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Preface and Acknowledgments

The assassination of Amílcar Cabral, the charismatic leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), on 20 January 1973, and the unilateral declaration of the independence of Guinea-Bissau by his liberation movement eight months later, were critical turning points that greatly sharpened my political consciousness. I was born in Gambia, West Africa, during the terminal period of British colonial rule. Both my parents were natives of Guinea-Bissau, then called Portuguese Guinea, located about four hundred miles south. Like thousands of others before them, they left their homeland to escape the harsher colonial order there characterized by forced labor and corporal punishment. While the Portuguese were not the only European colonizers in Africa to maintain the pax colonica by brutal repression, they were nevertheless the last to formally end it, in 1961, following the uprisings in Angola that signaled the beginning of armed national liberation struggle there.

Growing up in Gambia before the start of the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau, I heard numerous stories from newly arrived family members of colonial abuse and violence meted out to the majority of the population, contemptuously called gentios (heathens). As a student in England during the 1970s, I keenly followed the unfolding brutal war that became known as “Portugal’s Vietnam” because of the huge Portuguese troop concentration, the dropping of napalm and white phosphorous bombs, and the removing and resettling of villagers in heavily guarded camps fenced by barbed wire. I also kept abreast of the development of the armed struggle by way of publications obtained from the Mozambique Angola Guiné Information Centre (MAGIC) in London and presentations by Basil Davidson at the Centre of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, where I was a politically active graduate student.

The remarkable achievements of Cabral, who was an accomplished agronomist, an ardent nationalist, an astute diplomat, a brilliant military strategist, a committed Pan-Africanist, and an outspoken internationalist, became an enduring source of inspiration for me. As a revolutionary leader, Cabral remains as significant as his celebrated contemporaries, notably Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

A lot has been written about Cabral. Many of the studies are excellent scholarly analyses of him as a revolutionary theoretician and practitioner and of his achievements and legacy. In the English-speaking world, the pioneering work of Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution (1969), inspired or provoked such studies as Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War (1983) by Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral’s Revolutionary Theory and Practice: A Critical Guide (1991) by Ronald H. Chilcote, and Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free (1993) by Mustafah Dhada.

However, since most people are not scholars, the findings of scholarship have remained confined to a small group of specialists and general readers. One of Africa’s most original thinkers and politically influential figures, Cabral is little known in the Anglophone world. The notable contributions of this creatively pensive and charismatic African leader have yet to be found in high school or college textbooks. In the context of a rapidly globalizing and increasingly unequal world, his insistence that national liberation should not end with “flag independence” but should also empower people to consistently improve their material wellbeing has significance far beyond Africa. The enormous challenges he faced, and the successful approaches and strategies he deployed to find solutions, provide great opportunities to learn important lessons pertinent to the daily struggles of millions of people in the world toiling under the heavy weight of poverty, exploitation, and oppression. A visionary and inspirational leader, his ideas still resonate today. Yet, his life, charismatic leadership qualities, and accomplishments are largely unknown outside the Lusophone world. This short biography is an attempt to address this deficit.

It is singularly appropriate that a book on the life of Amílcar Cabral narrated against the background of his times should be included in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series. The biographical profile sketched out in the pages that follow will provide some insight into the intensively lived life of a remarkable self-styled “simple African” who became a leading founding father of two independent African nations.

I remain enormously grateful to the Ohio University Press series editor Gillian Berchowitz for providing me the great opportunity to write this book as a contribution. I am also greatly thankful to Gillian for her infinite patience and professional guidance and to Nancy Basmajian, managing editor, for supervising the skillful editing of the manuscript. Further thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their insightful critical comments. This book is based on my own studies on Amílcar Cabral and the colonial and postcolonial periods in Guinea-Bissau, but I am very much indebted to the corpus of research and publications on this important historical figure. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the veterans of the armed liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau who generously granted me interviews to share their valuable intimate knowledge and memories of Cabral; in particular, I am very grateful to Manuel “Manecas” dos Santos, Lúcio Soares, Samba Lamine Mané, Carmen Pereira (who died on June 4, 2016, six months after granting me an interview), Teodora Inácia Gomes, Douda Bangura, and Florentino “Flora” Gomes. I am also particularly grateful to Iva Cabral for her prompt response to my request for images of her father, which she generously provided, with kind identification of the photographers and the copyright holders. I remain beholden to my family, including my extended kindred in Guinea-Bissau, for their unfailing support. Ultimately, I take full responsibility for errors of fact and interpretation as well as translation of quoted Portuguese texts.

This book is dedicated to the young generation of committed nationalist and Pan-Africanist Cabralistas engaged in life-threatening struggles for social and economic justice, peace, prosperity, and the rights-based unification of the diverse peoples of Africa.