The wanton brutality meted out to the Pepels of Biombo, one of the petty kingdoms on the island then known as Bissau, resulted in thousands of deaths and the capture of hundreds of fighters, including the ruler, N’Kanande Ká. Defiant in captivity, the king reportedly told Teixeira Pinto that he would never surrender, that as long as he was alive he would always fight to expel the Portuguese from his realm, and that “if he should die, and there in the other world he should meet whites, he would wage war on them.”12 Captain Pinto proudly reported that the Pepel king was promptly condemned to death, then “tied up, mutilated, his eyes plucked out, and buried alive.” Luiz Loff de Vasconcellos, the outraged defense lawyer of the victims of the Bissau war, pointed out that after the defeat of the Pepels “the real carnage started,” as “men, women, old people, children, and the crippled” were “mercilessly killed,” their dwellings sacked and burned and their livestock looted, resulting in their homeland being “in the greatest desolation and misery.”13 That was just nine years before Amílcar Cabral was born. It would take two more brutal pacification campaigns, in 1925 and 1936, to subjugate the last resisters, the people of the Bijagós Islands.
Thus, when Cabral was born, Portuguese Guinea was simultaneously undergoing a brutal war of conquest and the consolidation of colonial domination by a weak imperial power that itself was experiencing tumultuous political upheavals following a bloody revolution that abolished the monarchy in 1910 and established a liberal republic, which was overthrown sixteen years later. In 1932, when eight-year-old Amílcar moved to Cabo Verde, António de Oliveira Salazar became prime minister of Portugal. As the effective dictator of the established New State he would maintain a brutal, repressive regime in the African colonies until his incapacitation by a stroke thirty-six years later. Cabral would devote his life to breaking the stranglehold of this harsh colonial order on the lives of the millions of Africans it subjugated.
Meanwhile, in Bafatá, two years before his son Amílcar was born, Juvenal made a passionate plea to the visiting governor for the provision of more schools for the natives, who were “still wrapped up in the plain cloak of their primitive ignorance.”14 Juvenal was indeed an outspoken advocate of the expansion of education in the territory, pleading strongly in 1915 for “the light of education to be shed on this people so desirous of lights” and insisting that, “as is already proven, the gentio is not devoid of intelligence, needing on our part to know only how to encourage him to love education.”15 His son Amílcar would inherit such passion for education, but as a weapon for liberation, “to combat fear and ignorance, to stamp out little by little submissiveness before nature and natural forces.”16
When Amílcar was born, his father registered his first name as Hamilcar, to honor the great Carthaginian general whose son Hannibal was also a famous general. Bafatá was then a relatively new settlement, elevated to the status of a town in 1917, but would soon after become the second most important trading center (after Bissau) in the territory. Of the population of about 1,500 residents, half were Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, and numerous civilizados—mostly Cabo Verdeans. The local economy was dominated by the production of export crops such as peanuts, cotton, and rubber, which were exported to Portugal and France by Portuguese and French trading companies including the Union Manufacturing Company (CUF), Casa Gouveia, Barbosa e Comandita Limitada, and the French West Africa Company (CFAO).
Notwithstanding his strong emotional and spiritual attachment to Cabo Verde and Portugal, Juvenal nevertheless recognized Portuguese Guinea as “the land where the genealogical tree of my ancestors grew and flourished,” and declared that since his youth he had struggled for the “dignification of the black race to which I belong.”17 This firm identification with Portuguese Guinea and his ready recognition of his black African ancestry undoubtedly had an influence on his offspring, particularly Amílcar and his brother Luís Severino de Almeida Cabral (born in Bissau on 10 April 1931), who would later embrace their dualities of birthplace and ancestral home and subsequently adopt binationalism as a strategy for the liberation of their two countries.
In November 1932, Juvenal retired to Santiago, taking with him Amílcar and his twin sisters. Iva stayed in Bissau to recover the loss she suffered from a burglary, returning a year later to take custody of her children. Thus, Amílcar Cabral only spent about seven years in Portuguese Guinea before returning, for the second time, to Cabo Verde. Very little is known about his life during those tender years he lived in his terra natal. Neither he nor his father—whose autobiography, Memorias e reflexões (Memories and reflections), was written when Amílcar was a second-year agronomy student in Portugal—has left any written account of those early formative years.
Amílcar was conscious of the hard life his mother had, of the long hours she had to work to ensure that her four children did not go to bed hungry. The sacrifices, which grew bigger as the children became young adults, and especially in order for Amílcar to complete his high school education in Cabo Verde, would be appreciated by a grateful son. Amílcar would later express his gratitude by describing his mother in a dedicatory poem as “the star of my infancy,” with the acknowledgment, “Without you, I am nobody.”18
Thus, notwithstanding the affirmations of Cabral’s notable biographers, particularly Mário de Andrade and Patrick Chabal, that Juvenal played a pivotal role in his son’s development of critical political consciousness, it would appear that Iva was the central figure. The radical political consciousness of Amílcar fundamentally challenged his father’s core political beliefs. Ironically, although Juvenal was a primary school teacher in Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar was not enrolled in any educational establishment in the territory, in spite of being of school age. It is probable that he was home-schooled, given the importance of education among Cabo Verdeans. Nevertheless, in Cabo Verde, Iva’s determination for her children to be educated would be realized. Life in the archipelago would be critical in the molding of Amílcar’s character.
2
Terra Ancestral
Schooling and Adolescence in Cabo Verde, 1932–45
Late in November 1932, after an exhausting two-day boat trip from Portuguese Guinea, Amílcar Cabral and his five-year-old twin sisters Armanda and Arminda, accompanied by their father Juvenal Cabral, disembarked in Praia. For about two years the children lived with their father in the interior of Santiago, in his big house at Achada Falcão, near Assomada, capital of the municipality of Santa Catarina and the second-largest city on the largest island in Cabo Verde. The house was built on extensive land, shadowed by the Serra da Malagueta mountain range, that Juvenal inherited from his godmother, Simoa dos Reis Borges.
Mountainous with relatively fertile valleys, Santiago was also the first island to be settled, initially by Portuguese migrants from the regions of Alentejo and Algarve and the Madeira Islands, as well as a sprinkling of Genoese and Spaniards. The island quickly became the heartbeat of the archipelago. In 1466, the Portuguese Crown granted the Santiago settlers special privileges to have their own administration and the right to trade on the adjacent West African coast. Six years later, a royal decree gave them the right “to have slaves, males and females, for their services, and to be occasion for their better livelihood and good settlement.”1 But they were prohibited from trading in African captives, and for their defiance they became known as lançados (from the Portuguese word lançar—“to launch”—meaning those who defiantly “launched” themselves onto the West African mainland), with the Rivers of Guinea of Cabo Verde as their principal area of activity.
Map 2. Cabo Verde, ca. 1960. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
The enslaved Africans in Santiago