Why Africa’s island-states are generally freer

CAPE VERDE may be best known for white sand beaches. But the archipelago, about 500km off the coast of Africa, has something else going for it. It is one of the region’s few fully fledged democracies.Africa has more than its share of despots. But archipelagoes like Cape Verde seem to have avoided this curse. Four of Africa’s five island-states with less than 1.5m inhabitants are rated “free” by Freedom House, an American think-tank. This means they are largely liberal and democratic. For the continent as a whole, fewer than one in five countries is “free”.