Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories

A Note On Attribution

The texts in ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’ were first published in English by Penguin, in 1969, in Basil Davidson’s The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution, apart from ‘The Relevance of Marxism-Leninism’ which was first published in 1972 in Our People Are Our Mountains: Amílcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution.

The chapter ‘Analysis of Different Types of Resistance’ was translated by Jethro Soutar in 2022

Abbreviations

CLSTP Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (Committee (later, Movement) for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe)

CONCP Conferéncia das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas

(Conference of the Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies) CUF Companhia União Fabril

ECM European Common Market

FRAIN Frente Revolucionária Africana para a Independência Nacional das colonias portuguesas (African Revolutionary Front for the National Independence of the Portuguese Colonies)

FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front)

FUL Front Uni de Libération (United Liberation Front of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands)

MING (Movement for National Independence in Guinea)

MLGCV Mouvement de Liberation de la Guinée Portugaise et des Iles du Cap Vert

(Movement for the Liberation of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands)

MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola)

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation OAU Organisation of African Unity

OSPAAAL Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina

(Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America)

PAIGC or PAI Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cape Verde)

PDG Parti Démocratique de Guinée (Democratic Party of Guinea)

PIDE Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International Police for the Defence of the State

Foreword

LENIN’S QUESTION

‘With the means we have, we can do much more and better.’

Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973),

‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’, PAIGC Directive 1965.

There is a tendency to make of Lenin’s most famous and enduring question a rhetorical device. Lenin’s question, ‘What is to be done?’, is posed only to be left unanswered. Not taken up in the least, as if the question itself signals political and theoretical familiarity not only with Lenin but with Marxism, writ large.

In our moment, where a former taxi driver turned imperial czar threatens the international community, when a former anti-apartheid activist become head of state, Cyril Ramaphosa will not condemn the war crimes committed by Czar Vladimir Putin. In our moment, when Narendra Modi, the leader of one of the founding countries of the Non-Aligned Movement is transforming a historically secular democracy into a Hindu nationalist state, Lenin’s question echoes with ever greater intensity. Indeed, what is to be done?

If we are to begin to answer Lenin’s question, which is also a plea for history-making action, then those who hold political leadership must confront the situation in which they find themselves honestly. Leaders must be truthful with their people. To do what must be done we must, as Amílcar Cabral urges us, ‘tell no lies’.¹ Present the situation as it is. Recognise what requires doing, urgently. Ask of the people that they do their share. Demand of the leadership that they behave always in a responsible and exemplary fashion. Identify with a careful eye the opportunists in the ranks of the oppressed, those who are fluent in the language of resistance but learn this language only to later, at a more convenient moment, turn the situation to their own advantage. Cabral warns us clearly against what he correctly denounces as the ‘mentality of petty ambition.’

Sadly, of course, as people in many postcolonial states can attest, the ‘mentality of petty ambition’ can in the blink of an eye become wholesale state capture, looting of the state’s coffers at the expense of the poor. All this occurs in the name of ‘the struggle’, a struggle long forgotten by elites except when it can be used to manipulate the public, when ‘the struggle’ can provide a shield against legitimate criticisms of the party’s failings. This is to say nothing of failed states, which Cabral did not live to see but anticipated. Cabral knew that the postcolonial state was doomed to fail its people if revolutionary movements turned into national governments that refused to understand their own shortcomings. He feared the failure of the postcolonial state through the abandonment of the revolution or, as he defined it, ‘rationalised imperialism’ – neo-colonialism, along with the extraction of a nation’s wealth, given ideological cover by self-serving native elites.

In this way, perverse as it is to say, we find ourselves grateful that Cabral did not live to see the triumph of petty ambition across the continent. Petty ambition, as exemplified by the multi-million-dollar expropriation of state assets by Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, was neither what Cabral nor poet and revolutionary Agostinho Neto intended for the people of Guiné, Cape Verde, and Angola, respectively. Cabral, whose vision of the world was decidedly global, was of course a determined pan-Africanist, always speaking with great feeling about movements on the continent fighting for liberation from colonial rule. Yet he was also deeply dedicated to the cause of Lusophone liberation, locating the PAIGC’s work within the context of its battle against the ‘criminal Portuguese colonialists’; recognising intimate links between the PAIGC in Guiné and Cape Verde and FRELIMO in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola.

Cabral operated with the lessons of Moïse Tshombe, the State of Katanga’s secession, as well as the brutal fate of Patrice Lumumba often at the forefront of his thinking. As a result, his words try to caution us about what can happen if party discipline shows any sign of slackening. Cabral did everything he could to prevent party members from self-enrichment and spoke repeatedly against it. He reminds us of this in what is surely his favourite phrase: ‘Rice is cooked inside the pot and not outside.’ All the hard work is crucial to hold the revolutionary movement and the revolutionaries who lead it accountable for all their actions, including their failings. In turn the people are made accountable for supporting the party. He describes this as the kind of work that begins with each and every individual in Guiné and Cape Verde. The work begins within; it is a ceaseless task. To invoke the spirit of Cabral’s rice metaphor: the revolution begins right there at home, in the kitchen.

