Cape Verde is morna, a musical genre that has also been a World Heritage Site since 2019, immortalized in the voice of the 'barefoot diva', Cesária Évora.

But if Cape Verde is morna, it is also Eugénio Tavares (1867–1930), poet, writer, or simply 'the Cape Verdean Camões,' a legacy preserved in the house museum on Brava Island, his birthplace and the smallest and most inhospitable island of the archipelago. It is there that a unique history that shaped a country still 'lives' and is remembered.

Little known abroad, Eugénio de Paula Tavares is a central figure in Cape Verdean culture, one of the greatest defenders of the Creole language (derived from Portuguese and now spoken throughout the archipelago) and author of the first and most sentimental mornas. He also created a Cape Verdean identity that would later become a nation.

He was born on Brava Island on October 18, 1867, in a line of descent that, in addition to his Portuguese father, reached, on his mother's side, from Spain and Italy. Amidst myths and legends of the time, it is known that the still-isolated island was already a healing and rest resort for the entire coast of Guinea and Gambia in the late 19th century, a veritable refuge for Europeans residing in the archipelago and on the neighboring coast of Africa.

The story goes that his father, Francisco de Paula Tavares, a native of Santarém who settled in Guinea, was a wealthy landowner in the Cacheu and Geba region. However, emerging tribal rivalries brought insecurity to the region.

The woman, Eugénia Nozolini Roiz Tavares, was pregnant with her third child, Eugénio Tavares, and with her health deteriorating, she decided to return to her parents' home on the island of Fogo and then to neighboring Brava, seeking improvement.

Eugénio de Paula Tavares was born in the family home in Brava, but complications during childbirth took his mother's life. Brava's most distinguished son would end up being raised by his godmother, as his father also died shortly thereafter.

"You are the marvel of a Woman who is doubly a Mother; no more holy a mother to the fruit of her womb than to the feelings of her soul; no more loving mother to her own children than a sublime mother to the children of others. I love you, my mother, and blessed be the inexhaustible source of maternal goodness that emanates from your spirit. Everything originates in love, nothing originates in blood."

The text was written by the poet Eugénio Tavares, dedicated to his godmother, adoptive mother, Dona Eugénia Martins da Vera Cruz Medina e Vasconcelos, who accompanied him throughout his life and whom he called “Badinha”.

They called it São João Island, but the name wouldn't go down in history. Its rugged terrain did, and it was later renamed Brava, being the most rugged. Elliptical in shape, it's only 64 square kilometers long and nine kilometers at its widest, through deep valleys and a maximum elevation of 1.100 meters at Monte das Fontainhas, with Fogo Island and its volcano eight kilometers away.

Considered the jewel of the Portuguese Colonial Empire, it was the birthplace of the poet Eugénio Tavares, as the history reveals in the poet's house museum, built there, in the village of Nova Sintra, and open to visitors.

"Discovered on June 24th, it was named São João Island. Later, the wild nature of its topography, the wildness of its valleys tangled with hostile vegetation, and the abandonment it suffered for many years, even after it was inhabited, gave it the name BRAVA."

This is how Eugénio Tavares described his island.

“O' Brave beloved, my nest in bloom,
O' little and humble Brava!
Once crowned with fire and lava,
Today your nimbus is our love!”

Thus begins the Bravense Hymn, written by the poet, dedicated to his eternal island.

Around the same time, he learned to play the Portuguese guitar, and his first musical compositions began. At the age of 15, he published his first poem in the "Almanaque de Lembranças Luso-Brasileiro," which soon led him to believe that, with his talent, he should leave Brava for a new environment that would allow him to soar.

It ended up being a flight closer, still in Cape Verde, but on the island of São Vicente. Eugénio began working at the Union Bazar trading house, representing the consular interests of the United States of America. However, his life would never be the same again, encountering the dynamic life of Mindelo, which contrasted with the rural environment of Brava.

Mindelo, in São Vicente, was already a space of culture and universality, a result of the importance of its commercial port, and a crossroads of customs where young people would awaken and refine their poetic vein.

As the poet's house museum recalls, in the middle of the Atlantic, Porto Grande do Mindelo already received more than one hundred thousand passengers per year at the time, in transit to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Asia and Europe, and Mindelo.

The mixed race, already more mixed than in Brava, offered beautiful types of Creole women, representing an unprecedented crossroads of races and cultures. It was a perfect environment for the budding poet. He quickly mastered English and French and soon began contributing to the local press.

