Amílcar Cabral. Peter Karibe Mendy

was in search of gainful employment that Amílcar Cabral’s mother and father, Iva Pinhel Évora and Juvenal António da Costa Cabral, found themselves in Portuguese Guinea during the early decades of the twentieth century. Iva was born on 31 December 1893, the daughter of Maximiana Monteiro da Rocha and António Pinhel Évora, both of modest social backgrounds. She arrived in Portuguese Guinea in 1922 with her nine-month-old son, Ivo Carvalho Silva, and the baby’s father, João Carvalho Silva. Shortly afterwards, she and her son separated from João, who had become a minor colonial official in Bolama, the capital of a “possession” hastily proclaimed on 18 March 1879 but yet to be “effectively occupied.” Relocating to Bafatá around 1923, Iva met Juvenal Cabral, a primary school teacher in the nearby town of Geba.

      The relationship between Iva and Juvenal produced four offspring: Amílcar, the twins Armanda and Arminda, and António. It lasted until 1929, during which time Amílcar lived two years in Bafatá without his father and three years in Geba with both parents.¹ Toward the end of 1929, Iva returned to Santiago, where, on Christmas Eve that year, Amílcar and his twin sisters were baptized at the Catholic Church of Nossa Senhora da Graça (Our Lady of Grace) in Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde.² Although she had intended to stay permanently, Iva was obliged to return with her children to Portuguese Guinea less than two years later due to difficulties in securing the basic needs of her family. They lived in Bissau, where Juvenal Cabral, recently married to Adelina Rodrigues Correia de Almeida (future mother of Luís Cabral), also resided. In 1932, Amílcar and his twin sisters returned to Cabo Verde with their father. Iva followed a year or so later and resumed care of her children.

      Juvenal Cabral was born on 2 January 1889, the son of Rufina Lopes Cabral, of humble origins, and António Lopes da Costa, a final-year student at the São José Seminary on the island of São Nicolau who was from a notable landowning family in Santiago. Juvenal’s paternal grandfather, Pedro Lopes da Costa, was one of the few Cabo Verdeans who “seriously cared about the education of children,” such that his family produced “distinguished priests, teachers and civil servants” who “served well and honored well” the patria (fatherland) of Portugal.³ With his father killed when Juvenal was only ten months old, the boy became the ward of his paternal grandfather Pedro and great-aunt Paula Lopes da Costa, and later his godmother, Simoa dos Reis Borges. Simoa inherited property upon the death of her brother in 1894, rented it, and four years later left for Portugal with her husband and eight-year-old godchild.

      Juvenal Cabral attended primary school in Santiago de Cassurães, Beira Alta, Portugal, as the only black student “among forty young white boys.” Upon graduation he entered the nearby Catholic seminary in Viseu, where one of his contemporaries was António de Oliveira Salazar, later to become the architect and dictator of the Estado Novo established in the aftermath of the 1926 military coup d’état that ended sixteen years of liberal democracy in Portugal. In 1905, due to financial difficulties, Juvenal was forced to abandon the seminary and return to Cabo Verde. Still determined to become a priest, he entered the seminary in São Nicolau, but once again his ecclesiastical studies were short-lived, lasting about a year, due to a disciplinary action against him for fighting with a student from Portuguese Guinea. Rather than endure “shame for being punished, like a child,” he quit the seminary and returned to Santiago in July 1907.⁴ Four years later, after a brief stay in Praia, he embarked for Portuguese Guinea “in search of employment, through the rewards of which I can decently maintain myself.”⁵ It was at the end of the first decade of a new century that had been inaugurated in Cabo Verde by a severe drought (1900–1903) that killed sixteen thousand people, a tragedy an angry contemporary Cabo Verdean lawyer, Luiz Loff de Vasconcellos, denounced as “a perfect extermination of a people,” blaming Portugal for a “tremendous and horrific catastrophe” that the Lisbon authorities had dismissed with the callous excuse that “the government is not culpable that in Cabo Verde there have not been regular rains.”⁶

