Tarrafal, 29 October 1936: Salazar's prison camp in Cape Verde opens

On 29 October 1936 the ship Luanda reached the bay of Tarrafal, a small town in the north of Santiago island in Cape Verde, then a Portuguese colony off the coast of West Africa. In its holds were 152 political prisoners. They had sailed from Lisbon on 18 October and spent twelve days below decks.2 sources

Some of them had taken part in the general strike of 18 January 1934 against the dictatorship's control of the trade unions. Thirty-four were sailors from a naval mutiny that September. Edmundo Pedro, one of the first to arrive, would return to the camp in 2009 to tell a documentary crew what had happened there.5 sources

They were taken to Chão Bom, just outside the town, where the government had decreed a penal colony six months earlier. The permanent prison did not yet exist. The decree allowed a provisional camp to be set up first, partly so that the prisoners' own labour could be used to build the colony.2 sources

Portugal had been a dictatorship since a military coup in 1926. In 1933 a constitution drafted by António de Oliveira Salazar, the head of government, founded the Estado Novo, or New State. It was approved by a plebiscite in which abstentions counted as votes in favour, and it left freedom of expression, assembly and association to special laws.2 sources

In September 1933 the regime's National Labour Statute, modelled on Mussolini's Carta del Lavoro, brought the unions under state control. Anarcho-syndicalists of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), communists and socialists answered with a revolutionary general strike on 18 January 1934. The regime had made arrests in advance, and the movement was quickly put down.1 source

Only in Marinha Grande, a glassmaking town in the district of Leiria, did it go further. Workers occupied the post of the Republican National Guard, the town hall and the post office and proclaimed a short-lived “soviet of Marinha Grande”. Troops restored control within hours, and a wave of arrests and deportations followed.1 source

When civil war broke out in Spain, Salazar sided with General Franco against the Republic. A Portuguese militia, the Viriatos, fought for the Nationalists, perhaps 20,000 men by unofficial estimates. Arms for Franco came in through Portuguese ports, and the Portuguese police handed Spanish republicans and refugees over to his side. In March 1939 the two dictators sealed their alliance in the Iberian Pact.1 source

On 8 September 1936 sailors on three warships, the Bartolomeu Dias, the Dão and the Afonso de Albuquerque, rose against the regime. The Revolutionary Organisation of the Navy, which grouped the Communist Party's cells in the fleet, planned to storm the prisons of the Azores, free the comrades held there and set up a provisional government to demand Salazar's fall. The government knew of the plan. Aircraft and coastal artillery fired on the ships, and within hours the revolt was over.1 source

Twelve men died. Of the 208 sailors arrested, 82 were convicted, with sentences of 16 to 20 years. Thirty-four of them sailed with the first group to Tarrafal, and most stayed until the camp was emptied in 1954. Five died there.1 source

The legal groundwork had been laid in the Diário do Governo, the official gazette, on 23 April 1936. Decree-Law 26:539, issued by Salazar's office and promulgated by President Óscar Carmona, created “a penal colony for political and social prisoners” at Tarrafal. It put into effect decrees of 1933 and 1934 that had already provided for such a colony overseas.2 sources

The colony was meant for people convicted of political crimes and sentenced to banishment, and for prisoners who, held in another prison, proved “refractory” to its discipline or “pernicious” to other inmates. If needed, it could also hold suspects awaiting trial whom the government chose to keep outside mainland Portugal. It was to have room for 500 prisoners, on about 1,700 hectares of land at Chão Bom, Achada Grande and Ponta da Achada.1 source

The decree also ordered an isolation zone around the colony “to prevent contact between the prisoners and the free population”. On paper the staff were to include a director, a chaplain, a doctor, a pharmacist, three nurses and seventy guards, backed by a company of African colonial troops under European officers.1 source

Former prisoners called Tarrafal the campo da morte lenta, the camp of slow death. Their memoirs, studied by the sociologist Antónia Gato, describe the routine. Prisoners swapped their own clothes for coarse uniforms they called “iron suits”. A guard struck a length of old rail hanging by the gate to sound each order, and the men had to line up bareheaded for roll calls, work brigades and the raising of the flag, and take off their hats before every guard.1 source

The first months were dry. Then came the rainy season and swarms of mosquitoes, and within days about 200 men were burning with fever. No doctor came to treat them and there were no proper medicines. The sick had a qualified nurse, who had arrived with the second group of prisoners in June 1937, and he had a thermometer, enemas and cold compresses.1 source

The first death came on 20 September 1937. In little more than a month the fever the prisoners called the biliosa killed seven men, all from the first group. Their comrades hid the deaths from the sick, saying the dying had been taken to hospital in Praia, and the carpenters among them turned refectory tables into coffins.1 source