Cabral, in the several addresses that compose Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories, is a strong advocate of self-sacrifice and self-discipline of the spartan variety. It is ok to drink, but never to excess, he advised his cadres. Behave with respect towards yourself, the people and your comrades, he urged

PAIGC members. Study, keep mind and body in equally good shape. To win the war against Portuguese colonialism, it is necessary to win every battle, to come out victorious in every skirmish. The first battle in that war is the battle within. Continual self-improvement is the only way. Political work is a permanent task.

LENIN’S QUESTION, ANSWERED

A strain of strict moralism runs through Cabral’s speeches. The work of the democratic revolution is to make, if not quite a virtuous person, then certainly a considerate one. A human being who having overcome the oppression inherent to colonialism behaves with a political thoughtfulness in relation to those around them. A mode of behaviour must mark the relations between self and other because that is the surest barometer of the newly liberated society as one of equals. A society in which everyone, regardless of gender, ethnic affiliation, religion, regional origin (Guiné or Cape Verde, it matters not) has the same right of access to the nation’s resources. There is to be no distinction in school admissions between boys and girls nor Christian or ‘Moslem’. At the end of Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon calls for the coming into being of a ‘new man’. Fanon conceptualises a different way of being human, of being in the world, in the relation between the colonial and the imperial worlds.

Fanon’s is a concept. A call to the future. However, whatever reservations there are to be had about Cabral’s moralistic streak, there can be no denying it is well-rooted in everyday praxis. Cabral’s attention to detail, his insisting on codes of revolutionary behaviour, are in fact a manual for how to achieve not only a postcolonial subject, but the citizen of Guiné and Cape Verde who has emerged out of the struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Cabral is explicit. This is what you must do, PAIGC cadre. That is how you must adjust your thinking on women, PAIGC regional leader. Fanon may have given the anti-colonial world a concept. Cabral provides a specific code of behaviour. He tells PAIGC members exactly what is required to make the future citizen of Guiné and Cape Verde (a union dissolved in 1980, which Cabral worked so hard to prevent) a different human being from the man, woman or child denied their fundamental rights by the Portuguese.

The radical new subject of the independent states of Guiné and Cape Verde begins in revolutionary praxis. How the anti-colonial cadre conducts themselves in the struggle is the model for different modes: of being human, of being a citizen, of being an African subject, of being human in the world. Cabral’s directions are the how-to for making Fanon’s ‘new man’ in the here and the now. A new humanity must emerge out of the work it takes to successfully execute a revolution; the everyday work is the revolution.

Cabral reminds of us of this with every speech he gives to PAIGC members, every address he delivers overseas. We hear it clearly when he receives an honorary degree from Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, African-American poet Langston Hughes’ alma mater. It is audible when he speaks at the United Nations. Waging the anti-colonial struggle is not enough unless out of it emerges a human being previously unknown in history. Cabral sets the bar high, and in doing so he answers repeatedly Lenin’s question. This, how we are in the world, it is this that must be changed. That, as history shows us, will take some doing. This is no abstraction. It is clearly stated, carefully defined. This is what Cabral demanded of his party members.

It is a call, this Cabralian mode of being in the world, that resounds with a bracing political intensity today. How can we not stipulate what we must do in our moment? We can only ignore Cabral’s call of history if we remove ourselves from the ugly realities that confront us. Cabral, as this collection bears testament, always made himself, his Party and his people face squarely their reality, unpleasant or not. Anything else Cabral deemed a ‘lie’. Whether or not one is partial to Cabral’s moral absolutism, the great advantage of having a moral outlook on the world is that it demands a confrontation with the truth. Such a confrontation requires that we see things as they are rather than how we would want them to be. Would we rather turn our back on Cabral’s observations than see what we need to do now? We need to work, to make a world fit for all to live in because our current world is not equal. It is devoid of justice, discriminatory, prejudicial and hostile to the majority of humanity.

CONSTRUCTIVE EMULATION

For Cabral developing a set of revolutionary practices is to work perpetually for the cause of universal good. ‘Constructive emulation’ was the term he coined to drive home the point of the exemplarity of labour. Political opera- tives, members of the military wing, students abroad enrolled in the PAIGC’s Reform School, all had to embody the exemplarity of labour. Older cadres were not only responsible for instructing the party’s youth in the ways of struggle but charged with moulding the youth to ensure the legacy of the struggle. Constructive emulation was Cabral’s way of demanding that all party members model the kind of behaviour befitting that of a nation-under-construction, a nation-being-born, for the people of Guiné and Cape Verde. Out of exemplary labour, out of revolutionary conduct would emerge the ‘flame of patriotism fanned by the fire of your weapons.’

