Cape Verde holds together, as a state, what the sea keeps apart

On the map Cape Verde is a group of islands west of West Africa. The state that carries them is not a coast with a hinterland. It is what holds between the islands, and what remains when people leave across the sea.

Praia, on Santiago, is the capital because government sits there and because Santiago is the most populous island, not because the archipelago has a natural centre. Mindelo, on São Vicente, was the harbour on the Atlantic routes. Sal and Boa Vista stand dry in the wind. Fogo carries a volcano. The area is 4,033 square kilometres, the population 527,326. Both figures describe the ground. They do not describe how far the families reach.

Windward and leeward

The northern islands are called Barlavento, the side that faces the wind. They include Santo Antão, São Vicente, São Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista. The southern islands are Sotavento: Santiago, Fogo, Brava and Maio. The names say which shore meets the trade wind first. The western islands are greener, the eastern ones dry. Rain there is not scenery for visitors. It is the line between a valley that can carry a crop and a field that cannot.

There is no mainland of this state. Anyone going from one island to another takes a ship or a plane. The republic has not made a romance of that. It has made harbours, administrations and a capital that claims the archipelago from Santiago. The eastern islands lie closer to the African coast and are still not an annex of that coast. The western ones lie farther out. Together they are a West African state without a land border. Neighbours in the sense of a shared boundary line are absent. The setting of politics is the sea.

Portuguese in office, Creole in the street

The official language is Portuguese. The constitution says so, and it holds for school, law and the written state. What people speak is Cape Verdean Creole, and they do not speak it the same way on every island. The differences belong on the map. Read only the official gazette and you see a Lusophone country. Stand in the market and you hear a language formed by the long contact of Portuguese with the African languages of the settlement. Independence in 1975 changed the flag, not this division of labour.

This double language order is not a gap the state still has to close in order to exist properly. It is the way the state exists. Portuguese ties Cape Verde to a wider Lusophone world and to written law. Creole ties the islands to one another, even where speech changes from Sal to Brava. A state made of islands needs a language people do not first receive at school. It also needs a language in which judgments and contracts stay fixed.

The islands are the state. What carries between them is language, and the crossing.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Leaving belongs to the order of things

The islands are dry, and the land that can be farmed is scarce beside the number of people born there. Emigration to Portugal, to the American continents and to other European countries is therefore not a side effect of the latest season. It is an old answer to a narrow, arid territory. Mindelo bunkered coal for ships crossing the Atlantic. The position on the routes tied the archipelago early to other people's harbours. Money sent home today repeats that order.

The capital remains Praia. The nation is larger than the area printed in the identity papers. That is not a line for a brochure. It is the political economy of a state that cannot feed all its people on its own ground and still treats them as part of its order. The currency is the Cape Verdean escudo, issued by the country's central bank and pegged to the euro. The peg says where part of the economic relation points. It does not replace the rain that falls on Santo Antão and fails on Sal.

Cape Verde is small in square kilometres and wide in the biographies. Praia is the seat of a state the sea both separates and carries.