The story of morna: Cape Verde’s music of displacement and return

How a music shaped by slavery, epidemics, famine and mass migration travelled the world, narrating stories of suffering and resistance.

Mariana dos Santos was 18 years old when she left her home in Cape Verde, the archipelago of volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa, for neighbouring São Tomé and Principe. It was 1954, and she had been given a contract to work picking coffee, coconut and cocoa at a plantation. She joined the thousands of Cape Verdeans leaving the country to work as labourers in other Portuguese colonies – something promoted by the colonial authorities as a way of alleviating demographic pressure on the islands and filling labour gaps abroad. “I felt like it was time, I was grown up enough and I had to go look for a better life,” the now 85-year-old tells Al Jazeera.