“Poverty in Cape Verde Is Female”(?)

Gender, Race, and Family Politics in Matricentral Contexts

Abstract

The article examines the relationships between the State, organizations of civil society and working-class families in Cape Verde. These relationships involve a set of moral perspectives that seek to shape behaviour related to notions of family, gender, and kinship based on certain worldviews that, although specific, are intended to be hegemonic. In this sense, such perspectives have a well-defined audience, targeting: individuals from the lower classes, especially women, whose families and their dynamics are classified as a “problem to be solved”. One such category is at the centre of the concerns of the actors and documents analysed here: single-parent families headed by women, in which the husband/father is absent. Based on ethnographic data, this paper proposes shifting the perspective from an external one based on notions of deviance – in which female heads of households are seen as the cause of their family’s poverty – to one that understands the strength women bring to family dynamics in these contexts.