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Mãe Patria

Higher Education and Political Militancy in Portugal, 1945–52

Early in November 1945, Cabral disembarked in Lisbon, capital of the mãe patria (motherland), about a month after his classes had begun at the Higher Institute of Agronomy (ISA) of the Technical University of Lisbon. The late arrival was due to bureaucratic delays in processing his travel documents. The institute had admitted 220 applicants comprising twenty females and two hundred males, including Cabral, the only African student. The five-year course in agronomy was so rigorous and intensive that only twenty-five students proceeded to the third year; among them were Cabral and a female Portuguese student, Maria Helena de Ataíde Vilhena Rodrigues, his future wife.

Cabral excelled in his studies at the ISA, earning top grades in all his subjects and gaining respect and admiration not only from his peers and professors but also from the rector of the institute, who asked him to tutor his children. Yet, notwithstanding his demonstrated intelligence, he remained humble and approachable. His whole university experience enabled him to refine his engaging personality and spirit of tolerance, which enhanced his organizational skills.

Besides his academic and professional training, the historical, political, and sociocultural contexts of Portugal and the dynamic background of the wider world provided the substance for young Cabral’s formation of a critical consciousness. This would bring about the fundamental transformations he had to undergo for his self-liberation—profound changes that would serve as a prerequisite for his commitment to struggle for the liberation of his fellow colonized Africans in “Portuguese Africa.”

When Cabral started his studies in Portugal, the twelve-year-old Estado Novo regime was still struggling to consolidate its imperial fiat. The fascist dictatorship was established in 1933 to arrest Portugal’s decades-old economic decline, a state of affairs aggravated by political upheavals epitomized by the overthrowing of the monarchy, which was preceded by the assassination of King Carlos I and his heir-apparent Prince Luís Filipe on 1 February 1908. This bloody event was followed by the short and ineffectual reign of the assassinated monarch’s second son, Manuel II, and the establishment of a precarious liberal republic on 5 October 1910, which was ushered in by a violent coup d’état that claimed over fifty lives. Portugal became the third country in Europe with a republican constitution, after France and Switzerland. However, during the sixteen years of republican statehood, the country had political instability second to none in Western Europe: scores of political killings, numerous actual and attempted military coups d’état, several civil wars, eight presidents (with only one completing his constitutional term of office), thirty-eight prime ministers, and forty-five governments that lasted, on average, four months.

Having established her present-day borders in 1149 with the final expulsion of the Moslem conquerors who dominated much of the Iberian Peninsula since 711, and having defeated the huge Castilian invading army in the defining battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, Portugal became a powerful unified nation characterized by strong centralized government, political stability, and sociocultural homogeneity. Nationalist pride, bolstered by scientific knowledge and the innovations of the Renaissance, enabled the country to embark on “voyages of discovery” under the visionary leadership of Prince Henry “the Navigator” that had profound impacts around the world. Its vast seaborne empire in Africa, Asia, and South America briefly made the fiercely nationalistic nation the richest country in Europe and the first superpower of modern times. The strong Portuguese nationalism and patriotic fervor demonstrated throughout the centuries were celebrated in literature and folklore and taught in colonial schools as part of the process of “civilizing” the colonized. Yet it did not dawn on the Portuguese colonizers that their unrelenting determination to be free and independent could also be an inspiration to their colonial subjects, like Cabral, to stubbornly seek their own freedom and independence.

Increased fiscal and economic stability under Salazar as minister of finance (1926 and 1928–32) and prime minister (1932–68) enabled the significant improvement of Portugal’s physical and social infrastructure, including the establishment of the Technical University of Lisbon in 1930. The science- and technology-based university and its agronomy school were created to address the needs of a predominantly agricultural country and its colonies, endowed with valuable natural resources. It was thus the most unlikely place to produce future political leaders, let alone radical anticolonial activists. Cabral would embrace the vision and mission of the institution but defy the expectation of political conformity.

Already well-steeped in Portuguese history, literature, and culture from his primary and high school education in Cabo Verde, with excellent oral and written command of the “language of Camões,”¹ Cabral arrived with a strong self-esteem that enabled him to withstand the preconceptions and prejudices of his white colleagues and professors, in spite of being legally “Portuguese.” Thus, from the onset, Cabral felt at ease with himself and with academic life, unintimidated by the new environment in which he was the only black student among privileged white classmates and professors.

While Cabral was comfortable in his own skin, he still had to deal with racism and its manifold manifestations. In Portugal, as in Europe generally, an upsurge of racism in the nineteenth century was propelled by prominent philosophers, social scientists, and politicians, among others, following Charles Darwin’s landmark publications, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). The central polemical thesis about the evolution of animal and plant life through natural selection quickly spawned a pseudoscience, Social Darwinism, which expounded the inherent superiority of the white man and his responsibility to the inherently “inferior” races.

