António Carreira´ Error
Humberto Cardoso
(Novo Jornal de Cabo Verde, August 1997/Revista Cultura No. 2 – 1998)
Toi Mulato (....) told us that Nhô João Joana told him that at the beginning of the world, the Earth was a very beautiful and very unhappy woman. Seeing her children die from lack of food, she would go out every night to wander and cry on the tops of the rocks for her lost loves. She had married a frivolous young man who never appeared to her whole, but rather broken into tiny drops of water. The Earth was always left longing for her husband's incomplete love. And he would leave shortly afterwards to visit the mothers of his children scattered throughout the world.
In “Chiquinho”, Baltazar Lopes
A glance at Cape Verde and its people leaves a strong impression of being in the presence of an extraordinary and unique phenomenon. Cape Verde seems like a place where two worlds have come together, where two races have strived to mix, and where history is made up more of stories of suffering than of joy. The reality, however, is different: there is only one world, and it is new; there is no one race, there are Cape Verdeans, and the history is made up of stories of hope.
Those who come from outside, from other places, where skin color informs and is shaped by history, prejudice, reactions, and resentment, suddenly find themselves among people who are basically distracted and oblivious to the variations in physical features and the nuances of color between the dark and light complexions of their parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, and fellow citizens from other islands.
The feeling of well-being that is immediately experienced comes largely from the relief of being freed from the racial burden, that is, from the acute awareness that one is of a certain race and that other people know this and model their behavior and social relations on that basis. It is a relief and a pleasure analogous to the sensation of floating that immersion in water allows us to experience by counterbalancing the oppressive force of gravity.
Moving from one island to another, one encounters the same people, despite the different and contrasting landscapes visited and the local cultural nuances perceived. A people with centuries of existence and a cultural resilience that has allowed them to emerge and grow as an autonomous cultural entity from an environment where Portuguese cultural influence prevailed.
They have survived constant threats to their existence and their very origins, namely slave-based economic systems; property regimes that denied families a basis for subsistence; the emergence, with the triangular trade, of the global phenomenon of racism; and, fundamentally, the terrible famines that threatened their disappearance from the face of the earth. Over the centuries, it has put down increasingly strong roots as it emerged throughout the archipelago, in the interstices of the dominant economic and social relations, and adopted forms of existence impervious to the erosive and corrosive effects of a hostile socioeconomic and political environment.
The self-awareness and pride that Cape Verdeans were able to generate despite the bitterness of their existence left deep marks that are manifested in a profound connection to the land and its people, as well as in their ability to survive in the face of the most terrible situations and the greatest neutralizing forces, such as time and distance. The communities abroad are eloquent in this regard.
Cape Verde is also surprising for its proximity to the Western world in terms of culture and civilization.
Cape Verdean culture did not result from the mixing of European and African cultures, contrary to what is commonly believed and what would seem logical given the geographical location of the islands. The mixing of cultures presupposes the existence of distinct communities with autonomous cultural dynamics, capable of a dialogue that generates a very specific synthesis.
Several factors contributed to the non-appearance of such autonomous communities in Cape Verde, meaning that one could never speak with any authority about Casa Grande e Senzala on the islands. In the archipelago, which was found uninhabited, the culture that emerged and differentiated itself after a certain time could only have elements of the Portuguese cultural matrix of the time as its basic reference. However, it benefited from the cultural contributions brought by individuals or groups of individuals from different places who settled in the archipelago or passed through it.
In this regard, what happened with Creole is paradigmatic;
I – 99% of its words have their direct origin in the Portuguese language, particularly that spoken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which highlights the status of this language as the basic matrix of the Cape Verdean language; 2 – Creole, despite the centuries-long Portuguese cultural influence in Cape Verde, is completely autonomous from the Portuguese language. It is therefore not surprising that what happened with Creole, the central expression of Cape Verdean cultural identity, has also happened with the other elements that make up Cape Verdean identity.
