Sub-Saharan early migrations as a means of african peoples’ initiative against colonial oppression: the Cape Verdean case

Abstract

Even before the beginning of liberation struggle, spontaneous migrations outside Sub- Saharan African lands can be described as an early initiative of resistance against material and ideological colonial oppression. The extended dispersion around the world of people of African roots has been usually associated to the European slave trade of pre-colonial times and to the renewed displacements that developed during the independent period -especially since the last decades of 20th centuryin order to evade economic crisis, wars and authoritarian governments. Nevertheless, we can also speak about an overseas dispersion as a result of spontaneous migrations that took place in colonial times as a deliberate initiative of Sub-Saharan Africans. These population movements transcended the simple action of escaping from oppressing conditions of foreign domination; they have been conscious strategies of labour and ideological insertion. There is no doubt: economic constraints and political limitations drove to the decision of migrating that led to decades of population displacements from the main departure point of Cape Verde archipelago, located in a privileged Atlantic position. Anyway, it also implied the construction of early collective identity definitions inside and beyond colonial boundaries, with the purpose of inserting in an occidental world where sophisticated laws had begun to classify people as “desirable” and “undesirable” appealing to the racialized principles that supported imperialist expansion. Our objective is to recover these initiatives and to analyse them as means of colonial resistance and as a main frame of the liberation struggle.