Amilcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist 9781787381445, 1787381447

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ANT6NIO TOMAS

Amilcar Cabral The

L*

oJ a Reluctant

l{ationalist

s 1i HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., S3Torbay Road, London NW6 7DT @ Ant6nioTom66, 2021 All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow The right ofAnt6nioTom6s to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by hfun in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and PatentsAct, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978 I 787381+45 This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources.

www. hurspublishers. com Photographs reproduced with the kind permission of DAC-Documentos Amilcar Cabral/Arquivo da FundaSo M6rio Soares.

To

-y

beloved uncle,

Aldemiro

CONTENTS

xl

List oJ A*onyms and Abbreviatioas

Inhoduction

1

1. Between Guinea and CapeVerde 2. TheYears in Lisbon 3. Engineer and Clandestine Militant

4. Shattering theWalls of Silence 5. A United Front 5. Modes of MakingWar 7. The Capely'erdean Question 8. A State Inside the Colony 9. Winning in PoliticsWithout Losing theWar

t7 33

53

77 87 109 127 135

149

10. Towards Independence 1 1. The Killing of Cabral

169

Epilogue

203

187

Notes

215

Bibliogruphy

233

Index

243

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Guinea and CapeVerde

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LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

CBC CEI

CEL

CIMADE CNCV CONCP CSL

CUF FARP

FLG FLGC

FLING FNLA FRELIMO FUL GNR GPRA GRAE

ILO ITU MAC MFA MLG MLGCV

Congressional Black Caucus Casa dos Estudantes do Imp6rio Conselho Executivo da Luta (PAIGC) Comit6 inter-mouvements auprds des 6vacu6s Conselho Nacional de CapeVerde Conferdncia das Organizag6es Nacionalistas das

Col6nias Portuguesas Conselho Superior da Luta Companhia Uniio Fabril Forgas Armadas Revolucionirias do Povo (PAIGC) Frente de Libertagio da Guin6 Frente de Libertagio da Guin6 e de CaboVerde Frente de Libertagio Nacional da Guin6 Frente Nacional de LibertagSo de Angola Frente de LibertagSo de Mogambique Frente Unida de Libertagio Guarda Nacional Republicana

Gouvernement provisoire de

la

R6publique

al96rienne Governo da Repriblica de Angola no Exilio International Labour Organization International Telecommunication Union Movimento Anti - Colonialista

Movimento das Forgas Armadas Movimento de LibertaEio da Guin6 Movimento de LibertagSo da Guin6 e CaboVerde

xl

LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS MPD MPLA NAACP NATO

Movimento para a Democracia Movimento Popular de Libertaglo de Angola National Association for t}e Advancement of Colored People North Atlantic Treaty Organization

PAI (Guinea and

Organizagio de Solidariedade dos Povos de Af.i"u, Asia e Am6rica Latina Organization of African Unity Partido Africano da Independ6ncia

CapeVerde) PAI (Senegal) PAICV

Parti Africain de I'Ind6pendance Partido Africano para a Independ6ncia de Cabo

OSPAAAL

OAU

Verde

PAIGC PCP

PDG

Partido Africano para a Independ6ncia da Guin6 CaboVerde Partido Comunista Portugu6s Parti D6mocratique de la Guin6e

do

PIDE/DGS

Policia Internacional da Defesa Direcgio Geral de Seguranga

PSP

Policia de Seguranga Priblica Rassemblement D6mocratique de la Guin6e

RDG

United Nations

UPA UPG

Uniio dos Povos de Angola Uniio dos Povos da Guin6 Uni6o dos Povos para a Independ6ncia de Cabo Verde

xll

Estado/

Uniio Democritica de CaboVerde Unilo Democr6tica Nacional de Mogambique

UDC UDENAMO UN

UPICV

e

INTRODUCTION

of 1954, Portugal, the most economically deprived, backward nation at that time in Europe, was facing three military insurgencies in Africa. In Angola, the armed conflict had started in January 1 951 , when hundreds of the FNLA's men attacked farms in the nort} of t}e country, killing thousands of Portuguese settlers as well as Angolan indentured workers mostly from the south. In northern Mozambique in 1964, FRELIMO's troops had attacked the Portuguese military positions, and soon made important inroads in controlling areas of the territory. But in Guinea in January 1953, the PAIGC soldiers had occupied isolated positions of the Portuguese army in Tite and launched what would become t}e most successful military camBy the end

paign against Portuguese colonialism. The brain behind Guinea's uprisings and operations was the Guinean-born agronomist Amilcar Cabral.

