The lyrics of hunger: Cabo Verdean music as a space for organic remembering

Abstract

In the Atlantic Ocean island state of Cabo Verde, silence about hunger is perennial. Elderly people who lived through devastating famines during Portuguese colonialism seldom talk about their memories, and contemporary experiences of food deprivation are buried in silence. Yet there is one space in which the silence is broken: music. Exploring that space, this article analyses representations of drought and hunger in Cabo Verdean music and explores the social contexts, positionalities and sentiments that the lyrics evoke. The article portrays the everyday listening to and singing of the lyrics as a kind of ‘organic remembering’ and demonstrates how it contributes to a view of hunger as a key symbol of the nation at the same time as the experience of hunger is surrounded by silence in everyday life. Furthermore, the article brings up the silencing of the Portuguese’ colonial responsibility for the sufferings. It also presents some reasons for this, including Cabo Verde’s hybrid position in the Portuguese empire as an uneasy mixture between a distant and neglected appendage to the metropole and a colony. Finally, it argues that not blaming the ex-colonisers has been an important way forward for the small and dependent postcolonial state.

Keywords:

• Postcolonialism
• colonialism
• Cabo Verde
• hunger
• music

Introduction

Around the globe, hunger and lack of food are associated with shame and victimisation, and people do their best to hide them (Walker 2014). In this article, we bring up a case where past and present experiences of hunger are silenced, at the same time as they paradoxically play a key role in the understanding of the national self. In the postcolonial island state of Cabo Verde, individuals and households, as well as representatives of the postcolonial Cabo Verdean state, avoid talking about hunger. As we will demonstrate, the silence arises from an existential desire to forget, but also from a wish to avoid admitting failures. In the case of the state, there is also an aspiration to present Cabo Verde as an African success story. As in many other cases, the sensitivity and complexity of memories of hunger are evident in Cabo Verde, and no public memorialisation of past famines exists. Yet there is one space where the silence is broken: music. Through lyrics, hunger is remembered.

In exploring that space, we analyse representations of drought and hunger in Cabo Verdean music and explore the social contexts, positionalities and sentiments the lyrics evoke. We bring up the symbolisation of famine, often couched in an implicit language, and explore the rich repertoire of feelings associated with hunger, as well as how the music portrays social breakdowns caused by famine. The article represents the everyday listening to and singing of the lyrics as a kind of ‘organic remembering’ and demonstrates how it contributes to a view of suffering and hunger as central to the Cabo Verdean historical experience. Thus, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, hunger appears as a key symbol¹ of the nation at the same time as experiences of hunger are surrounded by silence in everyday life.

In particular, the article explores a specific strand of Cabo Verdean music, represented foremost by the genre of morna. In 2019, UNESCO classified the Cabo Verdean music genre morna as an intangible world heritage. Most mornas were composed in the mid-1900s, but they are still a vital part of the national musical repertoire. The Cabo Verdean diaspora and many prominent musicians, including Cesária Évora, have spread the genre around the world and turned it into a hallmark of Caboverdianidade. In the lyrics of numerous mornas, hunger plays a prominent yet tacit role. In exploring the role of music in remembering, we discuss how memories of hunger are passed on from generation to generation through music. This transmission is all the more important considering the silence around elderly people’s actual remembrances of famine as well as contemporary experiences of hunger.

Furthermore, the article discusses how the lyrics present the reasons for hunger and points out how these have mainly been attributed to weather conditions and the lack of rain. It brings up the silencing of the Portuguese colonial responsibility for the sufferings and presents some reasons for that, including Cabo Verde’s hybrid position in the Portuguese empire as an uneasy mixture between a distant and neglected appendage to the metropole and a colony. In popular remembrance of the crises, there are few calls for retributive postcolonial justice. In exploring the limited attribution of political responsibility in the lyrics, the article contributes to the emerging literature on music as an ambiguous space for the politicisation of memories (see Mwambari 2020). Moreover, in linking the silence on political responsibility for hunger to the creole character of the Cabo Verdean nation, the article ties in with postcolonial perspectives and contributes to discussions on hybridity. The Cabo Verdean nation is an example of spontaneous hybridisation, where unconscious borrowing, exchange and appropriation processes have taken place over a long time (see  Werbner 1997). These processes created a nation where the colonial masters constituted a complex part of the national self while being distant and neglectful. Yet in contemporary Cabo Verde, which recently celebrated 45 years of independence, the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the Portuguese and the Kreol (Cabo Verdean), is clear-cut. For younger generations, colonial history belongs to a distant past, and so do the famines – except when they are remembered in the music.

In the following, we first provide an overview of the Cabo Verdean history of hunger and its relation to Portuguese colonialism. Subsequently, we move on to postcolonial times and explore the various reasons for the enduring silence surrounding experiences of hunger. This is followed by an introduction to Cabo Verdean music and its central role in the emergence of a shared national repertoire of ideas and meanings. We then discuss the concept of ‘organic remembering’ and link it to the importance of the lyrics for everyday memories of hunger. In the following, we analyse 30 lyrics and explore how they portray feelings, positionalities and social contexts associated with hunger. It is worth noting that although lyrics about hunger, poverty and consequent suffering appear in many styles of Cabo Verdean music, in this article, morna lyrics are selected as a case study. Our analysis of the mornas leads to a discussion about the portrayal of reasons for hunger in the lyrics and the limited attribution of political responsibility. In conclusion, we argue that music can be an important space for remembering hunger and other silenced topics.²

A history of hybridity and hunger

The Cabo Verdean archipelago was uninhabited when the Portuguese, with the forced support of enslaved West Africans, began to settle on the islands in the fifteenth century. Around the globe, all colonial processes were, in a sense, hybrid as the colonisers and the colonised mutually influenced each other, despite the highly uneven power dynamics. Colonial encounters comprised not only processes of domination or assimilation but also a mixture and reconfigurations of cultures (Bhabha 1994). In the Cabo Verdean case, we may talk about a ‘primordial hybridity’ as the nation itself was born in the mixed process of European colonisation and African enslavement. A mixed population became the largest group only a few decades after settlement as the Portuguese men considered sexual relations with enslaved women their unquestioned privilege.

