Cape Verde [antikvár]

ntroduction The flight to the island of Maic was full. As the tiny propeller plane bounced over Atlantic air currents, I was the only passenger to gaze out with a lick of fear at the mighty mid ocean below. Inside the plane everyone else seemed to have forgotten the sea. All was exuberance, chatter and a roaring laughter. The passengers were young men in polished shoes, expensive trousers and heavy gold jewellery. They spoke in a Creole that was too rapid for me to grasp and I wondered what interest Maio - flat, dry and quiet even by Cape Verdean standards - could hold for them. A few days later I was driving through the north of Maio, mesmerised by its endless stony red plains where the goats eat rock and the people eat goats. I reached a village - a single street of dust, two rows of parched, single-storey houses. 'This is Alcatraz,' the driver said. The street was quiet apart from a few of the ragged, wide-eyed children who populate the poorer half of the world. Some of the houses were nothing more than bare concrete carcasses while others were painted in greens and pinks and blues and even had glass in their windows. From the front door of one of the smarter houses a family appeared. I crossed the street and asked if I could take a photo. 'Not at all,' the man replied in perfect English. 'But don't you remember me? I was on your flight.' My perception jolted and suddenly I saw the urbane passenger, representative of a richer world, gold still gleaming at his neck. And then my world altered again and I saw a poor village, forgotten even within Cape Verde. He must have noticed my perplexity: 'I live in Holland,' he explained. 'I work on the ships I've come back to see my wife and children.' The woman at his side, uncomprehending, scooped a child on to her hip. 'How long have you been away?' I asked. 'Three years.' 'That's hard.' 'Yes,' he replied. 'But we Cape Verdeans - we have hard lives.' That is one of the paradoxes of Cape Verde. There is a widespread cosmopolitanism that dates from centuries ago, but it lives side by side with poverty and isolation. For generations the young men have gone abroad - to the USA, to Europe, to the African mainland - because the land cannot sustain them, because their families need money. Back at home their relatives mourn not just the loss of their own sons and husbands but the painful emigrations of generations before. They mourn the peculiar lot of the Cape Verdean, stranded on outcrops in the Atlantic, abused over the centuries not just by the waves but by many nations. They mourn in a particularly beautiful way which I first discovered on Fogo, the volcano island. I was clinging to the bench in the back of a small truck as it jolted up and down the steep cobbled roads of the old Portuguese town of Sao Filipe. Every so often