Cabo Verde

An uninhabited archipelago that became the first European colony in the tropics and the hinge of the Atlantic slave trade. The ten islands off Senegal had no population at all when Portuguese navigators reached them around 1456, and Ribeira Grande on Santiago, founded in 1462, was the first permanent European settlement in the tropics anywhere. Its position made it an entrepot: captives from the Guinea coast were held, sold and shipped on from here, and the society that formed from Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans produced a creole language and culture that predate almost every comparable case in the Americas. Drought is the recurring catastrophe - famines in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries killed large fractions of the population and drove emigration, and more Cabo Verdeans now live abroad, particularly in the United States and Portugal, than at home. Amilcar Cabral built the PAIGC to liberate both Guinea-Bissau and these islands, and independence came in July 1975; the planned union with Bissau ended after a coup there in 1980. Cabo Verde has held free elections and peaceful transfers since 1991, an unusual record. Morna, the music Cesaria Evora carried worldwide, is recognised by Unesco. Praia is the capital. The country has about 525 thousand people on ten islands, nine of them inhabited. Portuguese is official and Cabo Verdean creole is what everyone speaks. Cidade Velha, the old Ribeira Grande, is a World Heritage site. Pico do Fogo is an active volcano that erupted in 2014. The islands lie about 570 kilometres off the West African coast.

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