When you talk about roots, Cape Verde has a particular place in the world. Our roots extend over many continents. We are not like acacias, but, like the mangrove plants, which have multiple roots – the rhizomes.
Inviting the world to return to the roots by pointing them as a destination Cape Verde is something very deep and that accentuates our character of House of the World, of synthesis and eclectic people, of universal and particular culture.
My happiness is even greater when i realize that Back to tne Roots is a project for tourism purposes. Setting up a Tourism Fair on the value of culture is a safe step for sustainable, supportive, community, peer-to-peer and revolutionary tourism because we are putting something on the market that only we have in the context of nations because we are also at the root the new world. Culture has this gift of adding value to everything that nature and man produce. Roots are traces of a long walk of building an identity.
The purpose of Cape Verde is to make each person who visits us discover their own relative identity, their human identity through the relationship with the other. We are a mirror in this respect.
I warmly congratulate the promoters of this event, because they are assigning a seal to our sea
revolting and calm, crystalline and lukewarm, to our rugged and abyssal mountains, robbed of colors and sculpted, to our heaven now sometimes overwhelmed now moonlit, to our colorful and spicy markets, but, above all, to what we do with all this, transforming hardships in
shared wisdom, with open smile and soul.
Mario Lucio Sousa – Former Minister of Culture of Cape Verde