“The strength of Cape Verdean music lies in the ability to find relatives all over the world,” says José Da Silva, founder and director of the Kriol Jazz Festival of Cape Verde in Praia, the capital of that lusophone island country in West Africa. That artistic fusion that allows people from very distant places to be moved by chords that sound like their own responds to a profound characteristic of this Atlantic region: miscegenation. Children of Portuguese and enslaved people forcibly brought from the African continent, Cape Verdeans are recognizable in that fusion of identity that is mentioned as “the Creole”, what is raised from the mixture. It is what is born in that “point of contact between cultures, like the Sahel links the savanna with the desert,” as interpreted by Charles Akimbodé, Unesco advisor for African World Heritage.
The landscape of Cape Verde draws a continuity with that of the Canary Islands: aridity, light without shadows in the middle of an immense blue and volcanoes that appear like the last vestige of a continent (real or imaginary) that has sunk between America and Africa . In Cidade Velha, remembered for being the original port of slavery, the blackness of the sand and volcanic stones possibly evoke the last dark vision of their land that those who were forced into ships had for four centuries. , to be taken as merchandise to the other side of the ocean. Because, in the 15th century, the Portuguese found in these empty islands the opportunity to gather the stocks human settlement far enough from the African coast so that the prisoners had no escape.
In that condition of the shore of no return from slavery, the ground zero of the Creole that symbolizes the Cape Verde archipelago stands. And from this pioneering fusion emerges an artistic market that today has expanded beyond a musical festival towards the consolidation of a fair called Atlantic Music Expo (AME), which is held every year in Praia almost simultaneously with the jazz concerts, and which this year has celebrated a decade of existence. AME attendees (producers, musicians, programmers) try to connect the missing dots or reimagine the sunken continent, in the four strings of the cavaquinhoin the drums that echo ancient rituals and in female voices that sing saudade, with a nostalgic smile like that of Cesária Évora (1941-2011), a national heroine.
Thus, one April afternoon in Praia, the historian Akimbodé, government advisor and specialist in Creole, details: “The word created him either Creole “It is used in a particular context, that of the Atlantic slave trade.” On the island of Santiago, where the Portuguese arrived in 1460, a platform for buying and selling slaves was established and it was there where the concept was born, he says.
Human ‘breeding’ and passive resistance
“A new humanity, or a new culture, was founded on the Atlantic, which links all the peoples who have traveled through those waters and who remain in contact thanks to their ways of thinking, speaking (even drumming) or their culinary art. ”, points out Akimbodé. Creole—which continues to be a spoken language, because writing is taught in Portuguese—united people forced to emigrate, coming from different African ethnicities and those who had been captured in what is now Morocco, Mauritania, Nigeria or Senegal. .
This common language with a lexical base of Portuguese, which contains, among others, elements of Wolof, Sérère or Peul, then became a form of “passive resistance”, in the words of the historian. In that language there is “a poetic dimension and hidden codes that made communication possible between the members of that society of enslaved people, without the master understanding them.” They brought Creole to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, and the rest of the Caribbean and, with it, “intelligence and its capacity for resistance,” he adds.
In the genealogy of criollo, which is also a term linked to cattle breeding, as Akimbodé comments, we must talk about the judgment about people based on the color of their skin. According to the expert on the ‘slave route’ – who shares thesis with other historians—, the invention of the “color” category (a “purely economic” classification) was the responsibility of the Portuguese conqueror, since before his arrival, “populations were not defined by their skin, because in Africa there were all colors.” possible.” In this way, from afar it was possible to distinguish who came from Europe and who from Africa, changing the “medieval European classification, which depended on wealth (where the nobles, the clergy and the poor were).”
The decolonized identity
The Cape Verdeans seem proud of their double (or multiple) belonging, because they recognize themselves as part of Africa and, however, they also confess to being descendants of the European colonizers: “We no longer discuss that,” says Xosé Da Silva, who was a producer of Evora. “Precisely because it is crioulos We are a mix of Africans with Portuguese and Brazilians. We know that we are Africans but Europeans are accepted because we are a little European. There is, yes, a rivalry between islands,” he smiles.
“Our culture is united by the same historical thread as the slave trade, but we are not making it something exclusively negative, but rather we are looking for what brings us closer,” says Charles Akinbodé. From there arises the “economy of creation” linked to the Creole, like this market of African music to which the Atlantic waters bring, this time, artists who arrive from America, some of them children of the diaspora.
Maura is a young Cape Verdean musician from the North American diaspora. She was born in Cape Verde 22 years ago, but moved with her parents to Massachusetts. She sings with her bare feet, as Évora did—of whom she declares herself the heir—to “capture the emotions of the public and the energy of the land,” as she points out. He Creole It is the language in which he has never stopped communicating with his parents and in which he expresses himself when he feels that there are deep things that he cannot translate.
Augusto (Gugas) Veiga, current director of the Atlantic Music Expo, was born in 1971 in Lisbon, the metropolis where his father had to complete mandatory military service for all citizens of Portuguese colonies. Those soldiers could then be recruited to act against their own African neighbors who were rebelling against the colonizer.
Three years later, coinciding with the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal and the independence of Cape Verde, Gugas’ family returned to Praia. He studied in the United States and returned; His father was minister of Cape Verde in two democratic legislatures. “Things returned to normal with democracy, because even the Portuguese socialists and communists who were underground, fighting against his dictatorship, already had good relations with the African colonies.” The citizens and governments of Portugal and Cape Verde “are friends today,” he says.
The word “forgiveness” no longer makes sense, say Akinbodé and Da Silva, who defend, in exchange, a cultural and human approach to counteract any hint of discrimination. “We claim our miscegenation and take advantage of it, since we are all crioulos somewhere,” says the jazz festival director. And he adds: “The world creolizes. France [el país en el que creció] It has been there for a long time and, in fact, it would no longer exist without Creolite. Those who get involved in the discourse of segregation do so for the votes. The same thing happens in Portugal.”
Cesária Évora’s granddaughters
From those days of the music market, in which it has been possible to hear Bahians (Dendê & band), who carry all the ancestral percussion on this return trip, or Venezuelans of psychedelic folk (Insólito Universo), we must highlight the presence of Cape Verdean women—born or adopted by the islands—among them Nancy Vieira, Zubikilla SpencerElly Paris, Katia Semedo (descendant of Cape Verdeans born in Sâo Tomé e Príncipe), the daughter of Cape Verdeans DJ Damykas or Fattu Djakitéborn in Guinea-Bissau but raised in Cape Verde.
“In Cape Verdean music there is a social phenomenon that has occurred since the emergence of Cesária Évora. Before her, families prohibited her daughters from going to sing in bars or study music, because that was not a serious profession,” explains Da Silva. After the success of Évora, traditional families began to see music as a job opportunity, he details. “Girls have invaded the traditional music scene, but be careful: this does not happen with youth music, urban music and rap, where there are still 90% men,” warns the producer.
The second phase of the resounding arrival of women in music will therefore be to go from singing to playing more instruments and urban rhythms, Da Silva predicts. In his opinion, meetings like this fair and the festival last April contribute to an exchange with other artists, which “frees local musicians who could be blocked in their traditions.” In his words, in Cape Verde “there is a before and after” of these transatlantic meetings.
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