| Portugal, home to large Cape Verdean communities. Yet the tiny, dynamic nation is unique in Africa, perhaps the world: Its territory was empty before the slave trade, and its people now are a thorough racial and cultural blend of those who suffered and profited in the human exchange. I had heard the country was Portuguese and African, neither here nor there. Could one place be both? Was this place Africa or not? Before departing, I studied Cape Verdean history and academic theory but I did not prepare for a personal journey. I had no idea my time in the islands would force me to re-examine myself and my multiracial family at its very core. This is an intimate and sometimes painful tale about race and identity in my family and in a West African nation -- a place we once called home. "The culture started to mix"
My first glimpse of Cape Verde, population 400,000, was of the parched, crumbling dirt alongside the airport runway. It reminded me this was not a lush island paradise, but a country that gets almost no rain and suffers severe, prolonged droughts. Repeated famines have historically killed as much as 40 percent of its people. Though each of its 12 volcanic islands are different, much of the country’s 2,500 square land mass looks like a moonscape: cracked earth, sparse vegetation and very little natural shade. Yet the islands also are gorgeous, its people charming. In my first days there, I climbed steep, cobble-stoned roads and took pictures of pastel-colored Portuguese-style homes. Every vista, it seemed, revealed a pristine turquoise ocean, home to some of the most abundant fishing seas in the world. Still, lack of rain has been the nation's historical linchpin, the reason the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese claimed them during their 15th-century slave trade and the reason their attempts to build an agriculture-based slave society failed. On the windy islands, tens of thousands of West African captives were stripped of their cultures before being shipped to the Americas. Early Cape Verde was little more than a brutal trading post. “There were no conditions for classical colonization,” said Dr. Onesimo Silveira, the mayor of Mindelo, the country's second-largest city, on Sao Vicente Island. “There was no culture to be oppressed here and no resources to exploit.” “So,” he said, “the culture started to mix.” By the early 1800s, Cape Verde had more free, multiracial blacks than slaves. Today, about three-quarters call themselves Creole. Many resemble African Americans: decidedly black with a blend of features and skin colors from very pale to very dark. Other Africans often thought of Cape Verdeans as a bastardized people: not quite African, certainly not European. Their unwritten language, Criolo, was thought to be little more than a crude slang. In Santiago, the largest island, I looked around and saw, as I wrote in my journal, “Africa, undeniable.” I saw it in cuisine of beans, corn, rice and fish, in the quiet dominance of men in society, in the round-bottomed women supporting babies on their backs and balancing towering bundles on their heads. Yet Portugal was here, too. It was in the architecture and the espresso-rich cafes and the occasional white skin and blond hair. This was not the Africa I had known when I lived in Nairobi, Kenya, as a college student. And everywhere I saw my family. It was eerie to be 10,000 miles from home yet share sidewalks with people who could be my cousins, aunts and grandparents. I had never been in a place where I was constantly mistaken for a local. One breezy Sunday afternoon at a patio restaurant in Praia, the hustling capitol of 85,000, I asked a handful of Cape Verdeans about their nation’s identity. They watched dust clouds rolling down the street and debated the subject over Kleps beer. “The question is,” one woman said, pointing a finger in the air, “Is Cape Verde Africa or is Cape Verde Cape Verde?” One man blurted, “No! We are all Africans. We are all the same!” ‘Yes, we are African, but we are -- I don't know how to say it --diverse?” she said. “In America, you have Canadians and American Latinos but all are American. I am sure I am African, that is not a question, but we each have different cultures.” Joao Andrade, a government worker who was giving me a tour of the city, was visibly uncomfortable. “All this about Africa,” he scoffed, steering me away from the group. “What is the point?” We sat down to plates of fish, rice and French fries and he insisted, “We are Cape Verdeans.” I was confused. How could one man feel Cape Verde was Africa, one man say it was not, and the woman say it was both? And how could this group of strangers look and sound so much like my family, who had had -- throughout my childhood -- heated discussions about race over my grandmother's Sunday dinner table? A work in progress
