The history of Cape Verde

Cape Verde, or Cabo Verde, is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic about 570 kilometres off the coast of Senegal. The islands were uninhabited until Portuguese navigators found them in the 1450s, and the society that grew up there was created by the Atlantic world: Portuguese settlers and the West Africans they enslaved, whose descendants formed a Creole people with their own language and culture. For two centuries the islands were a hub of the slave trade between Africa, Europe and the Americas. Later, recurrent drought and famine made emigration a central fact of Cape Verdean life. Independent since 1975, the country has become one of Africa's most stable democracies.

The islands are the summits of volcanoes rising from the ocean floor, formed over millions of years. Fogo is still active and last erupted in 2014 and 2015, and evidence of an enormous collapse of its flank about 73,000 years ago, which sent a megatsunami across the neighbouring island of Santiago, has been found in boulders thrown high onto the land. The climate is arid, part of the Sahelian belt, with rain falling unreliably in a short season. Ancient geographers such as Pliny the Elder wrote of islands in the western ocean, the Gorgades or Hesperides, that some scholars have identified with Cape Verde, but there is no firm evidence that anyone lived on them before the Portuguese. Whether West African fishermen or traders ever visited is unknown.

The islands were reached in the course of the Portuguese voyages down the African coast sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator, part of the wider Age of Discovery. From about 1456 navigators in Portuguese service, among them the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, the Genoese António de Noli and the Portuguese Diogo Gomes, sighted and explored the eastern and southern islands; the dates and the credit for the first sighting were disputed even at the time. The crown granted the islands to members of the royal family and appointed de Noli captain of the southern part of Santiago.

In 1462 settlers founded Ribeira Grande, in a sheltered valley on Santiago's south coast, the first permanent European settlement in the tropics. Fogo was settled before the end of the century. The Portuguese Empire struggled to attract colonists to such a dry and distant place, so in 1466 the crown granted the settlers of Santiago the right to trade on the African mainland coast, from Senegal to Sierra Leone. That privilege shaped the colony's whole future. Settlers included Portuguese nobles and commoners, Genoese merchants, convicts sent into exile and New Christians, Jews forced to convert, escaping the Inquisition.

Ribeira Grande grew rich as a slaving port. Captives bought on the Guinea coast, in what is now Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Guinea, were brought to Santiago, where they were baptised, taught some Portuguese and resold to ships bound for Spain, the Spanish Caribbean and later Colonial Brazil. Cape Verde was one of the first stages of the Atlantic slave trade and, in the early 16th century, one of its main entrepôts. Ships also stopped for water and provisions: Vasco da Gama called at Santiago in 1497, and Christopher Columbus passed through on his third voyage in 1498.

The islands' economy depended on enslaved labour. Enslaved Africans grew cotton and indigo and wove them into striped cloths, the panos, which became a currency in trade on the mainland coast, and they raised cattle, horses and salt for export. A class of traders and adventurers, the lançados, settled on the Guinea coast, married into African communities and acted as middlemen between Cape Verde and the mainland. Ribeira Grande gained a church in 1495, became the seat of a Catholic diocese in 1533 and, by the late 16th century, had a cathedral, monasteries and a royal fortress.

The mixing of Portuguese and African peoples on Santiago and Fogo gave rise to a Creole population and to Kriolu, the Cape Verdean Creole language, one of the oldest Creole languages formed in the Atlantic world. In the interior of Santiago, communities of runaway and freed Africans, the Badius, kept stronger African traditions in music, dance and farming.

The wealth of Ribeira Grande attracted Portugal's enemies. When Portugal came under the Spanish crown in 1580, under Philip II of Spain, the islands became a target in England's war with Spain: Francis Drake sacked Ribeira Grande in 1585, and the Portuguese answered by building the fortress of São Filipe above the town. In 1712 a French expedition under Jacques Cassard plundered it again. As the slave trade moved south to Angola and the Bight of Benin, as royal trading companies took over the Guinea commerce and as the town's harbour proved hard to defend, Ribeira Grande declined. In 1770 the capital was moved to Praia, on a plateau a few kilometres along the coast, and the old town became known as Cidade Velha, "old city".

