“Bring the Empire Back In:” Neo-Lusotropicalism in the Cape Verde Islands

In a time of a widespread Afro-pessimist dogma with its “bring the empire back in” corollary, there is a tendency among Cape Verdean politicians to reshape and remake old and outdated colonial ideologies. These new ideologies, dressed not in imperial clothes but rather in republican clothes, are made be the way out for Cape Verdean socio-political and even economic development. The mainstream political discourse is heavily charged with fundamental tenets of the old Portuguese colonial ideology of Lusotropicalism, in which Cape Verdean population, a hybrid “race” is everything but an African people. After the pan-Africanist interlude of the post-colonial first Republic (19 75-1991), there is now a dominant political tendency toward “adjencentism” to the European Union. The political identity as such is reconstructed to fit the adjencentist model and there are politicians who even go further in advocating the withdrawal from the regional cooperation framework, the Economic Community of West African States.

This paper is analysis of the contemporary political discourse in Cape Verde. It is divided into four main parts. In the first part, the introduction, the theme of debate is presented and first steps towards my argument are taken. In the second part, I tackle the concept of Lusotropicalism, as both social scientific theory and an ideology of the colonial state, justifying and legitimizing the Portuguese in the tropics. In this section, I also break down the ideology of Lusotropicalism into its main tenets, which can be useful to draw a comparison with the present state of affairs. In the third section of the paper, I analyze the political discourse of the contemporary elite in Cape Verde, which it is argued that is marred with Lusotropicalist tenets. At the same, it is also looked at the causes of the rise of the Neo-Lusotropicalist ideology. In here special attention is given to the rise of what is termed as “neo-adjacentism,” that is, the idea that Cape Verde is part of European cultural tradition and, ipso facto, deserves to be politically adjacent islands to the European Union. In the concluding remarks, I restate my argument and present the key points defended throughout the paper.