When Cape Verdean musician Carmen Souza was a child, it took her so long to get ready for school, family gatherings or to sing in the church choir that she was often told to “ariope.”

It wasn’t until years later that she realized the Creole word came directly from the English word for “hurry up.”

“We have a lot of words that come from British English,” jazz singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Souza told the BBC.

“‘Salong’ is ‘so long’, ‘fulespide’ is ‘full speed’, ‘strreioei’ is ‘straight’, ‘bot’ is ‘boat’, ‘ariope’ – I always remember my dad saying to me during the races . He wanted me to speed up.”

Ariope is now one of eight songs Souza wrote for the album Port’Inglês (English Port), which explores Britain’s little-known 120-year history in Cape Verde. It started as research for her master’s degree.

“Cape Verdeans are closely associated with music – in fact, we always say music is our biggest outlet – so I wondered if there was a musical influence as well,” she said.

There are very few recordings of works from that time – Souza did find that the American ethnomusicologist Helen Heffron Roberts had recorded some works in the 1930s, but they were on very fragile wax cylinders and could only be Listen to it in person at Yale University in the United States.

So instead of reworking old records, Souza and her musical partner Theo Pas’cal created new music inspired by the stories she encountered.

She combines jazz and English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms, including funaná, played on an iron rod with a knife and accordion, and batuque, played by women and based on African drum rhythms.

The Cape Verde Islands are about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off the coast of West Africa. Most of these areas are arid, with limited arable land and prone to drought.

But they were strategic midpoints in the Atlantic and were first controlled by the Portuguese during the spice, silk and slave trade between Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. With the abolition of the slave trade, Cape Verde declined.

Cape Verde was a Portuguese colony until 1975, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it was settled by British traders and Cape Verde once again became a bustling crossroads.

The British came here for cheap labour, goats, donkeys, salt, turtles, amber and achille (a special ink used in British clothing manufacturing).

They built roads, bridges, developed a natural harbor (later known as English Harbor), and established coaling stations to transport coal from Wales.

The port of Mindelo in São Vicente became an important refueling station for ships carrying goods across the Atlantic or Africa, and became an important global communications hub with the completion of a submarine cable station in 1875.

Sousa’s exploration of the British presence in Cape Verde soon became personal.

“When I started researching, I found a lot of personal connections,” Souza said, including the fact that her grandfather loaded coal onto ships in Mindelo.

This inspired her to write “Ariope” – the story of an older man urging a young man who prefers to stay in the shade to play guitar to “ariope”. The British ships were coming and the sailors didn’t like to wait – “fulespide, strreioei” the song goes.

Souza imagines her grandfather’s spirit in the song. He used to play the violin and was considered a great storyteller.

“I was told that if you had to walk a kilometer with him, you wouldn’t notice the distance because it would be one interesting story after another.”

Souza is part of a large diaspora in Cape Verde. She was born in Portugal and lives in London. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), some 700,000 Cape Verdeans live abroad, twice as many as at home.

Historically, people have been forced to work outside their homes due to famine, drought, poverty and lack of opportunity.

The movement contributes to the island’s deep and rich unique musical tradition, including the melancholic morna, made famous by singer Cesária Évora, and was recognized by the United Nations in 2019 Declared by UNESCO as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Francisco Beleza, also known as B Léza, composed many of the songs that made Évora a global star. He revolutionized Mona music and is one of Cape Verde’s most influential writers, composers and Mona singers.

Based on Sousa’s research, he also believes that the British presence would be more beneficial than Portugal’s – at least for the Cape Verdean middle class.

Souza’s song “Amizadi” is a fusion of funaná and jazz, inspired by B Léza’s admiration for the British. He composed a mona (Hitler ca ta ganha guerra, ni nada, meaning “Hitler will not win the war”) to express solidarity with the British people during World War II and even to raise funds for the British war effort.

Souza found the port to be “an important hub for musicians,” who flocked to learn music and instruments from visiting foreign sailors.

They blended them with Cape Verdean rhythms to create new sounds. The mazurka is derived from a Polish musical form, while the contra is derived from the English quadrille.

There are few early written records of Cape Verdean music – apart from tax and merchandise records, the Portuguese colonizers did not document Cape Verdean life and society.

They also banned batuque – for being too noisy and African – and funaná because its lyrics challenged social inequality.

But Souza discovered an interesting entry in the diary of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who arrived in Cape Verde in 1832, the first stop on his famous Beagle voyage to study the living world.

He described an encounter with a group of about 20 young women, who, Darwin wrote, “beat their legs with their hands and sang a wild song with great energy.”

Souza said it was likely an early performance of Batuk — Darwin’s description of the warm reception he received in Cape Verde inspired her to write the song “Sant Jago.”

Many young Cape Verdean musicians tend not to play the island’s ancient rhythms, and some music like contradança is slowly disappearing.

Souza hopes her Port’Inglês album will inspire the younger generation that “there is a way to do something new with traditional genres.”

“I always bring some different elements—improvisation, piano, flute, jazz harmonies—so that the music goes through another process of creolization.”

“Port’Inglês” by Carmen Souza is released via Galileo MC