Celebrating tradition while being contemporary: the conversion of stigma into an emblem in Cabo-Verdean Batuku music

Abstract

Young artists from Santiago are representatives of what could be termed a Cabo-Verdean musical vanguard. Immersed in contexts which are by turns urban, western and contemporary, they are re-elaborating Batuku by transposing its rhythms for instruments and contexts belonging to contemporary urban musical production. At the same time, they are interested in themes in which rural-traditional imagery predominate. Their compositions celebrate the characteristics and way of life of the Badiu, especially the Badiu di fora – the people who live in the interior of the island of Santiago, stigmatised in earlier times, and who even today are the victim of prejudice by people from the capital, Praia. As a paradoxical vanguard looking backwards, the contemporary music scene in Cabo Verde is characterised by balancing itself between the rural and the urban, to some extent mixing them, without feeling them incongruent. This attitude of the musicians is revealed by examining the artistic careers of a number of them and the songs they have written, while leaving open a number of different pathways of interpretation for their motives.