Cape Verde’s History
The small country of Cape Verde is in West Africa. It is made up of ten volcanic islands and five rocks. It is located 300 miles directly west of the most western point of Africa. There are two groups of islands in the chain.
Along with the islets Raso and Branco, the Barlevento group in the north is made up of Santo Antão, São Vincento, Santa Luzia (which is empty), São Nicolau, Sal, and Boa Vista. These islands are in the Sotavento group, which is in the south. They are Maio, São Tiago, Fogo, Brava, and the islets of Grande, LuÃs, Carneiro, and Cima. On the Sotavento Islands, Praia is the center and largest town. In the north, Mindelo is the largest town on São Vincente.
Most of the people there are Crioulo (Creole) or mestico, which comes from ties between slave owners and their female slaves in the past. It is thought that the people of Cape Verde have a society that is a mix of European and African traditions. Portuguese is the main language of Cape Verde. Crioulo, on the other hand, is the mother tongue and the official language. Crioulo is the language that defines Cape Verdean culture and language. It expresses the country’s saudade (soul).
In the 1600s, a language called Crioulo developed out of old Portuguese that had absorbed various African languages. At first, it was used as a common language for business between Portuguese and African slave traders. There isn’t enough proof to say for sure, but the Cape Verde Islands may have been viewed but not lived on before the Portuguese came.
Hoenicians, Moors (Arab-Berbers), and people from West Africa may have been to the islands.
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Phoenician traders may have come by sea. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Moors may have arrived. Some Portuguese and Italian sailors working for Prince Henry “The Navigator” of Portugal were the first people to settle on the islands.
Some of the first people to reach the islands were Ca da Mosta, Diogo Gomes, Diogo Afonso, António, and Bartolemeu da Noli. This happened between 1455 and 1462. Early settlers, including Portuguese Jews, came to São Tiago in 1462 and built the first European village and church in the tropics. They called it Riberia Grande, which is now called Cidade Velha.
In the beginning, the Portuguese planned to use the islands as a port and a place to grow cotton and sugar. In 1495, the islands were made the crown property of Portugal. To work the land, Portugal began bringing in slaves from the coast of West Africa.
The Portuguese brought more than just slaves to Cape Verde. They also brought criminals, refugees, social outcasts, and a feudal system called “companhia.” At this point, Portuguese slave owners started having sexual contact with African slaves, which made the Crioulo society more diverse.
There were capitãos (chiefs), fidalgos (noblemen), cavaleiro-fidalgos (noble knights), almoxarites (tax collectors), degradados (convicts), exterminados (exiles), and lancados (outcasts) in the feudal social system. Slaves were at the bottom of the feudal social order. They were divided into three groups: escravos novos or bocales (raw slaves), escravos naturais (slaves born in Cape Verde), and ladinos (baptized or “civilized” slaves).
In the salt flats of Sal, slaves were often used to clear land, work on the cotton, sugar, and coffee farms, and gather plant dyes like indigo, orchil, and urzella. Badius, who were runaway slaves, farmed land in the interior and kept some of their African identity (that is, they were less integrated into Portuguese society).
In the end, the morgado or capela system of land ownership took over from the companhia system. A morgados was a large piece of privately owned land that was passed down according to the concept of primogeniture. The morgado method was done away with in 1863, when land reforms took over. As the slave trade grew in the 1600s, the Cape Verde Islands became an important link between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
The archipelago quickly became the hub of a three-way trade system. It sent slaves, ivory, and gold to the Americas and Europe on a regular basis in return for cheap manufactured goods, horses, rum, and cloth. Pirates from Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France were drawn to the islands because of the wealth that came from the transatlantic slave trade.
During the next few hundred years, these pirates and foreign raiders (William Hawkins in the 1540s, Francis Drake in 1585, and the French in 1722) attacked the islands many times, especially the city of Riberia Grande. Smugglers also liked the islands. They used panos, which were trade cloths, as money (two panos were equal to one iron bar), which hurt the Portuguese Crown’s selling monopoly.
