He is an important figure of the African revolution who would have turned 100 on September 12, but his life ended in 1973 due to his assassination at the hands of Portuguese colonialism. Amílcar Cabral left his mark on the history of the African continent. Diagne Fodé Roland pays tribute to him and stresses that the legacy of this great thinker is still relevant today.

Outraged by the Portuguese fascist colonial oppression, especially after the successive famines that caused 50,000 deaths between 1941 and 1948 in Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral decided to train in agronomy with the aim of helping peasants and studied agricultural engineering until 1952 in Lisbon, capital of Portugal.

There he met student activists for the liberation of the African colonies from Portuguese imperialism. With these activists of the independence struggle in western and southern Portuguese-speaking Africa, such as Agostinho Neto (MPLA), Eduardo Mondlane of FRELIMO, etc., they clandestinely created the Center for African Studies to promote the culture of colonized black peoples and collaborated with the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) (also clandestine). These future leaders were trained in scientific communism and decided to found the anti-colonial liberation movements in their respective countries.

Cabral decided to resign from his position as a researcher at the Agronomic Station of Lisbon (Portugal) to work as a second-rate engineer in Guinea, where he was responsible for the agricultural census that allowed him to identify the nationalities and social classes that made up Guinea.

In 1954 he created a nationalist political organization in Bissau under the pretext of promoting cultural and sports activities. This association was banned by the Portuguese colonialists and Cabral was expelled from his own country to settle in Angola, where he coordinated tasks for agricultural companies.

These investigations and studies of the peasantry under colonialism allowed him to apply dialectical and historical materialism, and to develop his own analysis of colonial society by adapting scientific communism to African realities.

In 1956, after being authorized to return once a year to Guinea-Bissau, he clandestinely founded the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands) of which he was appointed secretary general.

After the fascist colonial massacre during the dockers’ strike in 1959, the PAIGC opted in 1963 for armed combat and fought against the Portuguese army on several fronts in the neighboring countries, Guinea Conakry and Casamance, province of Senegal.

The PAIGC quickly controlled 50% of the territory in 1966 and 70% from 1968 onwards, and created a political-administrative organization in the liberated areas, the characteristics of which Cabral explains as follows: “The dynamics of the struggle require the practice of democracy, criticism and self-criticism, a greater participation of the population in the management of their lives, literacy, the creation of schools and health services, the training of leaders of peasant and worker origin, and many other achievements that imply a real forced march of society along the path of cultural progress. This shows that the struggle for liberation is not only a cultural fact, but also a cultural factor.”

Cabral developed a detailed analysis of the national realities and contradictions of Guinean and Cape Verdean society in order to determine the national and social groups most capable of engaging in the struggle against colonialism.

In 1961 he was a representative of the liberation movements of the countries colonized by fascist Portugal during the Third Conference of African Peoples that took place in Cairo. Starting from the Leninist formula of “concrete analysis of each concrete situation”, he explained that the struggle must “strengthen the means of action […], develop effective forms and create others, on the basis of knowledge of the concrete reality of Africa and of each African country, and of the universal content of the experiences acquired in other environments and by other peoples”.

Cabral teaches us that nationalities and social classes must be studied based on the fact that “people do not fight for ideals or for what does not interest them directly; people fight for concrete things, for better living conditions in peace and for the future of their children. Liberty, fraternity and equality are empty words if they do not mean a real improvement in the lives of people who struggle.”

Cabral combined the ideological and political-military struggle with the diplomatic struggle to achieve recognition of the battle for anti-colonial liberation on an international scale. In 1972, the UN recognized the PAIGC as “the true and legitimate representative of the peoples of Guinea and Cape Verde.”

Cabral was also the “ambassador-spokesman” of the national liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies in various African and international forums. He was the undisputed leader, especially at the Tricontinental conference where he took the floor on January 6, 1966 in Cuba to present his revolutionary theory of African national and social emancipation: “We do not fight simply to put a flag in our country and have an anthem, but so that our peoples are never again exploited, not only by the imperialists, not only by the Europeans, not only by white-skinned people, because we do not confuse exploitation or the factors of exploitation with the skin color of men; we don’t want there to be more exploitation in our country, not even by black people.”

Acknowledging both the internationalist role of Cuba and the pan-African role of independent Algeria for its active solidarity with all liberation movements in Africa, he declared: “Christians go to the Vatican, Muslims to Mecca and revolutionaries to Algiers.”

Unfortunately, Amílcar Cabral was assassinated on January 20, 1973 in Conakry by Portuguese colonialism that used agents infiltrated in the military branch of the PAIGC to commit this crime, which prevented the true father of independence from experiencing the birth of the State of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde proclaimed on September 10, 1974.

Hero and martyr of the first phase of African liberation, Cabral should serve as an inspiration for the current generation of fighters for the second phase of the national, pan-African and social emancipation of the peoples of Africa.

Source: Rebelion.