He became known as a journalist who began by describing Mindelo and São Vicente, his second homeland, and later fought – another trait of his identity, which would cause him disagreements with the colonial power – for his rights and his elevation to city status.

“The Happiness and Aggrandizement of the Cape Verdean People”.

Then Governor Serpa Pinto arrived in the Colony of Cape Verde, and the poet's dream was colored by the relationship between them. Eugénio responded, but as a journalist, he didn't shy away from demanding justice and morality for Cape Verde. It was also during this period, under Eugénio Tavares, that the sweet morna gained substance and sound, and new themes were introduced.

Love, the Island, the Sea, the Woman, the Emigrant, Departure, Longing: The Hour of Bai [farewell] with the goal of returning, were it not for Cape Verde historically a land of departure in search of a better life. It is this escalation that allows the Creole language, Cape Verde's mother tongue, to take its first steps on the path of Literature, once again through the pen of Eugénio Tavares.

The poet is Creole, and his lyre is Creole. The great leap forward is that he also published in Creole, not in the then-official Portuguese. Between 1890 and 1900, Eugénio Tavares was truly the "Double Dolphin" of Cape Verde, as his house museum on Brava Island so impressively describes, the place where he began evenings of mornas, poetry, and manidjas, followed by Coimbra-style serenades.

It is also there that theater is performed and people are taught to sing and play, with Eugénio Tavares at the center of it all.

“At the head of a Nativist Cultural Elite, with Loff de Vasconcelos and others, he identifies a new Culture, in the Portuguese space – it was the First Dawn of Cape Verdeanity; the Cape Verdean Man was identified.”

It describes the museum that now resides in the house where the poet was born. It is in this context that the most conservative disdain and reject the media attention achieved by Eugénio Tavares. Threatened by the privileges obtained at the cost of injustice, they attempt to halt his progress and have launched a smear campaign against journalists.

Of course, Eugénio Tavares was one of the main targets for his directness and caustic writing. Furthermore, Serpa Pinto had left Cape Verde, and to halt the social progress being made, largely driven by Eugénio Tavares, João Cesário de Lacerda was appointed Governor of the colony of Cape Verde, who would later repress and serve the cause of discontented conservatives.

In what was then described as “a brutal rebuke", prohibits references to the famine on the island of Santiago in the press. The other front is to demote the "Douphin" of Cape Verde, inventing an embezzlement of funds from the Public Treasury to persecute the poet. Eugénio doesn't disarm, but he opens the door to a conflict that would lead him to an ordeal lived in exile, in prison, and to an acquittal after twenty painful years.

This match was marked in writing:

It was the 12th of June 1900, on a beautiful morning, with a high sky, streaked with long, sparkling flakes, a calm, slightly choppy sea, spread out on an immense cloth of dotted blue silk.

The lugger spread its broad sails to the lovingly cool northeast, and set sail down the channel, facing America, the El Dorado of liberty, equality, and fraternity. With a splendid sail, light upon the sea, elegantly inclined, the ship flew, while my spirit painfully returned to reality, retreating, and becoming overshadowed by that indefinable, calm, tranquil, deeply painful opacity of great resigned sorrows.

On the bronzed mountain that lay behind us, sad eyes veiled with tears, tears that no balm could console, would perhaps cry, fixed, moistly fixed on the wake that the lugger was leaving on the calm blue surface.

You who know me, you know the reasons for my exile: you witnessed the monstrosities that overturned the muddy stream of unheard-of slander over my name.

Thus, in July 1900, after a 29-day journey, he arrived in the United States and stayed with relatives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where a significant community of Cape Verdean origin already lived—seafarers recruited to work on whaling ships. There, he made a living from writing and for writing, founding the newspaper "Alvorada," which gave voice to the immigrant community.

With the establishment of the Republic in Portugal on October 05, 1910, Eugénio returned permanently to Cape Verde after several clandestine visits, which the poet himself called "sad returns," which he also immortalized in poems and later mornas. He returned to celebrate the Republic before the admiring and affectionate gaze of the Cape Verdean people, as he described it at the time.

In a Cape Verde still dominated by Portugal, now republican, he returned to writing and journalism, through the newspaper “A Voz de Cabo Verde”, where he would write, once again, everything that the regime did not want to be seen.

