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.
