History

Pre-history

Its first seamount that came above the water was about 20 million years ago, and the sea level was about 200 to 400 meters, higher than the present day. The first islands formed were present-day Sal, and the eastern part, 50-40 million years ago. The western part was formed later, including, São Nicolau, as early as 11.8 million years ago, São Vicente, 9 million years ago, present-day Santiago and Fogo 4 million years ago, and Brava, 3-2 million years ago.

Some millions of years after the seamounts were raised above the ocean, its first geckos, lizards, and insects, as well as plants, came to the archipelago, one possible clue was that were rafted from the African mainland when the salinity of the ocean was lower. The archipelago had a couple of large volcanic eruptions recorded through geology including Praia Grande 4.5 million years ago, São Vicente possibly modern-day Porto Grande 300,000 years ago, Topo da Coroa 200,000 years ago, and the last one east of modern-day Fogo 73,000 years ago that inundated coastal Santiago Island and possibly Brava and a part of Barlavento Islands.

During the Last Ice Age, the sea level dropped to about 130 meters below its current level, its islands were slightly larger with the Northwest Island, present-day Santo Antão was a kilometer northwest of the island, Boa Vista and Maio were one single island, and there was another island named Nola (Ilha da Nola) northwest of Santo Antão that was about 80–90 meters tall. Before the end of the Ice Age, the Eastern Island (Ilha Occidental) split into three islands, one would be submerged and is now the João Valente Reef, and the Canal de São Vicente was widened to 12 km distant from Santo Antão, Nola Island submerged and again became a seamount and the east of the Northwest Island were broken up into São Vicente, the smaller Santa Luzia and the two islets of Branco and Raso.

The Arrival of European

Although there is no conclusive evidence that the islands were inhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese, cases may be made for visits by Phoenicians, Moors, and Africans in previous centuries. It was Portuguese navigators such as Diogo Gomes and Diogo Afonso, Venetian explorer Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, and Genoese navigators such as António and Bartólomeu da Noli, however, who began to report on the islands in the mid-15th century, shortly before a plan of active colonization and settlement was launched. In 1456, at the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, Alvise Cadamosto, Antoniotto Usodimare (a Venetian and a Genoese captain, respectively) and an unnamed Portuguese captain, jointly discovered some of the islands. In the next decade, Diogo Gomes and António de Noli, also captains in the service of Prince Henry, discovered the remaining islands of the archipelago.

In 1462 the first settlers from Portugal landed on São Tiago (Santiago), subsequently founding there the oldest European city in the tropics—Ribeira Grande (now Cidade Velha). Sugar was planted in an attempt to emulate the success of the earlier settlement of Madeira. Cabo Verde’s dry climate was less favorable, but, with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, the importance and wealth of the islands increased. In Spain, the Reconquista movement was growing in its mission to recover Catholic lands from the Muslim Moors who had first arrived as conquerors in the 8th century. In 1492 the Spanish Inquisition also emerged in its fullest expression of anti-Semitism. It spread to neighboring Portugal where King João II and especially Manuel I in 1496, decided to exile thousands of Jews to São Tomé, Príncipe, and Cape Verde.

The Portuguese soon brought slaves from the West African coast. Positioned on the great trade routes between Africa, Europe, and the New World, the archipelago prospered from the transatlantic slave trade, in the 16th century. Settlements started to appear on other islands, São Filipe was founded in 1500, Ponta do Sol, Ribeira Grande was founded in the mid 16th century, its first settlers also arrived in Madeira, Ribeira Brava on São Nicolau, Povoação Velha on Boa Vista was later founded, Furna, Nova Sintra on Brava and Palmeira on Sal. The islands’ prosperity brought them unwanted attention in the form of a sacking at the hands of pirates.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Cabo Verde served an increasingly important role as an offshore entrepôt with the development of the triangular trade, by which manufactured goods from Europe were traded for slaves, who were sold in turn to plantations in the New World in exchange for the raw materials produced there; with these, the ships returned home. Cabo Verde was thus a center for the trade of cheap manufactured items, firearms, rum, cloth, and the like in exchange for slaves, ivory, and gold. Cabo Verde was especially known for its pano cloths, usually constructed of six strips of fabric made from cotton that was grown, dyed dark indigo, and woven on narrow looms by slaves in Cabo Verde; the clothes were a valuable form of currency for the slave trade on the mainland. Tens of thousands of slaves were exported from the coast to the islands and then on to the New World, especially to northern Brazil.

