Cape Verdean emigration refers to the historical process whereby the inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of western Africa have immigrated to other countries over the last two centuries. The islands were uninhabited until they were colonized by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and so Cape Verde provides a peculiar case of a country which experienced both mass immigration and emigration over the space of just five centuries. Emigration since the nineteenth century has been driven by poverty, drought, famine and disease in a country which until recent times was very poor. The two main countries which Cape Verdeans left for were the United States and Portugal, as the mother country of the colony. Cape Verdean diaspora communities are also found in many other countries in South America, Europe and Africa. There are more people of Cape Verdean heritage living abroad than there are on the islands themselves.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
Cape Verdean emigration chronology of events
The Cape Verde Islands are an archipelago of ten volcanic islands in close proximity to one another in the Atlantic Ocean. They lie between 600 and 850 kilometers off the coast of Senegal in western Africa.[2] Because of their relative remoteness, the islands have been uninhabited for the vast majority of human history and were only first settled following the discovery of them by Portuguese explorers in the middle of the fifteenth century. Thereafter they became an important naval station in Portugal’s ongoing efforts to find a sea route to Asia by sailing around Africa. The first colony was established on the island of Santiago, the largest of the chain, in 1462. Thereafter the islands’ position in the mid-Atlantic became an important one in terms of facilitating the Portuguese trans-Atlantic slave trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and once the Brazilian Gold Rush began in the late seventeenth century. The population of the Cape Verde Islands grew in tandem. It drew colonists from Portugal, though the larger percentage of those who arrived were people of African heritage, either as slaves or free settlers and traders.[3]
Until the start of the nineteenth century the Cape Verde Islands were net centers of inward migration. That pendulum swung completely after around 1820. In an age of growing global connectedness as the age of the steamship and mass migration began, people began leaving, particularly so after slavery was belatedly abolished in 1878. Periodic bouts of drought and famine on these relatively barren volcanic islands fuelled intermittent waves of migration. This became more sustained in the twentieth century, particularly so during an age when identification of the islanders as ‘Portuguese’ made international migration easier. Independence in 1975 changed that dynamic, but emigration has continued nonetheless. Economic opportunity abroad has been a major driving force in the last quarter of the twentieth century, although rising GDP levels at home have dampened the impetus towards emigration in the twenty-first century.[4]
Extent of Cape Verdean emigration
While the Cape Verde Islands experienced net inward migration from Portugal and from western Africa between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, that process began to reverse itself in the nineteenth century. Accurate records are hard to come by in establishing the scale of Cape Verdean emigration, for the reason that most demographic records did not identify a separate category of Cape Verdean migrants. They were listed simply as Portuguese. Consequently, we cannot be sure exactly how many Cape Verdeans were leaving the islands in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century. Clearly the figure numbered into the tens of thousands. Many were leaving for Portugal, though others headed for the United States. The entry of Cape Verdeans was limited in the latter country after the implementation of the Immigrant Act of 1924.[5]
Others still headed for Brazil and Argentina, while others went to Africa where nearby Senegal was a popular destination, along with Angola and Mozambique, the latter two being distant from the Cape Verde Islands, but being Portuguese colonies as well. In more recent decades thousands of Cape Verdeans have arrived to other European countries. Some arrived second-hand via Portugal, notably to Luxembourg, a country where nearly 15% of the population are people of Portuguese heritage.[6]
Demographic impact of Cape Verdean emigration
The demographic impact of emigration from the Cape Verde islands has been less severe than one might think from examining the levels of migration over the last two centuries. It has not impacted on the overall population growth of the island archipelago. For instance, by the middle of the twentieth century, the Cape Verde population had grown to over 150,000 people. It continued to expand thereafter, reaching 300,000 in the middle of the 1980s, then half a million early in the twenty-first century. Today the population is nearing 600,000 people. Therefore, for all that emigration has been extensive for a sustained period of time, the population of the islands themselves has continued to grow quickly.[7]
The demographic impact abroad is harder to measure, a fact accounted for by the aforementioned tendency to identify Cape Verdeans in many countries as ‘Portuguese’, depending on when they were born and when they emigrated. This aside, there are substantial diaspora communities in many countries. The largest are in Portugal and the United States, though estimates of the size of these communities vary between 70,000 and 250,000.[8] In Africa, the largest Cape Verdean community is in Senegal, approximately 25,000 strong. The Netherlands, with an estimated 20,000, has a significant Cape Verde community, as does Argentina with somewhere in the realm of 15,000.[9] Beyond these there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people of Cape Verdean heritage in Spain, Italy, France, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and Germany. Because of its enormous Portuguese community, some Cape Verdeans have also ended up in Luxembourg, while there are several thousand Cape Verdeans in Angola and Mozambique, Portugal’s other former African colonies. Many Cape Verdeans no longer have recognizably Cape Verdean surnames. For instance, the famous Swedish footballer, Henrik Larsson, is of Cape Verdean heritage, though his surname is clearly a Swedish one.[10]
See also
Explore more about Cape Verdean emigration
- Cape Verde: Towards the End of Emigration? at Migration Policy Institute
- Portugal, Baptisms, 1570-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Marriages, 1670-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Portugal, Deaths, 1640-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/cape-verde-towards-end-emigration
- ↑ https://www.countryreports.org/country/capeverde/geography.htm
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1762/the-portuguese-colonization-of-cape-verde/
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/cape-verde-towards-end-emigration
- ↑ Jorgen Carling and Luis Batalha, ‘Cape Verdean Migration and Diaspora’, in Luis Batalha and Jorgen Carling (eds.), Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean Migration and Diaspora (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 13–32.
- ↑ Luis Batalha and Jorgen Carling (eds.), Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean Migration and Diaspora (Amsterdam, 2008), chapters 5–9.
- ↑ https://datacommons.org/place/country/CPV#
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/cape-verde-towards-end-emigration
- ↑ Marta Maffia, ‘Cape Verdeans in Argentina’, in Luis Batalha and Jorgen Carling (eds), Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean Migration and Diaspora (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 47–54.
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/03/henrik-larsson-i-have-106-caps-for-sweden-but-i-see-myself-as-foreign