was not only president but also an active member, being an adept soccer player and a keen sportsman. The honing of his organizing and leadership skills would also include the staging and directing of plays for both high school students and the youth of Mindelo, plays in which he sometimes also performed as actor.
Cabral’s extracurricular activities in Mindelo—where the Claridade literary movement, aimed at defining and affirming Cabo Verde’s specific Crioulu identity, emerged a year or so before his arrival—also included the writing of poetry and prose. The Cabo Verdean identity that came to be known as Caboverdianidade had, as its organ of expression, the journal Claridade: Revista de Arte e Letras, which was first published in 1936 and last appeared (the ninth edition) in 1960. Led by Jorge Barbosa, Manuel Lopes, and Baltasar Lopes da Silva, the proponents of this concept came to be called the Claridosos. They initially set the tone for a nativist literature that focused on the existential crises generated by drought, famine, poverty, isolation, and migration. They did not challenge the colonial order, but instead framed the literary renaissance in a regional setting considered part of Western Europe rather than Western Africa.
Nevertheless, this new literature was a radical departure from the previous Eurocentric focus of the earlier poets and prose writers who were educated at the seminary in São Nicolau. Steeped in the Greco-Roman classics, these pre-Claridade literati were later criticized by Cabral for producing a literature in which “they forget the land and the people.”19 In particular, they composed poetry characterized by the themes of love, personal pain, exalted patriotism, and profound nostalgia. Some of the poems were written and/or translated into Crioulu and song as morna, the quintessential Cabo Verdean music and dance genre made famous worldwide by Cesária Évora (1941–2011), a native of Mindelo commemorated by the name of the international airport on São Vincente.
The main factors accounting for the emergence of the Claridosos generation include the archipelago’s recurring drama of drought, famine, death, and emigration and the establishment of a secular coeducational high school with largely Cabo Verdean faculty and staff (unprecedented in Portuguese Africa) in Mindelo, the most cosmopolitan city in the archipelago, where the resident educated elite had easier access to foreign literature reflecting the perspectives of realism and impressionism as artistic movements. Significant also was the installation of the fascist Estado Novo and its increasingly suffocating stranglehold on the colonized and the stationing of a large number of Portuguese troops in the archipelago to bolster the defense of the colony. This increased military presence provoked clashes between the local inhabitants and racist white soldiers, which not only insulted the dignity of the Cabo Verdean people but laid bare the falsity of the assimilationist notion of equality between colonizer and colonized. Such developments generated a nativist awakening among the Cabo Verdean intellectuals that coalesced into the concept of Caboverdianidade, whose founders influenced Cabral’s early endeavors in poetry and prose writing. He would later commend the Claridosos for having their “feet fixed to the ground” and realistically depicting Cabo Verde as a place “where the trees die of thirst, the men of hunger—and hope never dies.”20
Thus it was with the outlook of the Claridosos that Cabral wrote his first poems, including “Chuva” (Rain), written in 1943, echoing the “drama of the rain.” Cabral’s early short stories included “Fidemar” (Son of the sea) and “Hoje e amanha” (Today and tomorrow), respectively written in 1942 and 1944. The first tells the story of a young man who is revolted by the dire conditions in the archipelago and agitates for change but decides to leave the islands and secure the wherewithal needed to make the necessary revolution; however, before he can return, the hero dies at sea during a naval battle. As noted by Chabal, the theme of this “poem of adolescence,” as Cabral later characterized it, was not uncommon, being “representative of Cape Verde’s sense of isolation from the rest of the world and the need to escape from this insular hell by seeking liberation outside.”21 In the second story, written during his final high school year but published five years later under the pseudonym Arlindo António when he was in the last year of his university studies in Lisbon, Cabral decries the evils of war and injustice, hatred and hardships, yet optimistically embraces a future with better prospects for a son he desires. Mário de Andrade notes that this essay represents “the first philosophical reflection of Amílcar” in which, with his desire for a son, he plans to reshape the future.22
While the poets and prose writers of Claridade were cultural nativists whose affirmation of Caboverdianidade did not challenge the fundamental premises of Portuguese colonialism, they were nevertheless not totally oblivious to developments in the rest of the African continent. For example, a poem by António da Silva Ramos titled “Abyssinia,” which became a morna expressing outrage against the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, reveals a rare Pan-African solidarity that urged Negusa Nagast (Amharic for “king of kings”; emperor) Haile Selassie, to defend his kingdom, “which is rightfully yours.”23
The Claridade movement was later overshadowed by the radical Certeza generation of younger writers and poets who focused on the linkages between the dire conditions of the archipelago and its status as a colony, as well as the historical and cultural links between the islands and the adjacent African mainland. Thus, these literati sowed the seeds for the germination of political consciousness that would lead to nationalist activism. The few issues of the journal Certeza that first appeared in 1944 contained poems and prose whose messages were deemed sufficiently subversive by the vigilant International and State Defense Police (PIDE) to ban the publication a year or so later, even though the authors were not yet calling for the overthrow of the colonial status quo.
Although Cabral admired the Claridade and Certeza poets and writers, having recognized their critical role in the emergence of an archipelago-centric literature, he nevertheless criticized them for their limited vision. In a penetrating analysis of Cabo Verdean poetry written in 1952, he pointed out that the messages of the poets and writers had to transcend both “resignation” and “hope” and insisted that “insularity and droughts cannot justify endless stagnation.” He further urged that “the escapist dream, the desire to leave, cannot remain the only theme,” that a different dream should “no longer be a desire to depart but to create a new land inside our land.”24 It was a clarion call for profound transformational change. His radical political consciousness had crystallized in Portugal during the seven years he spent there as a student and a trained agronomist.
Cabral completed high school at the top of his class in 1944. His journey to Portugal occurred a year later, after he and his family moved back to Praia, where he obtained employment as a clerk in the government printing office. He successfully applied for a scholarship from the House of Students of the Empire (CEI) to study agronomy in Portugal.
3
Mãe Patria
Higher Education and Political Militancy in Portugal, 1945–52
Early in November 1945, Cabral disembarked in Lisbon, capital of the mãe patria (motherland), about a month after his classes had begun at the Higher Institute of Agronomy (ISA) of the Technical University of Lisbon. The late arrival was due to bureaucratic delays in processing his travel documents. The institute had admitted 220 applicants comprising twenty females and two hundred males, including Cabral, the only African student. The five-year course in agronomy was so rigorous and intensive that only twenty-five students proceeded to the third year; among them were Cabral and a female Portuguese student, Maria Helena de Ataíde Vilhena Rodrigues, his future wife.
Cabral excelled in his studies at the ISA, earning top grades in all his subjects and gaining respect and admiration not only from his peers and professors but also from the rector of the institute, who asked him to tutor his children. Yet, notwithstanding his demonstrated intelligence, he remained humble and approachable. His whole
