Islands out of nothing
Unlike anywhere else in West Africa, Cabo Verde had no indigenous population: the ten volcanic islands were uninhabited when Portuguese and Genoese navigators reached them around 1462. The Portuguese settled them as a base for the slave trade, and from the mixing of settlers and enslaved Africans a new Creole people and language, Kriolu, were born — arguably the first Creole society of the Atlantic world.
Ribeira Grande, now Cidade Velha, on Santiago, became one of the first European colonial towns in the tropics and a clearing-house for captives shipped to the Americas. But the islands' position also made them a target for pirates — Francis Drake sacked the town in 1585 — and their arid climate made survival precarious.
Drought and departure
The archipelago's history is written in famine. Repeated droughts, worsened by colonial neglect, killed tens of thousands: the disasters of the 1940s alone are thought to have killed a large share of the population. Survival meant emigration, and Cabo Verdeans left in waves — for the whaling ships of New England, the plantations of São Tomé, and the cities of Portugal, the Netherlands and America. The remittances they sent home became a pillar of the economy, and the diaspora now outnumbers the resident population.
That experience of leaving and longing gave the islands morna, the melancholy Creole song form, and its greatest voice, Cesária Évora, the "barefoot diva" who carried Cabo Verdean music to the world.
A quiet success
Cabo Verde won independence with Guinea-Bissau under the shared PAIGC on 5 July 1975, but the 1980 coup in Bissau ended the plan for a single country and the islands went their own way. After a period of one-party rule, Cabo Verde embraced multiparty democracy in 1990 and has held peaceful, alternating elections ever since — a record most of the mainland cannot match.
With few natural resources, it has built a service economy on tourism, fisheries and remittances, and consistently ranks among Africa's strongest performers on governance and human development. President José Maria Neves and long-serving prime minister Ulisses Correia e Silva have presided over a country that quietly defies the region's reputation for instability, even as emigration and drought remain permanent facts of life.
Sodade and the sea
Cabo Verde's identity is built on distance and return. Morna and the faster coladeira and funaná express sodade — a Kriolu longing for home and the absent — and Cesária Évora made that ache world-famous, singing barefoot in solidarity with the island poor. The islands' Creole culture, neither wholly African nor European, is the oldest of its kind in the Atlantic.
The diaspora, larger than the resident population, sends home the remittances that keep the economy afloat and has scattered Cape Verdean footballers through the leagues of Europe. Beyond the resort beaches of Sal and Boa Vista, the volcanic cone of Fogo, the cobbled valleys of Santo Antão and the historic streets of Cidade Velha make the archipelago far stranger and more varied than the brochures suggest.