3 - Revolutions and Transformations (1973–75)

Summary

In Cabo Verde, rain is the problem. We’ve had this kind of problem with rainfall for almost twenty-five years. Since then, a lot of people have had to leave the country. I was one of them, not because I felt the necessity, but because many of my friends went to Portugal and I felt alone, so I went, too. I stayed in Portugal for seven years. I never went back to Cabo Verde but I’m going back this year to play there… After my father died, I went to work in a graphics place. The owner was from Portugal. I learned a lot of things with this guy. After that, I went to Portugal. I was sixteen years old and I worked in graphics there, too. And I was playing in this band … my band went to France, Holland, and Italy to play. After that, I came to America.

— Norberto Tavares

The War of Liberation (1961–74)

Between sixteen-year-old Norberto Tavares’s departure from Cabo Verde in 1973 and his band’s first album in Lisbon just two years later in 1975, Tavares underwent a transformation as he assimilated to urban life, joined a working band, and developed his songwriting skills. Life for his compatriots also changed in profound ways as Portugal’s former colonies/overseas provinces in Africa became independent. At the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, UK, in 1945, early African nationalists had already demanded the end of colonialism but the decolonization process in Africa unfolded in a variety of ways and speeds. By 1970 most other territories controlled by European powers had gained sovereignty, beginning with Ghana in 1957, but Portugal resisted. Sometimes the independence process was peaceful and in other cases, it only came after a drawn-out revolution.

Such was the case in Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé and Principe, Guinea-Bissau, and Cabo Verde, where it took a prolonged guerrilla war effort on the ground before Portugal relinquished its territories. António de Oliveira Salazar was prime minister of the Estado Novo and head of its far-right authoritarian regime in Portugal from 1932–74: the dictatorship was reluctant to lose the profitable overseas provinces.