Origins

Cape Verdeans originate from an archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, or Cabo Verde, that is located some 620 kilometres off the coast of Senegal in west Africa. Of the fourteen small islands, totalling approximately 4,000 square kilometres in area, nine are inhabited. They range in size from the smallest, Brava (77 square kilometres), to the largest, Santiago (990 square kilometres). It is likely that the Cape Verde Islands were known to some African groups but, because of their aridity and distance from the African coast, they were uninhabited when they were discovered by European navigators in the middle of the fifteenth century.

The Cape Verdes were settled by the Portuguese in the second half of the fifteenth century, and in 1495 they officially became part of Portugal and its expanding overseas empire. The first settlers, travelling over 2,800 kilometres from the Portuguese mainland, brought in African slaves to work on their plantations. The location of the islands made them a key point in the slave trade, which became the mainstay of the colony’s economy for almost four centuries. Ships came to obtain goods, including locally produced textiles, in order to use to barter for slaves from the African coast.

The present-day population of about 403,000 shows evidence of the mixture of Africans and Europeans that began in the earliest days of settlement. It is estimated that the vast majority of the population (71 percent) are mestiços (of mixed European and African ancestry), 28 percent African, and only 1 percent European. Although a few families claim noble European antecedents, most white settlers were of modest origin and included political undesirables and petty criminals exiled from Portugal. It is difficult to find cultural traces of specific African ethnic groups, probably because of the conditions of slavery under which the Africans came. Nevertheless, a general West African influence is evident in folk religious ritual, traditional furniture, and in techniques of weaving and food preparation.

The two official languages of the Cape Verde Islands are Portuguese, taught in the schools and used in formal contexts, and Crioulo, the informal creole language that is the mother tongue of the majority of the inhabitants. Because the islands are separated from each other by rough seas, their inhabitants have developed individual dialects and customs. The Portuguese brought Roman Catholicism to the islands, and most Cape Verdeans are practising or at least nominally Catholic. During the twentieth century, several Protestant denominations, notably the Church of the Nazarene and the Seventh-Day Adventists, have also been active.

Agriculture has traditionally been the principal economic activity, although productivity is limited because of the mountainous topography and extreme climatic changes. Extended periods of drought, sometimes followed by torrential rains, have recurred periodically throughout Cape Verdean history, frequently resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. In recent times, the islands proved useful to Portugal as a military base during the wars of independence waged by its colonies on the African continent from 1960 to 1974. One year later, the Cape Verdeans gained their independence with the creation of the Republic of Cabo Verde. For a few years after independence, the islands’ location gave them a certain strategic value that served to attract foreign aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies. This period was short-lived, however, so that today the Cape Verde Islands are among the poorest countries in the world.