We are more skeptical now, with good reason, about any call to patriotic arms. Our suspicion has a long history. Were we to make our individual lists of the national leaders who first gave us pause about the postcolonial nation, we would find ourselves presented with a great many options such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, Eric Williams, Edward Seaga, and Indira Gandhi.² We would not lack for options. Taking any path we choose, we would find ourselves by paths direct or circuitous, at our present moment, adding Narendra Modi, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa to our list. Always an incomplete list, one hastens to add. But a list to which we must regularly attend.

Excluding behaviour, another of Cabral’s struggles was alimentary, the struggle to secure sufficient food for the people of his country. As much the revolutionary as the agronomist, Cabral called on his people to be careful tenders of the soil. To plant, to reap, to provide food for all. He urged the farmers to practice crop diversification to prevent the depletion of vital minerals in the soil that ensure a greater-yielding crop. Sufficient education was another battle for the PAIGC where concerns of the alimentary arose. Nourishment of the body and nourishment of the mind, from securing the necessary learning materials for teachers and students alike and building schools, to providing enough food and chalk, so learning could take place under optimal conditions. No under-qualified teachers either, the only schools allowed to operate were those that were fully equipped to serve their students. In the era when he was writing, Guiné had an illiteracy rate of 99 per cent and Cape Verde, at 85 per cent, was only marginally better. Providing proper education was a vital matter for Cabral because he knew how important teachers, doctors, engineers and agriculturally astute farmers would be for the future of his people. Every school, he argued, must be able to ensure the safety of its students, teachers and the surrounding communities from possible colonial attacks. A school that could not protect itself put the lives of many people at risk. In addition, the PAIGC was duty-bound to provide adequate healthcare for every person in every region under PAIGC control, whether they were an injured militant or a sick child. The party took seriously the importance of training medical staff, both locally and abroad, to carry out these tasks.

Political opportunists and traitors to the PAIGC cause, Cabral had no time for. In order to minimise their impact, to reduce their ability to delay the struggle, Cabral preached vigilance. For the revolution to deliver on its promises, everyone needed to keep safe the project of liberation, to protect it from the enemy. It mattered not if that enemy were a Portuguese colonialist, a recalcitrant tribal chief, or a traitor masquerading as a loyal party member. Everyone was responsible for the success of the revolution. Those who worked against the interest of the majority, would be expelled from the party or dealt with appropriately. The revolution demanded this.

In his dedication to the alimentary, the provision of housing (for the troops and the population), education, security, food, healthcare, Cabral is notable among his revolutionary peers. In his commitment to the alimentary Cabral gives substance to his motto, ‘thought and action’. In building well-equipped and adequately staffed schools, by training of qualified medical personnel, in securing the liberated zones, in demanding that farmers learn the science of the soil, Cabral lived out his words ‘every practice gives birth to a theory.’ As to the order of which comes first, theory or practice? It did not matter to Cabral because the alimentary always preoccupied him. Not simply answering Lenin’s question but asking how what needed to be done could be done. From the on-the-ground realities he took his cue.

UNIVERSAL GOOD

The cause of universal good could only be served if, Cabral reminded everyone, women were treated as equals in the struggle. ‘We want the emancipation and advancement of our women’, he instructed the PAIGC, despite, as he acknowledged time and again, the resistance to gender equality in some quarters. Above all, commit to the struggle. Commit body and soul. Perhaps even take heart in Cabral’s call to arms.

There is no single call more stirring than when Cabral offers his definition of ‘struggle’. He calls it the ‘permanent victory over difficulties.’ Not the evasion of difficulty, but such a robust confrontation with it, that difficulty becomes confined to history. Difficulty then is not so much overcome as made redundant.

If we are to seek solutions to the many difficulties that confront our moment – political disorder, nationalist violence fueled by a nostalgia for empire, economic inequalities, intrepid migrations born out of economic inequalities, state capture by elites, corruption, nepotism, and most important of all, the looming threat of planetary destruction – then we are well-advised not to ‘claim easy victories’.

The greatest difficulty that confronts us is how to struggle in order to make a world in which all can live. It is doubtful, of course, that we can immediately overcome the array of difficulties that make up our realities. We may not even be able to do so permanently. We are, however, called upon by Cabral’s work to set our sights higher. It is not enough, he insisted, to struggle only for liberation. As he insisted to his PAIGC comrades, the struggle is also for the ‘progress of our people.’

There is always work to be done. What matters most is not only that we commit ourselves to the work but how we undertake to do the work. How can we put our thought into action? How can we make of our thinking an alimentary action? How is our thought revised in light of our action? Most elementary of all might be the need to make our action, like Cabral’s insistence on crop diversification, itself sustainable.

Cabral, through no fault of his own, bequeathed to us an incomplete project. What will we do with the legacy he has left us? What actions can we derive from his rooted-in-the-ground thoughts? What new, Cabral-inspired thoughts can we put into action? Cabral offered his work, in all likelihood unwittingly, as a provisional answer to Lenin. Now it is asked of us to begin the work of answering Cabral. Of answering and, in so doing, making ourselves accountable to Cabral.

