Amilcar Lopes Cabral (1924-1973)

January 20, 2023 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Amilcar Cabral to whom our library is dedicated, specialising in the history, political, economic and social life, literature, culture and religion of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We publish a contribution by Anna Maria Gentili, professor emerita of the University of Bologna and member of the Scientific Committee of the Centro/Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral. 

Por mais bela e atraente que seja a realidade dos outros, só podemos transformar verdadeiramente a nossa própria realidade com base no seu conhecimento concreto e com os nossos esforços e sacrifícios próprios. (…) A deficiência ideológica para não dizer a falta total de ideologia, por parte dos movimentos de libertação nacional – que tem a sua justificação de base na ignorância – constitui uma das maiores senão a maior fraqueza da nossa luta contra o imperialismo.

Amilcar Cabral

Africa was the last part of the world to be colonised and decolonised, starting in the 1950s after World War II. At that time the recognition of the right to independence of the last colonies seemed to mean the repudiation of the last form of racist domination. That was what all African leaders said, albeit with different formulas, and everyone saw the emancipation of each nation-state as the recognition and recovery of the long-violated dignity of free men, no longer slaves nor subjects, but full citizens of independent countries. Nationalist leaders, who in those years “conquered the realm of politics", as Kwame Nkrumah’s aphorism says [Translator’s note: “Seek ye first the political kingdom”], were aware of the backwardness and the legacies of dependence of their countries. However, and even if the paths and times of the negotiations and liberation struggles which led to independence were different, all nationalist leaders hoped and asked that their populations would be part of a shared journey of not only physical, but above all moral, reconstruction, just as was happening in the European countries that had emerged from the war, once Nazism and fascism had been defeated. The Golden Age was in the future, in the ability of men and women to invent a new, fair and supportive world. And what would pay the way to this new world could and should be the emancipation and progress of oppressed peoples.

As far as my generation is concerned, what led us to follow, study, and support the peoples’ liberation struggles against colonial rule was the strong empathy that we felt with the moral impulse of the forms of individual and collective subjectivity that guided the practical and symbolic action of their political and intellectual leaders.

In those years, Amilcar Cabral emerged as the most skilled and innovative revolutionary leader in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, which were considered to be territories without any economic importance, and yet they were strategic and military outposts of the irreducible Portuguese colonial power. Endowed with an immense charisma, Cabral was capable of soliciting internal and international consensus, and above all of mobilising the different ethnic, racial and class communities, which represented a diverse, often conflicting, social and political panorama and were to be guided towards a common action aimed at achieving freedom. Amilcar Cabral belonged to the generation of young Africans born around the 1920s and culturally formed in the 1940s who began to become protagonists of anticolonial politics in the 1960s.

Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister and then president of Ghana, the first country to gain independence in West Africa, became a mentor to the many leaders and parties that made the history of decolonization. Kwame Nkrumah was unyielding in his warnings against the neocolonial projects of those who “left to be better". From this generation we remember people with very different origin, thought and political action: Patrice Lumumba, Sekou Touré, Modibo Keita, Julius Nyerere, Ben Bella, Leopold S. Senghor, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and, as regards Africa under Portuguese control, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, and precisely Amilcar Cabral. And the great Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, whose Nations Nègres et Culture must be reread and who was long opposed for his theories and research which reevaluated the originality and depth of “Negro” culture.

It has been half a century since Amilcar Cabral was murdered by his own men in Conakry on 20 January 1973. His tragic death exalted the “universal” dimension of a thought free from any dogmatism, his ability as a political organiser and strategist in the conduct of the liberation struggle against the Portuguese dictatorship, which in the postwar period, while a lot of African countries were on their way to independence, left neither room nor hope for claims for autonomy, emancipation and independence of the indigenous communities and peoples, strongly conditioned by centuries of servitude and subordination.

After World War II, it seemed possible to eliminate the last vestiges of colonial domination and with it racism, thus recognising the right of African peoples to freedom, and therefore to the dignity of human beings as historical and political people, no longer subjects, but full citizens of nation-states. The new international order emerging from the rubble of the Second World War seemed favourable, and Amilcar Cabral proved to be a skilled and convincing diplomat in this context, demonstrating his ability to gain consensus in Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia, at the United Nations and not least in the Vatican. The Portuguese dictatorial regime rejected any openness: Cabral’s and his companions’ plea that peace could be built together in dignity, in a free and finally democratic homeland, was met with fierce repression, which forced Cabral and his men to follow the path to insurrection in 1961. I would like to recall here that in January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, betrayed by the Chief of Staff Mobutu, was captured and executed. On 30 June 1960, in his speech at the ceremonies marking the independence of the Republic of Congo from the Belgian colonial rule, Lumumba had claimed the right to equal dignity in freedom for the Congolese as citizens of a just and egalitarian society.

