José Luandino Vieira and the Tarrafal Prison

José Luandino Vieira, born José Mateus Vieira da Graça in 1935 in Portugal, was raised in Angola from an early age. In Luanda, he completed his secondary schooling, began publishing short stories and illustrations, worked as a film critic for a local newspaper, and became involved with the National Liberation Movement of Angola and the Angolan Liberation Army (NLMA-ALA). This political engagement led to his being placed under surveillance by Salazar's state security police in 1959. Following the NLMA-ALA's integration into the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1960, Luandino continued his political participation, contributing to the broader nationalist struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Because of this involvement, at the age of twenty-six, on the 20th of November 1961, the Salazar's state security police detained Luandino on charges of participating in Angola's independence movements. Subsequently, they sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment on allegations of treason and terrorism. Following a short period of incarceration in Lisbon, he was transferred to Angola, where he spent two years being moved among detention centres. In 1964, he was relocated to the Chão Bom Labour Camp, commonly referred to as "Tarrafal", where he remained for the next eight years.

The "Tarrafal penal colony" was established in 1936 on Santiago Island in Cape Verde (Decree-Law No. 26.539, 1936) under the authoritarian and national Estado Novo regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar, which governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974. Its creation was driven by the regime's need to detain political opponents, particularly individuals who "having been interned in another prison, have shown themselves to be refractory to the discipline of this prison or harmful to other inmates" (Decree-Law No. 26.539, 1936, p. 446). The construction of this detention facility relied heavily on prisoner labour, and for many years, detainees lived in canvas tents, a situation made especially severe by the region's intense heat.

In response to national and international criticism, namely from the USA, the prison was closed in 1954 for reconstruction. It reopened in 1961 as the Chão Bom Labour Camp (Portuguese Government Gazette, no. 139/1961). By 1961, most prisoners were activists in African independence movements (Andringa, 2010). This terminology shift (from "penal colony" to "labour camp") resulted from Salazar's broader strategy to mitigate international pressure, which also included replacing the word "colony" with "overseas province" and "empire" with "Portuguese overseas territory". These linguistic adjustments sought to portray Portugal as a multiracial, multicontinental state rather than a colonial empire (Valério, 2021). Despite such efforts, the prison continued to be widely known as the "Tarrafal concentration camp" and "slow death camp" (Barros, 2009), as there was no running water, food was inadequate and scarce, disease remained endemic, and psychological and physical torture were pervasive.

During the first month of quarantine, isolated from the other inmates, Luandino had access to a few books for company: the Bible, a Kimbundu-Portuguese dictionary, an English edition of Shakespeare's complete works, as well as language manuals and exercise books in Kimbundu, Italian and Russian (the guards initially mistook the Russian language book for Greek and only confiscated it six months later) (Ribeiro, Silva & Vecchi, 2015, p. 540). Reading and drawing had always been his preferred activities, and these occupied him upon his arrival at Tarrafal.

His writing and illustrations, produced in prison, initially in Lisbon, later in Angola, and in Tarrafal, were systematically organised and compiled in 2015 by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Mónica V. Silva, and Roberto Vecchi in the volume Papéis da prisão. Correspondência, diária, correspondência 1962-1971 [Prison Papers: Notes, Diary, Correspondence 1962-1971], with Luandino’s consent and involvement. This book spans over a thousand pages and encompasses an extensive collection of materials: notes, drawings, poems, traditional narratives, personal letters, lyrics of Angolan and Cape Verdean songs, glossaries of Kimbundu and prison jargon, descriptions of African popular games, literary character sketches, dialogues in various Angolan dialects, short stories authored by Luandino or shared among fellow inmates and outlines for literary projects. Within this collection, the fragment emerges as the predominant textual form, serving as a tangible manifestation of the prison experience that might otherwise remain absent from representation. Luandino's fragments operate as interconnected units, reflecting a principle of semantic interdependence since they emerge from the unified experience of a subject under constant surveillance. Although fragmentary, Luandino's texts stem from an ongoing writing process that creates a mosaic of prison life. Their sense of completeness also arises when readers interpret them collectively as temporary snapshots of a deeply subjective experience of confinement, enforced silence, and resistance (Baleiro, 2025).

In Tarrafal, Luandino Vieira “became a writer” (Vieira, 2009), although he had already written short stories before his imprisonment. In this 2009 interview, he highlighted that his evolution as a writer during his incarceration in Tarrafal stemmed primarily from a profound contrast between the prisons of Luanda and Tarrafal. In Luanda, he experienced a sense of community and shared national identity, while the adversary was positioned outside the prison walls. In Tarrafal, however, hostility was not external but embedded in the harsh environment and the extreme isolation: "We were on an island, the island in the middle of the Atlantic, within the island we were in the middle of the countryside, without any contact" (Luandino, 2009). These conditions, which are fundamentally opposed to human existence, led to an inward turn, encapsulated in Luandino’s own words: "Tarrafal is the prison within me" (Vieira in Ribeiro & Vecchi, 2015a, p. 1049). Within this context, writing became both a necessity and a deliberate choice. On one level, it was an act of fidelity to his political commitment: "It was not about becoming a great writer but about contributing to Angola's independence in the broadest sense of the word 'independence', via literature and my training as a writer. It was not just political independence but the cultural contribution to a national identity, consciousness, and values that, according to certain theories, shape the nation." (Vieira in Ribeiro & Vechhi, 2015b, pp.10-11). On another level, in a place of relentless surveillance, where he drifted "like a ghost" perceiving only "the surface of things" (Ribeiro, Silva & Vecchi, 2015b, p. 901), where memory faltered and escape was impossible, writing emerged as a strategy for survival, a means to access emotion, assert autonomy, and preserve memory. In Tarrafal, Luandino wrote Nós, os do Makulusu [Us, from the Makulusu] in just eight days, between the 16th and the 23rd of April 1967: “This book had been inside me for a long time. I could not find a way. I knew it hurt, and when things hurt, I must write.” (Luandino, 2009). In Tarrafal, he also wrote Luuanda (1964) and Vidas Novas [New Lives] (1968).

After the Carnation Revolution on the 25th of April 1974, which ended the dictatorship and initiated Portugal's decolonisation process, the Tarrafal concentration camp was closed on the first day of May 1974. After serving various functions (i.e., military base, warehouse, school), the Cape Verde government inaugurated the Tarrafal Museum of Resistance in 2000, with the support of the Portuguese government. In 2006, the former prison was designated a national heritage site. In 2024, the Cape Verdean authorities, along with Portugal, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, submitted an application for its inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List (Observador, 2025).

Luandino Vieira’s imprisonment experience in Tarrafal and the texts he produced during this time transform the Tarrafal Museum of Resistance into a literary tourism destination, creating a place where literary production, repressive mechanisms, collective memory, and history intersect. This site and its narrative highlight the importance of researchers, local communities, and political and cultural authorities collaborating to effectively balance the demands of remembrance, pedagogical responsibility, and ethical management when translating the site's significance into a public tourist experience (see https://www.unistrapg.it/en/dark-literary-tourism-and-remembrance-education, in this dictionary).

National funds finance this work through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, IP, under the Project CiTUR UID/04470/2025.

How to cite this entry: Baleiro, R. (2025). José Luandino Vieira and the Tarrafal Prison. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59.