Cape Verde should actually be under Cabo Verde as it is the name of the country, but we just happen to follow a pre list of countries so first of all – our apologies to Cabo Verde for following the English spelling.
Even A (11) who knows all the countries and their capitals in the world, struggles a bit to find Cabo Verde. But as he speaks Spanish, he quickly figures out what the name means: ‘Green Cape’. It is a country we hear so little about and might not know anything at all if it weren’t for one of the goddesses of world music, the great late Cesaria Évora. I saw her once in a concert and she was everything I expected her to be and more.
But first, as always. Food.
Food: Five countries on one afternoon
When life gets incredibly busy and weeks are filled with final exams and end of year events, time slips through fingers and there is less space for everything. We decide to organise a BIG Sunday afternoon for a few upcoming stops and celebrate Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo all in one afternoon. This is not to say that these are similar countries or the same, it is just an opportunity to get people together for one big night and proceed on our Virtual Nomad path. Therefore this introduction will be the same for the five countries but each time the specific entry will focus on the country that the stop is about.
The African Afternoon gathers 30 people around the table, a mix of seasoned Virtual Nomads and a handful of delightful newbies. Besides myself and my partner JK, we have my children A (11) and L (17), L’s boyfriend NA (18) and their lovely friend CC (17). Then on their 12th stop are AK, DK and their adult child AK (their other child MK usually comes along but today she is unfortunately sick). Other seasoned Nomads are dear friends JD, KD and their son KD (15), on their 7th stop. A 4th stop for L* and her daughter S*, our first friends in Australia. A 2nd stop for our resident Canadian CL (see the stop for Canada) and his beautiful family wife JJ and children EL (10) and SL (12). A wonderful fellow European CB comes to her 2nd stop with her delightful daughters JB (11) and EB (8), bringing her husband CBB along (his first stop). And then we are lucky to have another six great newbies – a joyous family of four KFFJ (children aged 11 and 13) and a lovely couple ER who live next door. And then of course my stepchild FK (15) and CH, Special Adviser to Virtual Nomad – she has been to over 140 countries and counting, and joins in between her travels. A wonderful group of amazing people, and everyone brings a dish.
In this entry, I will only talk about the Cabo Verde food of our happy, hilarious, joyful, warm and inviting African Afternoon.
Cachupa is considered more than simply the national dish of Cabo Verde. It has an enormous cultural value for Cabo Verdeans at home and diaspora. It is said that Cachupa represents the identity of Cabo Verde as it embodies the country’s history, blending African, Portuguese and other culinary traditions. As Cabo Verde had no inhabitants before Portuguese colonisation, it is a reflection of Cabo Verde’s cultural mix. It usually contains maize, onions, green bananas, sweet potatoes, spinach, corn and beans. Root vegetables are considered to be of African influence, and the dish evolved with locally available ingredients. Cabo Verde has arid soil which offers limited agricultural resources so the selection of ingredients is laterally narrow. For diaspora, Cachupa is an important feature to connect with the motherland and to preserve cultural identity. I noticed this in particular in one of the documentaries I watched for this stop about the Cabo Verdean immigration in Rhode Island. For our Virtual Nomad stop, we have entrusted the preparation of Cachupa to L*, an excellent cook. A great choice, as the dish is wonderful!
L (17) and boyfriend NA (18) are in charge of the Banana Fritters or “fritada de banana” as locally called. It is a dessert food but we eat them as part of the main meal as they become quite thick in our treatment. Banana Fritters are usually made from very soft or ripe bananas (mashed) mixed with flour and sugar, a typical street food or snack in Cabo Verde. Our fritters might have needed a bit more time to settle (the dough) but nevertheless they were quite nice. As they were part of a larger African Afternoon food offer, they blended in quite nicely without being stellar. (L proofreading note here: although the batter was very delicious, we must have gotten confused in our recipe while doubling the ingredient list, due to the resulting thickness. One of the children asked me whether NA and I had prepared fake meat as our meal!)
