OUT of all the sons of Africa who have struggled against European colonisation, there was none quite as brilliant as Amilcar Cabral.
He is remembered as a writer, agronomist, revolutionary theoretician, guerilla, diplomat and politician.
Amilcar Lopez da Costa Cabral was born in the West African country of colonial Guinea in 1924.
Guinea had been colonised by the Portuguese since the mid-15th Century.
Slaves were transported from Guinea to the Americas for hundreds of years to labour on cotton fields.
Cabral received his higher education as an agronomist in Lisbon, Portugal.
His activism began while he was still in Portugal after starting an anti-colonisation campaign with other like-minded students.
He was a patriotic and intelligent man who studied extensively to understand why his country and its neighbours were suffering.
He realised, as compared to other countries in the West, Portugal was poor and underdeveloped.
It was passing on its global, economic, social and cultural backwardness and incompetence to its colonies in Africa.
Unlike Angola, which was occupied physically by Portuguese settlers and saw its people displaced, Guinea was a commercial colony whose citizens did not experience outright displacement from their land.
Instead, the land and labour of the people of Guinea and islands like Cape Verde were exploited to produce goods that would be heavily under-priced to serve the Portuguese economy.
This led blacks to be poor while they were productive.
Like most African colonies, the traditional economic and social systems of the land were overrun by the European systems when they occupied the land.
For instance, in ancient times, a boy was given a goat skin outfit to wear.
Post colonisation, Western clothes were introduced to the Africans and the traditional system of acquiring the basic need of clothing changed.
Thus it had to be replaced by factories, otherwise the indigenous people would be left without provision of clothing.
Since Guinea and Cape Verdes’ colonisation, the needs of the indigenous people of that area were ignored and as a result illiteracy, illness and poverty became common place.
Such was the case in Guinea when Cabral returned from Portugal.
The people of the countryside were almost naked, with limited clothing and had a 99 percent illiteracy rate. Concerned about his people, Cabral started some political parties that were aimed at fighting for the liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde.
This liberation would allow them to compete fairly on the domestic and international market without being sucked dry by Portugal, their coloniser. The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded by Cabral and Henri Labery in 1956.
It has six founding members including Cabral’s brother Luis and was initially aimed at achieving independence politically.
Cabral was the secretary-general, and Rafael Barbosa the president.
The PAIGC held peaceful demonstrations, but after meeting the shrewd retaliation tactics of the Portuguese that involved the murdering of black activists, they were forced to take a militant position.
The turning point was August 1959 when the Portuguese massacred over 50 workers and injured over 100 in a period of less than 20 minutes.
The workers had gone on strike and were unarmed.
This tragedy shook the blacks of the region and by September, the PAIGC held a secret conference during which they agreed to meet the enemy with armed struggle.
Cabral as well as other leaders and members of the PAIGC studied the revolutions of China, Cuba and Vietnam. They called Che Guevara ‘the great’ and religiously read his book Guerilla Warfare.
They even studied the pan–European wars that are remembered as the world wars so as to understand the modern tactics of the enemy.
Mao Ze Dong’s book was also studied and had a direct impact in the PAIGC’s choice to engage in armed struggle.
From these sources, the PAIGC established the tactical and strategic principles of their guerilla struggle.
They applied these principles to the actual geographic, historical, social and economic conditions of their countries. Guinea was small in area and Cape Verde was in the middle of the ocean.
Guinea was also flat and had no mountains, which was a disadvantage because mountains are used by guerillas for shielding and hiding.
The liberation party leaders began to turn their citizens into symbolic mountains which the guerillas could run to for hiding and assistance.
They used their jungles and swamps to their advantage because they knew the Portuguese were not accustomed to that terrain.
Cabral and his companions also decided to shock the enemy by attacking them from inside the country, beginning with liberating the most central or urban areas from the Portuguese.
This was contrary to most guerilla wars that are fought from outside the country heading inwards.
They recruited guerillas from the peasant population and worked hard to give them a national awareness and ideology that they could comprehend.
They avoided using big words that the mostly illiterate population would not understand and instead addressed well-known issues like the deliberate under-pricing of their labour and agricultural produce, inequality, racism and the lack of schools, hospitals.
They won support from many areas in the country and the Portuguese became alarmed.
The Portuguese Government began calling the black activists and guerillas terrorists and rebels to the Portuguese colony.
They began using typical British and US tactics in defending their colonies.
They imposed armed repression, police arrests, murders and massacres by military forces to try and discourage the blacks from holding up their resistance.
They went further to cause divisions among people with varying complexions, tribes and so on, with the hope of achieving internal divisions.
All these efforts did not discourage the liberation parties that Cabral was heading. The Portuguese began sending troops, who were at times numbering 3 000, to scare the blacks.
They attacked an island called Como in 1964 in this way, but the blacks won the battle, killing 900 of their troops and confiscating much of their property.
The guerillas knew the coloniser had to disperse his troops throughout the country to defend his dominion and at such times they could attack and liberate Portuguese strongholds.
If the coloniser regrouped and centralised his army, the guerillas had the opportunity to take him down in one flurry. Thus Cabral pictured the coloniser as weak as long as the guerillas were communicating and aware of their goals and principles.
The Portuguese then resorted to all-out colonial warfare with modern-day weapons and funds provided by NATO.
Cabral and his men uncovered exactly who it was who was unjustly assisting the Portuguese in this war.
The weapons they confiscated from defeated Portuguese troops came from the US, Germany (Mauser rifles), Belgium, Italy (machine guns and grenades) and France (Alouete helicopters), among others.
They received war planes, jets, armoured vehicles, helicopters, navy ships and so on.
Apartheid South Africa and colonial Zimbabwe under Ian Smith also assisted Portugal in their fight against the guerillas.
They understood that the Portuguese civilians were not the Portuguese Government and exclusively attacked Portuguese military personnel in the beginning of their struggle.
The attacks were systematic. They targeted forts and camps which forced the Portuguese to be confined to their barracks.
From there the Portuguese tried to make secret allies with sellout blacks for informants.
They bombed the villages that protected guerillas and burned as many crop fields as they could find.
Their tactics of fighting guerillas constituted as terrorism in every way and their troops came directly from Portugal.
The PAIGC guerillas had comparatively old weapons.
All sorts of bombs, including napalm bombs, were also used against the guerillas but they remained an effective and fearless force.
Their support was from the people, their neighbours such as Republic of Guinea and also socialist nations like USSR and Sweden.