“Rostu Pa Mar, Kosta Pa Terra”: The Cape Verdean Diaspora In Portugal

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Cape Verdeans are roughly as numerous in Cape Verde as they are in the diaspora. About 200,000 of them live in the former colonial metropole, Portugal. In this text, Flávio Zenun Almada and Sónia Vaz Borges use a linguistic diasporic archive in order to describe this diaspora’s life conditions and aspirations (in particular returning to cultivating the land) through adages and music.

Salty waters, dry hot lands, no azáguas this year.

Spread across 4,033 square kilometers of land on the African Continent’s west coast, and lying between latitudes 14-18°N, and longitudes 22-26°W, is Cape Verde. Water and land are two of our focal points when analyzing the economy in this ten island archipelago. “Rostu pa mar,” (“Eyes on the sea”). During the rainy season (the azáguas) on a land that survives by farming, the farmer faces the sea. He sees the rain falling closer to land than to the horizon, yet without touching the ground that was just farmed. Farmers await the blessing from the sky for sprouts to start. They say “Hoji, tchuba ê na mar…” (“Today it rains on the sea…”), and if it continues like this, “…ês anu raboita ka di fiança” (“…this year the farming will not be guaranteed”).


The common expression, “Rostu pa mar, kosta pa terra” (“Eyes on the sea, backs turned to the land”), clearly describes the future of Cape Verdeans.

It reflects the idea of imagining a future beyond the mass of water that separates it from foreign lands: starting a new life abroad; living and fighting for a life elsewhere; sending remittances to the family who stayed behind, who are still waiting for the rain and working the land. From sailors to stevedores, from cooks in boats and houses, from domestic workers to construction workers, these sedentary island people migrate from the countryside to the city, and from the big city to cities across the world. Their eyes remain on the sea, but this time clinging to the hope of returning one day towards the end of their lives, to be farming again and waiting for the rain, but with the security of a retirement check from a life spent abroad.

There are other reasons that have enabled us to cross paths in Portugal. Sónia’s father escaped being sent to Angola to fight the Portuguese colonial war. For years, he lived in Lisbon semi-clandestinely, protected by his own dad, who was already a migrant construction worker in the city. Flávio’s mother came as a housekeeper, allowing him to join her and take up study at university.

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Inhabitants of Bairro Casal de Santa Filomena in the late 1970s. / Photo kindly provided by Francisco Silva, inhabitant of the Bairro at Rua D, number. 35-B.

We are members of a diaspora, living in Portugal, in the peripheries of what was once a metropole. For us descendants in Portugal, we found connections to our land through music, family meetings, anecdotes such as the ones from Nhu Puchin (the well-known Cape Verdean comedian), our Cape Verdean language, alias creole, cosmology, and food. We have all dreamt one day of returning home, even though most of us have never been there. Some of us carry the Cape Verdean nationality, even though we were born and raised in Portugal.

Talking about the Cape Verdean diaspora in Portugal is to talk about dreams and hopes, music and food, destruction and displacement, love and resilience.

Very often, when Cape Verdean migrants and their descendants share their travel experiences, they usually bring up how funny their encounters are with peoples across the globe that do not know about the existence of Cape Verde Republic. The dialog is similar wherever one goes:

“Where do you come from?”

“I am from Cape Verde, but I was born and raised in Portugal…”

“Cape Verde?”—confusion flashes across people’s faces the moment they try to situate the country that was just mentioned.

“Yes, Cape Verde”—we reply as if they were taken by surprise, understanding that our interlocutor does not have the same mental geographic map.

“Cape Verde; where is it located?”

“It is an archipelago of ten islands located in West Africa, next to Guinea-Bissau and Senegal…”

Cape Verde rarely appears on most standard maps of the African Continent. Even when it does, people still get confused about this set of points in the Atlantic. How does one resolve this absence in people’s imaginary? Surely, references to the economy, science, natural resources, or even technology are not helping. Music, on the other hand, presents itself as the solution. The easiest way is to mention Cesária Évora, the most well-known Cape Verdean musician—“the barefoot diva.”