Grant Farred - Ithaca, United States of America,

Professor of Africana Studies and English - July 2022

1 Coincidentally Cabral was born on 12 September, the same day on which Steve Biko would be killed 53 years later. Biko was assassinated by the apartheid regime that Cabral never missed an opportunity to condemn, and like many freedom fighters, Cabral himself would be assassinated in 1973.

2 In two places in this collection, we see Cabral avoid criticising revolutionary leaders to the fullest extent. One incidence occurs in ‘On the African Revolution: Homage to Kwame Nkrumah.’ There it can be argued that he is all too quick to lay the blame for Nkrumah’s sovereign impulses at the door of historical ‘traitors’. I suspect that for Cabral, Nkrumah was too much a revered figure of the anti- colonial movement to bear scrutiny. Ghana, after all, provided the first military training ground for PAIGC operatives. Cabral’s lack of historical clarity on Nkrumah is a moment of historical blindness, a failure to hold him to the same standards of revolutionary democracy that he expected of his PAIGC comrades, himself first of all.

Similarly, it is strategically easier to rationalise Cabral’s critical lack in relation to his neighbour, Sekou Touré. After all, Touré, the leader of Guinea-Conakry committed a great deal of his national resources to supporting the PAIGC’s struggle. Nevertheless, for all his accomplishments regarding equality forwomen, his dedication to national infrastructure (particularly in basic healthcare access; his commitment to building schools, and so on), Sekou Touré exercised a brutal power over his people.

Contents

A Note On Attribution

Abbreviations

Foreword

Introduction

Map of Africa, 1962

Map Of Guinea-Bissau And Cape Verde, 1962

Statement to the United Nations Special Committee on Territories Under Portuguese Administration

Brief Analysis of the Social Structure in Guinea

Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories ...

A Historic Lesson: Pidjiguiti

A Situation of Permanent Violence

Our Solidarities

The Weapon of Theory

Determined to Resist

Party Principles and Political Practice

The Development of the Struggle

Analysis of Different Types of Resistance

New Year’s Message, January 1969

The Tactic of Division

Portugal is not an Imperialist Country

The Danger of Destruction from Within

On the African Revolution: Homage to Kwame Nkrumah

The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence

The Relevance of Marxism-Leninism

Culture, Colonisation, and National Liberation

Fruits of a Struggle

The Struggle Has Taken Root

New Year’s Message, 1973

Map Of Africa, 1973

Introduction

We never encounter a book the same way each time we read it. Every time is different, each word magnified through different lenses. Circumstances, eras, places, and contexts dictate the way we engage with the written work. They dictate the nature of our engagement, which direction it will take this time around, which paths will be followed or left untaken. This is true of the writings of Amílcar Cabral. No matter how often one reads his words, new lines of thought and new directions will always be found. His words lead to strategies for imagining liberation from the past, and radical ways to live in our world today.

Born in Guinea-Bissau in the city of Bafatá in 1924, Amílcar Lopes Cabral was the descendant of Cape Verdean migrants who had settled in the area. Living under the authoritarian colonial rule of the Portuguese in both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau during his lifetime came to be crucial for his understanding of the world, especially as it related to the human condition. From 1945 to 1952 he studied and worked as an agronomist in Lisbon. His professional experiences in Portugal and the colonised territories of Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, led him to think about and understand the struggle threefold, through the land, agriculture, and peasants, later conceiving a role for the black working class that lived in the urban centres.

After World War Two (1939–1945) in Lisbon, the political centre of Portuguese colonialism, discontent grew amongst the more politically aware African students who had come from colonised territories to pursue university education. These students made the state-created Casa dos Estudantes do Império (House of the Students of the Empire) their base, using it to create the Centro de Estudos Africanos (Centre of African Studies).3¹ They were intellectually curious, and their political ambitions were nurtured and found expression in clandestine study groups hosted in the private home of the Espírito Santo family from São Tomé and Príncipe. The Santo home became a hub where critical political thought around national independence and liberation began to emerge amongst African students including Amílcar Cabral. By taking seriously these political and intellectual rebellions in the metropole, young Africans discovered their generation’s mission: to fight for Africa’s independence from colonialism. From these beginnings Cabral would go on to lead struggles in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. He became one of the most influential anti-colonial and revolutionary theorists amongst the African liberation leaders of the era, such as Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel in Mozambique; Agostinho Neto in Angola, Patrice Lumumba in Congo.

Cabral’s poetry from as early as 1943 anticipated the struggle for independence and he wrote of the links between colonial politics and the severe droughts and famines in the Cape Verdean archipelago. His revolutionary fever culminated in his 1946 poem ‘Grito de Revolta’ (‘Cry of Revolt’):

Who doesn’t remember that cry that sounded like thunder?!