Agriculture has been the dominant subsistence activity since the inhabiting of the islands, although it has always been precarious. Cabo Verde shares climatological conditions with the Sahel region, which means erratic rainfall and, periodically, years on end without any rain. What precipitation the islands may receive is determined by unpredictable and weak Atlantic winds. July to November used to be ‘the period of possible rainfall’. However, today, climate change has made this even more uncertain. Anxiously waiting for signs of rain has marked the Cabo Verdeans’ existence. Since the settlement of the archipelago, there have been recurrent periods of droughts and famine across the nine inhabited islands. The last periods of devastating hunger occurred during the 1940s when, reportedly, more than one-third of the total population perished (Carreira 1984, 108); moreover, as late as 1958–1959, thousands of Cabo Verdeans died of starvation (Gatlin 1990, 189). Hunger has driven people to leave the archipelago. Mass migration began in the early twentieth century and has been directed to the African continent as well as to the Americas and Europe. Today, the Cabo Verdean diaspora outnumbers the population of slightly more than 500,000 persons who live in the archipelago.

Due to Cabo Verde’s geographical position, the islands were integrated into the Atlantic slave trade economy early on. Yet Cabo Verde was always an insignificant part of the Portuguese empire. The lack of natural resources, in combination with the smallness of the archipelago and its population, made economic exploitation unprofitable, which, throughout the centuries, resulted in a colonial policy of neglect. This policy was not abandoned until the 1960s when Portugal became more concerned about its international image. The population in the archipelago was largely left to its destiny, and the Portuguese made few efforts to alleviate the suffering caused by the lack of rain. Instead, colonial authorities perceived hunger in Cabo Verde as normal and banal (Lopes 2021). Some colonial orders actually aggravated the crises. Travel between the islands was highly restricted, and Cabo Verdeans were not allowed to have fishing boats as these could be used to help enslaved people and exiled Portuguese escape from the islands. The restriction of movements and the isolated geographical position compelled the historian George E. Brooks (2006) to call colonial Cabo Verde the ‘Gulag of the South Atlantic’. According to him, the disastrous famines in the 1940s were not reported in the Portuguese press, and Portuguese authorities forbade missionaries and others to report deaths or use the word ‘famine’.

The ambivalent and hybrid positioning of Cabo Verde was an essential part of colonial policy. It was primarily a local elite that administered the islands. The colonial national identity was ambiguous. All Cabo Verdeans were awarded the status of ‘assimilated’ and granted Portuguese citizenship, in stark contrast to the people in the mainland colonies, who hardly ever were awarded these rights (Meintel 1984b, 128f). In Cabo Verde, the colonial authorities suppressed cultural expressions understood to contain African elements, and a sense of superiority in relation to Africa was fostered. This produced a backlash in the 1960s when the PAIGC³ independence movement developed and questioned the Portuguese-based politics of identity. Thus, on the one hand, Portugal was distant and threatening, and on the other hand, it was an awkward part of the Cabo Verdean self. In the archipelago’s music, this led to wariness about identifying colonial politics as responsible for hunger.

Hunger and silence in postcolonial Cabo Verde

After independence in 1975, hunger alleviation became the new regime’s priority. Development support from various donors, in combination with migrant remittances, enabled the government to guarantee most of the population a basic level of food security. Since this period, according to political rhetoric, hunger has ceased to exist in Cabo Verde. Food shortages are presented as belonging to the colonial past but not as threatening to the postcolonial state. To place hunger outside the time and space of the modern Cabo Verdean society is vital for the integrity and sovereignty of the state. In the public discourse, there are sometimes euphemistic references to carência alimentar (food shortage) but not to fome (hunger, starvation). A recent example of the political sensitivity of the concept of fome was played out when a Portuguese actress, in May 2020, published a film from Cabo Verde on Facebook and argued that the socio-economic effects of Covid-19 made ‘Cabo Verdean children die from fome’. Within hours, the Cabo Verdean Minister of Culture, Abraão Vicente, answered on his official Facebook account,

I would like you to know that nobody is dying from fome in Cabo Verde. I would like you to know that fome is a very sensitive theme for Cabo Verdeans, and we would be thankful if you did not touch upon it in this superficial way. (our translation)

As this example demonstrates, in public discourse, hunger tends to be portrayed both as a tragedy of the past and as a topic that should be avoided because of its sensitivity. This sensitivity has to do with the state’s desire to avoid admitting failures as well as with the public discomfort that is evoked from concepts such as fome. On both a collective and an individual level, hunger is associated with shame and humiliation, which may lead to what Connerton (2008) describes as ‘humiliated silence’. Despite the avoidance of the topic, however, a study demonstrates that 11% of the population suffered from malnourishment or hunger in 2018. Malnourishment was more prevalent in rural than urban settings and slightly more common among women and children than men (Ministério de Agriculture e Ambiente n.d.). Due to the Covid pandemic, the gross domestic product fell by nearly 15% in 2020 (African Development Bank 2021), which implies that hunger is probably more widespread today than it was in 2018. Although Cabo Verde officially proclaims itself as one of the most successful Sub-Saharan African countries in the United Nations rankings of human development (Monteiro 2018), these figures speak of persistent food deprivation in vulnerable households. But to discuss hunger openly undermines the political legitimacy of the state.

