By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar, IANS,
Panaji : Cape Verde, a sunny collective nesting of 10 picturesque islands in the Atlantic Ocean 570 km off Africa, is shifting its eyes from Europe to countries like India which it hopes can show the way to Africa about the benefits of South-South cooperation.
“We were initially looking at Europe. All of Africa was looking at Europe. But we are realising slowly the potential of South-South cooperation. India, with its phenomenal growth, is in the best position to lead and facilitate the shift,” Cape Verde’s Culture Minister Mario Lucio Matias Sousa Mendes told IANS in an interview here.
He is attending a conference on Decolonisation, Development and Diaspora: The Afro-Indian Experience, organised by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and the Goa government.
Claiming that India had a great potential to play leader in South-South cooperation, Mendes said shared cultural and colonial histories of the “southern” nations should make possible bilateral and multilateral cooperation between South-South nations.
According to Cape Verde lore, more than a million Cape Verdeans have immigrated and followed the footsteps of the whale-hunter in the 1830s, who became the first islander to migrate from the island country.
“In fact we have more immigrants living abroad than the population of Cape Verde itself,” says Mendes.
Mendes said that the million-odd Cape Verdean immigrants were spread out across the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal and Senegal, while the estimated indigenous population of the island country was just a bit more than 500,000.
“Our immigrants are more than three to four generations old in the countries they migrated to. As Cape Verdeans we are known as hardworking and honest people. It all started with the Cape Verdean fisherman who went whale hunting with some Portuguese sailors from the Azores region. He is supposed to have landed on the shores of the USA in the 1930s. He was our first immigrant,” Mendes said.
With tourism as one of the mainstay industries of the former Portuguese colony, what with its virgin beaches and warm tropical weather, Mendes said,tourism apart, one of the biggest contributors to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) came in the form of a consistent deluge of remittances from the immigrants.
“Remittances made by immigrants constitute 25 per cent of the money collected by the government treasury. We have strong family ties. They send money back home. Build houses and have strong links to the home country,” said Mendes, adding that the culturally expressive immigrant population were the best ambassadors of tourism.
In fact last year, Cape Verde was the top ranked African country as regards per capita remittance, which was to the tune of $306 annually.
“We get a lot of tourists from Europe. There are England, France, Germany, Portugal tourists who come to our country,” Mendes said.
In the first quarter this year, Cape Verde received 139,000 tourists.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at [email protected])