Identity questions have haunted my family for generations. Carlos and Maria Dias Teixeira, my Cape Verdean great-grandparents, emigrated to America in 1910. They joined a burgeoning Cape Verdean American community in New England and became part of a Diaspora that today includes more Cape Verdeans than in the islands themselves. Historical accounts indicate that most identified on immigration papers as Portuguese. My family apparently did, too. As I interviewed Cape Verdeans in Santiago, I remembered comments and conversations about race I had heard as a child in Southern California. It seemed my relatives had always disagreed on whether we were black, Cape Verdean, Creole or Portuguese. I didn't recall much mention of African roots, and when they talked about “back home,” they meant Portugal. Today, only a few in my family can easily locate Cape Verde on a map or recognize the sound of Criolo, an Afro-Portuguese language. Most would deny Cape Verde is part of Africa at all. My great-grandparents came from a place and time that embraced Portugal over Africa, and they emigrated to a country known for lynching its black men. With their Portuguese names and mix of physical features, it must have been relatively easy for them to overlook their African heritage and adopt a more convenient history. And pass it on to their children. Generations later, my parents and some in the family who matured during the civil rights movement flipped the script. They raised their children to be black and proud. Not Portuguese, not mixed, not even Cape Verdean -- terms they scoffed at as code for “better than black.” During my time in the islands, I learned that Cape Verde went through a similar identity transformation during its bid for independence, which came in 1975. Revolutionary and intellectual Amilcar Cabral simultaneously led freedom movements in Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau, alongside similar efforts in Angola and Mozambique. “It was an exciting time,” said Dr. Dulce Almada Duarte, a linguist who fought with her husband in the revolution. “We discovered we were African.” For the first time, Criolo music and poetry flourished, and many embraced a Cape Verdean history that was not Portugal-centered. That process is still in motion: This summer, for the first time, the nation’s democratically elected Parliament discussed making Criolo an official language (in addition to standard Portuguese). Likewise, my family's identity also is a work in progress. For me, part of that process involved searching for our lost relatives in Cape Verde. No conclusions
After about a week in Santiago, I headed west to Fogo, my grandfather’s island dominated by a massive volcano that last erupted in 1995. I had brought with me family photographs and a copy of my great-grandmother's passport, dated 1921. Maria and Carlos originally left around 1910 but returned a few times and had three children in the islands before they permanently settled in America. The document says that Maria da Graca Teixeira came from a village in Fogo called Mosquito. Once there, I quickly found Dias Teixeiras (this is the original family name, including the different spelling), but they were too young to know of my grandfather. For more than a week, I asked around, showed my pictures and scoured government offices for birth, property or marriage records. Once, I knocked on the door of a Teixeira family whose patriarch had just died. No one knew of my relatives. But folks in tiny Sao Filipe, Fogo’s capitol, heard that an American Cape Verdean journalist was in town asking about Teixeiras. I heard that an old man named Antonio Dias Teixeira from Mosquito was looking for me. At his home, I was greeted by familiar-looking faces. Antonio and his wife, Agda, grew excited looking at my family photos. Agda poked her husband, exclaiming that pictures of my grandfather, John Francis, looked like her son. Pointing to another photo, she said, “And look! This looks just like Nelhino!” Manuel “Nelhino” Dias Teixeira, an elderly Cape Verdean living in Boston, was a distant cousin of Antonio's. Though Antonio didn't know of my grandfather or his father, weeks later, back home, I contacted Nelhino and learned that Antonio is likely my grandfather’s second cousin-and that there is a large clan of Teixeiras originally from Mosquito living in Boston, Holland and Cape Verde. They had always wondered what happened to our branch of the family. Indeed. After nearly a month in the islands, I returned to California and have struggled to tell this story, struggled to understand my journey. I came to no profound conclusions. I think that, even as my ancestors built happy lives in America, they lost some part of themselves as they prospered. Perhaps by returning to Cape Verde, I made a small attempt to reintroduce my clan to Africa. Some in my family will be none too thrilled with this prospect. Others will be delighted. Though we may resemble one another and share blood, each in my family has adopted a different identity label. I'm beginning to understand that none is right or wrong. In my tribe, some are white and some Portuguese. Some are black, African American and Cape Verdean. Though I call myself African American, I know that I am also every label used by anyone who came before me -- even those terms that make me cringe. I'm all of it. I'm a Texeira.
