Cabo Verde (1): the 'special blacks'
What does one slave trading island in the Portuguese empire, tell us about the country today
This piece started as the story of Maria Teresa, a 34 year old Cape Verdean woman who moved to Lisbon to study in 2004. It was about her ambivalent relationship with Portugal and white Portuguese people and of confronting racial prejudice for the first time:
It was as if I only found out I was black when I arrived in Portugal, she told me the first time we spoke. Where I was born and raised everyone looked like me so I had no sense of being the ‘other’.
Between conversations with Maria I read the book Racismo em Português, I visited Cova de Moura, a Lisbon neighbourhood self-built principally by immigrants in the 1970s, and I spoke to other Cape Verdeans, or Portuguese children of Cape Verdeans. The piece broadened to include Cape Verde’s history within the Portuguese empire, and the role the country plays in Portugal’s imagination of itself today.
Not too ambitious then! I’ll publish in a few parts, because it’s ridiculously long. And I’ll come back to a fuller account of Maria’s life in Lisbon in a future post.
First some background. Cabo Verde, or Cape Verde in English, is a collection of islands more than 500 kilometres off the coast of West Africa. (I’ll use the Portuguese for the country, but the English Cape Verdean for the people, because that’s what I use in English speech).
When Portuguese sailors first landed there in 1456, the islands were uninhabited. The Portuguese established a settlement in the 1460s and a ragtag of others arrived in the following decades: Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, Muslims from the shrinking Iberian caliphates, some white skinned northern Europeans and many slaves.
The islands were a stopping point in the transatlantic trade in West African people. In Racismo em Português Cape Verdean historian Charles Akibodé points to a huge baptismal basin among the ruins of a cathedral on the island of Santiago. Its size and location - outside the building where services for free parishioners took place - are evidence, he says, of mass conversions to Christianity in order to raise the price of humans before they were shipped to the Americas.
Over time Cabo Verde developed a large population of mestiços, or mixed race people, with varying skin tones. Thanks to this ‘mixedness’ of part of the population, Cape Verdeans also found a special place in the Portuguese imagination as somehow more European, more civilised and more beautiful, than the populations of other Portuguese colonies in Africa. Although this did not prevent stereotypical representations of black people in Cape Verde (the main image for this article is of 18th century engravings of Cape Verdeans), it did have significant political and social consequences.
In the 20th century, the vast majority of black people in Portugal’s African colonies were classed as indígenas (indigenous) and only a small group as assimilados (assimilated). Qualifying as an assimilado required passing a test in Portuguese language and manners. A certificate was issued, which an assimilado could be asked to produce to enter a restaurant frequented by white people. Indígenas were subject to a separate legal code altogether, and could not access such spaces at all.
Cabo Verde, however, was never made subject to the indígena regime. It’s people were all assimilados. When asked why, António Salazar, Portugal’s right wing dictator from the early 1930s to 1968, is reported to have said:
Eles são nossos filhos, pretos especiais. (They [Cape Verdeans] are our children, special blacks.)
(Aside: in Portugal black people generally prefer the word negro to preto - black - because the simple colour description is generally used in a derogatory manner, for example in the prase, Achas que sou preto - ‘What, you think I’m black? - used when someone is asked to perform a task they consider unduly burdensome. When I heard this phrase, colleagues explained after that its use was lighthearted.)
When Portugal’s African empire transitioned from one of trade alone to settlement in the late nineteenth century, to ward off European competitors in the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ some pretos especiais were given a privileged position. They were sent to Guiné-Bissau (a Portuguese colony adjacent to Cabo Verde on the African mainland) as colonial administrators, or to Angola to work as supervisors.
Not all Cape Verdeans held high status positions. Many worked under the forced labour regime that persisted almost to the end of the Portuguese empire in the 1970s. But it is the role of the small elite that echoes most strongly today. In Racismo em Português Saico Baldé, an academic from Guiné-Bissau, says of the colonial period in his country:
Who were the administrators? They were rarely lisboetas [people from Lisbon] or minhotos [people from Minho, in the north of Portugal] - most of the time they were Cape Verdeans... We didn’t deal with the coloniser directly, but with a subcontractor. (My translation).
It’s this dynamic I want to try and explore in this piece, through Maria’s story, and others: Cape Verdeans as colonised, but in some cases elevated; as black and African, but also mixed race and Euro-proximate; as ‘othered’ immigrants when they come to Portugal, but idealised - both aesthetically and culturally - when they stay at home.