The revolution in Guinea has been hailed as one of the defining moments along Lusophone Africa's road to political sovereignty. Contrary to the expectations of the nationalists from the Portuguese colonies, the momentum of the military uprisings stalled the first year after the initial confiontation. Angola is a perplexing case in this regard. Following the uprising of 1960, Portugal implemented a number of sweeping reforms that paved the way for an era of robust economic growtir, which not only contributed to quelling the population's thirst for independence, but also drove hundreds of thousands of settlers to t}e colony. Mozambique, excluding the zones controlled by the guerrillas, was not much different. Guinea was an exception. Guineans were not only challenging the more powerful and better-equipped

AMiLCAR CABRAL Portuguese army, they were also laying the groundwork for the emergence of a postcolonial state. Ultimately, the military insurgency began

re-thinking t}e meaning of revolution itself. This book is about the man behind this struggle, Amilcar Cabral. It narrates his revolutionary trajectory, from his early life in Guinea to his death at the hands of his own men in the neighboring country of Guinea-Conakry on 20 January 1973. This book is, for the most part, the English version of the biography of Cabral, O Fazedor de I)topias, whose first edition, in Portuguese, came out in 2007. However, this version is not simply a translation, even if the overall structure is largely unchanged. It takes advantage of the troves of archival information which have recently been made public and insights from the deluge of studies on Cabral, the last years of Portuguese colonialism, and the anticolonial movement in the former Portuguese colonies. Furthermore, since I have not stopped working on Cabral (publishing papers, presenting at conferences, exchanging emails with readers), this edition has also given me an opportunity to elaborate, correct, and even reflect on issues that were not fully resolved in the Portuguese edition. Accordingly, restoring Cabral's political dimension is not what animates the writing of this study. To put it another way, the relative obscurity into which Cabral's travails may have fallen is not my main concern. This biography is concerned with the difficulty of how to write about African historical figures and tlle times and contexts in which they developed their political activities. I have reflected on this question elsewhere, building on the work of the anthropologist and cultural critic David Scott. In Conscripts oJ Modernity, Scott discusses t}e ways in which postcolonial scholarship uncritically assumes t}at we still inhabit the same historical times which produced the present day. I approach t}is conceptual problem by relying on what I call answerquestion dialectics. Action, and more specifically political action, is for the most part a response to a very particular question.The insurgency led by Cabral, for example, can be seen as the answer to the problem ofcolonial exploitation.This, according to Scott, poses a serious conceptual and epistemological problem. For if anticolonial critique were the answer to the problem of colonialism, postcolonial critique should be concerned with tlle question in itself, and not whether we arrived a process of

2

INTRODUCTION at the answer, as if we still live in those historical times. Heeding Scott's

advice, I have interrogated in my own work Cabral's diagnosis of the colonial question.Was he right? Did he portray colonialism in the most accurate way?

The question here is how to write about Cabral's times and struggles. As such, I am countering the ways in which a number of topics and motifs have been represented in the literature on Cabral. More

specifically, this biography of Cabral intends to address the gulf between the reality of the armed struggle in Guinea and the ways in which it has come to be discussed. Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher touched on this question when they recently acknowledged that t}ere were significant differences between what Cabral said and what he perhaps would have said if he could speak freely: Cabral was not only speaking of his own thoughts but was representing and leading a consensus within, for lack of a better term, a revolutionary movement. He was not, in other words, an individual public intellectual who said or wrote what was on his mind, but instead, and in any to think of the dynamics that were unfolding within the movement. case, he had