Erin Texeira is a staff writer covering race issues for the Los Angeles Times.
 | | | Our meeting had been arranged by Odette Nyiramilimo, a Tutsi doctor and the country’s minister of state for social affairs. The mother of three and herself married to a Hutu physician, Odette had been immortalized in Phillip Gourevitch's 1998 award-winning book, “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.” Several days before, I had ventured into Odette’s health clinic -- one of too few focused on women’s health needs in Rwanda. There, I’d watched scores of women patiently wait line up for hours outside the low-slung, white, stone building to be treated by the seemingly tireless doctor for pregnancy complications, disease, or need of simple compassion. Residing in Kigali, Clementine originally came from Cyangugu, a lush, agriculturally rich community located to the west on the Congolese (Zairean) border. Before April 6, 1994, she lived an uncomplicated, peaceful existence as wife to Rudasingwa Jean-Paul, and mother to two young sons, Patric, and Victor. On that day, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi, Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, respectively, was shot down just prior to landing at the Kigali airport. In short time, genocide by the majority Hutu ethnic group was launched against the minority Tutsis. Three months later, a million civilians had been murdered by their countrymen, and at least 1.2 million were displaced from their homes, fleeing into the rural, outer reaches or across the border in the direction to Zaire or Tanzania. “People [just] started killing each other,” said Clementine, who fled with her children to the Zairean border with UNAMIR (United Nations Mission to Rwanda) troops. “My husband was there. He had been cut (in the face) with a machete, but he could still talk. We were supposed to have met earlier.” Their meeting was brief as Hutu militiamen armed with panga sticks, clubs and machetes took him—along with other wounded civilians—and their two sons to another site. Clementine was sent to a village called Bukavu, and released after two nights. “I asked them, ‘Why do you take our husbands and sons?’ ” she recalled. “Then they would ask us for money to see them. If we wanted to bring food, we also had to pay. I went back to Cyangugu to find medicine and food.” Instead of the undisturbed, lovingly built home she expected, Clementine found the ruins of her family possessions, and a Hutu mob. The local political administrator had brought back the Interhamwe (Hutu militia) to the area in order to flush out any surviving Tutsis. The frightened woman was brought a list of Hutu people who’d been killed in the chaos and asked if was involved. She knew nothing about them, but the thugs began hitting her anyway with a mallet. “My two nephews were present at the attack [but could do nothing],” she told me. One week away from delivering her and Jean-Paul’s third child, her stomach was sliced open and the fetus taken out to be mutilated. The countrywide station, “Radio Milles Collines,” had urged Hutus to destroy babies, “potential enemies” for the future. Four of the men raped Clementine over several days’ time. When they had finished their violation of her, the political administrator savagely kicked her in the vagina, drawing massive amounts of blood. Speaking in her Kinyarwanda language through muted tones, Clementine remembered someone saying, “She doesn't merit this. Just beat her and kill her.” They did allow her to live though. “They wanted me to live a lifetime of suffering, to never forget what had happened,” she said. Seven years later, her husband and children dead, she is infected with AIDS. In the past decade an increasing amount of focus has been directed by the international community toward gender crimes, especially in conflict. But while much of the attention has been on the sexual maltreatment of female civilians in Kosovo and Bosnia, the situation in Rwanda has provided several landmark judicial rulings and resulted in devastating generational consequences for the survivors of 1994’s genocide. The two most visible effects are in the rate of HIV/AIDS infection and the parallel number of “unaccompanied” children. During the bloodletting, a well-conceived plan chillingly unfolded as the radio airwaves fueled the Hutu’s murderous frenzy, encouraging them kill anyone suspected of being Tutsi including the children, or “little cockroaches.” Women were targeted, not only for death, but sexual attack. Upwards of 250,000 women were raped by the Hutus, leaving the survivors infected with sexually transmitted diseases and 5,000 unwanted children, known in Rwanda as “enfants mauvais souvenir,” the “children of bad memories.” According to a 1996 report compiled by Human Rights Watch, “Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan genocide and its Aftermath,” victimized women were depicted as “high class seductresses, beautiful women who would corrupt a pure Hutu society.” Typically assaulted with sharp objects or gun barrels, many survivors detailed wounds to their breasts and genitalia. Nearly all of those raped were attacked after seeing their spouses and