Trying to understand these realities, experienced by all Cape Verdeans and accessible to all foreigners, through a model that assumes and stipulates the origins of Cape Verdean society in a slave-owning society that existed between 1460 and 1878, is an impossible task.
António Carreira and his followers seek to do precisely that, and the logical result of such an exercise cannot fail to appear bizarre, to say the least, to those who know the country and its people.
Models are constructed from schematic descriptions of systems, theories, or phenomena based on known or inferred properties. They are extremely useful in understanding the reality under study and can help predict the evolution of the system or its behavior in environments with certain parameters. But as abstract cognitive tools, models only hold up when they're backed up by facts, that is, when they can explain phenomena, justify internal consistencies in seemingly disparate phenomena, and predict future developments.
The model put forward by António Carreira in his book Cabo Verde: “Formação e Extinção de uma Sociedade Escravocrata (1460-1878)” (Cape Verde: Formation and Extinction of a Slave Society (1460-1878)) and used systematically in his subsequent works, and by other authors, to understand and interpret Cape Verde, does not stand up to the test of facts and Cape Verdean reality.
Carreira's model is based on the following:
• Cape Verde was settled by a naturally domineering European minority and Africans brought over as slaves.
• Cape Verde played a role as a trading post in the slave trade.
• The productive structure in the archipelago was based on slave labor.
The first aspect that stands out in Carreira's model is the fact that his fundamental assumptions are indistinguishable from the factors that shaped the current social, racial, and cultural structure of many countries in the Americas and the Antilles, as well as countries such as São Tomé and Príncipe. This is even emphasized by António Carreira (cited work, p. 2) when he states that “the economic policy and the processes followed in the occupation of the space and in the development of the two groups of islands (Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe) were almost identical—almost the same.”
The discrepancy becomes apparent when comparing the current societies of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, the Antilles, and the Americas. Cape Verde immediately stands out as a case apart. Its current appearance has little to do with that of Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, or the South American states. In view of this, the assumptions referred to must be challenged when applied to the reality of the islands. Carreira himself admits that he does not understand how, despite the similarity of processes, the coincidence of various historical vicissitudes, and basically the same human stock, Cape Verdean society and São Toméan society are so different.
Thus, he says in the introduction to his book Cabo Verde: “Formação e extinção de uma Sociedade Escravocrata (1460-I878)” (Cape Verde: Formation and extinction of a slave-owning society (1460-1878)), p. 22: (...) despite the fact that the two groups of islands experienced identical economic prosperity and went through almost identical difficulties, in Cape Verde, within its extreme poverty, miscegenation continued unabated, leading to the formation of a community with fundamentally Portuguese customs, habits, behaviors, and language, while in São Tomé, it seems that the results of racial and cultural contacts can be considered insignificant when compared to those achieved in Cape Verde.
In order to assess what really happened in Cape Verde, certain historical facts must be taken into account:
First,
• Cape Verde was discovered in 1460, 32 years before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Antilles and 40 years before Pedro Álvaro Cabral landed in Brazil.
• Cape Verde was found deserted and therefore without indigenous peoples or cultures.
• Cape Verde was originally intended to be populated in the same way as the Azores and Madeira. The climate was a strong deterrent to European settlement and forced the importation of slaves from the African coast.
The settlement of Cape Verde had the dual purpose of supporting commercial ventures on the African coast and serving as a forward base for navigation further south towards India and Brazil. The economic exploitation of the islands, along the lines of what was later done elsewhere, was not part of the plans of the newly arrived Portuguese.
The slave trade was then simply part of a much broader trade on the African coast. The creation of large plantation economies in the US, Brazil, and the Antilles in the second half of the 16th century and in the 17th century would focus all commercial activity on the west coast of Africa on the slave trade, through the infamous triangular trade. And, to support the establishment and consolidation of this circuit, an ideological and racist construct of the inferiority of the black race was developed, as a way for those involved to justify the enormous suffering caused and the extreme greed that had led them to institute this monstrous trade.
