the stationing of a large number of Portuguese troops in the archipelago to bolster the defense of the colony. This increased military presence provoked clashes between the local inhabitants and racist white soldiers, which not only insulted the dignity of the Cabo Verdean people but laid bare the falsity of the assimilationist notion of equality between colonizer and colonized. Such developments generated a nativist awakening among the Cabo Verdean intellectuals that coalesced into the concept of Caboverdianidade, whose founders influenced Cabral’s early endeavors in poetry and prose writing. He would later commend the Claridosos for having their “feet fixed to the ground” and realistically depicting Cabo Verde as a place “where the trees die of thirst, the men of hunger—and hope never dies.”²⁰

Thus it was with the outlook of the Claridosos that Cabral wrote his first poems, including “Chuva” (Rain), written in 1943, echoing the “drama of the rain.” Cabral’s early short stories included “Fidemar” (Son of the sea) and “Hoje e amanha” (Today and tomorrow), respectively written in 1942 and 1944. The first tells the story of a young man who is revolted by the dire conditions in the archipelago and agitates for change but decides to leave the islands and secure the wherewithal needed to make the necessary revolution; however, before he can return, the hero dies at sea during a naval battle. As noted by Chabal, the theme of this “poem of adolescence,” as Cabral later characterized it, was not uncommon, being “representative of Cape Verde’s sense of isolation from the rest of the world and the need to escape from this insular hell by seeking liberation outside.”²¹ In the second story, written during his final high school year but published five years later under the pseudonym Arlindo António when he was in the last year of his university studies in Lisbon, Cabral decries the evils of war and injustice, hatred and hardships, yet optimistically embraces a future with better prospects for a son he desires. Mário de Andrade notes that this essay represents “the first philosophical reflection of Amílcar” in which, with his desire for a son, he plans to reshape the future.²²

While the poets and prose writers of Claridade were cultural nativists whose affirmation of Caboverdianidade did not challenge the fundamental premises of Portuguese colonialism, they were nevertheless not totally oblivious to developments in the rest of the African continent. For example, a poem by António da Silva Ramos titled “Abyssinia,” which became a morna expressing outrage against the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, reveals a rare Pan-African solidarity that urged Negusa Nagast (Amharic for “king of kings”; emperor) Haile Selassie, to defend his kingdom, “which is rightfully yours.”²³

The Claridade movement was later overshadowed by the radical Certeza generation of younger writers and poets who focused on the linkages between the dire conditions of the archipelago and its status as a colony, as well as the historical and cultural links between the islands and the adjacent African mainland. Thus, these literati sowed the seeds for the germination of political consciousness that would lead to nationalist activism. The few issues of the journal Certeza that first appeared in 1944 contained poems and prose whose messages were deemed sufficiently subversive by the vigilant International and State Defense Police (PIDE) to ban the publication a year or so later, even though the authors were not yet calling for the overthrow of the colonial status quo.

Although Cabral admired the Claridade and Certeza poets and writers, having recognized their critical role in the emergence of an archipelago-centric literature, he nevertheless criticized them for their limited vision. In a penetrating analysis of Cabo Verdean poetry written in 1952, he pointed out that the messages of the poets and writers had to transcend both “resignation” and “hope” and insisted that “insularity and droughts cannot justify endless stagnation.” He further urged that “the escapist dream, the desire to leave, cannot remain the only theme,” that a different dream should “no longer be a desire to depart but to create a new land inside our land.”²⁴ It was a clarion call for profound transformational change. His radical political consciousness had crystallized in Portugal during the seven years he spent there as a student and a trained agronomist.

Cabral completed high school at the top of his class in 1944. His journey to Portugal occurred a year later, after he and his family moved back to Praia, where he obtained employment as a clerk in the government printing office. He successfully applied for a scholarship from the House of Students of the Empire (CEI) to study agronomy in Portugal.