      The “voluntary” emigration of Amílcar’s father and mother to Portuguese Guinea, in contrast to the “forced” exodus of Cabo Verdeans as contratados (contracted workers) to the notorious cacao plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe, occurred against the background of dire conditions in the archipelago. For more than three centuries, droughts and famines had regularly visited Cabo Verde, often lasting two to three years and causing spectacular death tolls, sometimes amounting to two-thirds of the inhabitants of some islands and up to half the population of the archipelago. These catastrophic natural and man-made disasters, together with brutal colonial exploitation and neglect, underlie the significant movements of the population, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Between 1902 and 1922, a total of 24,329 desperate Cabo Verdeans found themselves forced to become contracted migrant laborers, 98.5 percent ending up in São Tomé and Príncipe.⁷ On the other hand, during the period 1900–1920 an estimated 27,765 Cabo Verdeans “voluntarily” migrated, mainly to the United States (67 percent), Portuguese Guinea (8 percent), Brazil/Latin America (7 percent), and Senegal/Gambia (5 percent). The “voluntary” flow to the United States was effectively restricted in 1917, when a new immigration law required, among other things, literacy. Obviously, the prolonged harsh realities in the face of neglect and exploitation render redundant the categorization of migration from Cabo Verde as either forced or voluntary. Both were motivated by the specter of starvation and death.

      The relatively high literacy rate in Cabo Verde (22 percent in 1950) provided Portugal with a reservoir of willing collaborators—a collaboration conditioned by the prevalent poverty and limited employment opportunities. With a seminary established in 1866, a secular high school opened in 1917 (the first in Portuguese Africa), and several primary schools, Cabo Verdeans were indeed the main beneficiaries of Portuguese colonial education. This factor largely accounted for their significant presence in the colonial administration of Portuguese Guinea—about 75 percent of the colonial officials before the beginning of the armed struggle. Such preponderance gave rise to their pseudo-status as “co-colonizers” or “proxy colonizers,” notwithstanding the fact that Cabo Verde was a colony and Cabo Verdeans a colonized people with a history of brutal exploitation and callous abandonment to recurrent droughts and famines. With the Cabo Verdeans arbitrarily classified as civilizados (civilized), the colonial authorities endeavored to ensure that “to Guiné go only those with literacy skills who are going to fill public and business appointments.”⁸ For poor Cabo Verdeans, the main attraction to Portuguese Guinea was the territory’s reliable agriculture and enhanced food security. As one Cabo Verdean writer and colonial official noted, the colony was the “blessed land of rice and nuts and palm oil, where hunger is unknown and there are no beggars.”⁹

      Portuguese Guinea was (and remains) a multiethnic and multicultural country inhabited by Balantas and Biafadas, Brames and Bijagós, Fulas and Felupes, Mandinkas and Manjacos, Pepels, Nalus, Susus, and several other minor groups that, altogether, have more in common than the sum total of their differences. Desperate to establish the pax lusitana, the Portuguese exploited the differences of language and culture and played off one group against the other, constantly making a distinction between the Islamized “neo-Sudanese” Fulas and Mandinkas of the interior, the “builders of strong states,” and the “animist paleo-Sudanese” of the coastal region, the “more backward peoples.”¹⁰ Applying a racist anthropology, colonial officials-cum-social scientists considered the neo-Sudanese to be of Hamitic/Semitic racial origins, which supposedly made them superior to all the other groups regarded as paleo-Sudanese. This strategy of divide and conquer would constitute a formidable challenge facing Amílcar Cabral as he and his comrades embarked on mobilizing the people for the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial domination.

      Juvenal Cabral first worked as a clerk at the Bolama city hall, followed by two other low-level clerical positions in the colony’s treasury department and the office of the secretary-general of the colonial government. In January 1913, he became a primary school teacher in Cacine, in the southern region of Tombali, where he taught half a dozen children in a one-room school. He also taught in Buba, Bambadinca, Bafatá, and Geba. Forming the background to his teaching trajectory were the brutal “pacification” campaigns waged by Captain Teixeira Pinto’s mercenary soldiers, led by Senegalese warlord Abdul Injai. Juvenal supported the