The problem here doesn't just flow from Cabral's own representation of the liberation movement in Guinea, but also from the assumption that Cabral was speaking for "a consensus within the revolutionary movement."This passage hints at a major contradiction which will be examined in depth in this biography. On the one hand, it is true that Cabral was not able to speak freely. But on the other, nowhere will one be able to find a process through which a consensus was actually reached in the context of the national liberation movement. Paramount here is not only the issue of internal democracy (or the lack thereof in the operations of the national liberation movement, but also its consequences. Many writers consider Cabral's war leadership to be exemplary, and it has inspired many studies on revolutionary theory, on the control and administration of liberated zones, and on postcolonial state formation. But the enthusiasm that characterized accounts of Guinea's path to independence is not reflected in the country's present-day situation. In fact, Guinea's descent into one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world started right after independence. Some commentators have suggested that Cabral's mur3

AMiLCAR CABRAL der in 1973 deprived the soon-to-be nation of his problem-solving ingenuity. At the heart of this disjunction is perhaPs not the way in *fu.h we talk about Guinea's revolution today, but the ways in which it was represented in its own time. To be more emphatic, I am not concerned with contrasting Guinea's Present with the promises of the past.This would be cheap criticism, as hindsight allows us a far greater understanding than those that came before us of the complex choices that had to be made. Instead, I will address this question with reference to what Cabral was able to know at different points in time, and what materials he could use in order to make sense of the world in which he lived.This question is important, and I will set out to answer it in this book, thus acting as a corrective to a large amount of what has been written on Cabral. Earlier biographies of Cabral, by Russian Oleg Ignatiev and Angolan M{rio Pinto de Andrade, for instance, tend to depict him as an overconscious nationalist, able to anticipate the course and configuration of historical events well in advance. For them, the fact that Cabral became the leader of the PAIGC, for example, was simply the fulfillment of his calling. They write the life history of Cabral retrospectively. The Poems that Cabral wrote in his early days are seen to contain the seeds of tJle revolt which brought him to nationalism.This is not the approach I will take in this book. Let me give an example. By the mid-1950s, Cabral was back in Lisbon, after a spell in Guinea as an agronomist. Life was going well for him, his wife, and their small child---despite the rampant racism in the city at that time. While he was also involved in nationalist activities, under the alias Abel Djassi, he tried his best to live a double life.Yet in 1950, he had to commit fully to nationalist activism.Those biographers also tend to describe political sovereignty as the ultimate goal of his activism in t}e late 1940s and early 1950s, when Cabral was still a student in Lisbon. However, I demonstrate in this book that such a conception of independence was not available to tllem at that time. Only later, particularly after the 1950s, when most African countries had achieved independence, could Cabral assert independence as the primary goal of his struggle. Accounting for these discrepancies is the fact that a great deal of what we know about nationalism in Lusophone Africa may have been fabricated. Attempts have been made to expose such historical fabrica-

tions in books which are for the most part only available in +

INTRODUCTION

tried to bridge the gulf between the accounts of the revolutionary process and what really happened. Curiously, the nationalist Mirio Pinto de Andrade not only strongly contributed to the concoction of these misrepresentations, but also, even if involuntarily, tried to debunk them later in his life. In the famous interview with Michel Laban, M6rio de Andrade admits that propaganda was an important aspect of the anticolonial strategy in Lusophone Africa. Part of this may perhaps be explained by the schism that existed in these movements between those who made the war and t}ose who publicized it. Cabral was in the second group, and, as Reiland Rabaka has put it, he was a "reluctant soldier": he spent much of the war promoting, but not actually participating in, the fighting. Cabral was not a military man, nor dld he have any military training, and even though he was the commander of t}e rebel forces, he was convinced that the independence of Guinea could only be attained by diplomatic action. As such, Cabral spent a considerable part of the colonial war (from 1964 to 1973) travelling. It was through these trips that his party got almost everything it needed to subsist. But it also meant that Cabral had to depict events in a certain way. Cabral was an optimist, and much of the materials and information he circulated about the revolution in Guinea painted a rosy picture of events. For him, the revolution was about how Guineans were being exposed to modernity through the national liberation movement, how an African state was being formed through political action in the liberPortuguese. These studies have