Tried and acquitted, Eugénio returned to Brava Island for good in 1922, to live among his people and in the comfort of his family, writing to earn a living in addition to his teaching. But it was above all composing morna that he devoted himself most.

Until, five years later, then-Governor Guedes Vaz visited Brava for a courtesy visit that also served as a means of "redress" to Eugénio Tavares. The time had come to offer the poet a kind of apology for the suffering he had caused. He was then invited to travel to the island of São Vicente for a meeting of poets that would result in a national tribute to a group of writers, including Eugénio Tavares.

In the last decade of his life, after the death of his adoptive father, Eugénio inherited the Aguada estate, in Brava, and spent much of his days there, painfully wounded, isolated like a hermit in one of the darkest places on the island of Brava.

"There he resides, crushed between the pressure of two desolate mountains, with his unobstructed view of the sea, delimited in the distance by the summit of these truly dark rocks. There he lived, writing mornas and speaking to the sea in his soliloquies of helplessness."

The renowned Cape Verdean writer Luís Romano described Eugénio. Cultivating isolation, he is 62 years old and is not always in Vila Nova Sintra, the island's capital, or in Jardim Eugénio Tavares cultivating his flowers, an image that still lingers in the locals today. But it is from this period that two of his best compositions, the mornas "Bidjiça" and "Nha Santana," about the heartbreaks he experienced throughout his life, were born.

And in a life guided by the heart, this was also his farewell.

It was June 01, 1930, and at eleven o'clock in the morning, Eugénio Tavares, sitting in a rocking chair in his house in Vila Nova Sintra, received a visit from his friend Pedro Castro and his nephew José Medina e Vasconcelos.

The friends had come for a regular chat to tell the poet about an unusual and ridiculous incident occurring within the Colony's government. After listening to the story with great interest, the three ended the conversation with a roar of laughter, when Eugénio Tavares slumped over, struck down by angina.

He remembers the house museum, transformed in his memory since October 18, 2006. Amidst myths and stories, many even thought that Brava would disappear with its poet, who died at the age of 63, and took to the streets of Vila Nova Sintra to say goodbye to Eugénio Tavares with flowers thrown on the ground to the sound of mornas of longing.

The same one in which all of Cape Verde has since been immersed, which began to dedicate October 18th to it: National Day of Culture and Communities.

The final decision on ratification of the classification was adopted at the 14th annual meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO, held in Bogotá, Colombia.

“I declare the decision adopted,” announced María Claudia López Sorzano, Secretary for Culture, Leisure and Sports of the city of Bogotá, who chaired this annual meeting of the Committee, in a moment that brought the celebration to the 600 Cape Verdeans in the archipelago and to more than a million spread across America and Europe.

Popularly considered the “queen of music” of Cape Verde, the dossier for its candidacy for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, with more than 1.000 pages and around 300 interviews, was formally submitted by the Cape Verdean Government on March 26, 2018.

According to the candidacy dossier, morna appeared in the 19th century, with no consensus on the origin of the name and island where it was born: Boa Vista or Brava.

Marked by the lyrics of the poet Eugénio Tavares and later by Francisco Xavier da Cruz or 'B.Léza' (island of São Vicente, 1905 – 1958), morna found its greatest exponent outside Cape Verde through the singer Césaria Évora (1941 – 2011), who through that musical genre opened the doors of the world to the small island country.

Morna emerges from a blend of musical styles with strong African roots, landum, and influences from the Portuguese-Brazilian modinha, according to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage application. One of the oldest written references to morna is in a book by Russian naval officer Konstantin Staninkovitch, who visited Cape Verde in 1861.

“Morna is a musical practice structured in three dimensions: melody, poetry and dance, characterized by a quaternary time signature, slow rhythm and predominance of the perfect classical minor tonal schemes of European influence.”. It is also read in the process.

Performed in Cape Verdean Creole by a solo voice, male or female, although there are also merely instrumental mornas, and covering “lyrical-passionate themes, a melancholic song is produced, closely linked to the feeling of love, suffering, longing, tenderness, sadness, irony and the good or bad luck of individual destiny”.

Typically accompanied by viola, cavaquinho, violin, and piano, the "instrument par excellence of morna" is the guitar, introduced to Cape Verde in the 19th century. Cape Verde's candidacy was grounded in the popular culture that has kept morna alive to this day, fueled by musicians and performers of all ages.