I am not a very good cook, but sometimes I hit the spot, this time a sweet one. I prepare a dessert called Dulce de Papaya, a papaya dessert that is really yummy. It is a classic Cabo Verdean dish – essentially just papaya in spiced syrup. I get two very big, almost ripe papayas thinking that it will be enough for thirty people but in the end they fill one jar so everyone gets two pieces of the delicacy. And a delicacy it is – papaya boiled in sugar and cinnamon sticks with spices and then stored in a jar. When we serve the dessert, we add Grogue Velha, authentic sugarcane juice rum from Cape Verde, aged just over a year. It is from the village of Tarrafal, on Santo Antão (one of the ten islands). A big hit!
Arid islands of tourism
The islands that form Cabo Verde were discovered by the Portuguese in 1462, and while in most cases of colonialism ‘discovery’ is a completely misleading word, in this case it is the correct one. No one lived on the islands when the Portuguese came and decided to take them. The fun part stops there, as Cabo Verde became a haven for slave trade; the embarkation for the global slave trade and the place of the first slave market of West Africa. As Cabo Verde’s climate is dry and the soil is arid, slavery was economically very important to the islands. When slavery was abolished selectively in 1857 (after a slave uprising in 1853 with a sad ending of suppression through violence) and entirely in 1878, Cabo Verde was hit with an economic crisis and many inhabitants fought to immigrate away. Drought, famine and escaping colonial rule made Cabo Verdeans the first people of the African Diaspora to voluntarily immigrate, in almost all the cases moving to the United States. Nowadays, there are more people of Cabo Verdean origin living overseas than in Cabo Verde itself.
Independence arrived in 1975 after years of discontent with the Portuguese rule. The Cabo Verdean path to independence was closely linked with the process in Guinea-Bissau, but national relationships became strained after the 1980 coup in Guinea-Bissau (presently the two countries are buddies again). The first president Aristides Pereira (in power 1975-91) could be described as an authoritarian ruler or a dictator, but he has been said to be quite calm and moderate, albeit the one-party system in Cabo Verde that existed until 1990. Since then, the presidents have come from one of the two main parties. Today Cabo Verde is a democratically stable country with growing tourism.
The people of Cabo Verde are descendants of Portuguese settlers, Africans and European travellers. The biggest island is Santiago, home to half of the country’s population and the capital city Praia. The official language of Cabo Verde is Portuguese but most people speak Cabo Verdean Creole which is a recognised national language.
Happy news is that from 2024, Cabo Verde is officially a malaria-free country.
BOOKS: Unstable women and awful men
As I read six books for Canada, I am very aware that I cannot keep up that amount for the following countries. But as I have also learned, one book is not enough to represent a whole country so for Cabo Verde – with its very rich literary tradition – I decide to read three. It is hard to choose from a variety of books but again, I will be guided by recommendations, and choose three that seem to bring very different angles to the Cabo Verdean story. The stories told by Germaino, Dina and Shauna are all very different. And, as I find out, some I like much more than others.
My first book is by Germaino Almeida (1989) called The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araujo. There is a movie made of the book which I watch after I have read it – but I did not watch with an easy heart. I basically wanted to see how a rape scene in the book (implying that she really wanted and was ok with it) is handled in the movie, and whether a more contemporary (even if just ten years later) approach would go into more detail about how disturbing some parts of this books are. This is a short book (merely 159 pages) from the most celebrated author from Cabo Verde. It is a confusing book with really long sentences that are a messy diarrheal of words about a despicable man who chases after women and has sexual encounters that read like assaults. He dies and has a really long will in which he leaves everything to a child conceived through rape. This book has been selected as one of the ‘100 best books from Africa‘ (for example by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden, among others)’ as the only entry for Cabo Verde, but the troublesome elements are never questioned. I read some reviews of the book to see what the brilliance I missed is. While several reviewers have hailed the style and the story, a few women have been as uncomfortable as I was, one saying that the concept of Senhor da Silva Araujo raping his cleaner and her being ok with it felt like a patriarchal fantasy. This is one of my least favourites of the Virtual Nomad literature journey. The best part? It’s short.