When I asked white Portuguese people the first words that came into their head when I said Cabo Verde, or immigrant or student from Cabo Verde the responses were overwhelmingly positive:
Some translations: Luz means light, alegria is joy, criancas are children, bonitos beautiful people and felizes happy people. Dor is pain, potencial potential, trabalho is work and an informático is a software engineer. One friend who made the beautiful association explained:
It’s said, and I know quite a few models with Cape Verdean origins, that some of the most beautiful people in the black community are from Cabo Verde, because they have a specific mix of races.
This, on the other hand is how some of the same people think about Angola and Angolans in Portugal:
Again translations: Feio is ugly, corrupção corruption.
Apart from family connections to Angola, of which more below, the most striking difference, was the more negative connotations. Wars, both for independence and civil, and corruption, came up repeatedly. Angolans in Portugal, meanwhile, were thought of either as rich (children of the corrupt elite) or desesperado (hopeless) with ‘no future’ by some.
One friend I spoke to was born in Angola to white Portuguese immigrants or ‘settlers’ a few years before independence. When I said Angola his immediate response was pátria (homeland), spoken with a wistful satisfaction. (He has told me before the emotion he felt on finding his childhood home on returning to Luanda to work as an adult.) But he drew the clearest distinction between Cabo Verde and Angola:
We have a bigger influence in Cabo Verde in terms of Occidental culture than we have in Africa, Angola. We left probably the worst parts of Portugal in Angola. They didn’t learn the good parts of being a Portuguese.
Interestingly he separates Cabo Verde from Africa, only identifying the continent when he talks of Angola. On the communities of migrants from each country in Portugal he says.
Cape Verdeans and Angolans have very different ways of being. It seems like people from Cabo Verde grab the opportunity [of being in Portugal] in a way that they can take profit in the future… people from Angola come with the perspective of I’m going to have a good life, take advantage of the fact I’m not in Angola.
In some ways I am impressed by the level of Portuguese engagement with their colonial past.
Growing up in England I found empire was put in a box marked ‘history’. It already seemed to have been over for a long time. No one ever told me their family had lived in a colony, farmed in Kenya or Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), for example, or been an administrator in British India. This, I think, makes it easier for English people to see the empire as a series of abstract triumphs - bringing democracy, building railways, opening trade - rather than the more messy business of ruling darker skinned people. If the people who did the shooting are long dead, you don’t have to think of what they did.
In Portugal, by contrast, empire is a lived experience for nearly every family: Salazar’s estado novo regime encouraged tens of thousands of the country’s poorest to migrate to a ‘greater Portugal’, Angola and Mozambique in particular from the 1930s onwards. These families accumulated capital, built homes, hired domestic staff, and enjoyed a standard of living far removed from their Portuguese villages, many of which remained without electricity well beyond the Carnation revolution that finally toppled the dictatorship in 1974.
When empire did end, immediately after the revolution, Portugal’s population swelled by 10 per cent in just a few years. Hundreds of thousands of Retornados, many of whom had been born in Africa and never visited Portugal, were dumped by ships on the docks of Lisbon, with just a suitcase. They made their way to ancestral villages, or built houses from scratch in the suburbs that ring Lisbon. Through these people’s stories, their memories of the land on which they were born, empire remains part of Portugal’s contemporary discourse, it’s food, sometimes it’s music, in a way that is completely different to England.
One example: in my research for this piece, I ended up on the phone to a white friend of a friend on Christmas Eve. When I asked her about Angola, she passed the phone to her Mum, who was born there. Her mother told me how shocked she was when she came to Portugal for the first time, aged 13, as a retornado on Angola independence. Portugal was very cold, very backward compared to Angola at that time. She has never visited Angola since, for fear of being emotionally overwhelmed, and on a holiday to Mozambique on leaving the plane just the smell of the earth was enough to make me cry.
If British rule by a very few administrators at a long distance has allowed empire to be historicised into textbooks, the much more intertwined and contemporary Portuguese experience has bred a kind of romantic nostalgia - of a colonialism that was less severe and more mild compared to other European versions, and of Portugal, and the Portugese, by extension, as incapable of racism.
This can lead to an inability to face issues of racism in society today, and a violent rejection of anyone who points them out. Each time there was a Black Lives Matter march in Portugal last year, Chega, a far right party, organised a counter ‘Portugal is not racist’ demonstration. In this editorial an academic takes Mamadou Ba, head of Portugal’s main anti-racist organisation, to task. The writer says Ba owes a debt to white men who taught his ancestors justice, equality between men and women, even hygiene and how to live in a house.
