On July 5, Cape Verde marks 50 years of independence. It’s an important anniversary for the thousands of Cape Verdeans who will be celebrating in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which together are home to the largest population of Cape Verdeans in the country.
Morning Host Luis Hernandez spoke with two people from the region who are being honored at the national celebration in Washington D.C. Dr. Aminah Fernandes Pilgrim is a visual artist, community organizer and associate professor of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music. Providence native Sara Monteiro is an entrepreneur, artist, and University of Rhode Island alumna who will be performing at the 50th anniversary celebration in D.C.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Dr. Aminah, if I may ask just briefly, for people who may not know, but this independence came, I believe, after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Could you just help us understand what was happening right before July 5, 1975?
Aminah Fernandes Pilgrim: You know, for several years leading up to 1975, the anti-Portuguese colonial war was waged by this group of activists, intellectuals, farmers, teachers, poets, musicians, who really had a vision for a way out of the Portuguese fascism that was plaguing the country along with climate change and drought and famine that was killing hundreds of thousands of people. So leading up to that moment was a really powerful saga, a drama that took place across two countries, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau in Cape Verde, and represented one of the most powerful revolutions. [Amilcar] Cabral was able to unite many, many different people speaking many different tribal languages, worshiping different gods, people from Guinea-Bissau, as well as people from Cape Verde, and to do so in a way that inspired many, many different people all over the continent.
Hernandez: Something fascinating about this, Sara, is that celebrating American independence, no one has a living relative who was there to tell us what happened, but with your independence, Cape Verde independence, you have living relatives who could tell you what happened beforehand. You have those stories.
Sara Monteiro: I do. I do. I’m making my life goal to collect as many of them as possible. I think like the 50th is a time for Cape Verdeans to start talking about the silent sufferings that happened, the sharecropping happened in Cape Verde, for us to say that we were raped and that there is a lot of colorism and a lot of separatism between us made and manufactured by our colonizers. So the 50th to me is a call very much like Bob made when he asked for mental emancipation. The 50th very much is a call when Fela (Kuti) and everybody else asked for Africa to unite. Cabral very, very uniquely liberated two countries at the same time. I don’t know that we’ve seen that BOGO deal in, in world history, right? And so there is so much to uncover, like Cape Verdeans are going to have to be their own archeologists to go back, because we do have immaculate records. What we do know about slavery globally is that records were kept. So for me it’s Cape Verdeans embracing that identity, going back home and getting to know your stories. I am collecting those stories and I am telling them through photography, through poetry, and through different mediums.
Hernandez: Sara, can you share one of your poems with us that you’ll be reading at the event in Washington?
Monteiro: Yeah. I’ll give you a quick little piece that I use to just warm up the crowd. This piece is called “Time.”
How much love did you leave behind? Did you extend yourself to all humankind?Did you tend to your garden and watch your flowers bloom? Did you take up space while leaving room? Were you of service and selfish when needed?Did you stand firm in your values and deeply seated? Did you honor spiritual fruit and walk in humility?Did you leave everyone, including your enemies, with dignity? Were you the head and not the tail? When life got rough, did you bail?Or did you rise to all occasions and learn from your mistakes? Did you learn the lesson or did you need a second take?Hernandez: That was beautiful. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Such a beautiful day and so much to celebrate. And then unfortunately, there are these moments, and I’m thinking about the one actually that just happened, this week. A Lincoln man was caught on camera vandalizing a Cape Verdean flag outside of East Providence City Hall. He was caught. He had a knife and a Nazi flag. Sara, I’ll start with you. What does this incident signal to you about the current state of discrimination and racism still towards Cape Verdeans in the U.S.? Your reaction to what happened?
Monteiro: Yeah. I will just loudly say it for the whole world, that the enemy has never overwhelmed me, I’m underwhelmed by the stupidity in 2025. There is a time that we could have said, “Hey, certain decisions were made because people didn’t know better.” But we have enough information to know better now. And so when I see those forms of attempts of disrespect, I almost find them laughable to a certain degree – and I say this with a grain of salt, right? I live by the sayings that Jamaicans say, which is “If the mad man makes you mad, you madder than the mad man, you know.” We are focused on our independence. We are focused on freedom. We are focused on celebration, and there is nobody that can take that focus from us. The bill has been paid and the tip was high. There is no more explaining. And so I hope he got his tantrum out of his body. I hope that it cost him a lot, but for my people, it’s not moving us. And I’m super grateful for law enforcement just taking the actions that they needed to take. But I say we not give him too much time.
Hernandez: Dr. Aminah, please, I give you the chance to speak up about this.
Fernandes Pilgrim: Well, coming on this platform with a poet is a challenge and an honor. Sara spoke so powerfully about this moment. But for me as a cultural historian, I think about echoes that this moment has in the past. I grew up in Onset, Mass., which was known as Jungle Town. It was called Jungle Town by folks in the media who obviously had racist leanings and were thinking about stereotypes of the African continent. In Onset, there were many, many moments that were similar like the one that just happened in Lincoln. So what I’m getting at is that Cape Verdeans throughout the diaspora have always faced systemic racism, the same kind of anti-blackness that has played so many different people, melanated people. So this is just one recent moment, but I think it should make us think about the long history of struggle that we faced.
Click here for more information about Dr. Aminah Fernandes Pilgrim, Sara Monteiro, and the other honorees and performers at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Cabo Verde’s Independence in Washington, D.C. this weekend.