My second book is by Dina Salústio called Madwoman of Serrano (1998). Dina is the first female author to have a book published in Cabo Verde and also the first to be translated into English. She has worked as a teacher, social assistant and journalist in several Portuguese speaking countries. The story is about an isolated village and its people – the village goes for centuries without a name and then, due to specific circumstances, is dubbed Serrano. The people are peculiar and the ways of the village are quirky – there is a midwife who does not only deliver babies but initiates the village’s young men into life’s carnal pleasures (part of the job), a madwoman who incarnates every 33 years, a young woman without a memory who falls from the sky and a young mechanic who falls in love with her and a daughter of the village removed as a child now living a dull life in the city. The book belongs to the magical realism genre which makes it simultaneously fascinating and also somewhat difficult to follow, with some funny and quirky imaginaries, but overall not a cohesive enough narrative. Don’t get me wrong, it is a nice read with interesting plot lines that do not quite come together, but there is something funny and energetic about the book, some character arcs are just more interesting while others drag and feel as if they were written in a rush. It is like a curvy, bumpy road – sometimes fun, sometimes nauseating but never solid.
“It’s profoundly normal to become fragile while ordering coffee. The barista wants your money. The barista wants your name”… “When you get back to the party, make sure you know what you’re partying for.”
Shauna Barbosa was not born in Cabo Verde but in Boston in 1988. Shauna’s mother is American while her father comes from Cabo Verde. She teaches creative writing and is an awarded poet. Shauna’s poetry collection, Cape Verdean Blues, was published in 2018 to much acclaim. So I am back reading poetry which is not my favourite genre, as personally, poems need to be really dashing for me to fully appreciate them. This said, I enjoyed this collection more than I thought I would. It is modern poetic storytelling – the poems in this collection are like passing thoughts and reflections on self-reflections and understanding of womanhood, nostalgia and the undefined sense of longing. It is also to some extent about growing up between two cultures, which of course is almost becoming a norm (as I watch my children grow up between three cultures and native languages), and the sense of placelessness that comes easier to some than to others. This said, I feel the collection is more about being a young contemporary black woman and navigating relationships and the dating scene rather than about an immigration experience.
Movies: Immigrants in different shapes, that Senhor da Silva man and one of the greatest child actor performances ever
Cabo Verde does not produce a high number of movies so the selection naturally cannot be very wide.
Ilheu de Contenda (The Island of Contenda, 1995) by Leão Lopes is the first ever feature-length fiction film from Cabo Verde. Not only is it directed by a Cabo Verdean director, it also received financial support from the now defunct Instituto Cabo-Verdiano de Cinema. Leão himself is also a plastic artist, academic and politician. He was Minister of Culture and Communication (1991-2000) and is a professor of the University Institute of Arts, Technology and Culture that he founded. He also leads a cultural NGO that specialises in cultural training and local development.
The movie describes the times of change in Cabo Verde in 1964. The discontentment with the Portuguese rule is starting to diminish and the society is changing, and the quest for power between landowners and mulattos emerges. It is an interesting movie but feels older than it is.