My cry of revolt echoed

through the farthest valleys of the Earth,

crossed the seas and the oceans,

crossed the Himalayas of the entire the world,

respected no borders and made my chest vibrate ...

My cry of revolt made the chest of all men vibrate,

made fellowship between all men

and transformed Life ...

The poem explicitly announced the need for liberation of humankind, as well the solidarity and connection between people living in different worlds of oppression. In 1956 this cry turned into action with the creation of the PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde) – the African Party for Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

Founded in Guinea-Bissau but drawing on an extensive diasporic network, the PAIGC emerged out of a long tradition of resistance by Africans in GuineaBissau, Cape Verde, and Portugal. From 1903 to 1936, the people of GuineaBissau revolted against the imposto de palhota (hut tax), a property tax that was imposed on people who owned a house. A similar tactic was used across colonial Africa to force Africans into wage labour for settlers. In Cape Verde, a significant peasant uprising in 1910 known as the Revolt of Ribeirão Manuel saw the population protest deplorable living conditions in the countryside.

The objective of the PAIGC’s struggle was very clear: independence and liberation of two colonised territories, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, which were politically and culturally connected by the historical developments of colonialism. To achieve this, the PAIGC sought to overthrow colonial institutions of oppression and exploitation and create a project of national reconstruction to pursue the economic, political, and social liberation of the people. This project would fight against the toxic residues left by colonial structures in the bodies and minds of the people.

The liberation struggle is a social and political phenomenon that I define as an individual and collective process and response where people become conscious. They gain consciousness about their subjugation through racialisation, dehumanisation, oppression and exploitation under the colonial government inside their country and by external forces. They organise themselves to reclaim their political and economic sovereignty and to dismantle and destroy the institutions that overpower their sense of self. They seize the capacity to control the fruits of their labour. The liberation struggle employs – at different times – a range of means to end colonial domination, from armed struggle to labour strikes to educational programmes, and cultural resistance. The liberation struggle against colonialism, if it is to be a total liberation struggle, is not only for the political conquest of territory (so-called ‘flag independence’). It is within this framework of struggle that Cabral’s well-known statement, ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’, as well as this selection of his speeches between 1963 and 1973, are situated.

I first encountered Cabral’s intellectual work in my early twenties, while finishing my college degree. Despite his impact on the world I moved in, Cabral’s work was (and still is) barely taught in high school or university. Before that, all knowledge of him had come from family conversations, and a few newspaper articles I had seen growing up in Portugal. His work was often difficult to find in print, so I carefully photocopied the two old and fragile volumes of Unity and Struggle published by Seara Nova in 1978, that I borrowed from my college library. It is to these precious photocopies, with passages underlined in different colours over the years, and notes made in every margin, that I return as required reading from time to time. Upon every new reading, new knowledge was unveiled which encouraged me to make a deeper study of the education system developed by the PAIGC during the struggle for my doctoral dissertation.

Militant education was a committed, engaged, and conscious anti-colonial educational process focused on an expansive concept of liberation ‘rooted and supported by the realities and necessities of the community’ and principles of decolonisation. The liberation struggle was first conceived of by the PAIGC as an educational practice which then led to the development of militant education. Through readings, discussions and mobilisation militants were embedded within a larger international struggle. In PAIGC reports from 1978, militant education is described as a ‘pedagogical role [that] combined three aspects: political learning, technical training, and the shaping of individual and collective behaviours’. We can trace the roots of this to the very self-education study groups created by African students in 1940s Portugal. Cabral and his comrades reproduced this same practice in the forests of Guinea-Bissau known as the liberated zones, in underground meetings in the Chão de Papel neighbourhood in the city of Bissau, and in Cape Verde during the 1960s and 1970s.

Ideology, revolutionary consciousness, and using national culture as a method of mobilisation, are some of the themes we can use to navigate Cabral’s political theory as well as his practice. Here however, I’d like to foreground the practicalities of liberation. On this subject Cabral wrote, ‘always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.’ To this end, understanding the conditions under which one is living is crucial. Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories starts exactly from this point. With his address to the United Nations in 1962, Cabral exposed the nature of Portuguese colonialism on an international stage, and denounced the situation the people of Guinea and Cape Verde were forced to live in.

In pieces like ‘Determined to Resist’, he explored the practices that people engaged in to end such a situation. The dock workers’ revolt on Bissau’s Pidjiguiti docks, is one example that served as a model for future actions. One of the outcomes of the revolt was the attention it brought to the dangers within the resistance movement, such as tactics of division and the absence of ideology. Cabral identified the potential for a great deficiency in the national liberation movement; so he insisted that movements could not aspire to transform material realities while operating in ignorance of their historical realities. It was through the historical lenses of Marxism-Leninism and the Black Radical Tradition that many of Cabral’s analyses were made. As he wrote in his famous essay ‘The Weapon of Theory’, recognising political theories and experiences from other movements is an important source of learning. The success of PAIGC struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, he claimed, could only be achieved ‘by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices.’ Spread throughout these pages is the thought and process of liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, the dynamics of national liberation integrated into the context of the international struggle. Cabral emphasises the need for solidarity between the international working-class movement and the liberation struggle, by writing, ‘I am not going to tell you how to struggle ... but you must find the best means and the best forms of fighting against our common enemy. This is the best form of solidarity.’

