Music: an exception to Creole exceptionalism? Cape Verdean national identity and creativity post-independence

This article focuses on the interrelationship between the Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) language and music as it has developed over time in literature, composition and performance experience. The written record demonstrates that, over time, a blend of scholar-practitioners, trained academics who often engaged in both the study and composition of lyrics and music, blurred the lines of the oral and written hierarchy in CVC, ultimately co-fashioning the relationship between language and music as essential to identity alongside the many existing creative practitioners working exclusively in the oral realm. Since independence, too, a major intellectual project of Cape Verdean writers has been to celebrate the work of practitioners in a scholarly fashion. Simultaneously, many practitioners have worked to reclaim and reinvigorate traditional music genres. This has contributed immensely to both the understanding and creative expression of Cape Verdean national identity, or caboverdianidade. This article also takes on an ethnographic inquiry into the creative process and aesthetic preferences that bring together CVC and Cape Verdean music. It becomes clear that CVC is widely considered by Cape Verdean songwriters to be the best language for composition and performance on a number of grounds – sonic, aesthetic, linguistic and sociopolitical reasons among them.