In an interview carried out by the Portuguese news agency Lusa in 2019, Fátima Fernandes, professor in literature at the Cabo Verdean state university, summarised her view on the representation of hunger in contemporary public discourse in Cabo Verde:

There is a certain discomfort when it comes to talking about hunger. Of course, we do not want to claim a situation of hunger such as the one experienced during the constant drought crises that earlier victimized many Cabo Verdeans, but we believe that our present situation from the nutritional point of view, and even the vision that we have about the experience of hunger, is still subject to some discomfort and some taboo.

She continued by stating that she wants

To sensitise society so that we are not afraid or ashamed to talk about hunger, and to say that once we went through this [famine] and that today we are fortunately able to confront the situation, although there is still hunger in Cabo Verde. (Diário de Notícias 2019, our translation)

Her circumspect way of talking about ‘our present situation’ and ‘the vision’  demonstrates that she carefully chooses her words, although she aims to dismantle the taboo against discussing a lack of food. Regarding the state’s responsibility, she balances between saying that the government is capable of handling ‘the situation’ concerning food security and indicating that ‘there is still hunger’. When she talks about the silence on Cabo Verdean hunger in general terms, she relates it to discomfort, taboo and shame.

In the article ‘From Silence to Silence: The Hidden Story of a Beef Stew in Cabo Verde’, anthropologist Isabel Fêo Rodrigues (2008) explores the silence on hunger. She argues that cultural ideas about shame and sacrifice, also in postcolonial times, contribute to hiding hunger. According to Rodrigues (2008, 345. emphasis in original),  ‘Long established cultural conceptions about honor and shame conceal food needs behind closed doors … conceptions of sacrifice have contributed to normalize needs and vulnerabilities as an essential condition of living and surviving in Cabo Verde’. In Cabo Verdean Kriolu, sakrifis partly has a different connotation than the English ‘sacrifice’. The noun sakrifis indicates the existential condition of life as suffering. To see everyday existence as sakrifis entails the silent acceptance of a reality that Cabo Verdeans must endure. To rely only on rice and maybe a knorr (stock cube) for a meal or to skip a meal is spoken about as sakrifis, not as hunger or food deprivation. Yet the English connotation of sacrificing oneself for somebody or something is evoked when the concept is used as a verb (sakrifiká). Then, it speaks about sacrificing oneself for someone else or for a better future. Typically, this concerns women who skip meals or work hard for the benefit of their children.

Moreover, looking back at colonial history, Rodrigues (2008, 357) describes silence and forgetting as ‘an existential necessity’ for those who survived the famines and argues that this necessity was ‘irreversibly intertwined with colonial social stratification, colonial inaptitude and political censorship’. Sacrifice as a cultural practice, in combination with the fear of the colonial authorities, implied that individuals and households silently endured hunger and death, while collective protests, such as food riots, were rare. Today, hunger is still considered highly shameful, and people do their best to hide it. People living in poverty may leave their homes without having had anything to eat while still putting on immaculately clean and ironed clothes, thereby avoiding the appearance of being poor in public.

Thus, the contemporary silencing of hunger in Cabo Verde has manifold roots. It ties in with the visions of the postcolonial state, wanting to appear modern and sovereign. It relates to the historical and existential necessity of trying to forget unfathomable suffering to be able to move forward. It is associated with collective and individual shame and a desire to create a distance from feelings of shame. In line with the historical, political and existential silence on starvation, music lyrics do not explicitly refer to hunger but indicate a lack of food in other ways. We will come back to this, but first, we provide an introduction to Cabo Verdean music and its role in memories of hunger.

Music as the Cabo Verdean soul

Ideas, values and feelings that shape Cabo Verdean identities have developed in close relation to the musical tradition. Many genres have emerged across the nine inhabited islands and in the diaspora, and the different genres have been connected to varying social positions and racialised hierarchies. As Rui Cidra (2018) demonstrates, musical practices have been related to different versions of creoleness, which, in turn, have been perceived as indexes of civilisation and proper behaviour. Throughout the twentieth century, morna continued to be a popular genre in the archipelago as well as in emigrant communities, with performers and composers from all the islands and all social strata. In this article, we focus on morna and closely related genres as a case study.⁴

An important characteristic of the morna is that the lyrics are in Cabo Verdean Kriolu, the language all Cabo Verdeans speak in their daily life, despite Portuguese being the official language. Kriolu was essential for unifying the archipelago in the resistance against the Portuguese colonisers, who viewed it as a primitive distortion of Portuguese. While Portuguese was the voice of the official, Kriolu was the commentary on everyday life and, as such, popular and subversive. The poetic texts of mornas integrated narratives of the collective experience of Cabo Verdeans, including their migratory experiences and natural elements linking them to the territory, evoking the barren islands, the sea, and the lack of rain.

In the lyrics of most mornas, pain and suffering are keywords (Martins 2018), and the same is true for other music genres. These keywords reflect a history of drought and lack of basic necessities, which were aggravated by the colonisers’  incompetence and lack of interest in the archipelago. The composers of mornas had themselves experienced how hunger and poverty dominated the lives of Cabo Verdeans (cf. Harrison 2013, 3). A second key theme is more romantic and includes expressions of desire, primarily from a male perspective, and of longing for loved ones who have left for faraway countries.