Punishment meant the frigideira, the “frying pan”: a concrete block in open ground a few metres from the camp, about six metres long and three wide, split into two cells. Its only openings were an iron door pierced with small holes and a grating above it. In the tropical sun, prisoners said, the heat inside could reach 60 degrees. Men were held there on bread and water or thin soup, and at night they shivered on the concrete floor.2 sources

On 2 August 1937 a collective escape, planned with the help of two sentries, failed at the last moment. The prisoners the camp held responsible were beaten and 17 were sent to the frigideira. Days later a ditch was dug around the camp.1 source

The Museu do Aljube's list of people who died at the hands of the dictatorship names 33 men who died in the Tarrafal camp between 1937 and 1948. Most were workers: a glassworker and another worker from Marinha Grande, sailors, a barber, a cork worker, masons and drivers. The youngest, a newspaper seller, was 22. The oldest, a mason, was 58.1 source

Two of them led the movements behind the 1934 strike. Mário Castelhano, the anarcho-syndicalist leader of the CGT, died in 1940 at 44. Bento Gonçalves, a lathe operator and secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party, died in 1942 at 40. The Museu do Aljube calls both deaths murders.4 sources

The totals differ. The Museu do Aljube gives 340 prisoners and 34 deaths in one of its notes and 375 prisoners and 32 deaths in another. The mausoleum in Lisbon carries 32 names. The historian José Soares Tavares, a former Tarrafal councillor, told Lusa that 34 political and common prisoners were buried in Tarrafal's cemetery. Deutsche Welle and the documentary maker Diana Andringa give 32 Portuguese dead, and both note that others died after release from what the camp had done to them.6 sources

The Museu do Aljube dates the camp's first closure to 26 January 1954 and names Francisco Miguel as the last prisoner of that period to leave. Cape Verde's heritage institute puts the end of this first phase in 1956.2 sources

Early in 1961 independence movements in Portugal's African colonies took up arms, and Portugal sent troops. The camp was reopened as the Campo de Trabalho de Chão Bom, the Chão Bom labour camp. The Museu do Aljube dates the reopening to 14 April 1961 in one note and to June 1961 in another, while RTP and Lusa give 1962. The first prisoners, from Angola, arrived in February 1962. Guineans followed in September 1962, and the first Cape Verdeans in 1968.6 sources

Martins recalled cells so crowded that the men lay “like canned sardines”, and daily cachupa, the Cape Verdean maize stew, with traces of tuna. When prisoners refused rotten fish, the director cut their meals. In place of the frigideira there was now a small concrete punishment cell, barely taller than a standing man and barely longer than a man lying down. It was nicknamed the Holandinha, “little Holland”, after the country to which many Cape Verdeans emigrated.2 sources

Prisoners organised all the same. The camp had had a library since the 1940s, many peasants learned to read and write there, and Martins said almost everyone in his wing took up studying. Cape Verdean prisoners passed notes to the Angolans on the other side of the camp, with the help of some guards. Three or four African prisoners died there: two Guineans and one or two Angolans, depending on the source.3 sources

On 25 April 1974 the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the Estado Novo in Lisbon. Freeing political prisoners was one of the main popular demands, and on 1 May 1974 the last prisoners in Tarrafal, Angolans and Cape Verdeans, walked out through the gate. The camp was formally wound up in 1975.3 sources

On 18 February 1978 thousands of people followed the remains of the Tarrafal dead through Lisbon in heavy rain, chanting “Tarrafal never again”. They were laid in a mausoleum paid for by public subscription in the Alto de São João cemetery. It carries 32 names and the words “To those who, in the long night of fascism, carried the flame of freedom and for freedom died in the Tarrafal concentration camp” (translated from Portuguese).2 sources

The graves in Tarrafal's own cemetery remain. In 2020 Cape Verde's culture minister, Abraão Vicente, said the government was checking whether any remains had yet to be moved, and planned a memorial to everyone who had passed through or died in the camp.1 source

The camp itself became the Museu da Resistência in December 2000, at first a single room in the old secretariat. On 1 May 2009, the 35th anniversary of the liberation, Cape Verde's president, Pedro Pires, invited the survivors back for a symposium, and the museum reopened with galleries on both periods of the camp. Deutsche Welle dates the museum itself to that year. It was redesigned in 2016 and again in 2021.3 sources

Cape Verde lists the site as national heritage and has placed it on its tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status. In 2020 RTP described the museum as the country's most visited, with more than 9,000 visits a year.2 sources

On 1 May 2024, fifty years after the liberation, Portugal's president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, joined Cape Verde's José Maria Neves, Guinea-Bissau's Umaro Sissoco Embaló and Angola's defence minister at the camp. They opened an exhibition, “Tarrafal: from repression to freedom”, and heard a talk on the camp's history by the historian Victor Barros.1 source