Carmen Souza combines English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms

When she was a young child and taking too long to get ready for school, family get-togethers or to sing in the church choir, Cape Verdean musician Carmen Souza was often told to “ariope”.

What she did not realise until years later was that the Creole word came directly from the English word “hurry up”.

“We have so many words that derive from the 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 my father saying to me when he wanted me to pick up my pace.”

Ariope is now one of eight songs that Souza has composed for the album Port’Inglês – meaning English port – to explore the little-known history of the 120-year-old British presence in Cape Verde. It started off as research for her master’s degree.

“Cape Verdeans are very connected to music – in fact, we always say that music is our biggest export – and so I wondered whether there was also a musical impact,” she says.

There are very few recordings of compositions of the time – Souza did discover that an American ethnomusicologist, Helen Heffron Roberts, recorded some in the 1930s but they are on very fragile wax cylinders and can only be listened to in person at Yale University in the US.

So rather than rearranging old recordings, Souza – and her musical partner Theo Pas’cal – created new music, inspired by stories she came across.

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

The Cape Verdean islands lie about 500km (310 miles) off the coast of West Africa. They are mostly arid, with limited arable land and prone to drought.

But they are a strategic midway point in the Atlantic Ocean, and they were first controlled by the Portuguese as they traded between south-east Asia, Europe and the Americas – in spices, silk and enslaved people. With the abolition of the slave trade, Cape Verde went into decline.

Cape Verde remained a Portuguese colony until 1975 – but during the 18th and 19th Centuries, British merchants settled and Cape Verde once again became a bustling crossroads.

The British came for the cheap labour, goats, donkeys, salt, turtles, amber and archil, a special ink that was used in British clothes manufacturing.

They built roads, bridges and developed the natural ports – which became known as Port’Inglês – and set up coaling stations, with coal brought in from Wales.

São Vicente’s Mindelo port became a vital refuelling stop for steamships carrying goods across the Atlantic Ocean or to Africa – and an important global communications hub with the 1875 arrival of a submarine cable station.

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

“As I started to research, I found so many personal connections,” Souza says – including the fact that her grandfather loaded coal on to ships in Mindelo.

That inspired her to write Ariope – the story of an older man urging a younger man, who prefers to stay in the shade playing his guitar, to “ariope”. The British ships are coming and the sailors do not like to wait – “fulespide, streioei”, the song goes.

Souza imagines the spirit of her grandfather in the song. He used to play the fiddle – and was known as a great storyteller.

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

Souza is part of Cape Verde’s large diaspora. She was born in Portugal, and now lives in London. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there are about 700,000 Cape Verdeans living abroad – twice as many as at home.

Historically, people were forced to move for work because of famine, drought, poverty and lack of opportunities.

This movement contributed to the islands’ deep, rich tradition of strongly 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 revolutionised morna and was one of Cape Verde’s most influential writers, composers and morna singers.

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

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

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

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

Early written records of Cape Verdean music are scarce – the Portuguese colonists did not document life and society on Cape Verde other than records of taxes and commodities.

They also banned the batuque – for being too noisy and too African – and funaná because its lyrics challenged social inequalities.

But Souza found an intriguing 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, writes Darwin, “sung with great energy a wild song, beating with their hands upon their legs”.

That, says Souza, is most probably an early performance of batuque – and she was inspired to write the song Sant Jago by Darwin’s accounts of the warm hospitality he received on Cape Verde.

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

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

“I always bring some different elements – improvisation, the piano, the flute, the jazz harmonisation – so that the music is going through another process of creolisation.”

Port’Inglês by Carmen Souza is released through Galileo MC