Drought was the islands' constant enemy. Deforestation and overgrazing worsened the effects of failed rains, and the colonial authorities did little to relieve suffering. Famines in the 18th and 19th centuries killed well over 100,000 people in total, often a large share of the population of the affected islands at once. Many survivors found a way out through the sea: from the late 18th century American whaling ships from New England called at Brava and Fogo to recruit crews, and a Cape Verdean community grew up around New Bedford and other ports in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, one of the oldest African-descended immigrant communities in the United States.

In the 19th century São Vicente, previously almost empty, became important when British firms set up a coal depot at the harbour of Mindelo in 1839 to supply steamships crossing the Atlantic. Mindelo grew into a busy port and later a station for submarine telegraph cables, and it became the cultural centre of the islands. Slavery was ended in stages in the 1860s and 1870s, though many freed people remained bound to landowners through debt and tenancy.

The colonial state remained neglectful. During the famines of 1941 to 1943 and 1947 to 1948, some 45,000 people died. Thousands were sent as contract labourers to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe and to Angola, often in harsh conditions. Under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal, the Tarrafal camp on Santiago, opened in 1936, held Portuguese political prisoners and later, from the 1960s, African nationalists, many of whom died there. At the same time Cape Verdeans held an ambiguous position in the empire: better educated on average than most colonial subjects, many served as clerks and officials in other Portuguese colonies. In 1936 a group of Mindelo writers founded the literary review Claridade, which turned attention to Cape Verdean identity, the Creole language and the island landscape.

In 1956 Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist born in Portuguese Guinea to Cape Verdean parents, founded with his half-brother Luís Cabral, Aristides Pereira and others the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The party aimed to free both territories and unite them. From 1963 it fought a guerrilla war on the mainland in Guinea, where many Cape Verdeans held leadership roles; the islands themselves, small and closely policed, saw no armed struggle. Cabral, one of the most influential thinkers of African liberation, was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973.

The Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in April 1974 brought down the dictatorship and opened the way to independence across Portugal's African empire. After negotiations, elections to a National Assembly were held on 30 June 1975, and Cape Verde became independent on 5 July 1975, part of the final phase of the decolonisation of Africa. Aristides Pereira became president and Pedro Pires prime minister.

The PAIGC governed Cape Verde as a one-party state with a socialist orientation, though it kept good relations with both sides of the Cold War and relied heavily on Western food aid. Its government expanded schooling, carried out a literacy campaign and a limited land reform, and built terraces and small dams to fight erosion and drought. The plan for union with Guinea-Bissau ended in November 1980, when João Bernardo Vieira overthrew Luís Cabral in Bissau, and in January 1981 the Cape Verdean branch reconstituted itself as the PAICV.

In 1990 the PAICV accepted multiparty democracy. In January 1991 the new Movement for Democracy (MpD) won the parliamentary elections, and in February its candidate António Mascarenhas Monteiro defeated Pereira for the presidency, a peaceful handover rare in Africa at the time. A new constitution followed in 1992. Since then power has changed hands peacefully several times. The PAICV returned in 2001, with Pires as president and José Maria Neves as prime minister until 2016; the MpD's Jorge Carlos Fonseca was president from 2011 to 2021 and Ulisses Correia e Silva prime minister from 2016. In 2007 the United Nations removed Cape Verde from its list of least developed countries, and tourism, remittances from a diaspora larger than the resident population, and services have driven its economy.

In 2009 Cidade Velha was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2013 the government asked that the name Cabo Verde be used in all languages. Neves, of the PAICV, won the presidency in 2021 with about 52 per cent of the vote, and in February 2024 the World Health Organization certified Cape Verde free of malaria. In parliamentary elections on 17 May 2026 the PAICV won 37 of the 72 seats, a narrow majority, and its leader Francisco Carvalho was named prime minister, while Correia e Silva conceded and stepped down as MpD leader. A presidential election is scheduled for 15 November 2026.