Image source, Cape Verde Cultural Heritage Institute
Edmundo Pedro (1918-2018), entered the Tarrafal concentration camp, on the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde, at the age of 17.
He was part of the first group of prisoners who went to build the camp, which at the time had little more than tents. It was October 1936.
Edmundo Pedro was arrested eight months earlier for leading the Youth of the Communist Party and went towards Tarafal not knowing very well where he was going.
His father, Gabriel Pedro, was also an opponent of the government and traveled with him. Neither of us knew at the time how long they would spend in exile. They returned 10 years later.
The Cape Verde Penal Colony, the official name of the Tarrafal camp, was created in April 1936, in the context of several social protests that began in the general strike on January 18, 1934 in Portugal, in which many were arrested.
The regime created a concentration camp in one of its colonies and the most ideologically dangerous prisoners were then expelled.
“Political prisoners opposed to the regime were mainly housed in the first phase of the camp: anarcho-syndicalists, communists and socialists” explains the historian Isabel Flunser Pimentel.
“The camps looked like, not extermination camps, but concentration camps Nazi Germany or French Spain. The objective was not to kill the prisoners, but to neutralize them, lock them up as long as possible and let them die,” he says.
At first it was just a field with canvas tents. “The various facilities were built by the prisoners themselves, who were subjected to forced labour,” says Nélida Brito, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cape Verde.
340 prisoners passed through there, all Portuguese, in what was known as the “first phase” of the camp.
The conditions were terrible: In addition to the bad treatment and beatings, there was a shortage of food, a lack of hygienic conditions (the “bathrooms” were five holes in the ground with cans inside), together with the hostile climate of Cape Verde and the dangers of contracting malaria . . from mosquito bites due to lack of medical care.
So much so that Tarrafal began to know as “the field of slow death.”
Image source, Collection/SIPA
Whoever visits the Tarrafal camp today, transformed into the Museum of the Resistance, can read the declaration of intent of the doctor Esmeraldo Pais da Prata, who had to ensure the health of the prisoners, inscribed on the walls: “I don’t come here to heal, but to issue death certificates.”
“33 prisoners died between 1936 and 1954. Most of them from diseases like malaria or diarrhoea, as a result of the water they drank, which was not drinkable. But others from the ill-treatment they suffered them,” says Nélida Brito.
The worst punishment was called “frying.” Created by the first director of the Tarrafal camp, Manual dos Reis, in 1937, it was a concrete “box” six meters long, three meters wide and with a small crack in the roof.
“Exposed to the intense sun of Cape Verde, the internal heat could reach 60ºC,” says the history teacher.
the “fry”
“When I was in the frying pan – with twelve other men – the moisture from my breath condensed on the walls where it ran. It does not take much imagination to think what could happen when twelve men tried to breathe .inside a box like that for free. with the tropical sun heating the outside, and the evaporation of the breathed air running down the walls” wrote Gilberto Oliveira, a prisoner of the camp, in the book Tarrafal’s Living Memory.
“The bodies were soaked, the air without oxygen was suffocating, the blood was pounding in the head and the chest was constricted in maddening semi-asphyxiation. And we have to add to this all that viscous moisture in which they mixed the putrid acids of the can in which everyone discharged themselves. In summary, a pit where men were treated worse than animals“, writes.
Gabriel Pedro, Edmundo Pedro’s father, was the prisoner who spent the longest time there: 135 days. His despair was so great that one day he tried to take his own life. cutting his wrist with a cane. They found him in time to save his life.
Young Edmundo was locked in the fryer for 70 days, after an escape attempt.
“You can’t imagine what it was like. The temperature inside was almost 50 degrees. At night there was such condensation The moisture ran down the walls and we licked it. They took our water away. “I cannot explain the amount of suffering,” he said in an interview with a local newspaper in 2017.
Image source, Cape Verde Cultural Heritage Institute
Most of the prisoners ended up in the Tarrafal camp without any trial. “This is the case of Edmundo Pedro,” says historian Irene Flunser Pimentel. “He was there for 10 years and only when he returned to the city was he tried and sentenced to a half-year sentence, which, of course, he was no longer serving.”
In 1954, years later Allied victory in World War II and due to some international pressure, the arena was closed.
However, in 1961, with the end of the war abroad and with the independence movements in the Portuguese coloniesthe regime decided to reopen the field.
The name was changed, it became the Chão Bom Work Camp and the “frying pan” was destroyed.
The second period of the field
In its apparent place the “holandinha”, a cement construction, also precarious, but which was located inside another building, impossible to see from the outside.
In this second phase, the Portuguese anti-fascist prisoners were not, but members of the liberation movements of the African colonies.
“They went around there 107 Angolans, 100 Guineans and 20 Cape Verdeans. In this second phase, there was not so much forced labour, especially because the camp had already been built and they spent most of their time locked up there,” says Nélida Brito.
“A library was created that had three functions: a library, thanks to the sending of books, a school and a church. In addition, thanks to the comfort of some guards, [los presos] They found 3 radios. Conditions continued to be severe (corporal punishment and unsanitary conditions continued), but none of the brutality of the first phase.”
Image source, Collection/SIPA
The prisoners were separated by nationality and the guards did not allow them to mix, ie. so that the different political movements would not “feed” the others.
During the many years they were all there, the prisoners developed forms of resistance.
“Many did what they called academic improvement. Others who were more educated taughtsome only knew how to write their name. And this learning from each other was a way to survive and resist that oppression,” says Diana Andringa, journalist and author of the documentary “Memories of the Slow Death Camp”.
Recorded in 2009, on the 35th anniversary of the camp’s closure, the documentary shows the reunion of the prisoners who survived.
The useless evil
“It was very moving to experience that. Many did not even know each other, most were not back there and shared common medical memories. They entered it in a different way, because victors, because of what the Africans, in prison in the 60s, in part with the Portuguese, in prison in the 1930s, it was “anti-fascism and anti-colonialism”.
The images contain stories of extreme cruelty. Off violence, beatings, stories of isolation in the “holandinha” which ended in madness. But what impressed the journalist the most was what she calls “useless evil.”
“Some of them were arrested by their parents and, when they came here, they had to be naked. Many Angolans and Guineans would rather be beaten than undress in front of their parents. That is, in their culture, something that is not done. And it is here that colonialism shows a complete lack of respect for other people’s culture, and it is there that it brutally attacks them,” says the journalist.
Image source, Cape Verde Cultural Heritage Institute
“The families of the Guineans were told they had died. And many had a funeral. The weight this leaves on a family, the trauma of learning later that a child was buried alive… I also remember to the wife of a Portuguese anarchist, Mário Castelhano, who was returned a letter with the word ‘died’ written in red. That’s how she found out that her husband had died. These are the eruptions that have terrified me the most, because it is a useless evil. It has no purpose, just to cause more damage,” he says.
When the revolution happened in Portugal on April 25, 1974, some prisoners heard the news on the radio. And they also got information from some guards who had relationships with some prisoners.
“I have good news for you, something happened there,” a Cape Verdean guard told them confidentially. But nothing happens there. At least until May 1st.
That morning, A crowd gathered at the gate of the camp and demanded the release of the prisoners. The director of the camp, Dadinho Fontes, and some soldiers entered the camp, announced a regime change and released the prisoners.
When they came out, The prisoners were delighted by the crowd who carried them on their shoulders to the center of the city, in a party that lasted all day.
“The point is not that they tried to kill us slowly,” says Jaime Schofield, a Cape Verdean captured in 1967, at one point in the documentary. “The most important thing is that We refuse that slow death. At Tarrafal we reinvent life, always!”
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