Amilcar Cabral has written much and much has been written about him, his thought and action. In Italy, his figure became popular thanks to numerous articles by journalists who had the opportunity at the time to visit Africa which was on the verge of gaining independence. Many of us, who were young at the time, got to know Amilcar Cabral from the writings of Romano Ledda and Pietro Petrucci, who followed the events in the field, supported by a documented knowledge of local dynamics in the changing context of European and international politics.

Amilcar Cabral knew deeply not only the other Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique, whose leaders were and remained privileged interlocutors until his death, but he was in constant conversation with the debates that made the years at the turn of the 1960s so rich in ideas and hopes in what was then called the ‘third world’, in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Utopian of course, yet down to earth, Cabral chose to study Agricultural Sciences and as an agricultural engineer he travelled through Guinea Bissau, discovering the historical and political complexity of the different ethnic entities; during the liberation struggle, he promoted listening to cultural forms and expressions and to the history which characterises the complex and changing social and political landscape; this is what he will teach to his young and often impatient companions through the organisation of the PAIGC, which he intended as the fulcrum and laboratory of diversity integration. Throughout his career as a fighter and politician, he will never cease to insist and work for the unity of the nation, to be built on the primacy of respect and solidarity between the different material and spiritual cultures of the country.

Amilcar Cabral suggested methods and tools for the analysis of African societies and not only. Half a century has passed since Cabral’s death and the enormous economic, social and political changes which have taken place in this period, alongside to progress, more often testify to the recurrence of conflicts and exploitation of the weakest in ever new forms of exclusion and resurgent racism. This makes it more imperative than ever ‘to go back to the sources’ of your own history, taking a critical look and not finding refuge in theories and models which are dogmatic or completely alien to local cultures. It is, therefore, necessary to navigate knowledgeably the complexities with critical thinking and flexibility, without however yielding on principles, the same ones which inspired the struggle for the conquest and respect of fundamental human rights, without distinction of race, ethnicity or social class.

Cabral will always promote the study of history. Only through history can we give body and value to the depth of time and the articulation of space in the action of African societies and to the essence of protest forms. It is within these protest forms that political and social entities, even though limited in their action, meet, clash and negotiate ways of redemption, defence and affirmation of their own identity, interacting and integrating into constantly changing local, regional and international contexts.

One of the many lessons that we have all learned from Amilcar Cabral is to highlight the richness of Africa and its temporal and spatial historical depth in all its aspects, which go far beyond continental boundaries, the short period of formal colonialism and the first 60 years of independences as well.

Anna Maria Gentili

Professor Emerita Alma Mater - Università di Bologna

Member of the Scientific Committee of the Centro/Biblioteca

Amilcar Cabral di Bologna Amilcar Lopes Cabral was not only the main architect of the independence of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, but also one of the most important ideologists and politicians of the entire process of decolonization in Africa.

He was born in 1924 to Cape Verdean parents in Guinea, then known as Portuguese Guinea; he studied in Lisbon and returned to Guinea in 1952. It was during these years that he developed his dissent against the Portuguese regime. After a period spent in Angola, he returned home in 1956 to found an underground party, the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde); later, he established the FLGCV (Liberation Front of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde), open to all political parties, which set the immediate conquest of independence as its goal and which initiated a real conflict with the Portuguese regime. Cabral died in 1973, assassinated by one of PAIGC members in Conakry; that same year Portuguese Guinea became independent as Guinea Bissau. He was murdered just when he was about to achieve his lifelong goal: the end of Portuguese colonialism, the conquest of the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.

The Centro/Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral was founded in 1974 by the will of the Municipality of Bologna with the aim of developing knowledge of international issues and in particular of the political, social, economic and cultural life in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Now Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral is part of the Settore Biblioteche e Welfare culturale del Comune di Bologna; the library specialises in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania and its heritage is made up of over 48,000 volumes and over 400 periodicals. It documents, encourages and promotes the study, information and knowledge on international issues, with special emphasis on non-European cultures, history, political, economic and social life, literature, culture and religions of the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania . The library also promotes cross-cultural knowledge and exchange and, through its collections, aims to provide a qualified representation of current national and international scientific and editorial production in this area of specialisation. It organises meetings, seminars, book presentations, reading groups, bibliographic routes and exhibitions. On the cover: Monument to Amílcar Cabral (Assomada, Santiago Island, Cape Verde) Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons