Exploring the antifascist history of Cape Verde’s Tarrafal concentration camp

When photographer João Pina touched down on the island of Santiago, Cape Verde for the first time in January 2020, he headed straight to the home of an 87-year-old woman named Lilica. Cape Verde had long been on Pina’s list of places to visit, but he had been delaying his first trip to the island archipelago. His familial ties to the country meant he would be there to work on his most personal project yet.

“I went to visit a girl – who was then an 87-year-old-girl – who my great grandparents sponsored to go to Portugal and study,” Pina says. “She was the daughter of the couple who ran the local shop and housed my great grandparents in Tarrafal. They were the ones providing food to the camp, soap and aid to the prisoners.”

Tarrafal was an infamous concentration camp situated on Santiago Island, which was founded in 1936 under António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist rule of Portugal and its empire. During its first period of operation, from 1936 to 1954, Portuguese political rebels and dissidents were sent to Tarrafal – which was inspired by Nazi camps – and forced to work intense labour under the West African sun until they were released or died. In its second phase, between 1961 and 1974, the space was used to imprison independence movement activists and militants from then-colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

In 1949 Pina’s grandfather, Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, was sent to Tarrafal as a political prisoner. That same year, Pina’s great grandparents were given unprecedented access to visit Tarrafal, and they brought along a camera to take pictures of their son and his fellow prisoners, sharing the photographs with fellow family members as a means of keeping them updated. Lilica’s parents offered them a place to stay, and Pina wanted to reconnect their stories.

As Lilica and Pina sat and shared a plate of John Dory fish, she recounted how Pina’s great grandparents had helped to support and fund her education, after which she joined the guerilla independence movement for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and later served as the first female member of Cape Verde’s National Assembly. Resistance doesn’t fall far from the tree. “She is a very relevant woman in the struggle for independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde,” Pina recalls. “And here I am 60 or 70 years later, sitting down with her and having a conversation – it was a truly amazing moment.”

A small portrait of Lilica now features in Pina’s new monograph Tarrafal. Opening with those portraits of inmates made by his great grandparents, the book magnifies the stories of people who had spent time imprisoned in the camp, while providing a space for Pina to trace his connection with his ancestors. He first began working on the project in 2019, when he opened a box passed onto him by his mother that was filled with those pictures from Tarrafal, as well as several letters exchanged between his grandfather and great grandfather.

The book features those letters and photographs, alongside pictures that Pina made himself during his travels to Cape Verde and beyond, as he visited the concentration camp’s site (now the Resistance Museum), former inmates of Tarrafal and their families, as well as places that his ancestors had visited during their time in the archipelago nation.

It creates a humanising story of anti-fascist resistance, at a time when far right politics once again threatens ascendency across the western world. “For me, keeping the record of people who were opposing the Salazar regime was key,” Pina explains. “We just celebrated 50 years (since the fascist regime was overthrown), but we celebrated 50 years with a very sour taste in our mouths, because in the previous election the extreme right party had 50 parliamentarians elected – it’s interesting and sour at the same time, so we need to shed light on what happened.”

In doing so, he pays tribute to those who suffered and sacrificed while opposing fascism and imperialism. Conditions were harsh in Tarrafal, and several inmates never left. “The different directors of the camp had different policies [so living conditions differed],” Pina says. “But as the world war was starting and the fascist forces were conquering Europe, it was very clear that this was a camp for people to die – there’s a famous sentence from the camp’s doctor from when the prisoners were complaining that they were sick and needed help. He said he wasn’t there to cure anyone, he was there to write the death certificates.

“Tarrafal is this place of very heavy history, but it’s also a place where camaraderie and support for each other happened for so long,” he continues. “The ideas that brought those men there were the right ones – it wasn’t the fascists who were on the right side of history, it was these men who were on the right side of history. A few hundred men sacrificed their lives, their health and their families in order for us to be able to have this conversation today.”

Tarrafal by João Pina is published by GOST

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