Music not only places the islands on the map, but is a valuable archive to anyone who wishes to understand the archipelago’s history, especially for its diaspora. Music is what has kept generations together and continually connects to the archipelago. It was and still is our history book and survival archive. From batuku to funaná, mornas to borrowed kizomba, to rap; these are all played in the same home, sometimes on the same radio station. It used to be in the recorded k7 that circulated hand-to-hand, playing in old radios, then burned onto CDs. Today, our music is reduced to a mp3 file and saved on a pen drive, or transferred from phone to phone via bluetooth.

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Group of young people attending a cultural event in the Santa Filomena neighborhood, organized by the community. / Photo by Sónia Vaz Borges (2009).

Music as a Diasporic Archive ///

One gains access to historical reasons that forced Cape Verdeans to migrate to different parts of the globe when using music as an archival source. In this song interpreted by Zézé de Nha Reinalda, one finds the intersection between drought, social justice, and the demand for land redistribution:

Who is the landlord of my destiny?

I do not demand it from the sky

Neither from moon, much less from stars

I am a peasant; I need a voice to reach the boss

It is not only abandon

I want the rights of a free man

A vented life which makes me dependent on rain

Ungrateful nature expatriated my comrades to so far off land.” (Reinalda, 2015)

Zézé describes a combination of factors which forced Cape Verdeans to migrate, such as a long period of drought and colonial modes of production that led to endemic famines. Frantz Fanon characterizes colonized life: “not as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death. This ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any hope for the future.” It must be highlighted that between 1943 and 1973, over 43,000 Cape Verdeans died from hunger—according to the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) report of 1974—in a country that to this day has no more than a half-million inhabitants.

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Special Resettlement Program, Bairro de Santa Filomena (August 1993). / Câmara Municipal da Amadora, Departamento de Administração Urbanística.

When Zézé sings “It is not only abandon,” he is referencing how the islands were completely abandoned by colonial administration. Even when the governor died, the metropole would take months or even years to send a substitute. Yet by using the term “abandon,” we can connect it to the concept of “organized abandonment,” coined by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Abandonment does not happen by chance; it is produced by colonial structures that define a hierarchy of human life according to economic reasoning. There is a common saying that the Portuguese colonial regime used immigration as an excuse to minimize social catastrophe, but in fact it was a strategy to gain profit from labor exploitation in other colonized territories by Portugal. For instance, during the severe droughts and famine in the archipelago, Cape Verdean workers were being displaced to do forced labor in São Tomé or in Mozambique. Of course, the colonial official narrative never classified this as forced labor, instead euphemistically calling it “resgate” (rescue) or “contratados” (hire). It is important to recall that Cape Verdean workers were also relocated to Portugal, where they would build Lisbon’s city infrastructure during the colonial fascist regime, such as the April 25th Bridge. With the eruption of the anticolonial war for liberation, “immigration” was used as a strategy to prevent people of the islands from joining the PAIGC guerrilla in Guinea Bissau. Therefore, the widespread idea among Cape Verdeans that as migrant peoples we are courageous adventurers is a myth, and above all it is truly a consequence of Portuguese colonization policies.

Thus, in the Cape Verdeans’ collective imagination, the islanders are doomed to migrate. As the rapper Cikay sings:

Island people doomed to emigration/

Under oppression/ colony with captain

Surrounded by sea/ blue sky and cotton

Life is not good/ land without solution

At the bottom of horizon/ a glimpse of hope

For a new path/ a new world to reach a better life” (Duarte, Las, Lopi, and Souldejah)

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Aerial view of Cova da Moura, Amadora, Lisbon.

Thus, migration became synonymous with hope, the opportunity to improve the life conditions of the expatriated and also the entire family. But expectations have historically contrasted with the social reality encountered in the host country. Papa de Betina exemplifies this in his lyrics:

In the French land, damn, the plan has failed

The clandestine, has to run away from the police

Fear them like the devil fears the cross

It is so said that it is a human running from another human

Fear them like the devil fears the cross

It is so said that it is a human running from another

If one does not run away, one will pay a high price

France is hard, too much hard

France is hard, too much hard

We are now too much, and no one desires us anymore

When you go to work in construction, beware of the bosses” (Betina)

