This is my second post about Cabo Verde, or Cape Verde, a nation of islands off the coast of West Africa that was part of the Portuguese empire.
In the first I talked about the relative privilege some - generally mixed race - Cape Verdeans enjoyed within empire, and how some white Portuguese people view Cabo Verde as more European than other former colonies in Africa.
In this piece I want to talk about how a handful of Cape Verdeans I’ve spoken to process this history and external perceptions of their country.
Maria Teresa is a light skinned black woman (there’s vague memory in the family of a white presence somewhere in the bloodline, possibly a Jewish man from North Africa). She moved to Lisbon to study in 2004. It was the first time she had left Cabo Verde. Shortly after arriving she began to notice racial stereotypes, initially through small comments and behaviours:
I would hear ‘you know how black people listen to music loud, invite everyone around for food, talk loud to each other, and then we have to call the police.’ These were things that I had never thought of as ‘black’, just part of life. Now they meant calling the police.
At the same time she also heard from some white people that she was superior to other Afrodescendants - for example those from Guiné-Bissau, another former Portuguese colony west of Cabo Verde on the African mainland:
I was in the north of Portugal and this woman told me “you Cape Verdeans did better after independence than Guiné-Bissau. Your education system is better. When you come here you do well in university. People from Guiné-Bissau don’t study well. Their country is a complete mess.”
A third new idea Maria encountered: that other Afrodescendants might feel resentment towards Cape Verdeans for their role in the Portuguese empire. (As discussed in the previous piece some Cape Verdeans served as administrators in other Portuguese colonies).
Confronting all this also led Maria to realisations about the society she had grown up in: that standards of beauty are racialised in Cabo Verde, ‘straight hair, nose shape’; that immigrants from Guiné-Bissau in Cabo Verde all worked in the market, ‘a kind of segregation’; that Cape Verdeans referred to anyone from continental Africa as Mandjaku - the name of one specific ethnic group that forms part of the population of Guiné-Bissau, Senegal and Gambia.
In short Maria had to process a lot about her country, and how she was perceived outside in a short space of time. I found it fascinating to see how she goes about it.
When you ask a question about Cabo Verde, race or identity, Maria pauses before answering - as if considering the topic for the first time. She looks away and then slowly adds sentence to sentence. When she finishes she halts a second time, as if testing the response she has given for accuracy. Only when satisfied does she make eye contact again, inviting the next question.
What emerges is often ambivalent.
This was how Maria responded to the lady in northern Portugal who told her Cabo Verde had done better than Guiné-Bissau after independence:
I said you’re reading this completely wrong. Cabo Verde didn’t go through a war on its own territory [for independence from Portugal, as happened in Guiné-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique] and that makes a hell of a difference. Not just the physical destruction but the trauma that people hold. A generation of young people born in war… these are two completely different starting points for independence.
To me she explained further that Guiné-Bissau is a multi ethnic and multilingual state, whereas Cape Verdeans all speak a common creole (with variations between islands) and know little about their ancestry, white, slave, or other. This made it much easier to build and replicate the idea of a European nation state.
She says Cape Verdeans should be quicker to call out Portuguese who talk down other post colonial African states.
But a few minutes later when we start talking about how some people from Guiné-Bissau, like Saico Baldé quoted in the previous piece, see Cape Verdeans as complicit in the colonisation of their country, she becomes tense, her responses even more delayed.
It’s very uncomfortable, because you don’t want to deny it. But I also think that these people have an idea of Cabo Verde that is not completely true. People forget that Cabo Verde is not just São Vicente and Santiago [the two most populous islands]. It’s not just Praia [the capital]. It was a really tiny elite that maybe benefited [from empire].
She emphasises the thousands of Cape Verdeans pushed into forced labour by the colonial state. She talks of famines in Cabo Verde throughout the 1800s and right up to the 1940s, and she remembers a story her father often tells her: how he had to fish nails out of tins of beans as a young man, such was the quality of produce the Portuguese owned shop on his island sold to Cape Verdeans before independence.