Via Resumen Latinoamericano

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/09/21/the-great-thinker-of-the-african-revolution-amilcar-cabral-would-have-turned-one-hundred-years-old/

Inkani Books, a publishing house from South Africa, has released a number of remarkable titles in recent years. These books include Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories; a collection of the writings of Amilcar Cabral, as well as other books which correlate with the Zulu and Xhosa concept of Inkani – a stubborn determination, here, particularly the resolve of the oppressed to fight for liberation. The aforementioned text includes speeches and articles delivered by Amilcar Cabral; some of which are being translated into English for the first time. These articles, speeches, and communiqués are required reading for revolutionaries today who are struggling with the agrarian question and the current wave of revolts and revolutions in the peripheries of the capitalist world system. Cabral was a Cape Verdean revolutionary who played a pivotal role in founding the PAIGC, along with other forums and institutions dedicated to the overthrow of Portuguese colonialism in Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. Although he was assassinated before the brief unification of Guinea and Cape Verde could be realized, his ideas continue to resonate with relevance and potency today.

Economic, cultural, political, and armed resistance are themes explored in the majority of Cabral’s essays and speeches. All of these types of resistance revolve around a central axis: the question of land. Cabral knew that people do not fight for ideas alone, it is the resolution of the immediate contradictions and struggles in their lives that drives them toward revolution. In a speech delivered in London, someone asked Cabral if PAIGC is a Marxist-Leninist party. Cabral’s answer was revealing of the kind of revolutionary he was:

People here are very preoccupied with the questions: ‘Are you Marxist or non-Marxist? Are you a Marxist-Leninist’. Just ask me, please, whether we are doing well in the field. Are we really liberating our people, the human beings in our country from all forms of oppression? Ask me simply this and draw your own conclusions.

While this brilliant answer cuts away at ideological dogmatism and fanaticism, Cabral also knew that theory is a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. In an interview with a Portuguese journalist, Cabral puts forward a clear analysis of why his people are determined to resist. He relates the struggle of the people of Guinea and Cape Verde to the revolution in Cuba, Vietnam, and Palestine while also highlighting the clear distinctions in strategies and tactics of struggle in each locale. Many of the answers given by Cabral in this interview are relevant even today.

When asked about Palestine, Cabral had a more lucid analysis than most contemporary analysts, presenting Palestine as a key element of the Arab struggle, rather than constructing Palestine as a black-box nation state separate from the region. “We want the Arab peoples to seek the freedom of the people of Palestine, to free the Arab nation of imperialist disturbance and domination: ‘Israel’.” When asked about Che Guevara’s theory of guerrilla struggle and its applicability to the Guinean struggle, Cabral further elucidated the importance of marrying theory and practice.

Cabral points to the importance of understanding armed struggles as one facet of national liberation, while arguing that the people of Guinea must start from their own conditions as a launching point. The people of Guinea could not copy every tactic and strategy of the heroic Cuban people or the Vietnamese, but they could view these struggles as different terrains in the same fight. In this way, the beauty of Cabral’s statement on the Guinean struggle shines through: “Our people are our mountains,” he said. While Vietnam had thick jungle cover, and the Cubans fought in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the conditions in Guinea were such that the people became the stand-in for the environment, which was not favorable for clandestine armed struggle, according to the accumulated knowledge of guerrilla movements. This is why, according to Cabral, the Guinean War of Independence was a ‘centrifugal’ struggle. They started in the large cities and then moved outward toward the countryside. This is an inversion of the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban struggles where the guerrilla forces started in the countryside and moved toward the city. Cabral and the PAIGC were master tacticians in that sense, understanding that they could not blindly copy the blueprints of other peoples, but rather could see those people as an inspiration while building a uniquely Guinean revolution.

This independence in our thought and action is relative. It is relative because in our thought we are influenced by the thought of others. We are not the first to wage an armed struggle for national liberation, or a revolution. We did not invent guerrilla warfare–we invented it in our land…we must be aware that no struggle can be waged without an alliance, without allies.

The invention of guerilla warfare on one’s own land, with unique means and ends, contains the final and critical element of struggle: culture. During the Guinean revolution, many people believed that embracing one’s own culture in contrast to the colonial culture meant uncritically reverting to pre-colonial cultural practices. Cabral highlighted the failure of this strategy and urged the peoples of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde to forge a new, revolutionary culture through armed, economic, and political struggle. In this assessment, Cabral was not alone; the late Ghassan Kanafani was not only the spokesman of the PFLP but edited their magazine and produced cultural works himself. The revolution in Palestine—much like the one led by PAIGC in Guinea—has cultivated a people with a strong, resistant mentality and a revolutionary will that maintains cultural values and concretizes them through struggle.

Cultural symbols revolving around land animate the struggles of today. In Palestine, the watermelon, the olive tree, the koufiyyeh, and various tatreez symbols (embroidery) from each locale tie the people to the land and concretize the struggle in the subjective conditions of Palestine. This is the vision Cabral had of struggle in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; only through a profound understanding of one’s own conditions and the study of other revolutionary experiences can a movement advance toward liberation.

All of this is also intimately related to economic struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Cabral pushed for agricultural self-sufficiency, redistribution of land, and other economic forms of delinking from the capitalist world system. This, too, impresses the importance of charting an independent path toward revolution on those of us living in the shadow of Cabral and all the martyrs who came before us. The first task of national liberation, according to Cabral, is the reclaiming of the means of production, which have been usurped by external, colonial forces. From there, the revolutionary forces can take the lessons learned regarding culture and the question of land and go about building a new society, free from colonial domination. Although Cabral is no longer with us, the forces of revolution are alive in Palestine and the Sahel, shining a light on the path to liberation.

source: Al Mayadeen

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/09/01/amilcar-cabral-and-the-world-to-come/