AMILCAR CABRAL was hated not only by the Portuguese, but the many Western nations that aided Portugal against Guinea’s struggle.
The reason he was disliked so much was his worldview which was completely liberated and would inevitably set the tone for individual and national revolution of the oppressed people of Africa.
This was guaranteed because Cabral was an eloquent intellectual and writer who could also publish his philosophy in books.
Cabral spoke in interviews, commenting on world issues that related to the struggle of blacks and other races that fought or were fighting for freedom, rights and equality. He loathed imperialists and was determined to bring an end to the era of colonisation by revolutionary means.
Cabral was so eager to share his take on the black struggle in the US, the US-Vietnam War and the conflict in Israel-Palestine in books, speeches and interviews.
He wanted peace and prosperity for all of Africa and other places were humans were being oppressed.
He often stated, on behalf of his liberation party, that they were with the blacks of North America in their struggle against white oppression.
He praised South-American countries like Cuba for standing up against imperialism even though they were considerably smaller than the US and covered by the sea.
Cabral also encouraged the Vietnamese to carry on their guerilla struggle against the US and praised them for their courage and determination.
Regionally, he discouraged the people of Congo and Africa from tolerating sellouts like Moise Tshombe, whom he mentioned by name. Tshombe was the man who betrayed Patrice Lumumba to his death.
Cabral used the words ‘sellout’ and ‘Tshombe’ interchangeably; a trait that eventually caught on in Zimbabwe where the noun for sellout is now also ‘chombe’ and the verb for selling out ‘kuchomba’.
Regarding Palestine, Cabral repeatedly said whites who identify themselves as Jews had lived in different parts of the world, but mostly in Europe. Although it was unfortunate they were victimised by Germany under Hitler, these Jews had no justifiable reason to enter Palestine and displace the indigenous Arab population.
Like the former Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cabral was viciously against the occupation of Palestine by the Europeans and instead rooted for the Arabs to continue their struggle against the settler-Government.
He expressed his concern about the Palestinian refugees and casualties whom he affectionately referred to as martyrs to the cause of freedom.
These and more comments in the form of speeches, interviews and writings that were mostly broadcast in Latin-speaking countries made Cabral the West’s worst enemy.
He attacked the hearts of the Belgian, French, Portuguese, US and Zionist foreign policies and denounced them.
They all feared his ideas would be a game-changer if they were to spread and would undoubtedly cost them their African colonies through armed struggle.
However, the most pressing world issue in Cabral’s time was the war between communism and capitalism.
Communism was a school of thought that sought to implement governance of a nation based on ensuring the good of the community as a whole. Capitalism was a laissez-faire system which promoted an ‘each man for himself’ ideology that favoured the financially prominent in a system.
African leaders were expected at this time to be inclined to one or the other side. This would determine the African nation’s allies and enemies.
Communist countries aided African countries and groups that were for communism and the same applied to capitalist nations that would aid African countries that embraced capitalism.
This was a dilemma that many African leaders, including Lumumba of Congo, Rawlings of Ghana and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, had to face and their decisions had fateful results.
Cabral said it made no sense for the people of Cape Verde and Guinea to chase off the capitalist Portuguese only to replace their colonial presence with communist countries.
They were not fighting for a foreign power to rule over them, but for true freedom, sovereignty and solidarity.
However, when it came to the model governance that he preferred for his country, Cabral inclined to socialism.
His revolutionary ideas were always people oriented and so naturally, he was into socialism; particularly Marxism. This made Cabral very unpopular in the West.
Cabral once commented: “I would like to state loud and clear that we have firm allies from socialist counties since the peoples of socialist countries have never oppressed colonised people.
“Thus I have the honour of telling you that we are receiving substantial and effective aid from socialist nations, reinforcing the aid which we are already receiving from our African brothers.”
Cabral went on to say capitalist nations of the West that did not want them to work with socialists were the same ones helping Portugal’s fascist-colonial government in waging war against the people of Guinea and Cape Verde.
Seeing that Cabral’s guerilla war was growing in success and popularity, the Portuguese Government, under President António de Oliveira Salazar, adopted more cunning ways to oust Cabral.
Although independence was now inevitable seeing that the PAIGC had already won over most of the land and territory from the Portuguese, Cabral was marked for death by the West and Portugal was assigned to handle the problem. As was the case with Lumumba, the secret agencies of the US (CIA) in collaboration with that of Portugal (PIDE) set a plan in motion.
This plan involved winning over Cabral’s rivals through possible PIDE agents operating within the PAIGC, arresting Cabral and transferring his custody to Portuguese authorities.
Meanwhile, in 1972, Cabral was beginning to set up a People’s Assembly in preparation for their Independence.
On January 20 of the following year, a former PAIGC rival, Inocencio Kani, along with another man who was a PAIGC member shot Cabral in the head.
Cabral had been so popular in Guinea that no one ever assumed he would be betrayed by one of his own, especially after fighting the foreign enemy for so long. Kani is remembered as the ‘Tshombe’ of Guinea.
Guinea would win its independence eight months after Cabral’s assassination. Kani, along with 100 other PAIGC members, was executed after being found to have been involved in a conspiracy to seize power in the movement; a conspiracy that the foreign powers capitalised on and led to Cabral’s assassination.
Cabral’s half-brother, Luis, became the active leader of the PAIGC in Guinea and would become the first black President of the independent Nation of Guinea which was from then onwards known as Guinea-Bissau.
Although Cabral was prematurely taken from us and Africa was robbed of one of its most brilliant sons, his ideas continue to reverberate far beyond the African continent.
Besides his teachings on liberation, Cabral was an agronomist by profession and there are practical concepts that Cabral drew up that are yet to be studied and applied by all agro-based Africans.
These agricultural reforms worked in sustaining the formerly underproductive Guinean and Cape Verdean populations during their war of liberation.
Cabral is the only West African leader who successfully inspired his people to take up arms against the colonisers.
The rest of the sub-Saharan West African nations were simply granted moderate and almost ceremonial independence without engaging their colonisers in armed struggle.
In Africa, the guerilla tactics that were used against the Portuguese by Cabral were otherwise only evident in the liberation struggles of Mozambique and Zimbabwe.