There is a story told about the people of Santiago's interior: that they endured. That hunger, drought and landlords came and went, and the Badiu bent and survived. Survival is true. But the word hides what the interior actually did, which was to fight back, again and again, in the open and by name.
The same people were described by those in power as idle, stubborn and ungovernable. Read the other way, those insults are a record of refusal.
Land held by a few, worked by many
For most of Santiago's history the land of the interior belonged to a small number of large proprietors, the morgados. The families who farmed it did so as tenants, paying rent in cash, crops or labour, and the landlord set the terms. When rents rose beyond what had been agreed, or were demanded in years when the rain failed, tenants had no court that would take their side.
So they took their own.
Engenhos, 1822
In January 1822, in the parish of Santa Catarina, tenants and agricultural workers on the Engenhos estates refused to pay rent to the colonel who administered the district. The refusal spread and turned into open revolt. It showed that the tenants of the interior could act together, and it was not forgotten.
Achada Falcão, 1841
Nineteen years later the interior rose again at Achada Falcão, in the same highlands. Historians of Cabo Verde now read the two uprisings together, as a single tradition of rural resistance to the landlords' power over land and rent rather than as isolated riots.
Ribeirão Manuel, 1910
In 1910 the tenants of Ribeirão Manuel, also in Santa Catarina, refused to pay rent and began harvesting the castor-oil crop on the estates without the landlords' permission. When tenant farmers were imprisoned for it, the community rose against their imprisonment. The revolt was led by a woman, Ana Veiga, remembered as Nhanha Bombolom, and women stood at its front.
Cabo Verde has since raised a monument to the revolt, and the government describes it as a symbol of the region's self-affirmation.
A single thread
These uprisings are not a scattered list. They belong with the older withdrawal of free and self-liberated Africans into the highlands, with the Rabelados' refusal in the 1940s, and with the prisoners of Tarrafal. They lead to the generation that made independence in 1975. Each time, the people of the interior insisted on deciding for themselves how their land, labour and worship would be used.
"Lazy" was the word for tenants who would not pay an unjust rent. "Unruly" was the word for a community that stood up for its own prisoners. The Badiu can keep the history and leave the insults with those who used them.
Further reading: Eduardo Adilson Camilo Pereira, Os caminhos da revolta em Cabo Verde: as revoltas dos Engenhos (1822) e de Achada Falcão (1841), University of São Paulo (Portuguese); Government of Cabo Verde, the Ribeirão Manuel monument (Portuguese). See also Santiago's history and Santa Catarina.