The song narrates the lives of Cape Verdean workers in France facing exploitation and difficulties in getting documentation. It also expresses the reality of Lisbon, where Cape Verdean and other African migrant workers face the same problem. When the singer Papa de Betina recommends his comrades to watch out for the “bosses,” he speaks about common things that many Cape Verdean workers complain about to this day. Those who came before the new millennium speak about “Kaloti,” the act of being cheated at work, having worked without being paid. In Portugal, for instance, it was common for bosses to disappear at the end of the month without paying a penny to dozens or more African workers. I, Flavio, experienced it when I was a construction worker. One could speak about the promise of a “job contract” from “bosses” that never get fulfilled. When the job inspection official arrives at the workplace, undocumented workers need to hide or run away. Thus, these conditions of exploitation, persecution by immigration policies, and daily racism, are summarized by Julinho da Concertina:

It is too painful the immigrant lives

Our lives are like fishermen

When going to sea and when coming back

Those that are dead are not in the markets

Those that are dead, are not in the stores

Those that are dead also you do not find them in pharmacies

Otherwise, everyone would buy it

Immigrants in the Netherlands

Immigrants in France

Immigrants in Spain, Portugal

Those that are dead, we will not see them again

It is too painful the immigrant lives

We have been catching hell

Our lives are like fishermen (Conçertina, 2022)

Julinho expressed that in these living conditions, immigrants are simply “an object” for society. By saying, “Our lives are like fishermen,” Julinho is comparing the immigrant condition to the fisherman and implicitly mobilizing the islands’ tragic history of fishermen who disappeared in the ocean. In short, immigration is like navigating an ocean where suddenly one can lose their life. This metaphor exists in Cape Verde because fishermen disappear very often into the Ocean, yet the families never lose hope because there are some cases where these fishermen end up in João Pessoa, Brazil. Here, one could extrapolate a critique against the commodification of migrant lives, refusing to be treated as disposable by stating that “life is not tradable.” This demonstrates an understanding of the continuity of colonial logics through the racialization of social roles as a mode of profit accumulation.

Thus, Cape Verdean songs about migration usually incorporate the uncertainty of life that one could link with the structural production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death—to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

If I travel out to the land, so far from here

Without certainty of a returning

In chasing for life, we live under the treats

Give me a kiss and hugs to follow me in my destiny

I am lost in the sea, I am lost in the land

Me, instead of risking, I would rather suffer

Me, instead of suffering, I would rather die

Me, instead of dying, I would rather live in my Cape Verde land

I am lost in the sea, I am running into time

I am mourning because I am so far from you (Gomi)

This track sung by Kinita poses the question of gendered relations within Cape Verdean immigration. The group that went out to “foreign lands” were composed essentially of men—married men. In many cases, women stayed for decades in the archipelago, waiting to reunite with their families and for the return of their husbands. In this song, Kinita mourns a deceased lover. The death of a Cape Verdean emigrant away from their family was a very common thing to happen, especially in work accidents.

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Kola San Jon. Traditional Cape Verdean party that takes place in the archipelago, also performed in Cova da Moura since 1992. View of the street Travessa do Outeiro. Photo by Flávio Zenun Almada (2022).

Farming Diasporas ///

With around 150,000 nationals living in Lisbon, the ten islands that define the archipelago have grown, predominantly in community neighborhoods in the peripheries of big cities. One example is Cova da Moura, with approximately 5,000 inhabitants—the great majority being Cape Verdeans and their descendants. It’s commonly referred to as the eleventh island of the archipelago. Parallel to Cova da Moura, communities known as Afropean and Kova M (as kindly called by the younger generation) developed around the city, as described by John Pitts. Such was the case of Bairro 6 de Maio and Bairro de Santa Filomena, where both areas only had a few spare houses remaining due to destruction and displacement. These neighborhoods have been around since the 1970s until very recently, where informal community economies were developed, along with a sense of home and community. Here, any person coming from the islands could easily find their families or their path to them. Here, everyone knows everyone.

Uncertainty is a common characteristic present in every migrant life, and that has been a constant aspect of Cape Verdeans living in Portugal—from housing, schooling, and jobs, to access to citizenship and other documentation. The dream of returning is still the greatest anchor for the lives of most, even if such a return will never happen. For the older generation, farming on plots of land constitutes a daily important activity in and out of the archipelago. The farming of produce, from cabbage to corn, sugar cane to beans, are visually present around most of the Lisbon highways that lead to the periphery. Just as music became our archive for the history, culture, and practices of the archipelago, farming became the second connection—that to say, if not by words, then it is through the land—a land where hopes of growing produce and dreams are abundant, and our eyes are still placed firmly, waiting for azáguas. ■