Cape Verde

From uninhabited mid-Atlantic islands and the first European town in the tropics, through the Atlantic slave trade, recurring famine and a distinctive Creole culture, to Amílcar Cabral's liberation struggle, independence in 1975, and one of Africa's most stable democracies.

Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) is a ten-island volcanic archipelago some 600 kilometres off the West African coast, lying uninhabited until Portuguese navigators reached it around 1456 and began settling it in 1462. On Santiago they founded Ribeira Grande — today Cidade Velha — the first permanent European city in the tropics and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which grew rich as an entrepôt of the transatlantic slave trade. From this mingling of Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans emerged a distinctive Creole (Kriolu) people, language and music, above all the melancholy morna sung by Cesária Évora. Recurring droughts brought catastrophic famines that killed well over a hundred thousand people and drove waves of emigration, so that today the Cape Verdean diaspora outnumbers the resident population. After Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC waged a shared liberation struggle with Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde won independence from Portugal on 5 July 1975, broke off the planned union with Bissau after a 1980 coup, embraced multiparty democracy in 1990–91, and has since become a stable, services-based democracy widely cited as a development success.