Until the 17th century, the slave trade, which had existed since the dawn of time on every continent and involved the most diverse peoples, either as slaves or as slave buyers, had no racial basis and did not develop as a result of racist sentiments. The process of settlement, social consolidation, and the genesis of a society of its own in Cape Verde was largely spared these tensions for two reasons:
l – because it began long before the slave-based plantation model took hold in the new lands;
2 – because the archipelago fell into decline and isolation as soon as the conditions for the mass slave trade were created. This is evident from the notable miscegenation of the population, the recognition of children by Europeans, and the practice of freeing slaves, all activities which, by subverting the very foundations of slave societies based on the plantation system, would come to be vigorously condemned.
Second,
• From the outset, the islands' economy was based on their status as a trading post, enjoying monopolistic privileges.
• Agriculture, livestock farming, and other economic activities, such as cloth making, were marginal subsidiaries of the region's central activity of trade.
• Indigenous economic activities in the archipelago were heavily constrained by the weak, erratic, and unpredictable rainfall regime.
• The islands had no means of defending themselves against attacks by privateers.
The conditions offered by the Portuguese crown for settling the Cape Verde archipelago proved, from the outset, to be fragile, unmotivating, and unsustainable in the medium and long term. Based essentially on a monopoly of trade in the region, they would only prove attractive as long as foreign competitors could be kept at bay and as long as the interests of the metropolis did not conflict with those of the inhabitants of Santiago. There were no alternatives to trade on the African coast, and the scarcity of land and low rainfall meant that, from the very beginning of settlement, the collapse of the islands' economy was inevitable.
Trade in the western African region was unlikely to become a factor in the accumulation of wealth on the islands and the development of a sustainable internal productive structure. Agriculture and livestock farming on the islands would always be subsistence-based and, to a marginal extent, provide raw materials for industrial purposes, such as cotton, urzela, oilseeds, sugar, and hides. The near impossibility of generating their own resources and participating in regional trade with local products meant that the archipelago's prosperity was based on a narrow and fragile foundation, which was unpredictable and potentially prone to terrible conflicts: customs revenues.
Two economies developed in parallel in the archipelago: a mercantile economy based in the city of Ribeira Grande and a subsistence-based agricultural and livestock economy in the interior of Santiago and on islands such as Fogo, Boavista, Santo Antão, and São Nicolau. There were few points of contact between these two economies, the most notable being the supply of slaves for agricultural work and the production of cloth for trade on the African coast, both of which were marginal activities for their respective economies.
The prospect of losing the monopoly and the successive escape of ships from the control of the inhabitants of Santiago permanently threatened mercantile activity. The possibility of famine, social chaos, and death from starvation was a constant feature of rural life due to cyclical droughts. Attacks by privateers caused general disruption, with a particular impact on trade and the maintenance of the agrarian structure, which was based on the system of entailed estates and slave labor.
Successive breaches of the monopoly, competition from foreigners and, later, the ban on Santiago residents trading on the Guinea Rivers destroyed the archipelago's commercial activity. With trade went its sanctuary, the city of Ribeira Grande on the island of Santiago, the first Portuguese city in the tropics.
The abandonment of the city of Ribeira Grande marked a new era in the life of Cape Verde. From then on, the islands were basically left to their own devices, with increasingly rare contact with the outside world. The subsistence-based agricultural and livestock economy, the only one possible at the time and totally dependent on rainfall, hardly allowed the population to grow. The existing social stratification, based on this system, suffered permanent erosion due to the serious problems and chaos caused by droughts and, after the disappearance of the city of Ribeira Grande, due to the interruption of the flow of new slaves who fed the labor system in the fields.
Third
• The relative isolation of the archipelago and its existence on the threshold of survival were factors in the erosion and transformation of the original social relations.
• The occupation of the land on the islands other than Santiago and Fogo was carried out by people from the mainland and based on smallholdings, with marginal use of slave labor.