In early 1963, the independence party PAIGC started the liberation war for Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau on the African mainland. At the same time, Cabo Verdean composers began to turn the morna tradition into a vehicle for affirming the Cabo Verdean nation and criticising the colonial policy, although mainly in a veiled or implicit way. As Kriolu is the language of the morna, it reached out to a broad public, both in the country and among the migrants across both sides of the Atlantic. The leaders of the independence movement appreciated this fact. With the help of radio emissions and the international record industry, they used mornas to diffuse their political project to the Cabo Verdeans (see Cidra 2008). Thus, in the last phase of the colonial period, the morna was established as a space to affirm ‘us’ (Rodrigues 2015). In the period of transition to independence and the early years of post-independence, morna became a kind of carefully versed ‘protest music’.⁵ Yet there were also critical voices implying that the lyrics in the morna tradition transmitted a sense of acceptance, resignation and passivity (Braz Dias 2004). Moreover, the instrumentation and poetic language of the mornas implied that the genre was quite closely related to the ‘Europeanness’ in the Cabo Verdean creole identity and thereby embraced by the national elite (Cidra 2018).

After independence in 1975, the music in Cabo Verde entered a new era and gained more strength, more rhythms, new bands, new voices and, successively, a global outreach (Cidra 2008). Funaná and other Cabo Verdean popular cultural manifestations like batuku and tabanka, considered symbols of resistance to the colonial regime and the Cabo Verdean elite, became part of a rapidly growing field of national music. These genres celebrated the ‘African pole’  in the Cabo Verdean creoleness (Cidra 2018). This period was characterised by significant social and political transformations in the transnational country and many experiments in the field of music. In the 1990s, Cabo Verdean zouk gained space in the process of transnational recreation, having a significant presence among the youth of Cabo Verde and the diaspora (Hoffman 2008). Contemporary lyrics continue to portray social problems, such as poverty and unemployment. Some songs have a strong political message, particularly in batuku, finason, hip hop and rap. Batuku usually depicts situations of poverty, which often are described as accompanied by feelings of desperation, humiliation and sadness. Some rappers in Cabo Verde see themselves as activists and rap about the empowerment of the voiceless. They openly critique the government and evoke pan-Africanism (Lima 2012). A critique of socio-political realities is thus more openly expressed than before. Yet most lyrics do not depict hunger as such, but implicitly describe the vulnerable situation of those living in poverty.

As for the morna, the 1980s and 1990s represented a new era when the tradition entered the international market of World Music through singers such as Cesária Évora, Bana, and Ildo Lobo. The morna represented the Cabo Verdean community, this time with a significant impact outside the borders of the archipelago. In December 2019, the morna was declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. This has contributed to putting Cabo Verde on the map of international music and promoted Cabo Verdean culture and the growing tourism industry. However, while the global audience appreciates the sorrowful tone of the mornas, it can rarely understand the wording of the lyrics.

The 30 morna lyrics analysed in this article were selected based on their reference to hunger and famine, either direct or indirect. We have also included some baladas, a musical genre close to mornas. In addition, we have analysed a couple of batukus as they tend to focus on hunger thematically. After listening to the music and transcribing the lyrics, we carried out an analysis based on categories that we systematically developed throughout the process. These categories had to do with the different themes represented in the lyrics, but also with the representation of different ‘voices’ and the feelings that were evoked by the songs.

Organic remembering

It is early Saturday morning, and Juju is making coffee for breakfast and preparing to handwash a pile of dirty clothes. She listens to music from the national radio station while carrying out the household chores. From time to time, she pauses, sings along, and takes some dance steps, thinking about the tocatina that will take place at night in the neighbourhood bar. Maria Julia is a single mother of three and supports them through different temporary jobs. Her small battery-powered radio is a gift from her sister, who lives in Rotterdam, and it fills Juju’s days with Cabo Verdean music. By listening to music, she eases the pains and worries of her everyday life.

The tocatina in the evening is the highlight of the week. Maria Julia meets with friends in the bar and listens to live Cabo Verdean music performed by local musicians. The bar is full, and the animation is great as people sing along and dance. The background sound of voices laughing over a glass of grogue (local brandy) and a piece of fried fish feels comforting when Maria Julia dances in the arms of her friend Zé.

As this vignette exemplifies, music is constantly present in Cabo Verdean’s everyday life, and the role of music is often to arouse feelings of comfort and joy. Thus, it might seem paradoxical that suffering and hunger stand out as important themes in the lyrics. However, we need to remember that the lyrics were not composed with the aim of creating a public way of commemorating hunger and are not ‘used’ – that is, performed and listened to – in that sense, either. Cabo Verdean musicians and listeners do not act as mnemonic actors who ‘do things to remember the past’ (Conway 2010, 446). Rather, they perform acts of ‘organic’ remembering, where memories are recreated in unpremeditated ways. The lyrics are intended to evoke a Cabo Verdean ‘reality’, but they are neither performed nor listened to with the aim of commemorating hunger. Instead, conveying remembrances of hunger is an unintended, yet essential, aspect of the lyrics. Therefore, we prefer to talk about ‘remembering’ rather than ‘memoralisation’, which is a concept that denotes processes aiming at creating some form of memorial.

For the contemporary public, the lyrics are central to creating an image of the Cabo Verdean past as marked by hunger and suffering. This also means that music is vital for transmitting memories of hunger from one generation to another. This point is crucial, as many Cabo Verdeans avoid talking with elderly family members about their painful memories of destitution and famine. Music breaks the silence on hunger and represents the feelings associated with experiences of poverty and deprivation. The lyrics also highlight how social relations are affected by the lack of food, and they are vital for creating and recreating images of the reasons for hunger among Cabo Verdeans. Mostly, they contribute to an image of hunger as caused by weather conditions rather than political neglect.

When people today listen to and sing the lyrics, certain aspects of the past are transmitted to them in social processes of remembering (cf. Bohlin 2007). The memories created by the songs are intrinsically collective (Halbwachs (1992 [1950]) – that is, they are shared and transmitted by social groups rather than by individuals. Irwin-Zarecka (1994, 4) argues that collective memory is located in the resources that individuals share. Those who listen to the music remember as members of a group based on an understanding of shared national belonging. Thus, ‘remembering’ in this case does not primarily mean recalling personal memories of hunger (although that might happen) but reactivating a collection of historical experiences that individual Cabo Verdeans are expected to be familiar with.

