Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · Portuguese colony
Portuguese Cape Verde - 1947
Portuguese Cape Verde begins 1947 as a colony governed from Praia under António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo. The legal label matters: Lisbon will reclassify its colonies as overseas provinces in 1951, but that change has not happened and would not by itself create self-government. Appointed officials, censorship and police surveillance leave islanders few lawful ways to challenge policy. Geography fragments even this centralized authority. The islands have different rainfall, harbours and local economies; a decision in Praia reaches São Vicente, Santo Antão or Fogo only when a ship or radio connection carries it. Mindelo's Porto Grande remains the archipelago's principal maritime centre and cable station, although steamships' shift from coal has weakened the bunkering trade that once sustained it. Praia holds the governor and central departments on Santiago, the most populous island and one of those hardest exposed to rural scarcity. The postwar world speaks increasingly of welfare and political rights, but those promises collide here with a dictatorship that presents empire as permanent. You inherit administrative command without democratic legitimacy and a crisis too severe to hide behind constitutional formulas.
Starting position
Drought has turned the opening position into an emergency. Failed rains across the 1940s have ruined maize harvests and intensified famine, disease and mortality. Cape Verde's steep terrain, thin soils and irregular rainfall make farming precarious even in ordinary years. Cisterns, wells, terraces and seed reserves are strategic infrastructure, while imported grain is the immediate difference between life and death. Each island depends on coastal shipping, and Praia cannot assume that food unloaded at one port reaches an interior village. Establish island ration accounts, inspect merchants' stocks and reserve schooner space for relief. Public works can put income into households and preserve roads or catchments, but compulsory labour converts relief into extraction. Emigration is another survival system. Cape Verdean seafarers and communities abroad send money and goods home, while colonial authorities can channel desperate workers toward contract labour on São Tomé plantations. Facilitate voluntary passages and remittances, or use exit permits to force labour into routes Lisbon prefers.
What turns the campaign
The first turns ask who receives scarce food and who is allowed to report failure. Rural Santiago cannot compete politically with officials in Praia; remote islands can disappear behind aggregate statistics; Mindelo workers can be blamed for unrest when wages no longer buy imports. Create local relief committees with power to verify beneficiary lists, or let administrators and favoured landholders control distribution. Publish ship manifests and mortality reports even when they indict the government. Agricultural recovery requires more than distributing maize once: protect seed from consumption, repair terraces and waterworks, diversify gardens where water permits, and plan fodder for surviving animals. Port maintenance must continue because every recovery policy depends on inter-island movement. The coercive backdrop is Tarrafal, the prison camp established on Santiago in 1936 for opponents of the Portuguese dictatorship. Its cells and cemetery make clear that the regime answers some dissent with deportation, illness and death. Tarrafal was closed in 1954 and later reopened for African nationalists, so in 1947 it remains an active instrument against metropolitan political prisoners. You can transmit police suspicions and silence criticism, or insist that relief complaints and labour organizing are treated as evidence about conditions. There is no organized Cape Verdean liberation movement to command at this date; Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC lies in the future. Political play begins with truthful records, civic networks and protection from arbitrary punishment.
Signature challenge
An archipelago measured in missing rain
Cape Verde's signature test is whether an island government can make distance visible. A central grain total means little if Santo Antão has food while Santiago villages cannot reach a store, or if sacks wait in Mindelo while a schooner lacks fuel. Build a working picture from rainfall gauges, market prices, clinic admissions, burial records and the schedules of small vessels. Then direct relief by need and make losses auditable. Lisbon may resist reports that expose colonial neglect, but concealing deaths trades short-term official comfort for another preventable disaster. Longer-term resilience demands modest, distributed works: cisterns cleaned before rain, terraces repaired, drought-tolerant crops tested with farmers, and warehouses placed where rough seas do not sever access. Keep Porto Grande useful by serving shipping and maintaining workshops, while recognizing that harbour revenue cannot feed every island automatically. Diaspora links offer foreign exchange, passage and news outside official channels; protecting correspondence and remittances increases household options. Success does not mean defeating drought or declaring an independence that is not yet organized. It means fewer people forced to choose between hunger and coerced plantation labour, more communities able to survive the next failed rainy season, and records honest enough that neglect cannot masquerade as unavoidable nature. Under Estado Novo rule, preserving those lives and channels of truth is already a political achievement.
Try the Portuguese Cape Verde campaign
Make relief reach every island and turn survival into political capacity.
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