ated zones, and how a few hundred peasants were confronting the military might of the colonial army. A great number of Western writers,

journalists and activists who visited and wrote about the liberated zones simply repeated t}re same mantra, either out of idealism, or because of shortsightedness, in part because Cabral's party only allowed them to see certain aspects of the liberated zones. Ultimately, important elements of the movement were swept under the carpet. For instance, Cabral's constant absence bred resentment against him and other CapeVerdeans, and alienated him from the everyday experiences of the freedom 6ghters. As such, the way we recall the revolutionary process today is largely based on the "facts" which were produced as propaganda.

Commenting on Cabral and his revolutionary movement, the Sdo Tomean nationalistTomis Medeiros drew a stronger link between pro5

AMiLCAR CABRAL paganda and political leadership. He argues that most of the warrelated events were taking place elsewhere and that Cabral could only know what was going on through rePorts, which produced a great deal of noise. The question is whether this noise has persisted. Key here is to understand what really happened and how these events have been described and conceived. As such, the gulf, as discussed earlier, lies between reality and t}e description of this reality for t}e sake of propaganda. What impoverishes contemporary analysis of Guinea's road to political emancipation is that most of the same troPes are still evoked. But as it is no longer necessary to portray the anticolonial struggle in a specific way, our analysis of these historical Processes should change in its turn. Consequently, in this book I focus on archival materials, on the interviews I conducted in 2000-when a number of participants in

the events were still alive-and particularly on the evolving debates over the presentation of these questions in Guinea and CapeVerde. As

such, this book attempts to capture how the anticolonial war was perceived in the aftermat} of independence, when t}e optimism of this process had largely died down. The aim is to reflect the ways in which the life and work of Cabral is perceived today, outside the academic world. In doing so, I relied on a couple of sources which require a brief discussion. CaboVede: Os Bastidores da IndependOncia is a good source to start with. Written by the CapeVerdean journalist Jos6 Vicente Lopes, the book does not only chronicle the involvement of Cape Verdeans in the nationalist movement, but does so through the voices of those who had taken part in the action. Lopes had the oPPortunity to interview a many of the nationalists, some of whom have since died. In the same vein, another source to be taken into account is a book by the Portuguese journalist Jos6 Pedro Castanheira, Qrem

of having been written for the purpose of absolving General Ant6nio Spinola of any responsibility for t}re events that led to the death of Cabral, Castanheira's book nonetheless contains many details which have become standard in writing on this historical period. He was perhaps not only the first author to discuss in detail the three scenarios for the murder of Cabral, which I develop in the last chapter of this book, but he was also one of the first journalists to get access to the PIDE archives when they became available to the public. A considerable amount of the information is probmandou matar Amilcar Cabral? Accused

6

INTRODUCTION lematic and unreliable, but Castanheira was able to identify the most relevant parts by examining the system the PIDE used to ascertain the accuracy of the information provided by its collaborators. As such, his book is an antidote to the historical fabrications. Last but not least, the biography of Cabral produced by JuliSo Soares Sousa is also worthy of note. Although not much is added to what was already known about Cabral, Sousa has done remarkable work in terms of giving documentary substance to a number of events that researchers on Cabral only hint at. He has been able to clarify a number of outstanding questions about Cabral's life, such as the exact date on which he returned to Cape Verde, the place where he attended school, and, more importantly, Cabral's exact location at the time of the "founding" of the PAIGC. He also provides a wealth of new detail on the resentment between CapeVerdeans and Guineans, which contributed to the climate of conspiracy and helps to explain the killing of

Cabral. For the most part, this information can only be found in archives in Portugal and in the private communication between participants in the nationalist struggle. Read it carefully, and one starts to understand t}re unresolved issues within the movement that led to the assassination of Cabral.

