Filiason · The line of the fathers
Our line is the father’s line
“Fidju di gatu ta panha ratu.” · the son of a cat catches mice
We reckon ourselves through our fathers, and their fathers — a line that runs from the interior of Santiago back across the Atlantic to Kaabu and Senegambia.
the paternal Y-DNA shared with Mandinka, Wolof, and Fula men
the Mandinka homeland of many Badiu forefathers
how name, land, and lineage descend among the Badiu
Fadenya · father-childness
The house of the father
In the Manding world our forefathers came from, kinship runs through the father. Fadenya — “father-childness” — names the line of a man’s sons and their sons: the patrilineage that carries a family’s name, its land, and its honour. The Badiu brought this to the highlands of Santiago. A man is known by his father and his father’s people; a lineage is a chain of men reaching back to a founding forefather.
The genetic record confirms what the elders always said. The Badiu paternal line is overwhelmingly E-M2 (E1b1a) — the signature Y-chromosome of Niger-Congo Africa — beside the deep-rooting haplogroup A, the oldest branch of the human paternal tree. Father to son, unbroken, from Senegambia to the interior. See the lineages →
Tronku di família · The family tree
How the paternal lines spread
An illustrative model of how founding forefathers’ lines branched across the interior — Santa Catarina, Tarrafal, São Domingos. Representative, not a record of specific living individuals.
Kaminhu di nos antepasadus · The paths our fathers walked
From Kaabu to the interior — and outward
Map locations as text
- Santiago Island, Cape VerdeSantiago
Origin point of the Badiu people.
- Senegambia / Guinea-BissauAncestral homelands
Ancestral West African homelands: Mandinka, Balanta, Serer, Fula, Papel peoples.
- New England, USADiaspora
The oldest Badiu diaspora. Santiago men joined American whaling crews from the 1850s and settled around New Bedford and Providence; the packet trade later carried whole families. Cape Verdean Kriolu has been spoken in southeastern New England for over a century.
- Lisbon, PortugalDiaspora
Labour migration from the 1960s, concentrated in the Amadora and Sintra areas around Lisbon. The largest Cape Verdean population in Europe, and the one most often born there rather than arrived.
- Rotterdam, NetherlandsDiaspora
Recruited from the 1960s to the port and merchant fleet. The Rotterdam community is long-established, with its own associations, shops and Kriolu-speaking second and third generations.
- Paris & Île-de-FranceDiaspora
One of the largest Badiu communities in Europe. Labour migration from the 1960s onward, concentrated in the Paris region, with further communities in Nice and Marseille.
- São Tomé & PríncipeDiaspora
Contract labour on the cocoa and coffee roças, 19th and 20th centuries. Recruitment was often coercive and famine-driven, and many who went did not return.
- Ancestral homelands
- Santiago
- Diaspora
Click a marker for detail.
Kontas di kaza · The reckoning of the house
The fathers, named aloud
Where colonial paper is silent or distorts family lives, spoken genealogy preserves names, relationships, and place. In Santiago’s interior, elders, relatives, and oral historians may carry a family line across generations, village by village. This is oral history: an archive held through memory, repetition, and responsibility.
This project records those spoken lineages as primary sources: the fathers named aloud, as they have always been. If you carry your family’s reckoning, the Archive finding aid explains how to preserve its sources. Public submissions are not open while a consent-led review process is being designed.
Sources & method
On Manding patrilineage and oral-knowledge traditions, see the UNESCO General History of Africa (Vols. IV–V) and Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle. On the Kaabu homeland and the Upper Guinea slave trade, Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (2012). On Badiu oral tradition, Tomé Varela da Silva, Finaçon di Nha Nasia Gomi. Y-DNA lineage data is summarised on the Genetics page. The public record will expand only through a documented consent and editorial-review process.