in Cabo Verde were paralleled by those of urban workers, especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries when the number of strikes and demonstrations increased in Mindelo, capital of São Vincente Island, where workers at the port, the coaling stations, and the shipping agencies demanded better wages and working conditions.
Resistance in the context of periodic droughts and famines has been a salient feature of the history of Cabo Verde, a history that is also embedded in the various facets of Cabo Verdean culture, including folklore, music, song, and dance. Young Amílcar, like most young Cabo Verdeans, was conscious of this sad trajectory of his ancestral country, but as an adult he would change such static consciousness to active engagement in social transformation, thus reconciling memory and action. As in the case of Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar would later regard the numerous revolts during slavery and the many acts of defiance in the colonial period as sources of inspiration for his anticolonial activism.
Life in Achada Falcão for Amílcar and his sisters was but short-lived, less than two years. Little is known about this brief period when Amílcar intimately lived part of his age of innocence with his father. The family house was big, made of brick with red roof tiles imported from Portugal. The air of opulence it exuded was reinforced by Juvenal’s “proverbial generosity” in the face of ubiquitous poverty and misery, a generosity that included “lending money without guarantees.”9 With the severe drought and deadly famine of the early 1940s, having borrowed money against his property as collateral, Juvenal was forced to vacate the house and move with his family to Praia. Amílcar and his sisters had already moved out, when their mother finally reassumed responsibility for them shortly after her return from Portuguese Guinea in late 1933 or early 1934.
In Praia, Amílcar was enrolled at the Escolar Primária Oliveira Salazar, with his mother bearing the full cost of his upkeep and education.10 During this period the city was under enormous stress due to a slump in agricultural and commercial activities in Santiago and the other islands, a significant rural urban migration provoked by cyclical droughts and famines, the perennial neglect of Portuguese colonial rule, and a world at war. A safety valve for the accumulating socioeconomic crisis was the increased recruitment of contratados for the cacao plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. When two devastating famines (1941–43 and 1947–48) lasting five years officially killed 45,000 people (25 percent of the population), some 18,513 contratados, mostly poor badius from Santiago, “involuntarily” migrated south, mainly to São Tomé and Príncipe, while 6,898 more fortunate Cabo Verdeans “voluntarily” emigrated to Portugal (68 percent), Portuguese Guinea (20 percent), and the United States of America (5 percent).11 Young Amílcar lived through the generalized hardships prevalent in the archipelago, where he “saw folk die of hunger” and witnessed the forced migration of “thousands . . . as contracted workers for the Portuguese plantations in other colonies,” an experience that later left him sufficiently revolted and determined to struggle for the end of Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa.12
At primary school, and later in high school, Cabral followed the same curricula as that of students in Portugal, since Cabo Verde was officially considered a “civilized” colony that was sufficiently assimilated to Portuguese culture, unlike the “uncivilized” mainland territories of Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. The educational system was broadly Eurocentric and narrowly Lusocentric, which meant total neglect of African history and culture. The education emphasized the learning of Portuguese language and culture and, besides basic mathematics and science, the celebration of the maritime “discoveries” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the “genius” of the “Father of Portuguese Literature,” Luís de Camões, the miracles of Nossa Senhora de Fatima (Our Lady of Fatima), and the “historical mission” of Portugal. As a graduate of this paternalistic education, Cabral later scathingly commented on its racist content and alienating impact.
All Portuguese education disparages the African, his culture and civilization. African languages are forbidden in schools. The white man is always presented as a superior being and the African as an inferior. The colonial “conquistadores” are shown as saints and heroes. As soon as African children enter elementary schools, they develop an inferiority complex. They learn to fear the white man and to feel ashamed of being Africans. African geography, history and culture are either ignored or distorted, and children are forced to study Portuguese geography and history.13
Thus, in such Eurocentric education, just as the children of the assimilés in France d’Outre-mer (Overseas France) were forced to recite “our forefathers the Gauls,” so, too, young Amílcar found himself obliged to read “who are we, the Portuguese who for many centuries have lived in this corner of Europe? History says that we are the descendants of many ancient peoples who intermixed and intermingled.”14 He would retrospectively acknowledge the effectiveness of this colonial socialization process: “There was a time in my life when I was convinced that I was Portuguese.” But he would also later realize that he was not Portuguese because of his consciousness of “my people, the history of Africa, even the color of my skin.”15 Such awareness was premised on the strong conviction that “the culture of the people of Cabo Verde is quintessentially African.”16
In July 1937, Cabral graduated from primary school at the top of his class and passed his high school entrance examination with distinction. Together with his mother and siblings, he moved to Mindelo, São Vincente, and became one of the 372 enrolled students at the Liceu Infante Dom Henrique during the academic year that started on 21 October 1937. At age thirteen, he was two years older than the average enrolled first-year high school student. Five days after his enrollment (for courses that included Portuguese and French languages, mathematics, science, art, and physical education), the high school was closed by order of the minister of the colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, who requested its transformation into a vocational school. The closure provoked strong protests from the enrolled students, who were supported by their families and the general public, resulting in the reopening of the school three months later as the Liceu Gil Eannes. A participant in the demonstrations, the effectiveness of organized protest left an enduring impression on young Amílcar, a valuable learning experience and useful teachable moment that he would invoke three decades later in a seminar for the cadres of the PAIGC, pointing out, “I waited three months without going to classes at secondary school, because they [the colonial authorities] had closed it. For them what they had done was enough, no more was needed. From then on only training centres for fishermen and carpenters. The population rose and protested, and the secondary school began operating once more.”17
The seven years Cabral spent in Mindelo were, as in Praia, extended days and months of hardships and deprivations made bearable by the sacrifices of his mother and older half-brother Ivo, each of whom worked daily many hours for very little pay. Cabral’s mother labored in the local fish cannery, earning fifty cents an hour, where she worked eight hours a day when fish was plentiful and only an hour a day when fish was scarce. To supplement her meager income, she also worked as a laundress for Portuguese soldiers stationed on the island, since, despite her old craft as seamstress, “she made nothing from sewing.” Amílcar’s brother Ivo, who trained as a carpenter, did all kinds of odd jobs to contribute toward the upkeep of the household. Cabral himself helped by tutoring primary school and fellow liceu students.
Yet, in spite of the austere conditions he endured with his family in Mindelo, Cabral remained focused on his schoolwork and strove to surpass his classmates in all subjects. He quickly displayed the initiative and determination for which he would become well known. As class president throughout his high school years, his charismatic leadership won him numerous friends and admirers at the same time as it developed and refined his interpersonal skills and negotiating capabilities. The good impression he made on students and faculty lingered for years, as Manuel “Manecas” dos Santos, a later alumnus of the same high school and his comrade-in-arms in Portuguese Guinea, recalls.18 Cabral was also involved in extracurricular activities in and around Mindelo, including the founding of a high school sports club, the Associação