• Manumissions and slave escapes were a constant feature of life from the earliest times.
The occupation of the islands by a white, European minority and by a black slave labor force foreshadowed the creation of highly hierarchical and polarized social relations. The reproduction of these relations presupposed a dynamic of reinvigoration of white European protagonism and another dynamic of feeding the slave black contingent. However, such dynamics would only be sustainable if the economic structure erected had the capacity for accumulation and expansion at acceptable and attractive rates.
The constraints of life in Cape Verde, particularly low and irregular rainfall, immediately dashed any hopes of a dynamic economy that would fuel an influx of high-quality Europeans and sustain successive imports of slaves. Without this, the original social relations remained in a state of permanent tension and, after significant erosion, eventually collapsed.
The isolation of the archipelago and the absence of a flow of Europeans, particularly European women, quickly led to a process of miscegenation and, in its wake, to the first manumissions. The social polarization that had been anticipated in the original social relations collapsed with the appearance of mestizos and mulattos who were recognized by their parents and, in some cases, even inherited their status.
It is clear that in such an environment, there would be little room for exacerbated racial antagonisms. The growing difficulties in obtaining slaves and their increasingly inflated price imposed serious restrictions on the replacement of the slave quota. Slaves often took advantage of moments of crisis, such as famines and attacks by corsairs, and fled to the mountains or other islands. Others were freed by their own owners if, for example, they did not have the means to support them.
The demand for slave labor was greater on the islands of Santiago and Fogo. The property structure on these islands was based on the morgadios system, with large tracts of land to be cultivated. The importation of slaves, which continued for some time, was basically to satisfy this demand, causing various tensions in the process: each new contingent of slaves contained within itself the threat of a return to original relationships that had already been completely broken.
Furthermore, the existence of the morgadios tended to maintain a vertical hierarchical social structure and, because of this, led to various social problems. Mulattos and freed slaves, not being slaves and having no land, saw themselves and felt excluded and marginalized and were viewed by the morgado class as a disruptive factor. However, the fragility of the economic, social, and political system did not allow for adequate control of the slaves, leading many to flee to the mountains and pose a threat to people and property.
On the other islands, smallholdings prevailed and the need for slave labor was much less. In a short time, even this was no longer felt, to the point that on the island of S. Antão, in the middle of the 18th century, the Crown ordered the liberation of all slaves. Social relations on these islands were more relaxed, more horizontal in nature, and did not suffer the sudden tensions caused by the arrival of new contingents of slaves. Within the overall isolation of the archipelago, they were even more isolated, which gave them greater leeway in terms of human experimentation and social relations.
In conclusion, it can be said that, contrary to António Carreira's thesis, if there was ever a plan to create a slave society in Cape Verde, that plan failed completely.It failed because
• No one was able to establish a slave-based economy for the simple reason that it does not rain in Cape Verde and there is therefore no way to maintain Casas Grandes e Senzalas (big houses and slave quarters).
• The existence on the threshold of survival, with small and random peaks of prosperity and regular Malthusian adjustments of the archipelago's population, forced social relations and indigenous races to share a common destiny, punctuated by extremes, disfiguring and emptying them in the process.
• In the extreme situations experienced in Cape Verde, another people emerged, along with another culture and other relationships between people that effectively blocked subsequent attempts to establish slave-based economic and social regimes.Carreira's model, clearly inconsistent with the characteristics of human evolution on the islands, must be counterbalanced by another model that facilitates a comprehensive approach to the complexities of life in the archipelago over the centuries and is capable of accounting for the current human, social, and cultural physiognomy of the country. António Carreira, in his research studies, which focused mainly on Santiago, drew on certain, often apparent, similarities between the economic and social history of that island and the realities of the plantation system existing elsewhere, in order to adopt the slave-based model in his quest to understand the Cape Verdean phenomenon.