Portuguese efforts to monopolize exploration and trade along the western African coast were disrupted by those who saw the potential of the wealth of Africa for their own interests, and smuggling was rife. Although the slave trade was controlled through the crown-issued monopoly contracts, in the late 16th century the English and Spanish began to wear away the Portuguese monopoly. In addition, the prosperity of Ribeira Grande attracted pirates, who attacked the city in 1541. The English later attacked it twice—in 1585 and 1592—the first time under the command of Sir Francis Drake. After a French attack in 1712, it was decided to move the capital to Praia. With the transfer officially complete in 1770, Ribeira Grande began its long slow decline.

Praia was later founded in 1613 on the plateau of the previous settlement. The Pico of Fogo erupted in 1680 which resulted in the move of the population to Brava and other parts including Brazil, for a few years, the volcano was its natural lighthouse that sailors called and ships used it within the volcanic mountain. As a result of the French Cassard expedition in 1712 in which Ribeira Grande was destroyed, the capital was partly moved to Praia in the east, which later became the capital in 1770. By 1740, the island was a supply point for American slave ships and whalers, this started an all-male immigration to the American colonies (now the United States).

The 18th Century

In 1747 the islands were hit with the first of several droughts and famines that have plagued them ever since, with an average interval of five years. The situation was made worse by deforestation and overgrazing, which destroyed the ground vegetation that provided moisture. Three major droughts in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in well over 100,000 people starving to death. The Portuguese government sent almost no relief during any of the droughts. Textiles were smuggled and sold into the black market since their values were high and their origins were difficult to prove, between 1766 and 1776, 95,000 “Barafulas” (Cape Verdean textiles) were imported to the Guinean coast.

The Pico do Fogo again erupted in 1769 and was the last time it erupted from the top, further eruptions occurred in 1785 and 1799. Another famine started in 1774 when 20,000 people starved, as Brava and Fogo were affected, Fogo’s population dropped from 5,700 to 4,200 in around 1777. The first wave of emigration began from the islands of Brava and Fogo as American whaling ships visited these islands and took some residents for a better life in the United States. In 1770, Praia became the colonial capital which remained up to Cape Verdean independence. On 16 April 1781, though Portugal was neutral throughout the Anglo-French War and American Revolutionary War, the naval Battle of Porto Praya took place off modern-day Praia and the island between Great Britain and France.

The islands produced trade goods; especially important were cattle, cotton cloths (Panos ) made by slave women, and rum (grog ). These goods were used to purchase slaves and consumer items from slavers trading in the African interior as well as engage in the slave trade to the New World. The economy of the islands suffered from colonial restrictions on the production of potentially competitive export commodities, as well as from cyclical drought. Between 1747 and 1960, an estimated 250,000 Cape Verdeans died of famine.

The End of the Slave Trade

The 19th-century decline of the lucrative slave trade was another blow to the country’s economy. The fragile prosperity slowly vanished. Cape Verde’s colonial heyday was over. It was around this time that Cape Verdeans started emigrating to New England. This was a popular destination because of the whales that abounded in the waters around Cape Verde, and as early as 1810 whaling ships from Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the United States (U.S.) recruited crews from the islands of Brava and Fogo. The last pirate raids including one in Sal Rei in 1815 led to the building of a couple of more forts across Cape Verde. Other settlements on some islands were founded later including Mindelo (first as Nossa Senhora da Luz) in 1795, Pedra de Lume on Sal in 1799 and Santa Maria at the start of 1830 on the same island. The colonial capital Praia underwent modernization in 1822 which expanded the plateau towards the north.