Amílcar Cabral was the protagonist of a unique journey, but although his name is the most pronounced one in the PAIGC-led liberation struggle, it is important to understand his intellectual work not as an individual effort but a collective one. This wisdom was gathered in discussions with his comrades of all kinds: soldiers, teachers, children, and peasants, to mention few. It is this combination of thoughts, practices, and experiences that rest in the words presented here which we call today, O Pensamento the Cabral (Cabral’s Thoughts). In Guinea-Bissau in the liberated area of Lugadjor, a secret meeting was to be held on 24 September 1973. PAIGC members were invited to attend, and people walked day and night to reach the meeting. Unbeknownst to most of them, Guinea-Bissau would declare itself to be independent on that day. However, there was one person missing. Amílcar Cabral, assassinated on 12 January earlier that year, could not be present for such an important milestone in the liberation struggle. Less than a year later in Portugal, the Portuguese military overthrew the Estado Novo authoritarian regime on 25 April 1974, a turn of events in which the PAIGC had a crucial impact. This day would come to be known as the Carnation Revolution. When I ask Cabral’s comrades and other left allies about the celebration of this date, which is now Freedom Day (Dia da Liberdade), and the completeness of the revolution, they say the revolution is incomplete. Their answer, paraphrased, is, ‘Não, … porque faltou Cabral’ (‘No, … because Cabral was missing’).

Although Cabral passed on before these two important moments in African liberation history, people continue to repeat the Cape Verdean and Guinean kriol (creole) expression ‘Cabral ka muri’ (‘Cabral is not dead’). This phrase expresses the necessity of continuing to study and understand Cabral. We must keep alive the practice of militant education he explains in the Party Watchwords from 1965. We must ‘devote … seriously to study … constantly improve their knowledge, their culture, their political training … Learn from life, learn with our people, learn in books and from the experience of the other. Constantly learn.’

Sónia Vaz Borges, Grândola, Portugal,

Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, July 2022

1 The House of Students of the Empire was a meeting place for African students from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, who were in Lisbon pursuing higher education. It was funded by the Portuguese government and hosted a cafeteria, sports games and cultural events. Although it was not intended to be a political space, the initiative of the students led to it becoming the breeding ground for independence movements that would later emerge in the students’ home countries.

Map of Africa, 1962

Map Of Guinea-Bissau And Cape Verde, 1962

Statement to the United Nations Special Committee on Territories Under Portuguese Administration

Extracts from a statement made in Conakry in June 1962.

AFTER THE RESOLUTION ON DECOLONIALISATION – THE 1961 ‘REFORMS’

An analysis has been made of the position of the people of Guinea as regards to their relations with the metropolitan country, the basic laws governing their lives, the administrative structure and organisation, the political institutions and how they function, the right to vote and its exercise, the organisation and administration of justice, human rights and fundamental freedoms. That analysis presents actual facts culled from legislation in force and day-to-day reality.

The analysis makes clear that the constitutional, political, legal, administrative and judicial status of Guinea, far from that of being a ‘province of Portugal’ is that of a non-self-governing country, conquered and occupied by force of arms, ruled and administered by a foreign power. The economic, political and social life of the people of Guinea is governed by laws and rules which differ from those applied to the people of Portugal; the people of Guinea have no political rights, they do not help to operate the country’s institutions or to draft its laws, which, however, they must obey; they do not elect representatives and cannot invest political and administrative leaders with office or remove them from office; they do not enjoy the most rudimentary human rights or fundamental freedoms. Thus, far from having their own legal identity, the people of Guinea are a colonised and dependent people, whose dignity has been deeply wounded. Neither directly nor indirectly do they decide their present or future fate. Consequently, there can be no doubt that the people of Guinea are being deprived of their right to self-determination, a right proclaimed and established for all peoples in the United Nations Charter.

Nevertheless, those who are not familiar with the actual facts as regards to the present position of the people of Guinea might ask whether the recent Portuguese ‘reforms’ of colonial legislation promulgated in 1961 have not significantly changed the constitutional and legal status of Guinea.

