Cabral was born in Guinea-Bissau in 1924 of parents from the island of Santiago in Cabo Verde. The ten-island archipelago was reached and settled by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The slave plantation society that was established there was the prototype of what the Americas would later become. When slavery was abolished in 1869 it was replaced by an equally exploitative system that included the use of poor Cabo Verdean contratados (indentured laborers) in the cacao plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. On the other hand, as the main beneficiary of Portugal’s educational enterprise in Africa, with a seminary opened on the island of São Nicolau in 1866, Cabo Verde had the lowest illiteracy rate in Portuguese Africa: in 1959, it was 78 percent, compared to 97 percent in Angola, 98 percent in Mozambique, and 99 percent in Portuguese Guinea. The much higher literacy rate in the archipelago largely accounted for the predominance of Cabo Verdeans in the colonial administration of Portuguese Guinea, Cabral’s terra natal (land of birth), from where, at age eight, he moved to his terra ancestral (ancestral land).
In 1945, following the completion of his high school education in Cabo Verde, Cabral left for Portugal and enrolled as an agronomy student at the Technical University of Lisbon, where he graduated in 1950. While in Lisbon he actively engaged in clandestine antistate politics together with other radicalized African students, including Agostinho Neto and Mário Pinto de Andrade from Angola, and Marcelino dos Santos from Mozambique.
Cabral returned to Portuguese Guinea in 1952 to work as an agronomist. For two years he traveled extensively in the colony to conduct its first agricultural census. This gave him the opportunity to learn about the colonial realities experienced by the colonized. His seminal study on land use, crop cultivation, and, among other things, soil conditions, remains a work of reference. But perhaps more important for Cabral was the acquisition of strategic knowledge about the level of discontent among his compatriots, and the likely responses to an anticolonial mobilization drive for independence.
As the leader of the PAIGC he cofounded in 1956, Cabral became a key player in the political, military, and diplomatic battles that had to be won in order to guarantee victory for the armed struggle that was launched in January 1963, following unsuccessful attempts at peaceful decolonization. His true genius was his ability to mobilize and inspire his fellow compatriots to take life-threatening risks. He was also adept at persuading skeptical international opinion of the righteousness of the armed struggle in the context of an intensifying Cold War, and thus able to secure vital political support and material resources without ties and compromises.
A committed Pan-Africanist, Cabral also played a significant role in the establishment of two of the most effective liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique, respectively the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO). He was also a cofounder and the spokesperson of the three successive coalitions of liberation movements in Portuguese Africa, namely the Anticolonialist Movement (MAC), the African Revolutionary Front for the National Independence of the Portuguese Colonies (FRAIN), and the Conference of the Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP).
Cabral consistently expressed his commitment to and solidarity with “every just cause” in the world, from the Vietnam conflict to the Congo crisis, from the civil rights struggles in the United States to the Palestinian movement for statehood. At the same time, he wrote a number of brilliant works on liberation theory and practice, culture, African history, and class formation, for which he received international acclaim and many awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from Lincoln University in the United States and the Soviet Academy of Science in the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Notwithstanding his assassination, Cabral’s liberation movement was able to proclaim the independence of Guinea-Bissau, on 24 September 1973, which was quickly recognized by over eighty countries around the world. The military and diplomatic victory of the PAIGC contributed significantly to the downfall of the forty-eight-year-old fascist dictatorship in Portugal called the Estado Novo (New State) and the rapid dismantlement of the Portuguese empire in Africa. When viewed against the background of a raging Cold War and the stubbornness of a well-armed NATO member nation bent on maintaining its “overseas provinces” at all costs, Cabral’s achievements are indeed remarkable. His ideas, effective charismatic leadership, and achievements are memorialized in many countries in Africa and beyond.
This book aims to demonstrate the importance of leadership by focusing on the political and intellectual challenges and accomplishments of one of Africa’s most effective leaders of the twentieth century. Cabral’s importance lies in the fact that (i) he competently organized and led one of Africa’s most consequential armed liberation struggles, (ii) he skillfully mobilized more than a dozen ethnic groups into a united binationalist cause, (iii) he ably led a successful united front against Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and (iv) he wrote incisive essays and innovative books that still resonate today.
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Terra Natal
Early Childhood in Portuguese Guinea, 1924–32
Amílcar Lopes Cabral was born on 12 September 1924 in Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea, the mainland of which was finally conquered by Portugal only nine years earlier. The longstanding “pacification” campaigns that preceded the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and intensified after 1912 with the arrival of the conquistador Captain João Teixeira Pinto eventually ended with the conquest of the adjacent eighty-eight-island Bijagós archipelago in 1936.
Located in West Africa and wedged between Senegal to the north and east, the Republic of Guinea (also known as Guinea-Conakry) to the south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the area now known as Guinea-Bissau (36,130 square kilometers / 13,948 square miles) was the epicenter of the seven-hundred-year-old Mandinka Kingdom of Kaabu, which emerged after the collapse of the famous Mali Empire founded by the legendary Sundiata Keita in the thirteenth century. From its capital Kansala, near the modern city of Gabu in Guinea-Bissau, the mansas (rulers) of Kaabu exercised influence northward to the south bank of the Gambia River and southward to parts of northern Guinea-Conakry. During the transatlantic slave trade, Kaabu was engaged in numerous military campaigns that secured captives for the plantations of the Americas. The kingdom collapsed in 1867 as a result of domestic political crisis and increasing external pressure from three ambitious European maritime powers: the British on the Gambia River, the French on the Casamance and Nunez Rivers, and the Portuguese on the network of waterways known as the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde.
Map 1. Portuguese Guinea, ca. 1960. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Guinea-Bissau, with the landing of the explorer Alvaro Fernandes in Varela in 1446. Ten years later, some of the islands of the Cabo Verde archipelago were “discovered” by two Genoese sailors in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, Alvise Cadamosto and Antonio de Noli. Santiago and Fogo island were quickly settled by mainly Portuguese colonists and enslaved Africans from the adjacent coast. Claiming exclusive rights over her “lands of discoveries” in West Africa, Portugal was effectively challenged by her European rivals, resulting in her sphere of influence being reduced to the “Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde”—roughly corresponding to coastal Guinea-Bissau. From this network of waterways, the voracious activities of illegal Cabo Verdean slave traders called lançados facilitated the shipment of millions of African captives to Cabo Verde and the Americas. The lançados also became the pioneers of Portugal’s centuries-old entrenchment efforts in this area. In 1588, they founded one of the earliest Portuguese settlements on the West African mainland, the fortified town of Cacheu, in northwest Guinea-Bissau. Their attempts to undermine local sovereignties generated bloody conflicts. Nevertheless, over the centuries a constant flow of traders, missionaries, soldiers, colonial officials, and