After Portugal lost Brazil, the British used Mindelo for coal refueling for ships and the city flourished in 1838, and attempt on moving the colonial capital from Praia was made, first a plan to move to Picos in 1831 at the time another famine struck Cape Verde, then in 1838, Mindelo, many people do not want to move the colonial capital, the capital stayed in Praia. Fogo erupted for the last time in the 19th century in 1847, 1852, and 1857. Mindelo grew as a result of ship refueling, two submarine telegraph cables were linked in 1874 to Pernambuco, Brazil, Cory Brothers later opened, and another connected to Cameroon via Bathurst (now Banjul), the Gambia in 1885, Mindelo became the most used Transatlantic telegraph station for some time in 1912.

A total of 669 ships were refueled each year at the port, it reached to 1,927 ships a decade later, and then when gasoline fuel was started to be used especially boats, it never rivaled the ports of Las Palmas of the Grand Canary or nearby Dakar in Senegal. The usage of coal dropped which lead to a coal strike in 1912 due to insufficient work when the Great Depression began in 1930, ship activity ended. Slavery was disappearing in Cape Verde, the first was São Vicente, then São Nicolau, Santo Antão, and Boa Vista in 1867, At the same time the slave trade ended, and later slavery ended throughout Cape Verde.

Colonial Portugal

The waning of the slave trade—the Portuguese rulers and merchants reluctantly abandoned the industry in 1876—coupled with increasing drought slowly sapped the islands’ prosperity. In the early 1800s, Cabo Verde experienced not only recurrent drought and famine but government corruption and maladministration as well. In the mid-1850s the islands enjoyed a period of economic optimism as the age of steam replaced the age of sail, and large long-distance oceanic vessels needed strategic coaling stations such as Mindelo could provide. As a result, Cabo Verde was briefly the site of great port activity, before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut severely into this business. For the wider population, there was little relief or improvement, and emigration from the islands became the norm: faced with the prospect of drought and starvation at home, the poorest Cabo Verdeans commonly traveled south to work as agricultural laborers picking bananas and cocoa beans in Sao Tome and Principe; others found maritime work on whaling ships.

The phase-out of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in the Portuguese Empire, coupled with an 1886 law providing for the settlement of former Cape Verde slaves on open lands, brought the end of Cape Verde’s importance as a slave-trading center. The islands’ historical role as a port of call (prior to the building of the Suez Canal) became important again in the mid-20th century when they were used by Portuguese troops as a transit area for their African counter-insurgency campaigns. For five centuries, the Portuguese were strong enough to keep the archipelago as a colony until the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde

At the end of the 19th century, with the advent of the ocean liner, the island’s position astride Atlantic shipping lanes made Cape Verde an ideal location for resupplying ships with fuel (imported coal), water, and livestock. Because of its excellent harbor, Mindelo (on the island of São Vicente) became an important commercial center during the 19th century, mainly because the British used Cape Verde as a storage depot for coal which was bound for the Americas. The harbor area at Mindelo was developed by the British for this purpose. The island was made a coaling and submarine cable station, and there was plenty of work for local laborers. This was the golden period of the city, where it gained the cultural characteristics that made it the current cultural capital of the country. During World War II, the economy collapsed as the shipping traffic was drastically reduced.

Struggle for Independence

The long-standing joint colonial administration of Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau was terminated in 1879 when both became separate Portuguese territories. During World War II, British ships were stationed in Mindelo, later with Winston Churchill’s interest in Cape Verde, in April 1941, thousands of troops were stationed on the island. The famine in the nation worsened and struck when World War II was happening outside the Portuguese Empire between 1941 and 1942 and the second one from 1946 to 1948, it led to the emigration of tens of thousands to Europe, some left to Senegal and São Tomé and Príncipe. Espargos in the middle of the island was founded in the mid-20th century, it was founded in the late 1940s as an airport town, the last in the Portuguese era, in 1950, the number of flights rose, first Alitalia, then the Portuguese-Brazilian Friendship flight and South Africa Airways (SAA).

