FORTHCOMING ISSUE: TRANSITION 103
Cover Image: "Princesa Lantunada" Acrylic on canvas. ©2007 Nelson Lobo
From the issue:
"In many ways, [Cesária Évora] and her story have served as the loci for the inquiries that the curious outside world makes of Cape Verde more generally: Is it Portugal? Is it Africa? Is it the African Diaspora, the easternmost Caribbean, or even an extension of Brazil? Is it the New World’s first and original Creole?"
- Carla Martin
"My cousin would tell me that one of her mother’s brothers, Uncle Noronha, had emigrated in the nineteen-thirties. He had become the president of one of the societies promoted in the magazines. It made me a bit perplexed that her uncle belonged in a Black-American society. How had he got in? As far as I was concerned, Uncle Noronha was neither American nor Black. His skin was actually the lightest in his family!"
- Camila Mont-Rond
"Nonetheless, it still needs to be remarked that this willed condition—the refusal to confront history in its fullest implications—has led black leaders of the Diaspora in the recent past to embrace—at the expense of their kinfolk on the black continent—the heirs and perpetuators of the slave-master tradition, the Mobutu Sese Sekos, the Idi Amins, the Macias Nguemas, Sanni Abachas, Omar al-Bashirs, and company."
- Wole Soyinka"… they saw from their obscurity the morbid remains of His Excellency, that proud body, always gesticulating, reduced to a minute figure stripped of its proverbial arrogance, a simple cadaver, helpless and naked, highlighted by an erect, proud, and protruding organ perforating the air as an act of defiance against nothingness. It was the sum total of his power, the foundation of his authority, symbol of his portentous virility, vestige of his energy and secular domination of all living beings."
"What catches his attention, however, is the fact that the language that is other than Fang is alsoother than Spanish, that there is something like an otherness within and between black speaking subjects as well. Unable, for the first time in his young life, to understand a black person while nonetheless understanding a white person, the narrator-protagonist confronts a rift between the visible signs of the body and the audible signs of language that throws his national identity into question."
- Donato Ndongo
- Brad Epps"…[Thabo] Mbeki’s relationship with Mandela was a complex one. Both attended Christian missionary schools and were Anglophiles who greatly admired British culture and institutions. Both were formal men who rarely showed their emotions in public. But while Mandela lived all of his life in South Africa and spent twenty-seven years in jail, Mbeki spent nearly thirty years outside South Africa. Where Mandela ruled like a patriarch, leaving policy details to his lieutenants, Mbeki was a policy wonk who reveled in the mechanics of governance. Where Mandela was charismatic and popular among the masses, Mbeki relied on political maneuvering within the ANC."
- Adekeye Adebajo_______________________________________________________________
Cape Verde: A "Cluster of Writing and Art Work"
Transition (103) is the Cabo Verde issue. The issue also announces a new editorial team consisting of literary and cultural critic Glenda Carpio, multi-media historian Vincent Brown and philosopher Tommie Shelby in the wake of the departure of editor Abiola Irele from Harvard to assume the role of Provost in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kwara State University, Malete, Nigeria.
Among the cluster of writing and artwork from Cape Verde—the first of its kind to be made available to an English-speaking audience--gathered by doctoral candidate Carla Martin for the issue, includes the article Contemporary Cape Verdean Literature by Russell G. Hamilton.
Excerpt (subscription needed):
...Cape Verdean intellectuals have long exalted in and struggled with their national and ethnic identity as Africans and as Creoles. Racially, linguistically, socially, and culturally, Cape Verde is a quintessentially Creole nation. Cape Verde has the distinction of having been the first and most comprehensive Creole society in Portuguese Africa. Much of this distinction can be attributed to the fact that many Portuguese men—including Sephardic Jews—arrived as settlers in Cape Verde, where they fathered children with African slaves. Manumission came early in the archipelago's history, and many mixed-race offspring of white fathers and black mothers were recognized as citizens of the colony, which was often referred to as a Portuguese Overseas Province. Here I quote from Robert Harm's The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, an account of a French slave
ship in the 1730s which devotes considerable attention to Cape Verde, one of the Diligent's ports of call:"A mestiço community on Santiago had been recognized as early as 1582, and by 1731, Santiago counted 394 whites and 2461 mestiços.… The Cape Verde islands represented a kind of cultural halfway house between the society [that the crew of the Diligent] had left behind in France and the ones they would encounter in Africa. Not only did the skin tones they observed on the island cover the full spectrum from white to black, but the cultural mixture also defied existing stereotypes. Santiago had literate black priests and illiterate white priests, and the only dynamic sector of its economy was dominated by enslaved weavers using African technology. Culturally, as well as geographically, the Diligent was halfway between Europe and its designated landfall in West Africa" (p. 113).In the Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara, Eve L. Crowley elaborates:"A scarcity of human and financial resources made miscegenation with local populations a tactical necessity for Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese trade intermediaries.… In Cape Verde, superior education, cultural proximity to the Portuguese, and physical resistance to tropical diseases made the Creole offspring of Europeans and slaves from Senegambia, Guinea, and the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) ideal employees in Portuguese firms and administration throughout Portugal's African colonies" (p. 380).Eve Crowley and Robert Harms are both communicating the historical reality of the early emergence in Cape Verde of a Creole elite. Because of the nature of the settlement of the previously uninhabited archipelago, a Creole intelligentsia established itself on several of the islands considerably before the emergence of acculturated elites in the four other Portuguese colonies of Africa. We know, for example, that the first secondary school in all of the former colonies was established in the mid-nineteenth century in the city of Praia on the island of Santiago. Schools that also served members of the Black and mixed-race population opened on the islands of São Nicolau and São Vicente soon after. It was because of the early emergence of a Creole elite that Cape Verde gave rise to the Portuguese African colonies' first comprehensive literary-cultural movement: the claridosos, those literate, educated Creoles who, in 1936, founded the historic journal Claridade and saw their poems, stories, and critical essays published there. The Claridade generation, followed by those who founded the journal called Certeza, and then those of the Boletim dos Alunos do Liceu Gil Eanes: all of these writers and cultural agents have shared in the legacies of crioulidade [Creoleness] and reflect the relatively homogeneous hybridity of a former colony that developed, before its time, the ethos of a nation-state.But if everyone agrees upon the significance of Creoleness for Cape Verde, the significance of Africanness is more hotly contested. Some, including Eve L. Crowley, maintain that Cape Verde's Creole inhabitants are substantially less African than their counterparts in other former Portuguese colonies, specifically São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. The archipelago is situated about 385 miles off the west coast of the continent, and how the archipelago relates to its African past and present determines much of how Cape Verdeans view themselves in relation to the world.