As is well known, these ‘reforms’ of Portuguese colonial legislation were instituted shortly after the United Nations General Assembly, at its fifteenth session, had adopted the resolution on decolonisation (14 December 1960). Before proceeding further, it is worth noting that the hasty promulgation of such ‘reforms’ after the United Nations adopted that historic and constructive resolution is in itself a striking indictment by Portugal of its own colonial system. An analysis of the legal texts of these ‘reforms’ will demonstrate whether they actually did or could change the constitutional and legal status of Guinea to any significant degree. The following legislation was enacted:

Decree no. 43,730, which revised articles 489,511 and 516 of the Overseas Administrative Reform Act;

Decree no. 43,894, approving the regulation of the occupation and granting of land concessions in the colonies;

Decree no. 43,895, establishing provincial settlement boards in the colonies;

Decree no. 43,896, organising the cantons in the colonies;

Decree no. 43,897, recognising the usages and customs regulating relations in private law in the colonies;

Decree no. 43,893, repealing the Native Statute of May 1954.

(Except for the first, all these decrees are dated 6 September 1961.) Thus the matters affected by the enactment of the reforms are: administrative organisation, land occupation, colonisation, justice and political status.

In actual fact, this legislation made no significant change in those matters, nor was the practice of the Portuguese rulers greatly changed, and from the constitutional and legal standpoint the subjection of the people of Guinea to Portuguese colonialism. For example,

although Decree no. 43,730 states in its preamble: ‘in accordance with our administrative tradition, both overseas and in the metropolitan country, the commune is the basic administrative unit...’, it still leaves local administration in the hands of the Portuguese authorities for it provides that the mairies, the municipal commissions and the local communities shall be presided over by persons appointed by the territorial or provincial governments.

Decree no. 43,894 deals with public property and with land concessions granted to settlers, administrative bodies and Catholic missions, and defines measures and establishes organs for the granting of such concessions. All in all, the law opens up to Portuguese settlers in Guinea opportunities for the occupation of land which either never existed before or were very limited.

Decree no. 43,895, which explicitly states in its preamble ‘... We have always regarded these as prerequisites for the desired progress in the overseas provinces, as one of the bases for the permanent establishment of European Portugal in the African territories...’, is nothing more than a legal instrument for establishing effective organs and means for stimulating and achieving the long-desired permanent settlement of increased numbers of Europeans in Guinea.

Although Decree no. 43,986 lays the basis for the organisation of the regedorias, it maintains the old system of replacing traditional chiefs by persons appointed by the colonial authorities.⁴²

Decree no. 43,897, while it recognises local usages and customs regulating relations to provide law, provides in its article 2 that such recognition shall be limited by the moral principles and basic rules of the Portuguese legal system. The scope of these limitations continues to be defined by article 138 of the political Constitution as ‘morality, the dictates of humanity and the free exercise of Portuguese sovereignty’.

Decree no. 43,893, which repeals the Native Statute, is the only official text in all of the new legislation which should imply a change, however academic, in the colony’s constitutional and legal status. But point of fact that is not the case. In the prefatory statement, the reasons for repealing the Statute are candidly stated. It is said that the Statute is being repealed ‘because this law was not always understood in a way which did justice to the motives and intentions underlying it...’ and because its existence ‘provided an opportunity for our enemies to assert that the Portuguese people are subject to two political laws and are consequently divided into two classes with no communication between them...’ Thus, the lawmakers’ purpose was not to alter the motives and intentions underlying the Statute, which they do not condemn – despite the fact that the Statute had the effect of placing the African in Guinea in the position of having no identity in law and of being an indigena. The purpose of the lawmakers as disclosed in the prefatory statement, was to deprive the enemies of Portuguese colonialism of an effective weapon in the struggle on behalf of the Africans of Guinea – Portuguese law itself. But they did not succeed, for the following reasons.

First, the people of Guinea had no hand in drafting the new law, which is the result of a unilateral act, contrary to their legitimate aspirations. Secondly, Portuguese citizenship, fictitious as it is, is imposed on the African of Guinea without his consent. Although the Statute clearly defined the requirements for citizenship, there was never ‘any rush by the natives to secure the identity card which would make them citizens’, as noted by Teixeira da Mota, a European investigator and official deputy in Guinea. The Africans of Guinea, from the time of the resistance in the colonial wars of conquest to the freedom struggle of today, never fought to acquire Portuguese citizenship. Thirdly, the law repealing the Native Statute was not followed by other legislation which would, in practice, regulate the participation of the people of Guinea in the management of their own affairs. Finally, the daily life of the people of Guinea (their economic, political, social and cultural life), with the exception of a few superficial alterations, particularly in the titles of laws, has changed not one iota. For example, although the ‘indigenous’ identity cards were and still are being hastily replaced by ‘provisional’ identity cards, the indigena tax and its 10 per cent surtax were replaced by the annual personal income tax and the surtax, which not only amount to the same, but are still subject to the legislation governing the old taxes.

Consequently, it is fair to say that far from changing the constitutional status of Guinea, the 1961 ‘reforms’ merely made the situation worse, at least in the following respects:

By increasing the number of communes, creating additional local concentration of power and organising the cantons – which are always headed by persons appointed by the Governor – not only was Portuguese rule strengthened, but it was made easier for the colonial authorities to keep an eye on the Africans of Guinea and to carry out repressive measures against individuals and groups.

