Mindelo, Cesaria Évora, Tito Paris & my very nice travel & cultural experiences made in Cape Verde (part 1)

 Good morning everybody. Good news first! Today is the first half of this new wonderful weekend and I hope You are enjoying it as well, wherevever You are right now. 

I am comfortably lying on the sofa in our beautiful garden and reading some newspapers. As already mentioned in an earlier post, I have completely disabandoned reading printed newspapers and switched my subscriptions over to purely digital ones. And - besides beeing much cheaper and generating much less trash - I really got used to it and started to love it. 

The music playlist I am listening right now in the background to my reading has just been playing the song "Sodade" from the late Cape Verdian singer and songwriter Cesaria Évora, which I really adore deeply. And this brought me to the idea, to share my travel experiences to Cape Verde with You.

At the end of 1998 I arrived back to Germany from Brazil, where I had been living and working for 3 years as Project Manager and Engineering Department Manager at Henkel`s Chemical plant (which now belongs to BASF) in Jacarei, Sao Paulo. 

During 1999 I was Technical Director at Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s big cosmetics plant in Viersen-Dülken, Germany, where we produced huge quantities of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s hair colorants and many other fancy products. 

At the beginning of 2000 I moved to La Coruña, Spain, where I took over new responsabilities as Plant Manager of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s freshly aquired (from Gilette) famous "La Toja" cosmetics plant and where I stayed until mid 2003, when I decided to quit at Henkel after 16 years and look for new growth and experience opportunities as Managing Director of ElringKlinger, a German automotive parts supplier company, in Toluca, Mexico. 

During the time living and working in La Coruña, I spent a wonderful summer weekend in the beautiful city Bonn, which had been Germany`s capital since the end of World War II until 1990, when Berlin - after the fall of the wall and the German reunification - took over oficially this role again.

In Bonn I participated in a wonderful "Lusafrica" open air concert with tremendous live shows of several quite important and wellknown musicians and bands from Portugal, Brazil and the portuguese speaking African countries Moçambique, Angola and Cape Verde.  

Lusafrica (full name: Productions Lusafrica) is an independent record label company based in Paris, France. The company was founded in 1988 by José da Silva and it was the first multinational record company opened in Cape Verde.

One of the absolute super stars of the open air concert in Bonn was Cesaria Évora, the famous singer and songwriter from Cape Verde. I knew and loved her music already, but this was the first - and unfortunately only - ocasion, where I had the pleasure, to see and hear her singing in a live show. 

Back home to La Coruña, Spain, again, the strong wish, to travel once to Cape Verde and to get personally familiar with the home country of Cesaria Évora and so many other important "world music" musicians, was firmly born in my head. 

And finally in February 2002 I travelled there for 2 weeks of holidays. Before I share my experiences from this travel with You, I would like to give You - because most propably not all of You have heard much about this country so far - some general background information (with great help from wikipedia) about Cape Verde. 

Cape Verde is an island country in the central Atlantic Ocean. The group of in total 10 islands lies about 650 km west of the West African city Dakar, Senegal, with Praia as it`s capital located on Santiago island. 

The archiepelago remained uninhabited until the 15th century, when portuguese explorers arrived there and colonized the island group, establishing thus the first european settlement in the tropics. 

The islands grew prosperous throughout the 16th and 17th century, when Cape Verde became ideally located for the very sad Atlantic slave-trade and attracted lots of merchants, privateers and pirates.

The supression of the Atlantic slave-trade finally in the 19th century led to quick economic decline and massive emigration. 

Later-on Cape Verde gradually recovered as an important commercial stopover for shipping routes. Incorporated as an overseas department of Portugal in 1951, the islands continued to campaign for independence, which they finally achieved in 1975, after the "Revolution of the Carnations" in Portugal and the fall of the portuguese dictator Salazar. 

Since the early 1990s Cape Verde has operated as a stable representative democracy and remains one of the most-developped and democratic countries in Africa. 

Lacking natural resources, its developing economy is mostly service-oriented, with a growing focus on tourism and foreign investment. Cape Verde has approximately 550.000 inhabitants today. Official languages are Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole.

But today more Cape Verdeans live abroad (nearly 1 million) with significant emigrant communities in the US, Portugal, Angola, Senegal, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, France, Italy and Scandinavia.  

When I planned my trip to Cape Verde, it was clear from the very beginning, that I would not want to spent a single minute nor a single Cent in one of the tourists complexes concentrated in the surroundings of Cape Verde`s capital Praia on the island Santiago, where also the only international airport of Cape Verde for the same reason was located. 

My travel led me from La Coruña, Spain, to Madrid and from there to Praia, Cape Verde, and from there further with a small plane together with only a handful other individual travellers to the quite distant Cape Verdean island Sao Vincente, where I had made reservation of a room in a small, simple hotel in this island`s capital Mindelo. 

Mindelo is a port town which has about 70.000 inhabitants and which had always had the fame, to be the music and - at that time totally non-touristic, local, authentic - nightlife center of the Cape Verdean islands, where all the famous Cape Verdean musicians still played live - or had played in the past - like Cesaria Évora, Tito Paris, Bau (Rufino Almeida), Ildo Lobo, Teófilo Chantre, Herminia (da Cruz Fortes) and many others less known internationally, from time to time - and mostly for absolute surprise and without any public pre-announcement -  in the handful of bars at night.

On the above foto collage from my travel to Cape Verde during 2002 You can see some impressions of typical situations in Mindelo and the landscape around the city. 

And as a first taste of the beautiful Cape Verdean "Morna" music, I share this wonderful video of my most beloved song "Sodade" (Brazilian: saudade = home-sickness, desire, yearning, longing,.... in German: Sehnsucht; a culturally extremely important term for us in Brazil as well, which I will explain seperately in more details in a future post here in my blog)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku_WZoTtT8Q

And here one more very beautiful video with the song "Petit pais":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeLUGn7qYP8

I hope that this sharing of some general information about the Cape Verdean islands and my motivation, to travel there, called Your interested attention and created some curiosity about what I will share with You in one of my future posts here in this blog. 

I`d love to receive feedback from all amongst my readers, who have also already had the opportunity, to travel to Cape Verde and to get to know their own experiences.

Enough for today now. I`ll go straight to our fridge and get me a can of ice cold Brazilian "Original" beer. You know already my motto: "After action - satisfaction". 

Enjoy the weekend. See You back here again tomorrow.