The social processes of organic remembering are intimately associated with the vital role that music plays for Cabo Verdeans. Until quite recently, orality has predominated in the Cabo Verdean society, and musical practice has been – and still is – intense. The ‘musical density’ (Martins 2018) – that is, the number of musicians per inhabitant – is exceptionally high. Cabo Verdean children are introduced to music at an early stage in life. Music touches people’s daily lives and strengthens them in times of sorrow. People feel the music, play the guitar, and sing along. Thus, the memories evoked by the music become embodied. Music plays a vital role in the homeland and the diaspora at social gatherings, and most people know an astonishing number of lyrics by heart. Listening to music, singing, playing instruments and visiting outdoor concerts are essential elements in everyday Cabo Verdean life. Thus, music is constantly present, and since most people know the lyrics, they are an important source of collective memory.

In the following section, we analyse the lyrics and demonstrate how hunger is expressed through certain feelings, how it relates to social positions, and how the reasons for hunger are represented. Lastly, we discuss the restrained attribution of political responsibility for the sufferings. Most of the lyrics we refer to below can be accessed on YouTube.

The hunger in the lyrics

Feelings of hunger

In most lyrics, hunger is not explicitly mentioned, yet it is omnipresent; it dictates people’s lives. Often, representations of emptiness and lack function as symbols of hunger, and in the lyrics, such conditions characterise the islanders’ existence. The lyrics lament the empty panela (cooking pot) and the emptiness of the spaces where food is commonly stored, such as the barrel (tambor) and the larder (seron). Also, the hungry person’s pockets are empty.

One lyric portrays a struggling mother’s body as an empty sack:

Table

Mosinhus dexa-m xinta pa-m sumara	Children, let me sit down to reflect
Pamodi saku baziu ka ta sakedu	Because an empty sack doesn’t stay upright
Dexa-m ozerba nhôs dexa-m kuda mundu	Let me look at you, let me think of this world
Pamodi dja-m pasa mal tamanhu	As I already have endured so much^6

‘Ês Anu Raboitas Ka Di Fiansa’ (Aurélio Borges dos Santos)⁷

The emptiness of the body, turning it into a collapsed sack, is a strong metaphor for absence and lack, which provides a picture of want of everything essential for bare existence. In this and many other lyrics, the lack is glaring. There is no house to live in, no place to sleep, no bread to eat, and no coffee to drink. There is no fire in the fireplace, no clothes to wear or shoes to put on. In some lyrics, especially those written by Renato Cardoso (‘Alto Cutelo’, ‘Porton di nos ilha’), the lack of a small fruit, sinbron (cimbrão in Portuguese), carries a heavy symbolical weight. The lack of sinbron signals an immediate crisis, as sinbron is resistant and the last fruit to disappear during a drought. When there is no sinbron, there is nothing to eat at all.

The lyrics display a deeply troubled but rich and nuanced vocabulary of feelings associated with a lack of food and hunger. Emotions have been described in anthropology as experienced uniquely by individuals but expressed in accordance with cultural patterns. Emotion is thus both feeling and meaning – both sensory experience and cultural construction (Lindquist 2007). Feelings are not only personal experiences but also constructed in a discourse that collectively infuses them with meanings. This concerns the feelings associated with hunger in Cabo Verde. Concepts such as disisperu (despair) and miseria (misery) still evoke associations with the lack of food among Cabo Verdeans. The hunger of a not-so-distant past and, for some, of the present is still connected to the destiny of being Cabo Verdean, a highly painful fate. In her landmark ethnography about hunger in north-eastern Brazil, Shephard-Hughes (1992) describes hunger as leading to a number of dreadful emotional states, among them madness. Similarly, Cabo Verdean lyrics evoke different kinds of agonising feelings. There are raw feelings of suffering, agony, sorrow, anger and desperation. The song’s subject, who often figures as an anonymous representative of the suffering Cabo Verdean people, speaks in a distressed tone to the world – or God – about the agonies that she/he undergoes. Other emotions in the lyrics concern losing an inner state of trust and meaning, which leads to a sense of hopelessness. In ‘São Vicente di longe’ (Lela Maninha), Cesária Évora sings about the loss of direction, hope and opportunities. The subject in this morna aimlessly and restlessly moves around the town where he lives without any hope in sight. Many of the lyrics suggest a loss of courage and faith, as they evoke feelings of forlornness, of having been abandoned by a cruel destiny and/or God. Yet in the last verse of many of these songs, feelings of hopelessness are alleviated by a restoration of a belief in a better future. Despite all the present adversities, expressions of hope, courage, and faith in God’s benevolence commonly constitute the last words. Seemingly, many lyricists strive to avoid leaving their listeners in a mood of despair.