*** Amilcar Cabral was born in Guinea on 24 September 1924 to Cape Verdean parents, Juvenal Cabral and Iva Pin}el Evora. When he was eight years old, his family returned to the island of Santiago, where he attended primary school. After completing primary school in Praia, Cabral moved with his mother and siblings (the couple had split up) to the island of Sio Vicente to receive his secondary education at Liceu (high school) Gil Eanes, where he finished top of his class. It was during tlese years, from 1935 to 7944, tlut he started writing poetry and essays. Criticalll it was also during these years that he was confronted wit} poverty for the first time. To feed her children, Cabral's mother had two jobs, and Cabral and his siblings were forced to perform odd jobs in order to help at home.The SioVicente years also impacted him on a more dramatic level. Because t}e CapeVerdean islands were cyclically hit by droughts which killed thousands of people, from an early age Cabral saw people starving to death on the streets. This image remained with him for the rest of his life. a

AMiLCAR CABRAL After

a short stint

working for the

Imprensa Nacional (National Press)

in Praia, Cabral was awarded a scholarship to attend college in Portugal. In Lisbon, he enrolled atthe Instituto Superior deAgronomiain 1945, where he obtained a degree in agronomy and met his colleague Maria Helena Rodrigues, who would become his first wife. But the most important aspect of Cabral's life in Lisbon was the political activism he began to be involved with. In Lisbon, alongside other students from Portuguese colonies in Afiica, Cabral was exposed to three themes that would mark him profoundly: Nlgritude, Marxism, and nationalism. He wrote and published poems, led the Cape Verdean section of the Casa dos Estudantes do Impi.rio, and took part in the first cultural actions against Portuguese colonialism. After finishing his studies in 1952, he moved to Guinea-Bissau, his homeland, to take the job of agronomist at t}e Pessub6 Farm. His most important achievement in Guinea was planning and running the first agronomic census in this former Portuguese territory, which gave him plenty of information on

how the economy and particularly agriculture was structured in Guinea. During this period he became cautiously involved in subversive political activities, but none that were a concern at the time for the

Portuguese secret police, the PIDE. He relocated back to Lisbon in 1955 and, still on the payroll of colonial agricultural firms, visited Angola many times, using these opportunities to get involved in the emerging nationalist movement there and

to connect nationalists in Angola to those in Europe. As previously mentioned, Cabral has long been looked upon as being committed to the liberation struggle from the very beginning. But his decision to leave everything behind and embrace a clandestine life was not taken lightly. It was made after pressure from his Angolan comrades, namelyViriato da Cruz and Azancot de Menezes, who were crucial in the founding of what would later become the MPLA (see Chapter 4). Nor was he the first nationalist to attempt to rally Guineans in CapeVerde in support of the liberation movement. In fact, when Cabral arrived in neighboring Guinea-Conakry, there were already a number of nationalists, particularly from Guinea-Bissau, campaigning in support of the nationalist president, Ahmed S6kouTour6 (see Chapter 5). Having developed his ideas in the diaspora, particularly in Portugal, where he was a founding member of the Movimento Anti-Colonial, Cabral tried to unify all the 8

INTRODUCTION disparate movements into a single fiont. As such, Cabral was forced to confront a contentious aspect of Portuguese colonialism on the West Coast: t}e animosity between CapeVerdeans and Guineans. I will come back to this point, for it is central to the book.

Cabral only became fully committed to the nationalist cause in 1960, when he left Portugal and moved to Guinea-Conakry, just alter this French colony had become independent under the leadership of S6kouTour6. He then laid the foundations for the establishment of the PAIGC. In the end, Cabral managed to form his united ftont, using tJre PAIGC as an umbrella organization for the many other parties and groups fighting for t}e same goal. He achieved this in two ways: either by silencing the nationalists who did not agree wit} him, or by integrating them into the ranks of the PAIGC. One of the consequences of such a strategy was t}at Cabral ended up bringing the growing antiCapeVerdean sentiment into the party's daily operations. In January 1953, Cabral ordered the first military actions against Portuguese units in the interior of the country, an assault on a headquarters inTite, which marked the beginning of the anticolonial war in Guinea. What happened next, at the Cassac6 Congress of February 1964,is a cautionary tale against the rose-tinted depictions of the war in Guinea. Most militants were coming from a major conftontation with the Portuguese army, in Como. Cabral had given the order for his units to abandon the island and to join him in Cassac6 for the meeting. It was the first opportunity tle guerrilla leaders had to examine their progress so far and prepare for the next steps. A number of changes in the structure of the movement were implemented at the Congress. But these are not the reasons Cassac6 became a turning point in tle history of the party. It was the first time Cabral was confronted with what he Iater called negative cultural practices. There were a number of warlords who only wanted to fight to liberate their land, and who, once they acquired power, mirrored all the behaviors associated with it. They took village girls as wives, replaced the tribal chiefs, and killed people accused of witchcraft. A number of t}ese chiefs committed war crimes in the process, and Cabral was left with little choice but to condemn

