The Dutch in Seventeenth-Century Senegambia and the Emergence of Papiamentu

Author(s):  
BART JACOBS

This chapter explores the presence of the first Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 17th-century Senegambia, particularly in the Petite Côte region. The WIC's activity in this part of Upper Guinea is traditionally marginalised in the literature, but must be reconsidered in light of the compelling linguistic similarities between Papiamentu (the creole language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole (a cover term for the sister creole varieties of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau and the Senegalese province of Casamance). The chapter illustrates how the conquest (in 1621) and possession (until 1677) of Gorée guaranteed Dutch commercial dominance in the Senegambia region, a period in which the language transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao must have occurred. It furthermore describes how the Dutch episode in Upper Guinea came to an abrupt end after the loss of Gorée and other Petite Côte factories to the French.

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Jacobs

This paper takes as a point of departure the hypothesis that Papiamentu descends from Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole (a term covering the sister varieties of the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea-Bissau and Casamance), speakers of which arrived on Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century, subsequently shifted their basic content vocabulary towards Spanish, but maintained the original morphosyntax. This scenario raises the question of whether, in addition to being a creole, Papiamentu can be analyzed as a so-called mixed (or intertwined) language. The present paper positively answers this question by drawing parallels between (the emergence of) Papiamentu and recognized mixed languages.


1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-59

On 25 April 1974, we learned from radio broadcasts about the coup d'etat in Portugal by the armed forces which resulted in the ousting of the government of Marcelo Caetano and its replacement by a Junta of National Salvation. This movement, according to its promoters, is intended to provide a solution to the present crisis which the Portuguese regime and society are going through after thirteen years of colonial war.The coup d'etat which has just taken place cannot be seen in isolation. It is a result of the new awareness of growing sectors of the Portuguese people that the purpose of the colonial war launched by the fascist regime is to suppress the colonized peoples’ aspiration to independence and freedom and is against the desire for well-being and political and social democracy of the Portuguese people themselves.At this time we hail, in the first place, the Portuguese democratic forces which for many years have been actively and courageously opposing the colonial wars. This growing awareness is closely bound up with the affirmation of the unshakable will of the Mozambjcan people, and of the peoples of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, to achieve independence and freedom. This will has taken on material form in the armed struggle for national liberation which has been steadily growing and has already reached vital regions of our country. The coincidence between the crisis of the regime in Portugal and the great advances of the national liberation struggle in Mozambique over the past two years is no accident, but additional proof of the impact of our struggle on the situation in Portugal. The determinant factor of the situation in Portugal and the colonies has been and still is the struggle of our peoples. And the fundamental issue upon which the solution of all other problems depends is the independence of the peoples of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, as well as that of the remaining Portuguese colonies.


Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Jacobs

This paper deals with the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Creole as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance. In the linguistic section, the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Creole variety is lent support by focusing on the structural correspondences of the function words in five grammatical categories (pronouns, question words, prepositions, conjunctions and reciprocity and reflexivity). In addition, salient data from several early (18th and 19th century) Papiamentu texts is presented. The historical section provides a framework that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century.


1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 375-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. H. Hair

As part of a projected series of edited early Portuguese texts on Guinea, in the early 1960s the late Vice-Admiral Avelino Teixeira da Mota began to assemble, partly from archives, documents for a volume he intended to call Jesuit Reports. As it happened, many of the documents, especially those from Jesuit sources, were published in 1968 by another Portuguese scholar, the late P. Antońio Brásio. But Teixeira da Mota did not abandon his project, partly because he considered that Brásio did not always take account of all copies of a document and all variant readings, and partly because Brásio was unable to accompany the documents with informed Africanist annotation. In the 1970s Teixeira da Mota sent me his own collection of documents to translate into English— and also so that I could ultimately contribute part of their annotation. My translations were completed just before Teixeira da Mota died in 1982, and I have since translated a number of other documents, all from Brásio, which help to round out the picture. Not all of the documents were written by the Jesuits themselves, but most were.When it became clear that the publication of Teixeira da Mota's series would proceed at best very slowly, I began to publish those of the translations which were of material in the public domain, beginning with the material printed in the early seventeenth century by Guerreiro. Since much of the material related to Sierra Leone, I published in the Africana Research Bulletin of the Institute of African Studies at Freetown, and am much indebted to the organizers of the journal for providing an outlet.


Author(s):  
Michael G. Panzer

From the 1950s through the 1970s, several liberation movements emerged in Lusophone Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Cape Verde Islands) that fought for independence from Portugal. One of the most significant ideological frameworks that informed the political orientation of these movements was socialism. In Lusophone Africa, several liberation leaders gravitated toward the economic and political potentialities inherent in the discourses and practices of pan-Africanism and Afro-socialism. The liberation movements in Lusophone Africa that most identified with a socialist paradigm were the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA of Angola); Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO of Mozambique); Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands); and Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (CLSTP—later, MLSTP—of São Tomé and Príncipe). These groups suffered the burden of Portuguese colonialism and actively fought for independence from colonial rule. Although several other liberation movements also emerged in the Lusophone colonies, these four movements most espoused the hallmarks of Afro-socialism to challenge Portuguese colonial rule. All four liberation movements maintained networks with international actors opposed to colonialism, as well as diplomatic connections with sympathetic socialist and communist nations. Most notable among these bases of support were the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP) and the governments of Tanzania, Egypt, Guinea, the People’s Republic of China, East Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and Cuba.


Author(s):  
TOBY GREEN

This chapter illuminates how a mixed cultural framework developed in the 17th century on Cabo Verde. Following commercial and ecological collapse at the end of the 16th century, the island Creole class broke decisively from metropolitan control and created a new economy. Based on subsistence and also on trading with passing maritime trade, this led to different influences in different islands depending on the accent of the trade – English salt trade from the island of Maio to Newfoundland, for instance. By the end of the 17th century, differing identities in the differing islands of Cabo Verde were emerging, based on balancing the internal agency and influences with the priorities of external global demand. The mixed Creole world that emerged, transcending the polar hierarchies of race common elsewhere in the Atlantic world, became a fundamental constituent of the hybrid Creole identity of Cabo Verde to this day.


Planta Medica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (09) ◽  
Author(s):  
C Grosso ◽  
G Teixeira ◽  
I Gomes ◽  
ES Martins ◽  
JG Barroso ◽  
...  

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