Subsequent studies followed in his footsteps and today the slave-based model is generally accepted, despite its many shortcomings, namely the following:
• It does not explain what happened on the other islands• It does not explain the fundamental differences between Cape Verdean society today and other societies in other places that were indeed subject to slave-based systems:
• It does not explain the organic cultural unity of the entire Cape Verdean people.On the contrary, it can be and has been used to
• divide the country into one part, seen as the cradle or matrix of the Cape Verdean entity—the island of Santiago, or one of its municipalities—and other parts, considered assimilated, in the language of some, in which the salient elements of the matrix are more or less buttoned up or linked to elements imported from abroad;
• Create artificial dichotomies between regions of the country based on the preponderance of the African factor or the European factor;• Introducing elements that value purity and/or impurity of what is Cape Verdean;
• Justifying characterizations of the Cape Verdean population found in encyclopedias and other reference books around the world, which divide us into 71% Creoles or Mulattos, 28% Blacks, and 1% Whites.
It is therefore necessary to find a model for the genesis of Cape Verdean identity that stands up to the test of facts, allows us to anticipate obstacles in mobilizing the social capital needed to overcome the challenge of development, and serves as a powerful tool for strengthening the Cape Verdean nation.
From an analysis of historical documents on Cape Verde, what stands out is not the fact that there were slaves (there were slaves everywhere) or that an attempt was made to establish a slave-based system in the archipelago. What is striking is precisely the complete failure of these attempts and the immediate emergence of a new cultural entity, vibrant with life and armed with its own language, whose prominence beyond the islands, even in the 16th century, left marks still visible in the language spoken in Casamance, Guinea-Bissau, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, on the island of Curaçao.
It can therefore be said that the Cape Verdean entity emerged and thrived in the fertile ground left by the successive collapses of attempts to structure the Cape Verdean economy on the basis of slave-based systems.The weakening and collapse of the slave-based economic system paved the way for human and social experimentation.
The momentum that such experiments gained varied from place to place, region to region, and island to island, and depended on the relative strength of inhibiting factors in the surrounding environment. These experiments were particularly influenced by the existing property structure, the strong presence of administrative power, the level of natural resources on the island or in the region, and the characteristics of the flow of new slaves being brought there. All these experiments revealed a deep organic link that allowed them to reinforce each other, despite their geographical distance, and to establish themselves as the precursors of a unique cultural entity throughout the archipelago.
The miscegenation that accompanied these experiments caused a qualitative leap in the self-awareness of Cape Verdeans: they did not recognize themselves in any of the established races and did not feel compelled to belong to or approach them. Terms such as “white” in everyday language took on a meaning other than skin color or race.
The emerging Cape Verdean identity asserted itself as a cultural entity alongside the Portuguese entity that had served as its matrix. This is clearly and unequivocally illustrated in the dynamics of the Creole language itself, which quickly became the mother tongue of the new cultural entity, excluding all others, particularly Portuguese.
The universality of the Cape Verdean phenomenon in the archipelago was evident in the fact that it touched and affected all social classes and in the way it absorbed people who came from other places and settled on the islands. Such success testified to the vibrant, creative, and sustained force that erupted when the prevailing social relations collapsed under the impact of famine, declining trade, loss of customs revenue, and pirate attacks.
However, the experiments that were taking place here and there on the different islands would not have been able to prevail in the surrounding socioeconomic environment, nor would they have been able to coalesce into the global phenomenon of Cape Verdean identity if the trajectory followed in the evolution of life in the archipelago over the centuries had not been a very fine line between life and death. From this fact, only one conclusion can be drawn: the Cape Verdean is the cultural product of an existence on the brink of survival.
The extreme situations experienced for countless years as a result of devastating droughts, which killed thousands, and the absence of sustainable alternatives for the archipelago's economy, led to flexibility in existing human relationships and triggered a great deal of imagination and creativity in the construction of new relationships between individuals and between them and their surroundings. The unique cultural entity that is Cape Verdean identity was able to emerge, but not without going through a long and extremely painful birth. The abandonment of the city of Ribeira Grande can be seen as the beginning of this long journey towards the emergence and consolidation of Cape Verdean identity.