families murdered. Over a third of them were impregnated. In a country where rape and widowhood are quickly frowned upon, the lives of the devastated women have been anything but easy. Abortion is illegal in Rwanda, so many mothers of the Hutu-Tutsi children have abandoned them to orphanages, the streets, or in some cases murdered them. In addition to the children they bore, over half of the rape victims are thought to be HIV-positive, in a country where one in ten people has the virus. The infection rates were high due to several factors, including the number of rapes that occurred, the genital injuries inflicted and the frequency of gang rapes. HIV. When the 1.2 million Hutus who fled to Zaire returned home in 1998, they brought back two and a half years' worth of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. The rate of infection in the refugee camps was around eight and a half percent. As other sub-Saharan, African countries, HIV/AIDS has fluidly spread throughout Rwanda. Health experts with the National AIDS Control Programme estimate 500,000 Rwandans are infected, and sadly, the country is unable to treat or counsel a significant proportion of them. The country’s HIV/AIDS infection rate began rising in 1998, when 11 percent of the adult population was infected, compared to two percent in 1986. Even more telling is the fact that in a country of eight million citizens, there are only 120 doctors. Only a minimal number can afford the $450 per month for treatment. At Kigali’s central hospital, one of just two HIV/AIDS counseling centers in Rwanda, a staff of less than a dozen people faces 200 patients coming daily for testing. And even more troubling, the highest infection rate lies in the 13-19 year old age group. It is that very same group which is growing up with adult supervision because of the genocide. Drive most anywhere in Kigali and you’re likely to see homeless people tearing away any shred of sustenance from scattered fields. with hoes and shovels. The smallest children loiter on cardboard mats, doing flips and cartwheels or running up to the windows of passing U.N. vehicles to beg for money. In contrast to the stately homes occupied by the visiting international community, most residents survive in homes made of corrugated steel, mud-brick and wood. Upwards of 400,000 children are living in households headed by other children, orphanages, or on the streets. Few of them ever make it primary school. “There’s a problem with childcare because there are not enough men to do the work and the women have to take the children with them,” explained Mukandekezi, with the Duhonze women’s collective in the Shyanda commune. A rural development initiative supported by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), the group operates an income-generating scheme, as well as vocational training school for women unused to being the primary, or even sole providers of their families. Traditionally in Rwanda, people live alone and are very private people, there’s not an extended family tradition. Since the genocide, Rwanda’s population has become 70 percent female, 60 percent of whom are widows. “There were some women who were assaulted and raped during the genocide from our organization,” Mukamutamu Daphrose, president of Duhonze, told me during a tour a vegetable field. “Until now we didn’t detect any members with AIDS, but we are [now] promoting protection and awareness. Four of the women have married and were tested beforehand. Some of the [them] continue to have psychological problems, so it’s up to us to help. Another problem is that they’re still waiting for justice to be carried out against the ‘genocidaire’ (individuals accused of taking part in the genocide).” As with virtually every other institution of government and society, the legal system was severely devastated by the massacres, in Rwanda. Thousands of lawyers and judges fled in advance of the killings, and those who remained faced certain death. In the present Tutsi government’s attempts to bring everyone involved in the genocide to justice, the system has buckled under. Presently, a quarter of a million men and women are being held in prisons and jails across the country, nearly 10,000 in Kigali alone. Less than 2,000 accused persons have been tried in the nation’s courts. A parallel court of justice, the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) created in 1995, has fared better and even issued the first conviction for genocide in an international court, as well define drape as a crime of genocide. The case involved Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of Taba, convicted in the fall of 1998. During the killing spree, Akayesu rounded up 300 women prisoners and confined them to the Cultural Centre of Taba for weeks, where they were constantly raped, tortured and then murdered. In issuing its guilty verdict against him, the lead judge, from Senegal, said that “sexual violence is not limited to physical invasion of the body and may not even require physical contact.” Acts of sexual violence brutally wielded during Rwanda’s massacres constitute genocide the same as any other act. His was the first conviction for sexual