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Cape Verde

A song written the day Cabral died

Kaoguiamo

António "Tony" Lima was a Cape Verdean student in Paris in January 1973 when he learned that Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated in Conakry. Cabral had founded the independence movement and was days from seeing Guinea-Bissau declare itself free. Lima wrote "Amílcar Cabral" that same day. The song became the second track on Korda Skrabu! ("Wake Up, Slave!"), the 1974 debut album his band Kaoguiamo recorded for the PAIGC's own label, a mix of funk and Afrobeat that amounted to the new nation's first musical eulogy for its founder. It also started what became a fifty-year tradition. Cape Verdean musicians working in morna, funaná, reggae, and rap have kept writing songs for Cabral ever since, most recently for his 2024 centenary. Lima later became a career diplomat and eventually served as Cape Verde's ambassador to the United Nations.

Cape Verde's barefoot Grammy winner

Cesária Évora

Cesária Évora grew up in Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, and sang in local bars for decades before a French producer brought her to Paris in 1988, already in her forties, to record her first album abroad. She performed barefoot, by most accounts as a quiet show of solidarity with the Cape Verdeans who couldn't afford shoes. More than anyone else, she took morna to a global audience. It's the country's aching, blues-like national genre, built around the untranslatable ache of sodade. In 2004 she won the Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album for Voz d'Amor. She died in Mindelo in 2011, on the island she never really left behind even at the height of her fame.

The Collection