t}em to death. I would not go so far as Daniel dos Santos in suggesting that the murder of Cabral, nine years lateS was the result of the deat} sen9

AMiLCAR CABRAL tences he authorized

in

Cassacri. Rat}er,

I would say that

Cassac6

brought to center stage the question of culture, by separating those who were defined by their culture, the Guineans, from those who were not, the CapeVerdeans.These problems became even more acute as the number of Cape Verdeans in the ranks of the party increased, particularly after 1955. Most CapeVerdeans who joined the movement were cadres, which means that they were not directly involved in fighting or, exposed to the suffering and deaths of loved ones. Contrary to a number of guerrilla leaders, Cabral was never convinced that armed struggle would bring independence to Guinea and CapeVerde. He used the armed struggle mostly to draw the attention of the international community to the plight of the Guineans under Portuguese domination and to create the structure of the future independent country. Instead, he viewed diplomacy as t}e most viable path to liberate his countries. From 1953 to 1973, Cabral undertook intensive political and diplomatic activity, and by t}e time he was killed by his own men, he was in the process of securing t}e support of a handful of countries for Guinean and CapeVerdean proclamation of independence. This book tries to bring together, on the one hand, Cabral's personal trajectory and, on the other, his revolutionary ideals and philosophy as

he put them into practice. Identity is the question that unites both points. More than any other nationalist of his time, Cabral was obsessed with a collective examination of identity, an interest which underpins all of his writing on subjects such as culture, ethnicity, and class. More importantly, his whole concept of the reasons behind the emerging national liberation movement derives from his quest for identity.While Guineans up until the start of the anticolonial struggle did not have a clear-cut identity, Cape Verdeans, whose collective evolution is the product of the encounter between the Portuguese and Africans, had been obsessed with tlle question of identity. The literary and cultural movement, Claridosos, in the early 1930s, is a case in point. Cabral was in a privileged position to understand the contribution of the people of Guinea, or of those from the coast ofAfrica, to the formation of Cape Verde-even though he downplayed the power dynamics. In his view, the penetration of Guinean elements into the Cape Verdean personality took place in a somewhat horizontal way. In fact, during the colonial period, Cape Verdeans saw themselves, 10

INTRODUCTION and were seen by the Portuguese, as superior to the Guineans. This explains the pivotal role CapeVerdeans played in the colonisation of Guinea. The islands were used as a base for the occupation of the WestAfrican coast, and, since this part of Africa is one of the most

inhospitable on the continent-marked as it is by swampy soil and high temperatures throughout the year-the Portuguese relied heavily on Cape Verdeans to control Guinea. They took an active role in the slave trade, and some were involved in the war against the local rulers which was instrumental for Portugal to assert its sovereignty over that region ahead of the Berlin Conference of 1884 5. Things did not change much when the agreement signed at the Conference gave the Portuguese license to lay the groundwork for the modern colonial state. The role played by Cape Verdeans in the colonization of Guinea is central to understanding Cabral's revolution, but is often overlooked in most writings on Cabral. At the heart of t}is question is t}e relationship between nation-state and empire. Most of the writing on Cabral tends to project our contemporary understanding of the nation-state onto Cabral's time. I prefer to follow the thought of Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, for whom the framework of empire may be more appropriate for understanding the processes through which nationalism developed. Cape Verdeans moved through the Portuguese empire as quasi-citizens and played the role of subaltern colonizers in Guinea. Even after the effective occupation of Guinea, Cape Verdeans still filled most of the available positions in the colonial administration. As I discuss in Chapter l, thousands of Cape Verdeans migrated to Guinea, constituting a sort of middle strata between the Portuguese and the natives. However, CapeVerdeans were not seen as colonized, and had a political status that differed dramatically from that of the natives.

