Cabo Verde (3) - searching for Cova de Moura
A self organising black community or a den of drugs and violence? Why everyone in Portugal has a picture of this neighbourhood whether they've been there or not
Cova de Moura is a neighbourhood perched on a hill to the northwest of Lisbon. It sits between several motorways and the railway line that heads out to the historic hilltop town of Sintra.
Until the 1960s, like much of the land along the linha de Sintra train tracks, it was agricultural. Then with the Carnation revolution of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese empire in Africa came to an abrupt end, and Lisbon swelled with hundreds of thousands of returning white ‘settlers’ and black overseas citizens. The city expanded along the linha to accommodate them.
This was not a planned process. Post 25 de abril (the revolution is referred to by its date for shorthand) Portugal saw left and right wing coup and countercoup. It wasn’t a time for major public works. Instead immigrants built their own homes and made makeshift connections of water and electricity, where possible.
Settlements known as bairros de lata (literally neighbourhoods of tin) or what might be pejoratively called shanty towns in English, grew almost overnight. A man I know from Sintra tells of taking the train back to his parents’ home after a period studying abroad. He woke at a station he remembered as surrounded by fields to find the sun blocked by hulking buildings.
Many of these bairros have since been torn down and replaced by social housing in a highly controversial process. People received ‘formal’ homes but had to pay rent instead of owning space, while communities and families were separated. (This is an excellent documentary, with subtitles, about the last days of one such neighbourhood.)
But some bairros auto-construídos (self-built neighbourhoods as they are more positively called) still exist. Cova de Moura emerged from one - although permanent buildings have long since replaced makeshift structures, and the city levies a council tax even if many residents lack deeds to their property. New ones also still spring up: my first summer in Portugal, I took a ferry across the Tejo river to cycle to the beach. Google Maps led me to a riverside track where I found a grid of sand streets, corrugated iron homes and children playing outside. An older lady eyed me as I rode by, every bit the out of context tourist.
Whether in bairros auto-construídos or bairros sociais (the government housing that replaced them) the linha is where much of Portugal’s immigrant history has played out since the revolution - at least until the arrival of Eastern European and South Asian immigrants this century, with the latter crowding into cheap apartments in the oldest parts of the city centre.
What has all this got to do with Cabo Verde, the topic I’ve been writing about in the last two pieces?
Well some people would say that Cova de Moura is the most important centre for Cape Verdean culture in Portugal today. Cape Verdeans were the principal builders of the neighbourhood (alongside black and white retornados from other ex colonies and rural Portuguese moving to the city in search of work) and their imprint remains today. Others, as I found out, do not associate Cova de Moura with Cabo Verde at all, but instead with crime, violence, drugs and disorder.
For everyone though, including me, Cova de Moura means something. And that’s what I want to get at in this piece: how different people project a variety of ideas onto this immigrant space.
Vítor Sanches was born in Cova de Moura to Cape Verdean parents not long after the revolution and, apart from a period in London, has lived in the bairro most of his life. For him Cova de Moura is a place of community, where black people, in particular, can form positive identities about themselves and each other. He remembers growing up listening to creole as much as Portuguese and talks about the excellent Cape Verdean food you can eat in the neighbourhood.
Vítor is one of many residents seeking to grow businesses in the area. Currently he runs a store called Dentu Zona, selling pan-Africanist pamphlets and music, t-shirts he designs under the label Bazofo, and books by and about Afrodescendants in Portugal - I picked up the novel As novas identidades portuguesas by Patrícia Moreira, a Portuguese child of Cape Verdean immigrants, who spent part of her childhood in Amadora (a larger neighbourhood, of which Cova de Moura is part).
His message of economic self sufficiency resonates in some quarters.
Paula Gomes, the Portuguese daughter of Cape Verdeans we met in the last piece, grew up in Setúbal, a working class town, about 50km south of Lisbon across the Tejo. But she would spend school holidays in Amadora with relatives of her mother, while one cousin grew up in Cova de Moura itself.
At each stage in her life Paula moved into progressively whiter spaces, from school to university and then employment, and with each transition expectations people held about her as a black woman became more obvious: at work when she sends emails replies are often addressed to her supervisor, in meetings she calls elder white men assume they can lead. For Paula Cova de Moura signifies a place of empowerment, free from these expectations:
Cova de Moura is something special. It has a sense of community that should be a model. There are many small businesses. It’s a community that supports itself, recycles money within it, a kind of microeconomy. People don’t have a need to ever leave the bairro.
But later in our conversation she adds a throwaway line.
Remember I haven’t actually spent time in Cova de Moura, maybe driven through there once. This is just what I understand it to be.
The hopes Paula vests in Cova de Moura and the conviction in her description are not grounded in experience. If Cova de Moura is an idyll where she could be both black and free, it’s one that she only imagines, not a place she knows exists in Portugal.
