Cape Verde when Portuguese explorers discovered and colonized the islands, establishing the first European settlement in the tropics. Ideally located for the Atlantic slave trade, the islands grew prosperous throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, attracting merchants, privateers, and pirates. The end of slavery in the 19th century led to economic decline and emigration. Cape Verde gradually recovered as an important commercial center and stopover for shipping routes. Incorporated as an overseas department of Portugal in 1951, the islands continued to campaign for independence, which was peacefully achieved in 1975. Since the early 1990s, Cape Verde has been a stable representative democracy,
Literature of Cape Verde is related to Cape Verdean independence. Its first recorded literature from Cape Verde was in the 16th century with some works written by André Álvares de Almada, he wrote annals of the Portuguese expansion, his most important was a treatise on the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde, an area between the Senegal River and Sierra Leone. Cape Verdean literature would be rarely recorded until 1890 with Eugénio Tavares with his morna poems, himself was the dolphin of Cape Verde, his poems were written in Brava creole. The second Creole book was the "Sorrow of Love" by Xavier da Cunha