Family members of prisoners in the Tarrafal concentration camp, after reopening in 1974, during the period of political transition in Cape Verde, signed a petition complaining of omission in the history of space.
© Lusa
12/09/2026
by
Lusa
“ A letter points to a recently published historical investigation, according to which dozens of Cape Verdean citizens were arrested and sent to the Campo do Tarrafal, between December 1974 and July 1975, without judicial conviction and, in many cases, without formal accusation ", reads in a statement of the Presidency of the Cape Verdean Republic, released on Friday.
The presidency released the petition after receiving the subscribers.
The arrests took place already after the release of the prisoners of the Portuguese colonial regime, who imprisoned more than 500 people there and in which 36 died (32 Portuguese, two Guineans and two Angolans), as documented in the now Museum of Resistance, in a space that is being applied for the heritage of humanity.
The petition complains of the omission of references to prisoners between 1974 and 1975 and this part of the history of the field, indicating that “historical memory cannot be selective or built on silences”, according to the presidency statement.
Cape Verde’s head of state, José Maria Neves, has made a commitment to “direct the exhibition” to the institutions responsible for the museum and contents “to evaluate (...) the inclusion of contextualized information on the uses of space in the political transition period (1974-1975)”.
The Cape Verdean President defended “spaces of technical and museological dialogue” in the face of the public petition.