Mostly she stresses how well Cape Verdeans have governed themselves. The literacy rate was 20% at independence and is now 70%, she says. This happened in just 40 years, not the 100s of years the Portuguese ran the country. She says her parents’ generation are people who managed, under very hard circumstances, to get their shit together
We have gone in five minutes from Maria slapping down a white Portugeuse woman for suggesting that Guiné-Bissau squandered its independence to a passionate defence of how well Cape Verdeans have managed their own. An unfriendly listener would say she is implicitly making some of the same points that the white lady did.
In my experience these are the mental gymnastics that immigrants, or children of immigrants, often end up performing: criticising behaviours within their communities, but defending the community from outside attack, always having to be vigilant for criticisms of hypocrisy. These two instincts - to criticise and defend - aren’t necessarily inconsistent. They can be two truths, equally felt, but in different contexts, for example to criticise and seek to improve when speaking to someone in the community, but to defend when speaking to an outsider.
Growing up as the child of immigrants, and knowing many others, I think I learnt to perform some of these gymnastics as second nature, only becoming aware of them later. That Maria has come to do so as an adult, pretty much alone, and most importantly with a degree of consciousness about the tensions in her thought was new to me. Speaking to her felt like I was seeing a process of identity formation occur in real time.
Another reason I was so drawn to Maria’s story is that of my parents. Indian immigrants in South Africa, they grew up in an explicitly racist state that restricted where they could live and the bathrooms they could use, yet afforded them a status higher than black ‘natives’. Observing them watch films about apartheid South Africa is to see fury and pain at the violence of state mandated racism, but ocassionally also confusion at how estranged they were from the protagonists in the film - black South Africans. In a very different context to Cabo Verde and Portugal, themes of oppression and elevation also end up tied together.
Paula Gomes was born in Portugal to Cape Verdean parents. She was exposed much earlier than Maria to the complex history of Cabo Verde within the Portuguese empire, because it was written into the family story she learnt from her parents.
Her father is light skinned and was considered almost white in Cabo Verde when it was still under Portuguese rule. At the age of 18 he moved to Angola to become the boss of a large area of a plantation. He supervised hundreds of Angolan workers, although he had no more than a few years of primary schooling and no farming experience. His skin color qualified him to command.
But when he moved to Portugal in the 1990s, he took the job most associated with black males in Portugal: he worked in construction.
In Angola my father was white, Paula says. But in Portugal he is black.
How do people make this distinction if he’s so light skinned?
It’s because of his hair [it’s not straight] - and his voice. People think he’s from Cabo Verde, or maybe Brazilian, but definitely not Portuguese.
Like Maria, Paula says that when she reveals her parents are Cape Verdean, Portuguese people react positively.
Cabo Verde has always been Portugal’s favourite. We’re seen as at the top. And the rest [of the ex colonies] are below in terms of estatuto [status]
But for Paula this is often an annoyance. The association of Cabo Verde with mixed race beauty is such that men immediately sexualise her, she says, asking if she wants to go home with them in a way she is sure they wouldn’t a white Portuguese woman.
(Brazilian and other Latin American women in Portugal have told me something similar - not necessarily that they are considered especially beautiful, but that they are assumed to be sexually available. One immigrant from South America told she was twice asked to have sex by potential employers when looking for work.)
Paula’s impression is that positive ideas about Cabo Verde in Portugal are purely abstract. They are associated with a group of islands ‘over there’, or some idealised hard working immigrants here, but rarely with actual Cape Verdean people.
Like Maria, Paula is light skinned, but she feels to Portuguese people, she is just another black person, until they speak to her and hear a specific story.
When they see me, I am sure they think I’m from the linha (the linha de Sintra, a commuter rail line that stretches out from Lisbon populated with immigrant communities) They look at me in that way
It’s this idea I want to pick up in my next and final piece about Cabo Verde. Do the positive ideas that exist about Cabo Verde in Portugal have any impact on the lives of Cape Verdeans here? I’ll approach the question by discussing various ideas of one specific place, Cova de Moura, a neighbourhood of Lisbon on the linha de Sintra.
Notes
Both Maria Teresa and Paula Gomes are pseudonyms. Names changed on interviewees’ request.