Amilcar Cabral: an extraction from the literature

Monthly Review, Dec, 1998 by Sylvester Cohen

There can be no doubt that Amilcar Cabral is the most original political and revolutionary thinker Africa has produced in modern times. What is often overlooked and less well known is that Cabral was an innovative and important military thinker within the context of Africa and the Third World. The purpose of this essay is to examine and extract through Cabral's writings and related scholarship his key politico-military strategies which enabled him to lead the African Independence Party for the liberation of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) to victory over the Portuguese colonialists. It is the contention of this study that a successful socialist revolution is unlikely to take place anywhere in Africa without African revolutionaries learning some of the political and military lessons of Amilcar Cabral.

When one realizes the enormous odds against a successful anti-colonial insurgency in Guinea Bissau during the early 1960's the implications for future socialist insurgencies in Africa are positive. Amilcar Cabral led a tiny African coastal enclave of 600,000 people - 99 percent. illiterate with only fourteen university graduates in the entire country, about two-fifths the size of Portugal - against a modern Portuguese military force considerably larger proportionately than the American expeditionary force in Vietnam during the late 1960's. In addition, Portugal had substantial support throughout most of the war (1962-1974) from its NATO allies. NATO was at that time and still is the most powerful military alliance in the world. The PAIGC could not hope, initially, to match materially the resources of the colonial armed forces. But according to Cabral, 'victory in a national liberation struggle is the result of human forces and only secondly of material resources'.(1) Victory would depend first and foremost upon the determination of the people of Guinea and Cape Verde to throw off the colonial yoke.'(2)

Three years after its founding in 1956, the PAIGC organized a strike by dockworkers in Bissau, the capital city. This strike led to the massacre of 50 dockworkers at Pidgiguiti on August 3, 1959. After the massacre, Cabral and his associates decided that the Guineans could not hope to gain independence from the Portuguese through peaceful means. The PAIGC left a small clandestine organization in Bissau and other towns and departed for the countryside to politicize the peasants. For Cabral and his comrades realized that the peasants would have to undergo political mobilization before armed struggle could be conducted successfully.

By political mobilization Cabral meant that the peasantry had to be organized effectively as participants in the many ways necessary to facilitate the national liberation struggle against the Portuguese colonialists. Fortunately, Cabral was uniquely qualified to lead the political mobilization effort among the peasantry in Guinea Bissau. Cabral was a trained agronomist. And in this capacity in 1954, he conducted a countrywide agricultural census under the auspices of the Portuguese colonial regime. This project enabled him to visit all the ethnic groups in every section of the colony. Cabral was able to learn, analyze and assess the various economic systems, customs and traditions of the many different ethnic groups within Guinea Bissau. He was undoubtedly the most knowledgeable person about the colony at the beginning of the armed struggle in 1962. His knowledge gave him a unique advantage in orchestrating the colonial revolution because he understood the realities of Guinea society. Cabral wisely stated, "It is impossible to establish effective armed struggle ... unless we really know our reality" and "start out from our reality to wage the struggle."(3)

Always the realist, he recognized it would take years to sufficiently explain the realities and need for revolution to a reluctant and skeptical peasantry. True enough, the peasants were the main force in the colony - 'a great physical force' - but in 1959 not yet a revolutionary force. In 1960 when Cabral began training cadres (revolutionary political workers) in Conakry to go into Guinea Bissau to politicize and mobilize the peasants he gave the following astute advice:

Remember always that the people do not fight for ideas, for things that only exist in the heads of individuals. The people fight and they accept the necessary sacrifices. But they do it in order to gain material advantages, to live in peace and to improve their lives, to experience progress, and to be able to guarantee a future to their children.(4)

Cabral would rehearse the cadres sometimes as much as 'several times' in the proper way to contact the elders (homens grandes) in the villages.(5) Even the arguments to use with the elders were selected during these simulated exercises.(6) According to the PAIGC's political worker, Antonio Bana:

Before going into a village to meet the elder, we asked for information about him. You had to be very careful. You found out about his everyday life, his standing in the village, his relations with the Portuguese....(7)