in Cabo Verde, would be appreciated by a grateful son. Amílcar would later express his gratitude by describing his mother in a dedicatory poem as “the star of my infancy,” with the acknowledgment, “Without you, I am nobody.”18
Thus, notwithstanding the affirmations of Cabral’s notable biographers, particularly Mário de Andrade and Patrick Chabal, that Juvenal played a pivotal role in his son’s development of critical political consciousness, it would appear that Iva was the central figure. The radical political consciousness of Amílcar fundamentally challenged his father’s core political beliefs. Ironically, although Juvenal was a primary school teacher in Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar was not enrolled in any educational establishment in the territory, in spite of being of school age. It is probable that he was home-schooled, given the importance of education among Cabo Verdeans. Nevertheless, in Cabo Verde, Iva’s determination for her children to be educated would be realized. Life in the archipelago would be critical in the molding of Amílcar’s character.
2
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