Feelings of shame are also commonly described in the lyrics. Poverty and hunger are related to humiliation and indignity. The song of ‘Terra’l’ (Michel Montrond) speaks, for instance, of a father who, early in the morning, leaves his hungry children at home. The children have ‘their beaks to the sky’, like young birds waiting to be fed. When he arrives at the site of his exploitative and underpaid job, a horde of children in the street make fun of him because he is poorly dressed and barefoot. This image of poverty and famine brings about a social loss of control, which often appears to be more painful than bodily suffering. The physical suffering is seldom represented in the lyrics, except for a few references to ‘weak arms’ and, thereby, a loss of capacity to work. There is a silence on the embodied suffering, the actual feelings of being hungry. What it feels like to physically endure a constant lack of food is left out in the lyrics. Maybe it is too painful and too humiliating to represent.⁸

Emotions may play an especially important role in contributing to remembrances of famine. Thus, Jacob Climo (1995, 183) argues that emotions link individuals to ‘important group events they did not experience directly in their individual lives, but which impact greatly on their identities and connect them profoundly to their heritage and culture’. In Cabo Verde, feelings of despair, hopelessness and shame are still related to poverty and hunger, even among those who do not have any individual experience with lack of food. Most Cabo Verdeans listening to the lyrics know that the feelings of hunger were part of their collective national history, and elderly family members have experienced famine. One way of reacting to this may be an obsession with food in abundance. At Cabo Verdean parties, there is always a lot of food and people are expected to eat copious amounts.

Positionality and social context of the hungry

Since hunger is shameful and sensitive, the lyrics are not autobiographical. The hungry persons are anonymous yet recognisable as typical characters in the Cabo Verdean social landscape and generally positioned in a family network. The family members in the lyrics tend to belong to the same household, although the concept of familia covers a broader circle of relatives and various generations. Hunger is primarily a household experience centred around the (empty) cooking pot. Tellingly, the traditional black iron cooking pot is sometimes jokingly called mãe preta (black mother). Many Cabo Verdean households are matrifocal (Åkesson 2004; Åkesson, Carling, and Drotbohm 2012), and it is ultimately the responsibility of the most senior woman in the household to find food for the cooking pot. The lyrics spell out the devastating social effects of hunger, as households break up and their members are separated, for instance by somebody dying. Frequently, the person who dies in the lyrics is the father, and his passing is portrayed as the loss of the breadwinner for the household. This gendered dimension points to the fact that from the 1930s and onwards, the composers of the mornas were male (Rodrigues 2015), and they tended to uphold a traditional Europeanised perspective on gender relations. Hence, although the cooking pot is a female responsibility, according to lyrics such as ‘Manu’ (Adalberto Silva), it is the death of a senior male that causes the household to lose the capacity to feed its members.

The separations depicted in the lyrics are also caused by poverty and hunger, driving people to migrate. To emigrate is to follow a deeply rooted Cabo Verdean way of living, and hundreds of thousands have left their homeland since the end of the eighteenth century. Historically, emigration, as well as comprehensive internal migration, have been driven by recurrent famines. Hunger has led to forced migration and subsequent longing for those far away that never ends. In particular, the lyrics portray mothers as suffering from sodade (longing, nostalgia) for their forlorn sons who toil in Portugal or on the plantations in São Tomé e Principe. The concept of sodade builds upon a specific collective memory formed by many generations’ experiences of separation over long distances in time and space.

Some lyrics describe how hunger forces people to migrate under exploitative conditions. In ‘Alto Cutelo’ (Renato Cardoso), the female subject has been unable to ‘light the fire’ – that is, the fire for cooking – for a week. Consequently, her husband has sold their plot of land for ‘half the price’ and signed a contract for ‘Lisbon’. The lyric continues,

Table

Ali, el ta trabadja na tchuba na bentu (na friu)	There he works in the rain in the wind (in the cold)^9
Na Kuf, na Lisnave i na Jota Pimenta (sploradu)	At CUF, at Lisnave and at Jota Pimenta^10 (exploited)
Mon d‘obra baratu, pa mas ki trabadja (serventi)	Cheap manpower, no matter how hard you work (a servant)
Mon d‘obra baratu, baraka sen lus (kumida a presa)	Cheap manpower, shacks without light (meals in a hurry)
Inda mas nganadu ki s‘irmon branku (nganadu)	Even more cheated than his white brother (cheated)

For those who stayed behind, the migration of a household member could mean relief from starvation or, as phrased by the composer Manuel de Novas, ‘a spoonful of porridge from abroad’. Yet the departure of an able-bodied person could also entail increased vulnerability if the obligation of sending remittances (Åkesson 2011) remained unfulfilled. In many cases, this was caused by miserable conditions in the receiving countries. At the time when most of the lyrics were written (the 1930s–1970s), Cabo Verdean migrants were predominantly male. Still, there were also numerous female migrants and independent female migration already in the middle of the twentieth century. Yet in popular discourse, ‘the emigrant’ was constructed as a man, in line with the image of the male breadwinner. This implied that ‘those left behind’ were portrayed as women and children, and females waiting for money to be sent from overseas figure prominently in the lyrics. One of them is ‘Maria di Lida’ (Jorge Tavares Silva), who has three hungry stomachs to fill. Her husband is in Lisbon and does not send any money or get in touch with her. In the voice of Maria di Lida, the lyrics describe how the ‘raven circles’, which is a metaphor for death, while nothing grows due to the lack of rain.

Reasons for hunger

People in Cabo Verde tend to portray drought and hunger as a historical destiny caused by weather conditions and the archipelago’s vulnerable position in the middle of the Atlantic. Depictions of poverty and lack of food as an inevitable and natural destiny frequently appear in the lyrics. There is a tendency to describe Cabo Verdeans as thrown into the middle of the ocean by an unfortunate fate – or by God. Yet the religious undertones are not very strong. Rather, it concerns an existential thrownness in Heidegger’s sense, a sense of having been thrown into sufferings that one had not chosen. This ‘thrownness’ made Manuel de Novas describe Cabo Verdeans as ‘underdogs shipwrecked in the middle of the sea’. In ‘Sina de Cabo Verde’ (Destiny of Cabo Verde), the lyricist Gabriel Mariano conveys that ‘Our God put it [Cabo Verde] in the middle of the sea’, and he compares the nation with ‘a ship made of stone searching for its course’. The poem continues by describing the consequences of the erratic rainfalls, underlining the picture of Cabo Verde as being exposed to a relentless and arbitrary destiny.

