O Extrativismo Humano em Cabo Verde. Notas sobre algumas continuidades coloniais após a independência

Abstract

The Royal Charters of 1466 and 1472 inaugurate a colonial policy in the Cape Verde islands which is called human extractivism, in the context of the commercial and mercantile capitalism emerging at that time. The city of Ribeira Grande Santiago was to be the protagonist of a “bureaucratic machine” at the service of colonial modernity which was to be exported to the Americas. The processes of ladinisation (baptism) of the enslaved, of the creation and consolidation of the categories “whites of the land” and “cast-offs”, constitute examples which paradoxically confirm human extractivism at the heart of the island slave society and the unprecedented transformation of the human being into a product for exploitation and export and, on the other hand, motivate a secular resistance of the same. The work also aims at analysing, besides ruptures and transformations, some continuities of this bureaucratic machine after independence, namely in the political and immigration fields.