All Portuguese education disparages the African, his culture and civilization. African languages are forbidden in schools. The white man is always presented as a superior being and the African as an inferior. The colonial “conquistadores” are shown as saints and heroes. As soon as African children enter elementary schools, they develop an inferiority complex. They learn to fear the white man and to feel ashamed of being Africans. African geography, history and culture are either ignored or distorted, and children are forced to study Portuguese geography and history.13
Thus, in such Eurocentric education, just as the children of the assimilés in France d’Outre-mer (Overseas France) were forced to recite “our forefathers the Gauls,” so, too, young Amílcar found himself obliged to read “who are we, the Portuguese who for many centuries have lived in this corner of Europe? History says that we are the descendants of many ancient peoples who intermixed and intermingled.”14 He would retrospectively acknowledge the effectiveness of this colonial socialization process: “There was a time in my life when I was convinced that I was Portuguese.” But he would also later realize that he was not Portuguese because of his consciousness of “my people, the history of Africa, even the color of my skin.”15 Such awareness was premised on the strong conviction that “the culture of the people of Cabo Verde is quintessentially African.”16
In July 1937, Cabral graduated from primary school at the top of his class and passed his high school entrance examination with distinction. Together with his mother and siblings, he moved to Mindelo, São Vincente, and became one of the 372 enrolled students at the Liceu Infante Dom Henrique during the academic year that started on 21 October 1937. At age thirteen, he was two years older than the average enrolled first-year high school student. Five days after his enrollment (for courses that included Portuguese and French languages, mathematics, science, art, and physical education), the high school was closed by order of the minister of the colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, who requested its transformation into a vocational school. The closure provoked strong protests from the enrolled students, who were supported by their families and the general public, resulting in the reopening of the school three months later as the Liceu Gil Eannes. A participant in the demonstrations, the effectiveness of organized protest left an enduring impression on young Amílcar, a valuable learning experience and useful teachable moment that he would invoke three decades later in a seminar for the cadres of the PAIGC, pointing out, “I waited three months without going to classes at secondary school, because they [the colonial authorities] had closed it. For them what they had done was enough, no more was needed. From then on only training centres for fishermen and carpenters. The population rose and protested, and the secondary school began operating once more.”17
The seven years Cabral spent in Mindelo were, as in Praia, extended days and months of hardships and deprivations made bearable by the sacrifices of his mother and older half-brother Ivo, each of whom worked daily many hours for very little pay. Cabral’s mother labored in the local fish cannery, earning fifty cents an hour, where she worked eight hours a day when fish was plentiful and only an hour a day when fish was scarce. To supplement her meager income, she also worked as a laundress for Portuguese soldiers stationed on the island, since, despite her old craft as seamstress, “she made nothing from sewing.” Amílcar’s brother Ivo, who trained as a carpenter, did all kinds of odd jobs to contribute toward the upkeep of the household. Cabral himself helped by tutoring primary school and fellow liceu students.
Yet, in spite of the austere conditions he endured with his family in Mindelo, Cabral remained focused on his schoolwork and strove to surpass his classmates in all subjects. He quickly displayed the initiative and determination for which he would become well known. As class president throughout his high school years, his charismatic leadership won him numerous friends and admirers at the same time as it developed and refined his interpersonal skills and negotiating capabilities. The good impression he made on students and faculty lingered for years, as Manuel “Manecas” dos Santos, a later alumnus of the same high school and his comrade-in-arms in Portuguese Guinea, recalls.18 Cabral was also involved in extracurricular activities in and around Mindelo, including the founding of a high school sports club, the Associação Desportiva do Liceu de Cabo Verde (Sports Association of the High School of Cabo Verde), of which he was not only president but also an active member, being an adept soccer player and a keen sportsman. The honing of his organizing and leadership skills would also include the staging and directing of plays for both high school students and the youth of Mindelo, plays in which he sometimes also performed as actor.
Cabral’s extracurricular activities in Mindelo—where the Claridade literary movement, aimed at defining and affirming Cabo Verde’s specific Crioulu identity, emerged a year or so before his arrival—also included the writing of poetry and prose. The Cabo Verdean identity that came to be known as Caboverdianidade had, as its organ of expression, the journal Claridade: Revista de Arte e Letras, which was first published in 1936 and last appeared (the ninth edition) in 1960. Led by Jorge Barbosa, Manuel Lopes, and Baltasar Lopes da Silva, the proponents of this concept came to be called the Claridosos. They initially set the tone for a nativist literature that focused on the existential crises generated by drought, famine, poverty, isolation, and migration. They did not challenge the colonial order, but instead framed the literary renaissance in a regional setting considered part of Western Europe rather than Western Africa.
Nevertheless, this new literature was a radical departure from the previous Eurocentric focus of the earlier poets and prose writers who were educated at the seminary in São Nicolau. Steeped in the Greco-Roman classics, these pre-Claridade literati were later criticized by Cabral for producing a literature in which “they forget the land and the people.”19 In particular, they composed poetry characterized by the themes of love, personal pain, exalted patriotism, and profound nostalgia. Some of the poems were written and/or translated into Crioulu and song as morna, the quintessential Cabo Verdean music and dance genre made famous worldwide by Cesária Évora (1941–2011), a native of Mindelo commemorated by the name of the international airport on São Vincente.
The main factors accounting for the emergence of the Claridosos generation include the archipelago’s recurring drama of drought, famine, death, and emigration and the establishment of a secular coeducational high school with largely Cabo Verdean faculty and staff (unprecedented in Portuguese Africa) in Mindelo, the most cosmopolitan city in the archipelago, where the resident educated elite had easier access to foreign literature reflecting the perspectives of realism and impressionism as artistic movements. Significant also was the installation of the fascist Estado Novo and its increasingly suffocating stranglehold on the colonized and the stationing of a large number of Portuguese troops in the archipelago to bolster the defense of the colony. This increased military presence provoked clashes between the local inhabitants and racist white soldiers, which not only insulted the dignity of the Cabo Verdean people but laid bare the falsity of the assimilationist notion of equality between colonizer and colonized. Such developments generated a nativist awakening among the Cabo Verdean intellectuals that coalesced into the concept of Caboverdianidade, whose founders influenced Cabral’s early endeavors in poetry and prose writing. He would later commend the Claridosos for having their “feet fixed to the ground” and realistically depicting Cabo Verde as a place “where the trees die of thirst, the men of hunger—and hope never dies.”20
Thus it was with the outlook of the Claridosos that Cabral wrote his first poems, including “Chuva” (Rain), written in 1943, echoing the “drama of the rain.” Cabral’s early short stories included “Fidemar” (Son of the sea) and “Hoje e amanha” (Today and tomorrow), respectively written in 1942 and 1944. The first tells the story of a young man who is revolted by the dire conditions in the archipelago and agitates for change but decides to