Cape Verde

Abstract

The rain-starved Cape Verde islands, two hours by plane west of Dakar, have the dubious honour of having been both one of Europe’s very first colonies in Africa and one of its last. The country’s colonial history from the 1460s to 1975 magnified and often anticipated every horror of the larger relationship between the continents in the same way that early printed maps magnified the islands, whose importance to the designs of the West had them appear four, five or ten times their actual size. Similar forces have continued to make the country loom large in the generation since the Cape Verdean independence leader, Amilcar Cabral, began to organise the liberation of its sister colony, Guinea-Bissau. The world community first saw Cape Verde heroically struggling against the ecological and economic crises of the last two decades to create a sort of African model of radical democratic socialism or Eurocommunism and green politics and the leading edge of Africa’s return to multiparty democracy.¹ Later commentators have, in contrast, praised its outwardly oriented liberal development policies advocated by the World Bank and the IMF.