By defining procedures and establishing organs for the application and granting of land concessions to non-indigenous parties, more opportunities were provided for usurping and effectively occupying land which had until then belonged to the African communities.

By setting up the Provincial Settlement Boards, contrary to the spirit of the law itself, the way is being opened for European colonisation in Guinea to the detriment of the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people and of all classes of Africans.

Moreover, the 1961 ‘reforms’ are contrary to the spirit of the provisions of resolutions 1542 (XV) and 1514 (XV) of the United Nations General Assembly, because they effect no change in the Portuguese political Constitution which, having been revised in 1961 with the clear intention of evading the obligations arising from the principles of the Charter, continues to state that Guinea is ‘an integral part of the Portuguese nation’. Their purpose is to perpetuate the fiction of the ‘overseas provinces’ and they therefore constitute a flagrant violation of the right of the people of Guinea to self-determination and independence, while at the same time an attempt is made to baffle the vigilance of the forces fighting for freedom, particularly those of the United Nations.

But the Portuguese colonial government has never succeeded and never will succeed in attaining the objectives of the 1961 ‘reforms’. Despite all subterfuges, they fail to conceal the actual realities of the constitutional and legal status of the people of Guinea. These very ‘reforms’ show that, now as before, this status continues to be determined by:

the Portuguese political Constitution;

the Overseas Organic Law;

the Administrative and Legal Statute of Guinea.

Moreover, the organs of Portuguese sovereignty – the Head of the Portuguese State, the Portuguese National Assembly, the Portuguese Government and the Portuguese courts – still have the final say in the economic, political and social life of the colony. The National Assembly, the Council and the Portuguese Minister for Overseas Territories still hold special legislative powers with respect to Guinea.

These metropolitan organs enjoy the co-operation of the Portuguese Corporative Chamber, the Conference of Overseas Governors, the Economic Conference of Overseas Portugal and other technical bodies. The Governor and the Government Council, the former exercising executive and legislative powers and the latter acting in an advisory capacity, are still the colony’s organs of government. There has been no change either in the system of appointing the Governor or in the composition and the manner of appointment and election of the members of the Government Council.

Today, as yesterday, the Portuguese in Guinea are imbued with the same spirit in which, from the Middle Ages until our times, they practised the slave trade; the spirit in which they engaged in their cruel wars of conquest and occupation, in which they built up and organised, down to the smallest detail, the colonial exploitation of the country’s human and natural resources, and which at present motivates the prevalent economic, police and military repression and furnishes the threat of a new colonial war which hangs over the people of Guinea. It is that spirit, which is a historical development of the Middle Ages, which determines and shapes Portugal’s colonial legislation and methods.

INTERNAL PEACE AND SECURITY – REPRESSION

The laws and the daily realities of economic, political, social and cultural life to which the people of Guinea are subjected reveal that the people are the target of one of the most violent and best-organised examples of oppression (national, social and cultural) and economic exploitation in the history of colonialism. This system of oppression and economic exploitation wa introduced and built up in Guinea by force of arms. Its development and continued implementation could be achieved only by recourse to armed repression (by the army and the police) and by the systematic use of violence in all its forms against any attempt at insurrection made by the people of Guinea.

The ‘internal peace and security’ imposed by Portuguese colonial domination in Guinea is not, and never has been, anything other than the fruit of a victory achieved by systematic repression, supported by an administrative framework which has engineered down to the most trifling detail its action against the long-standing desire for liberation and the active hatred of the people of Guinea for foreign domination. This situation has been the samefrom the times of the conquest and colonial occupation right up to the active struggle for national liberation which our people is waging today.

In the course of colonial wars lasting over half a century (1870–1936), hardly a year went by, as Teixeira da Mota admits, without some kind of military operation. These operations ‘had sometimes to be repeated over and over again against the same populations’. The period from 1936 to 1959, after the administrative machine had been put together and set in motion, was one of silent repression, of secret recourse to violence, of unsung victims, of disorganised, individual reactions, of assaults and crimes of all sorts taking place within the four walls of the administrative buildings. Since 1959, in the face of the great strides of the African peoples along the road to national independence and of the firm resolution of the people of Guinea to free themselves from the Portuguese colonial yoke, there has been a return to open and undisguised repression by the army and police, in the towns as in the countryside, in private homes as in the public services, in the massacre of indigenous populations as in the murder of nationalist prisoners.

A detailed and concrete study of the practical realities of the life of the people of Guinea and the practices of the Portuguese overlords reveals that despite all the precautionary and repressive measures taken by the Portuguese colonialists, they have never actually experienced a real ‘era of internal peace and security’ in Guinea. One of the most interesting features of the Portuguese colonial laws is that despite all attempts at disguise, they disclose not only the intentions and actions of the Portuguese masters, but also the methods