Without the city's commercial activity, the only alternative to agriculture and livestock farming disappeared, and there were no more imports of factors that could potentially undermine the experimentation that was taking place on the islands. Perhaps this is why the collective memory of Cape Verdeans does not record or show nostalgia for the loss of this city, which was left behind in the memory of times gone by and is considered by all to be a Portuguese city.
The people of the islands, left to their own devices, knew how to establish multiple channels of communication through which they shared information about the titanic effort that each and every one of them was making to free themselves from pre-established social relations and build an existence more in tune with their surroundings and more supportive in times of extreme hardship. The fruits of this centuries-old dialogue manifested themselves exuberantly when, for the first time, Cape Verdean rural society became urbanized and created its first city—Mindelo, on São Vicente.
The effect that São Vicente had on the entire archipelago demonstrated the authenticity and universality of the different forms of expression that had been created, seemingly in isolation, on each island. The interaction of these expressions in the cosmopolitan environment of the city gave the separate contributions of each island a breadth and scope that led the people of the archipelago to recognize themselves and enabled them to envision the exact dimension of their cultural heritage.
Morna is the most spectacular example of this. Created in Boavista, it matured in Brava with Eugénio Tavares and, taken to São Vicente, achieved universal status, establishing itself as the music of Cape Verdeans. Today, Cesária is confirming this before audiences on every continent.
Since national independence, a second round of urbanization has been taking place in the city of Praia, involving people from all parts of the country, but particularly from the interior of Santiago. The creation and development of the nation's capital is also being accompanied by cultural exuberance, with particular emphasis on cultural forms that, until now, have been specific to the interior of the island of Santiago. The entire country is waiting to enrich its cultural heritage with the contributions that will naturally result from the interaction of these forms of expression in the new urban space.
From an understanding of the dynamics of the islands in shaping Cape Verdean identity, as advanced by the new model, we can conclude that, for the good of Cape Verde, it is necessary to increase communication channels, develop common platforms for action, and explore possible synergies between them. The greatest crime that can be committed against each of them and against Cape Verde is to govern or administer the islands as if they were separate worlds.
The new model helps to chart the way forward in affirming Cape Verde's unique character in the world and, at the same time, provides every Cape Verdean with the elements to calmly see and be proud of their identity and cultural heritage. The doubts resulting from the extreme reasoning of certain people who, using the Career model, question the very existence of Cape Verdean identity and accuse Cape Verdeans of racism towards black Africans, are completely unfounded when viewed in the light of the new model.
Racist attitudes have never been widespread in Cape Verde and, in any case, those that did exist have been overcome in the making of Cape Verdean identity. Reactions of strangeness can only be cultural and civilizational in nature. It should not be forgotten that Cape Verdeans are Christians and their entire way of seeing themselves and the world is based on Christian tradition, naturally showing some difficulty in functioning with people with a different philosophy of life or with other traditions and religious beliefs.
The adoption of the model, which posits the emergence of the Cape Verdean entity from an existence on the threshold of survival, leads not only to an understanding of certain very peculiar and unique characteristics of Cape Verdeans, but also to the assumption that such extreme situations will have created serious handicaps in society. Many of the problems facing society today in its march towards modernity (lack of team spirit, associative spirit and civic spirit among the people; general inability of social organizations to gain autonomy and promote the emergence of civil society; deficiencies in the establishment and organizational maturation of social institutions and state institutions; surprising difficulties in developing a sense of general interest and public interest; poor exercise of state power) may have their roots in these handicaps.
It is essential that we equip ourselves with conceptual tools that are adequate for understanding the complexity of the emergence and existence of the Cape Verdean entity. The country's development depends on the construction of a vision from which the Cape Verdean effort can be mobilized and brought together to realize the dream of generations: Cape Verde proud of its origins and its destiny and triumphant over the fatalities of its existence.