Panos were made from cotton by woolen spinners and weavers, who then painted them with orchil and urzella. Even though they failed, people tried to stop the cheating and smuggling. On the other hand, in the 1680s, selling panos was illegal and could lead to death. As a result of the sad end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1876, the Cape Verde Islands once again became a major hub for trade in the late 1800s.
When steam-powered ships came along, the islands (at Mindelo) were used as a refueling stop on the way across the Atlantic. Before World War II, submarine cable stations also drew a lot of ships. Even though there was increased interest in the islands, the people of Cape Verde were still going through drought, famine, and bad government.
A lot of people from Cape Verde worked as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Others went to São Tomé and PrÃncipe to work as farmhands, and a lot of them joined fishing and sealing ships. Tens of thousands of people from Cape Verde came to the United States on their own to work as longshoremen or in cranberry bogs and factories between the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of them went to southeastern New England.
At the start of the 20th century, more and more people in both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau were against the Portuguese crown. When fascists took over the Portuguese government in 1926, they added a colonial strategy to the constitution. As a result, anticolonialist groups grew in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.
Dissidents and nationalists from Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Portugal were put in prison camps at Tarrafal, São Tiago (also known as Chão Bom). These camps were notorious for being very harsh. Baltazar Lopes, Jorge Barbosa, and Manuel Lopes founded the literary claridade (calrity) movement in 1936, which was where the first nationalist ideas emerged. People in the Claridade movement spoke out against racism, fascism, and the rule of Portugal over Africa.
To stop the rise of nationalism, Portugal changed Cape Verde’s position in 1951 from a colony to an overseas province. Nationalists reacted by creating the secret Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), a party started in 1956 in Guinea-Bissau by Amilcar Cabral and a few others. The goal of the PAIGC was to free Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese rule. In 1958, the PAIGC called for a number of general strikes.
In 1959, a strike in Guinea-Bissau’s Pijiguiti turned into a killing spree. Still, the PAIGC came to the conclusion that the colonial state’s violence could only be stopped by violence against violence and armed fighting. So, the PAIGC gave up peaceful ways to protest and fought a war to free their country. The armed battle began in 1963, and most of the fighting took place in rural Guinea-Bissau.
Because of problems with logistics, the PAIGC didn’t attack the Cape Verde Islands. As the PAIGC made steady combat progress, the Portuguese fought back with bombing attacks that used white phosphorous and napalm from the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By 1972, the PAIGC held most of Guinea-Bissau, even though there were Portuguese troops in towns that were fortified.
Amilcar Cabral was killed on January 20, 1973, but the PAIGC quickly stepped up its attacks on the Portuguese military, which was already weak, and on September 24, 1973, independence was announced. The fascist Portuguese government was overthrown on April 25, 1974, after this statement. This caused the new Portuguese government to start talks with the PAIGC about decolonization.
In December 1974, Portugal and the PAIGC decided to share power for a short time. South Africa got its freedom on September 24, 1974, and Cape Verde got it on July 5, 1975. The Republic of Cape Verde’s first president was Aristides Pereira, and its first prime minister was Pedro Pires. The original constitution called for formal unification with Guinea-Bissau, but a coup in November 1980 made things difficult between the two countries.
Soon after, Pedro Pires started the Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo Verde (PAICV), giving up on the idea of uniting with Guinea-Bissau. The PAICV set up a one-party government and ran Cape Verde from the time it became independent until 1990. The first votes with more than one party were held in 1991. The Movimento para Democracia (MPD) took over from the PAICV leaders. Pereira was replaced by António Mascarenas Monteiro, and Pires was succeeded by Carlos Veiga.
In 1992, a new constitution was passed that set up a multiparty government. The MPD got most of the votes in the 1995 elections, which were seen as free and fair by monitors from both inside and outside of Vietnam. In 2001, Pedro Pires and Jóse Marie Neves, both from the PAICV, were elected president and prime minister, respectively. This was another change of guard.
Cape Verde is a part of the UN, the Organization of African Unity, and PALOP, which is a group of African countries where Portuguese is the main language. With help from the World Bank, Cape Verde has worked on a number of projects to improve its infrastructure. These have included building up cities, managing water resources, and improving schools.
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