Cabral's nationalism, then, was caught up in the zone between the empire and the nation-state.While Cabral strived to form two nationstates, t-he materials he used to do so were salvaged from the wreckage

of empire, in that the relationship between

Cape Verdeans and Guineans was a by-product of Portuguese colonialism. Ultimately, Marxism may have provided Cabral with a way out of the abyss. Firstly, Cabral saw colonialism as an ideology, one that masked social reality itself. People were not conscious of their own

1l

AMiLCAR CABRAL predicament, but they could be made to understand it, hence the role of the national liberation movement. Secondly, Cabral understood cul-

ture, ethnicity, and class as the products of objective reality-the superstructure, in Marxian terms-and if one changed objective reality, culture, ethnicity, and class would change in line with it.To accomplish this, Cabral thought that if Cape Verdeans were made to experience the same kind of ordeal to which Guineans had been subjected, they would be able to understand the real nature of colonialism. But the war was never extended to tlle Island of CapeVerde, which created

major problem within the liberation movement. The lack of ideological clarity was comPensated for by the care given to matters of war. Cabral did remarkable work in terms of adapting a counterinsurgent methodology to the physical conditions of Guinea itself, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 5. Guinea did not have mountains (traditionally the sanctuary ofguerrilla fighters), but it had dense forests, where freedom fighters focused much of their war effort. But a

Cabral himself was not a combatant, and never entertained the prospect

military victory over the colonial army. Instead, he overestimated the importance of t}e role of the international community in contributing to the independence of Guinea. While Cabral was making the case for Guinea's sovereignty, the party was engaged in creating state-like structures in the liberated zones. However, the long years that the war took to reach its final phase became a problem, affecting the morale of the combatants and creating enough justification for a conspiracy against Cabral's leadership. This in turn led to the events of the night of 20 January 1973,in Conakry, the capital city of Guinea, during whichAmilcar Cabral, dre fighter for the national liberation of Guinea and CapeVerde, was brutally assassinated. The direct perpetrators of this act were his own men, militants of the Aftican Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), the party he himself had founded. Unconfirmed suspicions regarding the assassination of Cabral have pointed to a more elaborate and complex plot, involving different branches of t}e Portuguese army and secret police which, since t}re beginning of the armed struggle in 1953, had shown a particular interest in decapitating the leadership of the PAIGC as a way to solve the conflict in this thenPortuguese territory. of solving the colonial question by

12

a

INTRODUCTION By the time of his physical elimination, Cabral was hailed as the most serious African revolutionary. This was not only because of his military successes, but due to the administration of the territories rccently liberated from t}e yoke of Portuguese colonialism. Particular attention was given to social areas such as health and education, and the establishment of state structures such as justice, commerce and so on, internationally raising hopes for the future of Guinea once fully liberated from Portuguese colonialism. Cabral's travails, it has to be

noted, were taking place against the backdrop of the emergence of what is now retrospectively called Afro-pessimism, when the dream of an independent Africa had veered off course into mismanagement, coup d'6tats, and ethnic cleansing. The interplay of three fns1e15-n1 unresolved assassination, the everyday aspects of an African revolution, and the unfulfilled revolutionary hopes-account for the vivid interest that Cabral has elicited since his assassination. This explains the deluge of works on Cabral and the revolution in Guinea. I have written this book not so much as a scholar, but as someone who was born and came of age in a world in which the emergence of Cabral's theory on decolonization was instrumental.

I was born in Luanda in the same year in which Cabral was killed, 1973. The revolutionary ideals he championed were shared by his Angolan compagnons de route, such asViriato da Cruz, M6rio Pinto de Andrade, Lucio Lara, and Agostinho Neto. The independence of their countries, Guinea in 1973 and Cape Verde and Ang