Regarding the supposed racial and intellectual inferiority of Africans, the famous Portuguese writer and politician Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins insisted in 1880 that education for Africans was “absurd not only in the light of History, but also in light of the mental capacity of these inferior races.” Contemptuous of Portugal’s proclaimed double mission of civilizing and evangelizing the “inferior races” and “barbarous peoples” of Africa “placed between man and the anthropoid,” Oliveira Martins sneered, “Why not teach the Bible to the gorilla and the orangutan, who have ears even though they cannot speak, and must understand, almost as much as the black, the metaphysics of the incarnation of the Word and the dogma of the Trinity?”²

The new generation of passionate colonialistas of the late nineteenth century also included António José Enes (royal commissioner of Mozambique, 1891–95), who considered the African “a big child” and “half savage”;³ Mouzinho de Albuquerque (conquistador of Mozambique, 1895), who insisted that, in order “to educate and civilize the native,” it was imperative “to develop in a practical way his aptitude for manual labor”;⁴ and Eduardo da Costa (governor-general of Angola, 1906–7), who warned about “the gross and dangerous error of considering equal, before the law, the civilized European and the savage inhabitant of the African bush.”⁵ It was the racist ideas of such staunch imperialists that came to form the cornerstone of Portuguese colonial philosophy and, during the Estado Novo era, became camouflaged with Gilberto Freyre’s imaginary tale of “lusotropicalism.”

Portuguese imperial triumphalism and hubris were hugely displayed at the three-month Colonial Exposition of Porto inaugurated on 16 June 1934, eleven years before Cabral arrived in Lisbon. Inspired by the London Exposition of the British Empire in 1924 and the International Colonial Exposition of Paris in 1931, this celebration of white supremacy was complete with exhibitions of reconstructed African villages showing the “exotic natives,” who supposedly represented, in the words of British poet Rudyard Kipling, the “new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.” The exposition was evidence of Portugal taking up Kipling’s “White Man’s burden.” At Porto, the exhibition of sixty-three pretos da Guiné (blacks of Guinea) drew huge crowds of spectators who gaped and gawked at the half-naked “savage” women with their exposed breasts, the scantily clad men, and the nude children. The exotic Africans on display also included Angolans and Mozambicans in their replicated “natural habitats” of “primitive” mud-hut villages, in which they were required to live and display their putative lifestyles and cultures for the duration of the exposition. On show in much the same way as the animals in the nearby Porto zoo, the human exhibits were meant to testify to the supposed superiority of the white race. This was also the objective of the many expositions of the other European and American colonial powers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Thus, when Cabral arrived in Portugal, memories of the human zoo that characterized the Colonial Exposition of Porto were still fresh in the country. Five years earlier, an even bigger celebration of imperial pomposity, the Exposition of the Portuguese World, had been held in Lisbon (June–December 1940), calculated to promote the Estado Novo dictatorship, celebrate the consolidation of Portuguese sovereignty in the overseas provinces, and further reinforce the notion of white superiority.

While Cabral was very much admired by his white colleagues for his intellectual prowess, he nevertheless encountered overt racism within and outside the ISA. But he was psychologically and emotionally prepared. On the eve of his departure from Cabo Verde, his father talked to him about his own experience in Portugal four decades earlier. Juvenal described his stay in the metropole as the happiest years of his adolescence, although “very hard.” He accordingly warned his son thus: “It is obvious that in the metropole you will not encounter racism so rooted as, let’s say, in the United States. However, even in Lisbon, there can be manifestations of this abominable phenomenon. Do not be astonished nor lose your head, if you note among your future colleagues a certain attitude of reserve in relation to you.” Alluding to the possible racial bias of his teachers in Portugal, Juvenal advised his son to always remember that “you must show knowledge more profound than any candidate of Portuguese descent,” because, “taking into account your origin, your knowledge will be evaluated with greater rigor.”⁶ Already a brilliant elementary and high school student, Amílcar would have no problem heeding his father’s advice.

Cabral’s colleague and girlfriend, Maria Helena Rodrigues, a native of Chaves in northern Portugal, recalled the cold reception he received when she took him home to meet her family. “The adults in the village would not talk to him, only behind his back.” But Cabral remained unruffled when the children of the village, who had never seen a black person, ran after him “to see and touch him,” a spectacle which he accommodated by “letting them touch his head” and using the occasion as a teaching moment. “He explained to them where he came from, what Africa was and who the Africans were. He explained to them that despite colour differences all men were equal.”⁷