Like Paula, I have an idea of Cova de Moura that is completely disproportionate to my experience of it. I’ve barely spent an afternoon there, but I am writing a piece about it, or at least ideas of the neighbourhood (I certainly don’t know enough to speak of the place itself).
Why does one bairro generate such strong reactions? Because Cova de Moura is inescapable in Portuguese discourse - media, politics, but also everyday conversation.
Remember how in the first piece, I asked white Portuguese people for words they associated with Cape Verdeans in Portugal and they used terms such as hard working, trustworthy, kind and beautiful. Well these are the words the same people associated with Cova de Moura, a neighbourhood largely populated by Cape Verdeans:
Only one of the white Portuguese people I spoke to had any sense that Cape Verdeans lived in the neighbourhood at all. Most thought it was ‘African’ in a general sense, or ‘maybe Angolan’. None had ever been there. All of them said these ideas started with television news:
As a child I remember reports about guns, drugs, violent crime. Then as you grew older and started to move around, it just became a place you obviously wouldn’t go or drive through.
One of the only cultural reference points on the Wikipedia page for Cova de Moura is the film A Esperança Está onde Menos se Espera (Hope is where you least expect it), by white director Joaquim Leitão. It’s from 2009, a financial crisis era film from a country among the most deeply rocked by the banking collapses of that time.
The trailer shows a wealthy (white) man losing his job. His son has to swap a life of luxury for danger: a school near Cova de Moura with mainly black students! He encounters violence, has to run from the police but also falls in love - with a black girl. This is liberal film making: hope exists - even in Cova de Moura. But the premise requires this to be unimaginable to the audience, when they start watching. I decided not to watch the actual movie.
Vítor Sanches says this idea of Cova de Moura as a place of violence is a result of how police treat the neighbourhood - like a warzone - rather than how people who live there treat each other, and in Racismo no País dos Brancos Costumes, Público journalist Joana Gorjão Henriques provides a detailed account of police brutality in Cova de Moura.
I met Vítor at his store in late summer, during a lull between Covid related lockdowns and he told me that police had been flying drone-mounted cameras over Cova de Moura to enforce social distancing rules. The machines would follow residents as they walked along the street. When a small group of people congregated outside a shop for an impromptu conversation, a police car sped into the neighbourhood to break them up.
I told several friends who live in other neighbourhoods of Lisbon about this account. None of us had heard of drones being used to enforce rules, or, frankly of any strict policing of Covid regulations at all. This is just an anecdotal example.
Anthropologist Ana Rita Alves describes a process in which Amadora, and other bairros along the linha have become marginalised, not just physically separated from the city centre, but comprehensively othered as places of violence and danger that need to be managed and controlled. This has led the people who live there - generally black - to be dehumanised as well.
I think we see a result of this in the words my white Portuguese friends associate with Cova de Moura. It’s why Cape Verdeans can be imagined as hard working and friendly, while a place where many of them live is seen as a place of violence.
I’ll end with Maria, the immigrant from Cabo Verde who got me started on this set of pieces. Her relationship with Cova de Moura began when her cousin was conducting research for her psychology degree at Moinho da Juventude, a NGO in the bairro and suggested Maria join her some evenings as a volunteer.
Her first experience was another moment of culture shock. Most of the young people she worked with identified as Cape Verdean, even though they were born in Portugal, and they didn’t believe she was from Cabo Verde at all. She spoke a different creole (she’s not from Santiago, the most populous island) and didn’t conform to the idea of being Cape Verdean they had grown up with in Cova de Moura.
She was initially furious - Who are you to question whether I’m Cape Verdean or not? I’ve been there my whole life, but soon found the young people’s reactions amusing, while they eventually acknowledged her identity. What frustrates her more is how white Portuguese people refused to associate her with the Cape Verdeans she was now spending time with in the bairro.
White Portuguese people differentiate between me and black people from Cova de Moura. They say to me: ‘You are different. You’re like us, not really black. They separate me from my blackness rather than changing their mind about what black is. So then I end up thinking, what is this thing you call black? It’s this idea you have of violence, and of Cova de Moura. It’s a place you put things.
I imagine I’ll come back to Cova de Moura again. Vítor and his girlfriend have promised to take me for Cape Verdean food when Covid times end and perhaps the annual music festival will return this summer . Eventually hopefully I can bring more than another superficial image in the various duelling ideas of what Cova de Moura is.
I hope these few pieces about Cabo Verde have been interesting, if anyone made it this far!!! They come from a limited reading of history, and only a handful of interviews, so I make no claim to authority, but I wanted to write down my own navigation of a complex and unique history.
Do let me know if you have any thoughts - in the comments below, or by email.