Amílcar Cabral and Revolutionary Education
On July 1, 1970, Pope Paul VI received the leaders of the liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies – Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde – in a private audience at the Vatican. The highest representative of the Catholic Church was meeting with (and backing) the people who were fighting the Catholic and fascist Estado Novo in Portugal. That day amounted to a great political victory and an important recognition for Africa’s anti-imperialist movements, at the cost of a diplomatic incident between the Vatican and the Portuguese government.
Among the representatives received by Pope Montini was Amílcar Cabral, secretary of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), founded in 1956. Cabral was born on September 12, 1924, 102 years ago, in the Guinean town of Bafatá. He was a guerrilla fighter and a poet, a Marxist revolutionary, but first and foremost an agronomist. His many different sides allowed him to grasp with great clarity the contradictions of the colonial society the Portuguese had built, and to work out which insurgent actions – civil at first, then armed out of necessity – would be needed to break it down, over 11 long years of struggle, from 1963 to 1974.
National liberation, in Cabral’s conception, was simply one step along the road to emancipation from an economic system founded on exploitation by one’s fellow man. Colonialism, in this view, was a consequence and not the cause of capitalist domination.
The economy of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde was at a pre-capitalist stage, mainly rural, technologically underdeveloped. There were no great monopolists, and most of the resources were in the hands of the colonial elite.
The ideas of the revolution, together with the scarcity of material means available to the insurgents, thus created an opening for a socialist economy, a chance that had to be taken. Cabral developed these ideas for the first time while he was doing his work as an agronomist, traveling around a country that was still unified, commissioned by the Portuguese authorities.
Those who would fight for liberation were the peasants and proletarians, spurred into action by the political skills of a leadership group that had emerged from the local petty bourgeoisie. The rebels’ military effort in Guinea-Bissau was made easier by the nature of the land, largely covered in scrub and therefore suited to asymmetric warfare, and by the economic and political backing from the communist bloc. While the colonial system exploited the ethnic, economic and social divisions of the population, the anti-imperialist struggle minimized those differences in order to bring people closer to pan-Africanism, calling for a collective coming to consciousness.
“Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the 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,” Cabral said and wrote.
Material hardship was therefore a sufficient condition for revolution. The institutions of the new state, as he conceived them, would be legitimized by being under the control of the people, gathered in committees and tribunals. A fully democratic system, because it was scrupulously held to account by the masses.
Cabral was particularly far-sighted in bringing culture and revolutionary practice together, two aspects that were complementary in his view. He never underestimated the importance of education in the emancipation of the Guinean population. In his speeches he urged the liberation fighters to set up schools and cultural centers in the liberated regions, to integrate culturally with the local population and to share the experience of liberation, in order to draw people more easily to take part in the common effort.
Sadly, Cabral never saw his country’s day of independence. He was killed on January 20, 1973, the year before the liberation process was completed and ratified by the UN General Assembly. Like other leading figures of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, the revolutionary was assassinated in Conakry, in formerly French Guinea, by a man close to him, Inocêncio Kani, who had been co-opted by Lisbon’s secret police – with doubts remaining over the role of Guinean president Sékou Touré, who in those years was giving asylum to the pro-independence leaders of the former Portuguese colonies.
To this day, the political conditions theorized by the liberation movements have not been met in most of the liberated African countries. The ruling classes in Africa almost always set up rapacious systems for the misappropriation of collective resources, given legitimacy by international interests. Cabral explained this arrogant attitude by the absence of a strong and well-developed revolutionary theory, together with the lack of historical consciousness, behind the seizure of power by said ruling classes.
Fifty years on, Italy’s ties with the figure of Cabral and with the anti-imperialist movements have not been forgotten.
A public research center in Bologna has been named in honor of Amílcar Cabral, specializing in political and social research on Africa, Asia and Latin America. Also in Bologna, the Amílcar Cabral library, hidden among the trees on the road that climbs from Porta San Mamolo into the hills, has been a reference documentation center for students, journalists and academics for more than 50 years. And on Saturday, September 12, on the anniversary of his birth, a garden was named after Cabral in the Ostiense district of Rome.
“Preserve memory, build the future,” Amílcar Cabral said, reflecting on the condition of his people. Today, our remembrance of a leader who has been kept off the radar of common historical memory means bringing the liberation struggle waged in Guinea-Bissau and across Africa back into focus, and universalizing the message of anti-colonialism, which starts precisely from culture.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/leducazione-rivoluzionaria on 2026-09-12
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