Morabeza, cash or body: Prison, violence and the state in Praia, Cape Verde

Abstract

In the past decade, Cape Verde has been facing severe and growing problems of youth delinquency and gang-related violence. The state has reacted to this challenge mainly with a securitization politics, expanding and modernizing its security forces. As a result, the Cape Verdean prison population has more than doubled over the same period. In the capital city of Praia, more and more youths from the disadvantaged periphery find themselves behind bars, serving long sentences for mostly drug- and gang-related crimes, in what seems to be a replication of the experience of many Cape Verdean immigrants in Portugal and elsewhere. In a personal fieldwork account, the article sketches out parallels between the experiences of immigrant youth in Portugal and marginalized youth in Cape Verde, and discusses the way the Cape Verdean state is presently dealing with the phenomenon of ‘youth delinquency’. Essentialist notions of the country’s supposed culture of ‘ morabeza’ (gentleness) are confronted with actual patterns of symbolic and physical violence, revealing a persistent unwillingness of Cape Verdean public discourse to face up to the country’s growing structural socioeconomic disequilibrium.