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 agronomy.
The struggles of poor peasant farmers 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,