Imagining a Better Future: Anti-colonial Protest and Social Debates in Santo Antão, Cabo Verde, 1945–1975

Alexander Keese

doi:10.1017/s0165115320000066

Abstract

AbstractHow did the populations of a remote Cape Verdean island—Santo Antão—construct and formulate their goals of emancipation and social reform in the late colonial period? This article revisits the experiences of anti-colonial mobilisation in the island in the late 1960s, bringing them together with other narratives of social needs formulated by Santo Antão's populations. Those include the fears of being recruited for plantation labour in São Tomé e Príncipe, the objective of obtaining the improvement of social infrastructure, and the local struggles for water that became again more acute between 1945 and independence. The article shows that local experiences of Cape Verdean populations, of both the islands’ elite and local peasants, sharecroppers and fishermen, were much more complex than a simple, straightforward narrative of nationalist sympathies and activity. The internal conflicts outlined here also point to the numerous struggles that would shake Santo Antão's society after independence.

Highlights

Defesa do Estado—better known as PIDE—feared a full-fledged revolt on the island.3 A contingent of the PIDE was shuttled in, together with other police units; repression with some arrests initially seemed to be successful
According to the activists of the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau, fighting for the Partido Africano da Independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), which never organised a rebellion in the archipelago but successfully took over power by 1975, the moments of conflict and repression were linked to party activity
What were the priorities of local individuals? This question has at times been asked with respect to other decolonisation processes in Africa, and some of the difficulties have been pointed to as well; these are especially at play whenever social improvements were the alternative to rapid political emancipation

Summary

Introduction

Defesa do Estado—better known as PIDE—feared a full-fledged revolt on the island.3 A contingent of the PIDE was shuttled in, together with other police units; repression with some arrests initially seemed to be successful.

Results

Conclusion