Table

Se ca tem chuba, morrê di sede	If there is no rain, we die from thirst
Se chuba bêm, morrê Fogo de	If the rain comes, we die from drowning
Gente sem sorte ca tem ramed	Unlucky people have no remedy
Tchora bô sina, tchora maguado	Cry your fate, cry your pain

The climate is undoubtedly the most common explanation in the lyrics for the sufferings of the Cabo Verdean people. The lack of rain and the concomitant barrenness – which implies that when it rains at last, there is a risk of flooding – is constantly pointed out as distinguishing Cabo Verde. The infertility of the land itself, the stones, the rocks, and the hopelessly dry fields bring hunger and suffering. Sometimes, rain is conceived of in religious terms. Rain is life-giving, and rainfall is a sign showing that God, after all, has not forgotten Cabo Verde. The day it rains is a day filled with hope for tomorrow and renewed faith. The emphasis on faith is salient in many of the lyrics, and as a cultural norm with colonial roots, it resonates with the understanding of sacrifice, as mentioned above. A notion of faith in tomorrow – and in God – goes hand in hand with the idea of sacrifice in the present. In practice, this faith is exemplified by how people with access to a small plot of land try to save seeds from one year to another, despite their experiences of successive failed harvests. To not do so would be to demonstrate a lack of faith.

However, beyond the image of geographical and climatological destiny as the main reason for the lack of food, a social critique started to emerge in the lyrics. It grew stronger as the independence movement gained ground in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In some cases, it was formulated as a critique of the morgado (landlord), who would charge the tenant a hefty rent even if it did not rain, and subsequently force the tenant to sell at a loss. In addition, they could demand free labour from their tenants and compel them to grow certain crops (Bigman 1993, 98f). The critique of the small but powerful national bourgeoisie and the sharecropping arrangements was substantiated by increasing protests against the colonial power. For the first time, it became possible to criticise colonialism openly as a source of suffering. The attribution of any political responsibility for hunger and death is thus of comparatively late date in the lyrics, as well as in Cabo Verdean society at large.

A restrained attribution of responsibility

In most cases, the lyrics demanding independence were formulated in guarded terms. In ‘Sonhe dum Criol/Chitada de fome’ (A Cabo Verdean’s Dream/Overcome Hunger), the lyricist Manuel de Novas states that ‘they don’t want us to speak clearly’. The reference to who ‘they’ are is left to the listeners’ imagination. In none of the lyrics we have analysed are ‘the colonisers’ or ‘the Portuguese’ explicitly pointed out. Instead, poems talk about the ‘domination of strangers’ who ‘sold our dignity for a penny’ (‘Nha terre aonte e aoje’, Kaka Barbosa) and state that ‘we have to take over our land’ (‘Grito de povo’, Abilio Duarte), without explicitly mentioning from whom. The attribution of a colonial responsibility for Cabo Verdeans’ hunger and misery was late and careful.

Arguably, there were manifold reasons for this guardedness. Fear and intimidation played an important role, especially during the period of the colonial liberation wars in the Portuguese African empire (1961–1974). Fighting never reached Cabo Verde, but some Cabo Verdeans joined the armed struggle on the territory that is today Guinea-Bissau. Yet there was a massive presence of Portuguese troops in the archipelago, and the concentration camp Tarrafal on the island of Santiago, run by the Portuguese secret police, cast its shadow across the archipelago. In Tarrafal, numerous freedom fighters from Angola, Guinea, Portugal and Cabo Verde succumbed to the heat behind the walls.

Another reason was the ambiguous political position of the colonial Cabo Verdean elite. In the Portuguese colonies on the African mainland, Cabo Verdeans served as middlemen. In the archipelago, only the governor and the most senior officials were Portuguese, while the rest of the administrative staff were Cabo Verdeans. The Cabo Verdean officials serving the metropole played a double role. They were Cabo Verdean subjects, and occasionally they advocated for their compatriots, but at the same time, they were representatives of the Portuguese administration. This position implied that they emphasised their elite status and distanced themselves from the rest of the population. This could entail blaming the desperate situation in Cabo Verde on the subordinate population and their alleged ‘passiveness and apathy’, and they demanded little support from the colonial state in alleviating poverty and starvation (Keese 2012, 55). After independence, many members of this elite group moved to Portugal and continued to see themselves as Portuguese citizens with Cabo Verdean ancestry.

Throughout the decades, the music worked as a sensitive witness to the sufferings caused by widespread hunger and periodic famines. Lyrics composed after independence were as political as they were poetic. One of the most famous of these lyrics is Renato Cardoso’s ‘Porton di nos ilha’ (The Gate of Our Island). In recent years, the widespread popularity of this music has made the Cabo Verdean government adopt its title as the name of the official website for online services to its citizens. The lyric starts with the line ‘When a new world knocked on the gate to our islands’ and finishes by affirming that in this world, everyone has the right to a ‘drop of water’. Everyone, in this case, is every human and every sinbron, the little yellow fruit mentioned earlier, whose disappearance from the dry slopes in the Cabo Verdean landscape signals the onset of famine. To write a lyric about the rights of the sinbron is not revolutionary in the traditional sense of the word. Still, it echoes a strong connection to the land and the fragile existence of its inhabitants.

Conclusions

As we argue in this article, hunger is surrounded by silence in Cabo Verde. Yet, paradoxically, experiences of suffering caused by the lack of food are central to understandings of what it means to be a Cabo Verdean. The national identity has been created in relation to a history of famines and the tiny nation’s vulnerable position in the middle of the Atlantic. Surrounded by the immense ocean and at the mercy of erratic rainfalls, Cabo Verdeans have been victims of hunger throughout history. Despite the silence, Cabo Verdeans know that hunger is central to the collective national history and that elderly family members have lived through ‘frakeza’, literary ‘weakness’, a concept that sometimes is used as a euphemism for famine. There is a sense of a shared history of victimisation.

