• Country's whose diaspora dwarfs the residents
• Legacy of colonialism and seafaring defines islands
• Remittances power the economy

Being Cape Verdean does not simply mean living in Cape Verde. Probably in the entire world, it is the only country where two-thirds of its people live abroad.

About 360,000 Cape Verdeans reside in the islands. But a similar number live in America, the majority concentrated in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Another similar number is scattered in Europe. All have one thing in common though – their strong ties to the motherland.

The Cape Verde islands are known officially as the Republic of Cape Verde, one of the smallest in Africa. The islands lie approximately 515km off the west coast of Senegal, the westernmost country on the African continent. The republic consists of 10 islands, nine of which are inhabited, and five islets in the Atlantic Ocean. These islands and islets cover an area of 4,033sq/km, also referred to as the Cape Verde Archipelago. The cluster comprises the islands of Santa Antao, Sao Vincente, Santa Luzia, Sao Nicalou, Sal, Boa Vista, Maio, Sao Tiago, Fogo and Brava.

Keen soccer fans know of Patrick Vieira, who plays for France’s national squad. He may be a French citizen, but his roots are Cape Verdean, through parents who lived in Senegal. In America, the best-known Cape Verdean sports figure in the 1990s was Dana Barros, who played professional basketball for the Bolton Celtics. There was also Wayne Fontes, a New England Cape Verdean, who coached the Detroit Lions (American) football team in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Cape Verde has another unique statistic: It is perhaps the only country whose legislature sits representatives for the diaspora. There are two of them for the Massachusetts-Rhode Island population. Cape Verdeans can take up dual citizenship and are free to vote in Cape Verdeans wherever they are residing.

Apart from an embassy in Washington DC, Cape Verde maintains a consulate in Boston to serve the large New England diaspora. There are three weekly flights from Boston Logan airport to Praia, the Cape Verde capital. Moreover, for much of the 20th century, Cape Verdeans have been politically active in New England and have even sent representatives to the Massachusetts and Rhode Island state legislatures, mostly through the Democratic Party. In 1998, the first Republican Cape Verdean, Vinny Macedo, the representative from Plymouth, was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Today, American Cape Verdeans are also very visible in fields like law, medicine, education and business.

Seafaring

How did Cape Verde end up having the bulk of her people in the diaspora, more so America? The answer begins with the whaling industry in the 18th century. As early as the 1750s, Yankee whaling ships regularly called at Cape Verde. The foreign ships offered opportunities for young male Cape Verdeans, who had little else to look for at home. By the 1840s, over 40 per cent of the whalemen in the Massachusetts islet of Nantucket were Cape Verdeans. As whaling gradually declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, the American Cape Verdeans found work in emerging American industries like shipbuilding, textiles and vehicle assembly.

Portugal first claimed ownership of Cape Verde in 1455, during its sea-faring heyday epitomised by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Bartholomew Diaz. Besides being a crucial port of call, the archipelago served another unspoken function such as England put to use with Australia – as a dumping ground for Portuguese convicts. Though Portuguese colonisers claimed they found the islands uninhabited, there almost certainly must have been some indigenous people in the place.

However, these were soon overwhelmed by waves of Portuguese immigrants and black slaves they shipped in to work for them. Portuguese colonialists, wherever they went, whether in Angola or Brazil, had no scruples about coupling with native women, unlike their British of French counterparts who were fastidious about such things. In fact, the scarcity of European women in Cape Verde ultimately led to the intermingling of the Portuguese male settlers with the native Africans, resulting in 90 per cent of the population being of mixed blood.

This intermingling has set Cape Verdean islanders somewhat racially apart from continental Africa. In America, it has resulted in something of an identity crisis. They are neither black nor white. And being overwhelmingly Catholic, they can’t quite blend with African-Americans. Racially, the majority of Cape Verdeans at home are categorised as Creole.
Portugal’s practice of sending criminals to Cape Verde continued on a regular basis until 1882. Many Jews also came along, wishing to escape persecution in Portugal. Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the time the two powers ventured onto the exploration to the New World, often left after being robbed of their money and their possessions. In fact, much of the wealth Queen Isabel of Spain used to finance Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas was confiscated from persecuted Jews, many of whom she later conveniently expelled.

Portugal was also extremely active in the slave trade until much later when the British led the campaign to have it stopped. Thus, many captured Africans found themselves in Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

New England

Cape Verdean migration to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries comprised, in the main, the islands' poorer classes. But come 1922, the US Government restricted the immigration of peoples of colour, thus greatly reducing Cape Verdean immigration. The new regulations also prevented Cape Verdean Americans from visiting the islands for fear of being denied re-entry to the US. This resulted in the two Cape Verdean communities becoming relatively isolated from each other for about 40 years.

With doors to America closed, Cape Verdeans began to immigrate in larger numbers to Europe, South America, and West Africa along routes charted by commercial shipping and the Portuguese colonial empire. During the same period, some Cape Verdean Americans migrated from the long-established East Coast communities to the steel towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and to California.
In 1966, the US government relaxed its regulations, and a new wave of Cape Verdean immigration began. The new arrivals met an established Cape Verdean-American ethnic group, whose members looked like them, but was quite different culturally. Separated for so long, the groups knew little of each other's recent history or treasured memories.
Because Cape Verdeans form the second largest linguistic group (after English) in Massachusetts, Portuguese has more speakers there than even Spanish. Back home, the beautiful beaches and low crime rate have greatly promoted tourism. Yet the Cape Verde Government earns more from diaspora remittances than it gets from tourism.

There is indeed a certain footloose quality about Cape Verdeans. The 1950s migrant wave into Europe came at a time of frenzied European postwar reconstruction. Europe needed workers, and not just from Cape Verde. Many others came from other parts and the Portuguese colonial empire, and from North Africa and the Caribbean. For Cape Verdeans, the largest group settled in the Netherlands. As a whole, the European cape Verdeans were sending so much money home as remittances that it became the biggest source of income.