Tarrafal Concentration Camp (Cape Verde)

On 5 September 1935, the preliminary design for a penal colony in the north of the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde, for 500 to 600 “colonists”, was presented to the Interior Minister.¹ The first prisoners left Lisbon on 18 October 1936, in the holds of the ship Luanda, and arrived on 29 October, after a eleven-day voyage: communists, anarchists and republicans who had been held in the Aljube, at Peniche, in the Lisbon Penitentiary and at Angra do Heroísmo, among them participants in the general strike of 18 January 1934 and in the sailors’ revolt of 8 September 1936.²¹ The sailors had been held at the police post at the “Mitra”, in the eastern part of Lisbon, and then in the Penitentiary.⁹ Among the prisoners who inaugurated the camp was the communist leader Militão Ribeiro.⁵

The Aljube Museum calls it the “camp of slow death”, designed to cut the prisoners off from the world, in subhuman conditions.² Between 1937 and 1939, its “acute period”, the “frigideira” (frying pan) was in systematic use: a windowless concrete structure, exposed to the sun, where the temperature reached 50 degrees. There was also the “Brigada Brava” (Wild Brigade), of prisoners forced into hard labour, mainly quarrying stone.¹ The prisoner Edmundo Pedro remembered the frigideira as “a real oven”.⁴

After the Second World War, the camp passed to the Ministry of Justice, and 110 amnestied prisoners left the island on 25 January 1946. The Commemorative Commission counts 32 prisoners who died, of disease and of the conditions in the camp, up to 1949. Tarrafal closed on 1 January 1954, and a decree-law of 7 July 1956 abolished it.¹

During the colonial war, on the orders of the Overseas Minister, Adriano Moreira, it reopened as the Chão Bom Labour Camp, for activists of the liberation movements. The first 32 Angolan prisoners arrived on 25 February 1962; 100 Guineans came in the same year, and the Cape Verdeans in 1968.¹ The “frigideira” gave way to the “holandinha” (little Holland), a concrete cubicle next to the kitchen where some prisoners could not even stand up.⁴ It was here that the writer José Luandino Vieira, accused of fighting alongside the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), was serving his 14-year sentence when the Portuguese Society of Writers gave a prize to his book Luuanda, in 1965; he was not released until 1972.⁷

After 25 April, activists and supporters of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) went to the camp and, on 1 May 1974, freed the Angolan, Guinean and Cape Verdean prisoners.³ The former camp is now the Tarrafal Concentration Camp Museum, also called the Museum of the Resistance, with a route that begins at the old “porta de armas” (main gate).⁸