The silence on hunger is apparent both in the official discourse promoted by the Cabo Verdean state and in everyday conversations. Contemporary hunger is a very sensitive theme, both to the state aspiring to appear modern, developed and successful, and to individuals wanting to avoid the stigma of poverty and failure. The history of hunger also contributes to the silence. Still, today, allusions to fome (hunger, starvation) evoke horror and dismay. The dark echoes of widespread hunger are still present and evoke feelings of fear, loss of dignity and powerlessness. Silence is sometimes an existential necessity.

Yet in the lyrics of Cabo Verdean music, the silence on hunger is broken. The consistent focus on poverty and hunger contributes to an unconscious ‘organic remembering’ and a transmission of memories across generations. The lyrics are not written, performed or listened to with the explicit aim of memorialising periods of famine. Yet they break with the silence on hunger and contribute to creating and recreating an image of drought and hunger as fundamental to Cabo Verdean history. This is all the more important as music plays a key role in contemporary constructions of the national self. Throughout the Cabo Verdean homeland and diaspora, people proudly see music as a ‘national speciality’. This has been fortified in recent years, as music from Cabo Verde has spread across the globe. The frequent allusions to hunger in the lyrics demonstrate that music may play an important role in transmitting memories that otherwise remain unspoken. Thus, this article demonstrates that music can be a space for remembering that diverges from official discourses and everyday topics of conversation. Lyrics can be important for identifying hidden discourses on hunger and other silenced issues.

Furthermore, this case exemplifies a less common version of (post-)colonial attribution of responsibility. Whereas in some former colonies, for instance India, the colonial power is identified as responsible for the hunger in colonial times, this is not the case in Cabo Verde. Cabo Verdeans agree that the Portuguese authorities totally disregarded the population’s sufferings, but despite this, there is very little attribution of responsibility to Portuguese colonial politics of neglect. Instead, a nameless destiny is blamed for hunger throughout the lyrics. As many of the songs were written in colonial times, one reason was fear of reprisals from the authorities. Yet it also had to do with the gradual and spontaneous process of colonial hybridisation, which implied that the Portuguese constituted an intrinsic part of the national self at the same time as they were immensely distant. Thus, the primordial hybridity characterising the nation and involving Portuguese ancestry is part of the explanation. In postcolonial times, the Cabo Verdean dependence on the outside world limits the space for blaming the former colonisers. Since independence, the Cabo Verdean state has done its best to keep up amicable foreign relations with all states that may influence the political and economic development in the country, and this obviously includes Portugal. Not blaming the ex-colonisers has been an important way forward for a small and dependent state.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Åkesson

Lisa Åkesson is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. She has led several projects on the recent Portuguese migration to Angola and Mozambique, focussing on postcolonial identities, power relations and transfer of knowledge. In addition, she has carried out research on Cape Verdean migration, exploring transnational families, remittances and relationships, return migration and cultural meanings of migration. She is the author of Postcolonial Portuguese Migration to Angola: Migrants or Masters? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and she has published in a number of journals, including Ethnos, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Global Networks and Geopolitics.

Alícia Borges Månsson

Alícia Borges Månsson is Senior Consultant with an MA in International Education and 20 years of experience working internationally on development cooperation projects. Her work has included management, preparation, implementation and evaluation of education, skills for employment, and health projects or programmes in various countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Notes

1 We use “symbol” in the sense of Victor Turner (1967, 19) – that is, “a symbol is a thing regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing or recalling something … by association in thought and fact.”

2 The ethnography of the article is based on the two authors’ long-term experience of the role music plays in Cabo Verdean everyday life. Lisa Åkesson has carried out intermittent anthropological fieldwork in Cabo Verde and the Cabo Verdean diaspora since the late 1990s. Alícia Borges Månsson grew up in Cabo Verde, has a keen interest in Cabo Verdean music and returns to her family and the island of her birth every year.

3 Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde).

4 The morna was born on the island of Boavista in the nineteenth century and evolved in the town of Mindelo on São Vicente. The port of Mindelo brought together inhabitants from the different islands and gave rise to an intense exchange of music styles.

5 Examples of such lyrics are found in mornas like ‘Li kê nha tchon’, composed by Pedro Rodrigues and performed by Ildo Lobo_Os Tubarões, 1989; ‘Tchon di morgado’, composed by Caló Querido and performed by Ildo Lobo_Os Tubarões, 1989; ‘Grito de Povo’, composed by Abilio Duarte and performed by Bana (Adriano Gonçalves), 1976; and ‘Pinote na vapor’, composed by Manuel de Novas and performed by Nhô Balta – Black Power, 1976.

6 All lyrics are originally in Cape Verdean Kriolu and have been translated into English by the authors.

7 We have consulted relevant Cabo Verdean authorities regarding permission to quote the lyrics, to ensure that there is no objection to our use of them in the article.

8 When googling famine, hunger and feelings, we found many links to “symptoms,” ie an outsider’s view, but very few references to what it actually feels like to starve, the insider’s perspective. Similarly, Scheper-Hughes (1992) comments on the lack of representation of actual experiences of hunger in anthropological texts.

9 When performed as music, the text in parentheses works as an echo for the rest of the line.

10 These were workplaces in Lisbon, well known for their exploitative working conditions. Companhia União Fabril (CUF) was one of the largest Portuguese corporations from the 1930s until 1974. Lisnave was a shipyard and part of CUF, and J. Pimenta was a construction company.