violence in a civil war. A little over a year ago, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, former Rwandan minister for Family and Women’s affairs, was also convicted as the first woman ever to be charged with rape by an international court of justice. Only recently has the justice ministry sent out interviewers to speak with survivors of the genocide-related rapes. In the fall of 1999, the first indictments of mass rape were brought against three dozen men in the Bicumbi commune. Currently, over 300 rape cases are awaiting trial in the national courts. During an hour-long meeting with Jean de Du Mucyo, the Minister of Justice, I asked him why the nation was dealing with justice for the genocide in a seemingly inefficient manner, considering the fact that international observers speculate it would take several hundred years to try everyone now in custody. “The experiences in Rwanda cannot be compared to the experiences of another country,” he explained. “Rwanda has its own way of solving problems. In Rwanda, there is a system called participatory justice, which is applied because in just three months one million people were killed. As a result, most of the population played a part in what happened and therefore they should be active in devising a solution.” In a number of rural areas outside of Kigali, communities are attempting to establish the “Gacca,” whereby justice is dispensed from local residents affected by the genocide. Being a “category one,” the most serious of offenses in the Rwandan penal code, rape would be excluded from Gacca. Given the highly public nature of that particular venue, the sensitivities of rape survivors could easily be overlooked. “Although the formal punishment for rape is six to 20 years in prison, lawyers and judges are men and rape is usually managed at home,” said the Minister of Gender Affairs, Angelina Buganza, in a recent report of the Women’s Commission on Refugee Women and Children. Historically, rape had always been handled by the families involved. No public accusation is made and the matter is to be settled by submitting a farm animal, beer or saleable commodity to the victim's family. Absent a material form of reparation, the victim becomes the “wife” of the attacker. In the event of a formal arrest, the rapist must be fed by the victim or released after several days. One of the too few heroes addressing the social and personal needs of traumatized women in Rwanda was Beatrice. Honored by Amnesty International for her work championing the rights of widowed and struggling women, Beatrice Mukansinga invited me to the Kigali-based "Barakabaho Foundation. “In Kinyarwanda, Barakabaho means ‘let them live,’ ” she explained. An exile in Kenya with her minister husband and their sons during the genocide, Mukansinga had returned and started a program specifically for orphaned children. She quickly discovered that a number of mothers were willing to abandon their children for lack of resources or skills. The organization assists nearly 200 women, widowed, childless, infected with an STD or vocationally unskilled, in reclaiming a sense of normalcy and independence in a society that traditionally disenfranchises them. At the association women and young girls receive vocational training in tailoring, enterprise and agriculture. Additionally, those unable to find a home or adequate health care are provided with places to stay. Sitting in Beatrice's large but sparsely furnished office one late spring afternoon, I spoke with several members of Barakabaho. One woman, wearing a pin-striped shirt with a floral headdress, was raped and somewhat less hopeful than other survivors. Like all of the women spoke with at the foundation, she declined to give her name, but did talk openly about her life. During the massacres, she lost her husband and a child, but has four sons and daughters with her. Missing an arm, she had been able to work selling charcoal, tomatoes and small miscellaneous items. She was also raped. “I’m just trying to sell vegetables now, but life is not so good for me,” she said. “We don't have our own house anymore. We had one in Ruhengeri, but the family moved because no one was left there. I found us a home here in Kigali, but when the owner comes back, we will have to move out.” By the time of my visit with Beatrice and the women of Barakabaho, four of its members had already died of AIDS. “I have AIDS, but the cost of the medicine prevents me from taking everything I need,” she continued. “When I die, [Barakabaho] will take care of my family.” Another member, also wearing a pink pin-striped shirt and green skirt was attacked by Hutus while traveling in a larger group of displaced families. Her husband died but she still had three children and an orphan for whom she cared. The most visible evidence of her experience was a missing right arm, hacked off by an attacker’s machete. Though not sexually assaulted, she assured me that the genocide can never be forgotten. “Forgive? Forgive whom, and how?” she asked. “I can’t ever forget. “People have pity for me. This culture doesn’t allow laughter, only pity.” Jimmie Briggs is a freelance writer based in New York City. |
