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June 30, 2005

Yawu Miller

When the Portuguese flag came down in the capital of the new Cape Verdean Republic on July 5, 1975, Jose Barros was there among the thousands of former colonial subjects catching their first breath of liberation.

Barros, who had worked with a group of student activists to help support the liberation movement being advanced by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, found himself at the center of a once-in-a-lifetime event: the birth of a new republic.

“I was next to the stage where everything was taking place,” he recalls. “There were foreign dignitaries and airplanes flying overhead, dropping colored confetti.”

Not all went smooth, according to Barros, now an organizer with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.

“When it was time for us to get our flag up, the cords tangled,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Is this independence going to be hard for hard for us? Are we getting into more trouble?’”

Colonialism hadn’t been easy either, though. For hundreds of years Portugal had used the archipelago off the coast of Senegal as a trans-shipment point for its colonial enterprises in Africa. The Portuguese settlers lorded over the African creole population they had brought to the formerly deserted islands.

Like other Lusophone colonies in Africa, Cape Verde was underdeveloped, lacking electricity and other basic infrastructure.

The Cape Verdean creole language was banned in schools and in government. Portuguese settlers were given the best jobs and even the indigenous Cape Verdean music forms were suppressed by the Portuguese.

It was only after independence that Cape Verdeans were allowed to express all aspects of their culture.

“Finally, you could be who you were, not just who they allowed you to be,” noted Denise Gonsalves, who heads the Roxbury-based Cape Verdean Community UNIDO organization.

Gonsalves, who is too young to remember independence, is helping to coordinate this year’s Cape Verdean festival, which will commemorate 30 years of independence. Boston’s celebration, which is scheduled for Monday, July 4, will be followed by celebrations in Brockton, Taunton, New Bedford, Onset and Providence.

In attendance at the Boston celebration will be many of the estimated 3-500,000 people of Cape Verdean ancestry living in the United States. On display will be the music of Cape Verde — African music that was outlawed under Portuguese colonialism.

That same music blossomed in the years following independence, according to Lima.

“People began to dress in African garb,” she recalls of the post-independence era. “The music that was outlawed before — funana, batuka and tabanka — became the national music.”

While most Cape Verdeans did not consider themselves Portuguese, the liberation movement under the leadership of Amilcar Cabral took on the ideology of the Pan-African movement that had swept the continent in the preceding decades.

Armed conflict never reached Cape Verde, but Cabral assumed the lead of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde and took his anti-colonial fervor to nearby Guinea Bissau, where armed resistance was raging. His death, in 1974, enshrined him as the foremost revolutionary leader in Cape Verde.

A key turning point in the struggle came in April of 1974, when a cadre of captains in the Portuguese military staged a coup d’etat, and made clear their intentions to make peace with the anti-colonial movements that by then were raging in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea.

In the months leading up to independence, the anti-colonial movement became emboldened, according to Lima, a language acquisition coach in the Boston public schools.

“There was a group of us who wouldn’t sing the Portuguese national anthem in school,” said Lima who was 10 at the time. “Our teacher just looked at us. She didn’t know what to do.”

The patriotic fervor that blossomed on July 5 wasn’t shared by everyone, Barros recalls. Many questioned whether the islands, which suffer from periodic droughts, would be able to survive without the backing of a colonial power.

“There was a lot of discussion,” he said. “There were two parties in addition to the PAIGC. One wanted independence without Guinea Bissau, Another wanted a commonwealth status with Portugal.”

Even Barros had his doubts.

“We were poor,” he said. “There were no jobs, no electricity. There was poor communication between the islands.”

The lack of natural resources and periodic droughts have remained a constant since Cape Verde was first settled in 1456. Those factors have compelled generations of Cape Verdeans to leave their homeland and settle in Senegal, Portugal, the United States, France and other countries.

Like many, if not most Cape Verdeans, Adalberto Teixeira experienced the birth of the Cape Verdean republic as a member of the diaspora (While there are 470,000 people living in Cape Verde, there are at least 500,000 Cape Verdeans in the diaspora.)

Teixeira, who now works in the city of Boston’s personnel department, was then a technician working for Portugal’s telephone company.

“I was at a relative’s home,” Teixeira says. “It was being shown live on television. At night, people gathered into union halls and held rallies in city squares. It was quite a moment.”

Teixeira said many Cape Verdeans in Lisbon were concerned that independence would end their jobs as Portuguese settlers in the islands returned to Portugal. The Cape Verdeans, who until then had Portuguese passports, were concerned that they might be deported from Portugal, where jobs were more plentiful than in the home country.

Teixeira says the socialist and communist parties in Portugal were supportive of the Cape Verdean workers, urging them to join unions to protect their jobs.

Teixeira had lived in Portugal for more than five years before independence and may, therefore, have qualified for Portuguese citizenship. But he never bothered to investigate the possibility. Once Cape Verde began issuing passports, he obtained his and moved to Boston.

The Cape Verdean community in New England, which began to form as islanders came here during the whaling trade in the 19th century, grew in the post-independence era as people continued to leave the islands in search of jobs. While Cape Verdeans live throughout the United States, the greatest concentrations remain in Boston, Providence, Brockton, New Bedford and Taunton.

Although the islands continue to struggle with periodic famines and a scarcity of jobs, Gonsalves notes encouraging signs. The islands were recently given a Millennium Challenge Grant, a pilot project that ties US aid to good governance and transparency. The national airline, TACV, now has direct flights to Boston.

Thirty years after independence, the islands have two political parties, a 70 percent literacy rate and a growing tourism sector. And Cesaria Evora, the island’s most famous export, has introduced millions of music fans the world over to Cape Verdean music.

While world music fans can hum along to Evora’s Mar Azul, Lima still hears in her head the liberation songs her family taught her to sing and the revolutionary fervor that swept the islands and compelled Cape Verdeans to dream of a better future.

“I hope we can recapture that and transmit it to the next generation so that they’ll understand what it means to be Cape Verdean, what it means to be African,” Lima says. “What it means to be part of that struggle.”

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