Amado’s work is the first academic book in English on language policy and the politics of language in the unique case of Cabo Verde. This is an important book. It is the best academic discussion I have read on the subject. It is sure to be hotly debated back in Cabo Verde but it will elevate that decade-old discussion. The book not only contributes to the wider literature on the language question in post-colonial Africa as well as all creole societies, but it also provides valuable contribution to Cabo Verdeans inside and outside the country who wonder why the country has agonized for so long over its language and its national identity. What happens in a country where the “official” language is not the everyday language of the majority of the population, and what does this tell us about governance, national identity, social inclusion? Abel’s book is an imaginative, readable, jargon-free and sweeping work on the history and politics of language in the Cabo Verde, bringing together his own original research and scholarship from multiple disciplines of sociolinguistics, political science, social theory and post-colonial critical theory. This is a provocative work. It is not subtle in its critique and careful research. It is unsparing in exposing the discrepancies, hypocrisies, and ultimate damage between the professed ideals of one of Africa’s democracies and the actual practices and institutions of democratic governance. Importantly, Abel’s work is really not just about language policy. It is about the quality and durability of democracy itself in Cabo Verde. The book’s innovative idea of the “illegible state” shows how the use of Portuguese in a society where the majority of the population do not speak it has a harmful impact on political participation and the ability of citizens to hold the state accountable. There are many threats to Cabo Verdean democracy today, and language policy is one of them as it suppresses participation and diminishes accountability. But by making themselves illegible, the state and its governing elites alienate and push away the very society they depend on – a society that has no sense of ownership of the state or democracy and that actively finds ever more creative ways to avoid, evade, circumvent the state, its laws, its rules and institutions. In his frontal, unflinching, and unsparing analysis of the history and politics of language policy, Abel carefully unpacks the many layers of language policy and debates to reveal the ways in which language policy is ultimately a power project by elites to maintain their domination but also how what is ostensibly a practical matter of what language to use touches on the deeper, complex, agonizing struggles the society has over its very identity as a nation – whether it is an African society, European, something else. The book speaks to a bigger issue facing all post-colonial societies, but the country case itself makes the language issue both fascinating and complex – an archipelago of regional differences and a diasporic nation with most Cabo Verdeans living outside the country. Ironic that Cabo Verde turns its back on kriolu but across the oceans the US state of Massachusetts has pioneered bilingual education for Cape Verdean immigrants using their primary language. The book not only reveals the international politics involved in both maintaining Portuguese language hegemony but actively excluding the native language. Aside from the state deliberately making itself illegible, strong regionalism pushes back against the adoption of the native language while the country’s global diaspora common language and identity as a people is the native language.
João Resende-Santos, Bentley University