One cosy Saturday night of the southern spring, JK and I watch a gorgeous small movie: àma Gloria (2023) by Marie Amachoukeli. It is a solo debut from Marie that currently has (October 2024) a 100% standing in the movie site Rotten Tomatoes (her first movie Party Girl, 2014, was co-directed and won the Camera d’Or award in Cannes). àma Gloria has one of the best child actor performances we have ever seen from a completely mesmerising and throughout real six-year-old Louise Mauroy-Panzani. Her outstanding performance is the soul and heart of the movie, and so open and honest to the point that it would feel like a documentary if it was not for the dream sequences that carry the story. She is a first-time actor as is the other main character, equally effective Ilça Moreno Zego. It is a wonderful, sensitive, intimate and emotional movie about love, loss, jealousy, family and longing. It is a profoundly small but rich story about a world of motherless children and mothers who need to leave their children to take care of other people’s children. “I have no memories before you” says a six-year-old French girl Cléo (who lost her mother to cancer) to her Cabo Verdean nanny Gloria who had to leave her own children in Cabo Verde to provide them a better life. Gloria’s mother dies and she has to return to her children who do not know her and leave Cléo who she has raised. Cléo comes to visit and they both have to adjust to a new reality. The movie is such a discovery, and so deep, multilayered and captivating.
Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? A Cape Verdean American Story (2006) by Claire Andrade Watkins is a feature-length documentary about Cabo Verdean immigration to the United States, especially to Province, Rhode Island. Claire, herself a descendant of Cabo Verdean immigrants, had planned the documentary for over twenty years. The documentary looks not only into her childhood but into the experiences, traditions, art and music of the Cabo Verdean community in the Foxpoint area with a prominent Cabo Verdean immigrant community, and then the displacement of the area due to gentrification and urban development leading everyone “to go their own way”. Claire’s grandmother was one of the immigrants, arriving in Rhode Island on a boat called Savóia in the early years of the 21st century. The community was very tight, keeping to itself and taking jobs no one else wanted. Several people who came to the US as children from Cabo Verde tell their story and their recollections of the community, most specifically the life in Foxpoint in the waterfront. It is a fascinating documentary that tells the story of a community through memories about gatherings, children playing together, dance, music, food, a club for boys to keep them off the streets, etc. It is also a story about relentless racism in a society where the only job for an educated ‘coloured’ girl was to be an elevator operator. It is also a generational story in which the newer generations start to break through to better opportunities. A great documentary that also dedicates much time to a dish called Mantxup (munchupa), also called Katxupa (cachupa).
JK and I really want to watch Omi Nobu by Carlos Yuri Ceuninck (2023) about a man who has lived forty years in an abandoned village, Ribeira Funda. When everyone else left, he decided to stay. Currently it is not available on any platform or other forms that I have access to so this section will be updated one day – when we have access to what looks like a superb documentary.
Ok – why am I doing this to myself? I strongly disliked the book this movie is based on. O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno (The Will of Senhor Napumoceno) is a 1997 movie from Cabo Verde based on the book by Germaino Almeida (read for this stop). It is directed by Francisco Manso. What makes me watch it? Well, it is said to have a 20-minute performance by the great Cesaria Evora. In the end the performance is very short and the rest of the movie, well, I would dislike it as much as the book, but what saves it a little bit is the visuals of Cabo Verde and interesting stage production. But the movie itself – the plot, the clearly intended overacting and the disturbing age differences between the main actor and some of his leading ladies– it really is not for me.
Cesaria Évora
And finally, to the grand wonderful Cesaria and her melancholic music. The music and dance genre Morna is considered the national music of Cabo Verde. Slow, gentle and harmonic, Morna was proclaimed part of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019. Cesaria is the most famous of the Morna singers, known for smoking and drinking on stage and singing barefoot. She was born into poverty and did not find success until later in life after several hardships. Cabo Verdean Morna is often associated with her.
When I saw her in concert, she was clearly uncomfortable with the public’s attention, but then when she sang, eyes closed and barefoot, she elevated the music beyond brilliance. Her voice was even better live than recorded, and she had a remarkable, impactful presence. I have seen a lot of live music in my life but she was in a league of her own. My absolute favourite of all her songs is Sodade but I know that fan favourites are also Miss Perfumado and Petit Pays (L’s favourite!).
Next stop: Central African Republic
Thank you L for the proof reading!