Cape Verde’s first concentration camp waiting to become a museum

In an interview with Lusa news agency, the mayor of Tarrafal de São Nicolau, José Freitas, admitted that the project to conserve and turn into a museum what remains of the structure that was built on the outskirts of the town in 1931, then to receive the political deportees of the revolution of Madeira, already has some years.

Still, there is finally a guarantee of funding, by the Tourism Fund, with the support of the Institute of Cultural Heritage (IPC).

“Once we have the historical part, we will resize the project, and we already have a guarantee, not the amount itself, but we already have the guarantee from the Tourism Fund that it will be financed,” he said.

The goal is to replicate and explain some of the history that took place there almost a hundred years ago, in a concentration camp that operated for a year and a half until December 1932 and which was at the genesis of the later construction of the concentration camp in Tarrafal, Santiago Island – which in turn operated until 1974 and where political prisoners from Portugal and the various colonies passed through.

“We will make some replica of the space in the concentration camp to turn it into a tourist attraction.

“It remains the memory of people and the camp before moving to the concentration camp of Tarrafal de Santiago,” added the mayor, recalling that this is the reason for the germination between the two municipalities Tarrafal, São Nicolau, and Santiago.

“This year, we can guarantee that we will have the project ready together with the IPC and see the financing through the Tourism Fund”, assured José Freitas.

In conversation with Lusa, the historian José Cabral, from São Nicolau and who spent almost half of his nearly 60 years investigating the installation in that island of the prison for the political deportees of the revolution of Madeira, initially installed in the seminary of the island and later shared with the concentration camp in the outskirts of the village of Tarrafal, regretted the lack of interest, until today, in preserving the memory of what happened there.

“After so many years, the space is the same,” he observed, recalling the importance shared by other scholars on the subject of São Nicolau at the beginning of the Portuguese dictatorial regime.

“That Cape Verdean island, after the Madeira revolt, served as an “experiment of the new prison model” of the regime, which until then saw the islands “as a prisoner’s prison. “This model goes from island prison to island prison,” he recalls about the choice of São Nicolau.

After May 1931, Portuguese deportees arrived in São Nicolau and were housed in the then Seminario-Liceu in the town of Ribeira Brava, another of the island’s locations. A concentration camp was built from scratch in Tarrafal de São Nicolau, which were prefabricated wooden buildings of German origin.

The historian recalls that the first concentration camp in Cape Verde resisted for a short time.

Still, in the decree creating the penal colony in Tarrafal de Santiago, the concentration camp that ended up operating until the end of the dictatorship in Portugal, it was “expressly stated” that it was to use the “material used in the attempt to install the São Nicolau concentration camp.

So those barracks, whose foundation marks can still be recognized in São Nicolau, were dismantled and transported to Santiago.

Cape Verde received, at the time, he estimates, about 400 political deportees from the revolution in Madeira, many of them decorated Portuguese soldiers from World War I, which was quickly put down by the regime, half of whom were concentrated in São Nicolau.

For about a year and a half, the seminary in Ribeira Brava, and the concentration camp, in Tarrafal functioned as a prison for these deportees on the island of São Nicolau.

“A very violent concentration camp. It was a terrible regime; there were deaths,” explains the historian, citing the survey he conducted over the years by consulting death certificates.

“Many of them had tuberculosis and were left there,” he adds.

The camp then faced logistical problems, with more than a hundred men incarcerated there without basic conditions, so a few months later, even before building the camp in Tarrafal de Santiago, the deportees returned to the island as a prison, confined to São Nicolau.

The concentration camp disappeared as quickly as it appeared on São Nicolau after the Portuguese regime decreed an amnesty on December 5, 1932, although most were forbidden to leave the island.

The prisoners of the time became involved with the local population, many of whom started families, changing the life of that island in social and cultural terms.

“We are facing a profound and very interesting history of Lusophony and the Salazar regime, which is little known,” laments José Cabral, appealing that after decades of waiting, the former camp should finally be preserved and made into a museum, preserving history and boosting the site’s potential for tourism.

With information from Lusa

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