Don’t Overlook Africans, Pope Says in Cape Verde : Pilgrimage: John Paul starts an eight-day tour. He urges the have nations to remember the have-nots.

At the start of a pilgrimage to some of the poorest nations on Earth, Pope John Paul II on Thursday asked the world community not to overlook Africa in its preoccupation with sudden change in East Europe and the Soviet Union.

Stiff winds and blowing sand greeted the Pope in this tiny island nation 300 miles off West Africa as he began an eight-day journey to five sub-Saharan countries where per-capita income averages less than $220 a year.

Enthusiastic crowds waving white and yellow papal flags lined freshly tarred roads to welcome John Paul to Praia, a city of 60,000 people and national capital of this Rhode Island-size country. About 90% of Cape Verde’s 364,000 people are Roman Catholic.

“This is probably the biggest day in Cape Verde’s history,” a diplomat in the receiving line said.

In the golden days of sail, Cape Verde seamen, the descendants of Portuguese colonists and African slaves, served as crewmen on board New Bedford whalers and Yankee clippers. Today, many Cape Verdeans live in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts.

En route from Rome on his sixth visit to Africa and the 45th foreign journey of his 11 years as Pope, the 69-year-old pontiff seemed relaxed and fully recovered from a bout with the flu. He chatted with reporters, offering an insider’s glimpse of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to the Vatican last month. He said Gorbachev had applauded the concept of prayer, and he added:

“I can say without betraying any personal secret that (Gorbachev) was very pleased with the Pope’s prayers. He said prayer was certainly a sign of spiritual order, spiritual values, and that we have great need of these values.”

After two days in Cape Verde, John Paul will visit four countries on the African continent--Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad.

“This trip is especially dear to me,” he said, “because we are going to meet the poor in a desert region often called the Sahel. They are poor in an economic, material sense. In a moral sense, poverty means wealth.”

Responding to questions, the Pope said that developed countries working to solidify changed East-West relations must maintain their economic commitment to the have-not nations of the Third World.

“They cannot abandon their common and current responsibilities . . . for the problems of the Third World,” he said, “and for this I also thank providence that at this time my journey is taking me precisely to Africa, to the Sahelian countries. This is an act of providence.”

Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony, has no natural resources, yet it is the richest of the five countries John Paul will visit. Per capita income is about $400 a year.

Its economy is tied to subsistence agriculture on islands subjected to prolonged droughts, and its people rely on foreign aid and remittances from relatives living abroad.

The Pope, making the first of two African trips scheduled for 1990, asserted on arrival his oft-expressed conviction that for there to be a just world, the rich must help the poor.

“The Holy See and the Pope feel allied with Africa and other countries of the Third World because we must present to the rich all the needs of the poor,” he told reporters. “We must insist on solutions. It’s a question of solutions of an individual and concrete type. How can you not cry out in certain situations?”

John Paul is scheduled to fly this morning to the island of Mindelo, then move on Saturday to Guinea-Bissau, his second stop.