Aside: the canonical idea of a brando (bland) - and leve (mild) Portuguese colonialism is Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 work Casa Grande e Senzala - The Masters and the Slaves - which the Estado Novo promoted aggressively. If you’re at all interested in this, Portugal’s Colonial Complex: From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony by Miguel Vale de Almeida is a good place to start.
Portugal’s lived colonial experience is important in any discussion of Cabo Verde, I think. Angola was a country lived in by many Portuguese, and so it is one where the violence of empire, particularly the long war the Portuguese fought against independence from 1961 to 1974, cannot be ignored. Few Portuguese went to Cabo Verde in the twentieth century, on the other hand, so I sense that it is a place on which it is easier to project the idea of empire promoted by the estado novo: miscegenation (as an expression of inherent Portuguese cosmopolitanism), the civilisation of parts of Africa, and a resulting population that is supposedly mixed race but also Portuguese.
Returning to impressions of Cabo Verde and Angola among friends and people I spoke to, I think we see some of this play out.
Cabo Verde is seen as a place of successful settlement in the early centuries of empire, allowing it to be ‘rediscovered’ in recent years as a holiday destination for Portuguese. Several people I spoke to had travelled there recently and associated the country with ‘sun, beach and booze’ or ‘sol, praia, bebedeira’ (it sounds much nicer in Portuguese). They spoke of Cape Verdeans as friendly, hard working and intelligent.
By comparison, Angola seems to have been effectively frozen in its twentieth century history of mass settlement and conflict. Apart from two people I spoke to who were born in Angola, just one person had visited the country. She spent summers there as a child when her father, an engineer, worked in the country. She returned with a deep affection for Angola and Angolan people, but warned me: Look Ajay, I think I am the only person who will say this.
Another friend, in her late 20s, says ‘generally Angolans are seen as less trustworthy than the other ones [immigrants from other African colonies]’. She distances herself from this perspective, and is saddened by it, and suggests glumly it must stem from memories of the independence war.
Do Cape Verdeans grow up thinking of themselves as different from other African people too? From what I have heard, no.
Like Maria Teresa, Helton Luís was born in Cabo Verde and left the islands for the first time when he moved to Lisbon to study aged 18. As far as he is concerned, he’s black and has always thought of himself that way, though there is a white great grandfather somewhere in the family tree. He says he’s African too and Cabo Verde is definitely part of the continent.
In history class he learnt that the Portuguese were colonisers, they treated the people in Cabo Verde badly, and that Cape Verdeans struggled for independence just like every other country in Africa.
Did Cabo Verde have a special relationship with Portugal? No
Did Cape Verdeans play a role within Portugal’s empire? No, not that I ever heard of.
Maria’s understanding is more nuanced.
Some people from Guiné-Bissau would say… that we [Cape Verdeans] were privileged within the Portuguese empire, which is true to a certain degree.
But she learnt this only after coming to Portugal, where she encountered Afrodescendants from other former Portuguese colonies and heard that Cape Verdeans and Angolans often don’t get along. Growing up, did she think of Cape Verdeans as different from other black Africans? Was she aware of the role some Cape Verdeans played in the empire?
Basically no I didn’t have a clue.
In the next piece we’ll get on to the experience of Cape Verdeans in Portugal. What happened when Maria confronted the idea that her country may have had a privileged status within the Portuguese empire? How did she process that when simultaneously being racialised as black in a majority white country for the first time.
Notes:
Afrodescendant is a term favoured by people in Portugal descended from black Africans. It has more positive connotations than immigrant, which is often used to describe Portuguese born children and grandchildren of immigrants.)
Maria Teresa’s name has been changed on her request
The main image is of copper engravings of inhabitants of Cabo Verde from an early edition of The four years voyages of Captain George Roberts by Daniel Defoe, 1726, available copyright free from slaveryimages.org
There were no universities in Cabo Verde before the 2000s and Cape Verdeans are charged local tuition fees to attend Portuguese universities (i.e. the same rate as Portuguese nationals), so there has been a steady flow of Cape Verdean students, like Helton and Maria Teresa, arriving in Portugal for decades.
Your work is amazing, and I do not use the word loosely. I look forward to reading the next part(s).