In 1951, Portugal changed Cape Verde’s status from a colony to an overseas province in an attempt to blunt growing nationalism. In 1956, Amílcar Cabral and a group of fellow Cape Verdeans and Guineans organized (in Portuguese Guinea) the clandestine African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). In 1952, the Portuguese government planned to transfer over 10,000 settlers to the island of São Tomé in São Tomé and Príncipe, that time another Portuguese colony to work in plantations instead of the Forros. In the lead-up to and during the Portuguese Colonial War, those planning and fighting in the armed conflict in Portuguese Guinea often linked the goal of liberation of Guinea-Bissau to the goal of liberation in Cape Verde. (For instance, in 1956, Amílcar and Luís Cabral founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.)

After World War II, Portugal was intended to hold on to its former colonies, which since 1951 were called overseas territories. When most former African colonies gained independence in 1957/1964, the Portuguese still held on. Consequently, following the Pidjiguiti Massacre, the people of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau fought one of the longest African liberation wars After the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974, Cape Verde became more autonomous but continued to have a governor from overseas, later that post would become High Commissioner. Widespread unrest forced the government to negotiate with the PAIGC, and agreements for an independent Cape Verde were on the table. Pedro Pires returned to Praia on October 13 after being exiled for over a decade. After his return, Portugal signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement. On July 5, at Praia, Portugal’s Prime Minister Vasco Goncalves turned over power to National Assembly President Abilio Duarte, thus the colonial history of Cape Verde ended when Cape Verde become independent.

Independent Cabo Verde

Immediately following a November 1980 coup in Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese Guinea declared independence in 1973 and was granted de jure independence in 1974), relations between the two countries became strained. Cape Verde abandoned its hope for unity with Guinea-Bissau and formed the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV). Problems have since been resolved, and relations between the countries are good. The PAICV and its predecessor established a one-party state and ruled Cape Verde from independence until 1990. Responding to growing pressure for a political opening, the PAICV called an emergency congress in February 1990 to discuss proposed constitutional changes to end one-party rule. Opposition groups came together to form the Movement for Democracy (MPD) in Praia in April 1990.

The MPD won a majority of the seats in the National Assembly, and the MPD presidential candidate António Mascarenhas Monteiro defeated the PAICV’s candidate by 73.5% of the votes cast to 26.5%. He succeeded the country’s first President, Aristides Pereira, who had served since 1975. Legislative elections in December 1995 increased the MPD majority in the National Assembly. The party held 50 of the National Assembly’s 72 seats. A February 1996 presidential election returned President António Mascarenhas Monteiro to office. The December 1995 and February 1996 elections were judged free and fair by domestic and international observers. In the presidential election campaign of 2000 and 2001, two former prime ministers, Pedro Pires, and Carlos Veiga were the main candidates.

During the legislative and presidential elections of 2001, the PAICV was returned to power, with Pires winning the second round of balloting to secure the presidency despite allegations of irregularities by his opponent, former prime minister Carlos Alberto Wahnon Carvalho Veiga. That same year food shortages—a common predicament for Cabo Verde—worsened considerably, and the government relied heavily on foreign aid and food imports to feed the country. Veiga and Pires faced each other once again in the presidential election of 2006, in which Pires—with diasporic support—very narrowly secured reelection. The constitution prohibited Pires from running for a third term, and in the 2011 presidential runoff election, Jorge Carlos Fonseca of the MPD defeated Manuel Inocencio Sousa of the PAICV. In the National Assembly elections in March 2016, the PAICV lost the majority that it had held in the legislative body for some 15 years; the MPD won more than 50 percent of the vote.