This article deals with the continuous flow of resources, values and goods that takes place within a Cape Verdean institution called tabanca. It examines the effects of some practices of the so-called Cape Verdean diaspora on local forms of sociality in Santiago's tabancas, in order to show that these flows have a remarkable conservative tendency and contribute to the reproduction of traditional forms of social organization. The Cape Verde I present in this article is at variance with the standard image of the country in current anthropological literature, which approaches social life in the archipelago using analytical tools developed in interdisciplinary fields such as globalization theory and post-colonial, transnational or diasporic studies. Through the ethnographic analysis of the flows within the tabanca, I put the Cape Verde case in the general context of West African political culture to argue that some of its attributes, which appear in literature on transnationalism, diaspora and globalization as the outcome of contemporary transformation, can best be explained in terms of a conservative structural continuity with the political culture that evolved in the northern part of West Africa, known as Senegambia.