Carmen Souza combines English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms

As a young child, when she took too long to prepare for school, family gatherings or singing in the church choir, Cape Verdean musician Carmen Souza was often told to “ariop.”

What she didn’t realize until years later was that the Creole word comes directly from the English word “make haste.”

“We have so many words that come from British English,” Souza, a jazz singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, tells the BBC.

“’Salong’ is ‘so long’, ‘fulespide’ is ‘full speed’, ‘streioei’ is ‘straightaway’, ‘bot’ is ‘boat’ and ‘ariope’ – which I always remember as my father told me.” He wanted me to speed up my pace.

Ariope is now one of eight songs Souza composed for the album Port’Inglês – which means “harbor” in German – to explore the little-known history of the 120-year-old British presence in Cape Verde. It started as research for her master’s degree.

“Cape Verdeans are very attached to music – in fact, we always say that music is our biggest export – and that’s why I wondered if there was a musical influence too,” she says.

There are very few recordings of compositions from this period – Souza discovered that an American ethnomusicologist, Helen Heffron Roberts, had recorded some of them in the 1930s, but they are on very fragile wax cylinders and can only be seen in person at Yale University be heard in the USA.

Instead of rearranging old recordings, Souza and her musical partner Theo Pas’cal created new music inspired by stories she encountered.

She has combined jazz and English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms – including the funaná, played on an iron bar with a knife and the accordion, and the batuque, played by women and based on African drum rhythms.

The Cape Verde Islands lie approximately 500 km (310 miles) off the coast of West Africa. They are mostly dry, have limited arable land and are prone to drought.

But they are a strategic hub in the Atlantic Ocean and were first controlled by the Portuguese as they traded between Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas – in spices, silk and enslaved people. With the abolition of the slave trade, Cape Verde experienced a decline.

Cape Verde remained a Portuguese colony until 1975 – but in the 18th and 19th centuries British merchants settled and Cape Verde once again became a busy hub.

The British came for cheap labor, goats, donkeys, salt, turtles, amber and archil, a special ink used in British clothing manufacturing.

They built roads and bridges, developed the natural harbors – which became known as Port’Inglês – and established coal stations where coal was imported from Wales.

The port of São Vicente in Mindelo became an important refueling stop for steamships transporting goods across the Atlantic or to Africa – and, with the introduction of a submarine cable station in 1875, an important global communications hub.

Souza’s exploration of the British presence in Cape Verde quickly became a personal affair.

“When I started researching, I discovered so many personal connections,” says Souza – including the fact that her grandfather loaded coal onto ships in Mindelo.

This inspired her to write Ariope – the story of an older man who urges a younger man who prefers to stay in the shadows and play the guitar to “Ariope”. The British ships are coming and the sailors don’t like to wait – “fulespide, streioei,” the song goes.

Souza imagines her grandfather’s ghost in the song. He used to play the violin – and was considered a great storyteller.

“I was told that if you had to walk with him for miles, you wouldn’t notice the distance because there would be one funny story after another.”

Souza is part of the large Cape Verdean diaspora. She was born in Portugal and now lives in London. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), around 700,000 Cape Verdeans live abroad – twice as many as at home.

In the past, people were forced to move for work due to famine, drought, poverty and lack of opportunities.

This movement contributed to the islands’ deep, rich tradition of distinctive music, including the melancholic Morna, made famous by singer Cesária Évora and declared an intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO in 2019.

The composer behind many of the songs that made Évora a global star was Francisco Beleza – also known as B Léza. He revolutionized the Morna and was one of the most influential writers, composers and Morna singers in Cape Verde.

According to Souza’s research, he also considered the British presence to be more beneficial than the Portuguese one – at least for the Cape Verdean middle class.

Souza’s title Amizadi, a mix of funaná and jazz, was inspired by B Léza’s admiration for the British. He wrote a morna – Hitler ca ta ganha guerra, ni nada, meaning “Hitler will not win the war” to show his solidarity with the British people during World War II – and even raised money for the British war effort.

Souza noted that ports were “an important hub for musicians” who flocked there to learn the music – and instruments – of foreign sailors.

They mixed them with Cape Verdean rhythms to create new sounds. The Mazurka – derived from a Polish musical form – and the Contradança from the British quadrille dance.

Early written records of Cape Verdean music are rare – the Portuguese colonists did not document life and society in Cape Verde other than records of taxes and goods.

They also banned the Batuque – because it was too loud and too African – and the Funaná because its lyrics denounced social inequalities.

But Souza found a fascinating entry in the diary of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who arrived in Cape Verde in 1832 – the first stop on his famous Beagle voyage to study the living world.

He describes an encounter with a group of about 20 young women who, Darwin writes, “sang a wild song with great energy, beating their legs with their hands.”

This, says Souza, is most likely an early performance by Batuque – and it was inspired to write the song Sant Jago by Darwin’s accounts of the warm hospitality he received in Cape Verde.

Many younger Cape Verdean musicians tend not to play the islands’ older rhythms, and some such as the contradança are slowly dying out.

Souza hopes her Port’Inglês album will inspire younger generations that “there is a way to do something new with the traditional genres.”

“I always bring different elements – improvisation, piano, flute, jazz harmonization – so that the music goes through a further process of creolization.”

Port’Inglês by Carmen Souza is published via Galileo MC