If Cape Verde is today a popular tourist destination for its natural beauty, the country also conceals a rich history marked by slavery and the complex process of creolization.
Now served by four international airports, Boa-Vista, Mindelo, Praia and Sal, the islands of Cabo Verde have become in a decade a popular destination for its beaches and landscapes. Around the ruins of fadenzas », certain large land properties fallen into oblivion, the price of building land can soar. Land and real estate speculation today attracts investors from the diaspora and foreigners charmed by these sites.
One story drives out another, but surreptitiously, more than five centuries of history are still visible in the morphology of these places.
To the south of Santo-Antão, between mountain and ocean, with its houses clustered on a narrow volcanic flow, Tarrafal do Monte Trigo is one of them. The place is no longer, since the death of the founder, the farm full Ferro family. Established during the XNUMXthe century, it was spread over 62,5 hectares in a fertile, steep-sided valley, fed by an important source of water. Today, it is one of those places whose value is on the rise. There farm forms the link between the slavery period (from the end of the XNUMXe century to around 1650) and today.
Lease land to his former slaves
La farm emerges from the marginalization of Cape Verde from the Atlantic trade (from 1650) when ruined, the masters of the slave plantations, called morgados, redirect their accumulation base. It is no longer based on agricultural production and slave labor, but the rental of land.
The masters resell their slaves, free others, while keeping some for their service. The early collapse of this slave society (comparatively, the African slave trade began in Martinique in 1635) did not sign the end of theslavery. Even after the official abolition in Cape Verde in 1869, it persists in practice, in the physical and psychological dependence of landless peasants (former slaves who have become sharecroppers: to rent their land, they give up half of their production to the owner).
In the farm, the owner is a respected lord. The sharecropper owes him everything, water, land and also help for his marriage, the baptism of a child or the organization of a funeral. The sharecroppers and their families receive in proportion to the services rendered and the personal relations maintained with the owner and his family. Thus, knowing that arable land is scarce, to better establish his domination, the owner modulates the quality and quantity of land granted to sharecroppers, as well as the hours of water allocated for irrigation. Clientelist relationships condition the distilled privileges according to familiarity, intimacy, ambivalent when it slides towards the provision of endless services, sometimes sexual.
La farm is therefore characterized above all by the construction of a mental space shaped by clientelist social relations between sharecroppers (partners) and former slave masters, themselves based on induced dependence on permanent credit.
Unquenchable debts
Still alive, a few witnesses can detail the functioning of the fadenza Ferro (founded in 1880). It is a historical and ethnographic treasure recorded in the memory of the inhabitants, because the social relations established within the farm Ferro are similar to those that emerged in the second half of the XNUMXthe century. These relations will continue, without notable changes, until 1980 with the advent of the agrarian reform of Cape Verde. This will grant a number of land titles to landless peasants (sharecroppers), without really succeeding in attenuating the unequal land distribution previously instituted.
Moreover, if since the reform of 1980, the owners no longer impose the monoculture of cane in the same way to the detriment of food crops, it remains preponderant in the archipelago (monoculture has long reinforced famines, despite the potential wealth of certain areas such as Tarrafal). And the cost allocation mechanism for renting the land has not changed. The sharecropper still has to pay his debt for the leased land, friendly, that is to say that 50% of everything produced on the leased plots goes to the owner, including 50% of the cane alcohol produced by the sharecroppers. Of this percentage, for every twenty liters of alcohol produced, the partner still owes the owner four liters to defray the cost of making the rum. This cost-sharing mechanism for the rental of the so-called land at friendly (in sharecropping) and the production of rum are still in force today.
Slave plantation reinforces creolization
In the islands of Santiago and Fogo where the slave society was initially deployed, many sites therefore still evoke the slave trade and the plantation economy. These places also invite us to take the measure of cultural phenomena linked to slavery. From the second half of the XVe century, landed in the uninhabited archipelago, Luso-Africans (brokers permanently settled on the coasts of West Africa), slaves (the majority and from different African societies) and Portuguese (aristocrats and colonists) : the premises of a Creole society.
In its cultural and social dimension, the creolization is a way to continuously transform, in an unpredictable way, by creating strange provisional balances when each component of the society in the making seems to act on the other and to be acted by the other, without always taking the measure of it. Thus, the meeting between the Catholic culture of the masters of the slaves and those of the slaves of various origins is unequal: one tries to impose on the others their ways of thinking, of understanding, of speaking, of living – in vain.
Gradually, it was rather Catholicism that became creolized and therefore also the masters who learned from the slaves: the work of an arid land, culinary knowledge, pharmacology. A flaw is thus emerging in this unequal society. The slaves sneak in to affect the master. By their competence, their ability, their cunning, some slaves obtain some benefits.
With creolization, the culture that invents itself mobilizes feelings, intimacy, affectivity and, even more, ability to affect others remotely, by the increasingly shared understanding of a common imagination, steeped in particular in fears (including that of witchcraft).
Creole society happened little by little. Creolization is an involuntary, unfinished historical process, still in progress. To go to Cape Verde is to witness it… Or, possibly, to be an actor in it?
Pierre-Joseph Laurent, Professor of Anthropology, Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain)
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.