In this wide-ranging interview with ROAPE’s Mike Powell, Leo Zeilig asks him about Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary activism. Powell talks about Cabral’s relentless focus on actual political dynamics of struggle, the purpose of theory, and his focus on the mode of production. For Cabral, Powell argues, nothing was static, everything was in a process of dialectical change, processes which could be consciously influenced by people acting together. Powell also discusses Basil Davidson’s collaboration and friendship with Cabral.
Leo Zeilig: Could you please tell roape.net readers about yourself? Your political background, your work and involvement in ROAPE in the 1970s, and after?
Mike Powell: I was a history student in England in the mid 1970s. It was a time of radical change, with women’s liberation sweeping across the university, and our politics being shaped by the anti-imperialist wars raging across the globe. I managed to focus my studies on these struggles and, in the process, came across the first editions of ROAPE and issue 45 of Transition magazine, then edited by Wole Soyinka, which had a special feature on the revolution in Guinea Bissau.
The emphasis of both on the practical effects of politics led me away from academia to train as a nurse and then to work in Primary Health care and humanitarian responses in Latin America and Africa for several years. This experience illustrated large gaps in the knowledge of international development agencies about the social realities that they were aiming to change and between academically produced knowledge and those working for social justice on the ground. Thinking about and trying to develop new intellectual practice to overcome those gaps has been the focus of my work and politics for the last 30 years.
I did my nurse training in Sheffield, where I first came across Lionel Cliffe, Jan Burgess and Jitendra and Judy Mohan of ROAPE and the West Indian activist Basil Griffiths through the Sheffield Southern Africa solidarity group. When I returned to Sheffield in the late 1980s, I became more involved in the journal, at first in its development as a cooperative business. Over time this morphed into an interest in what sort of knowledge the journal was producing and for what purpose.
The Cabral special issue in 1993 was my first effort at producing content for the journal, after which I was invited to join the editorial collective, as one of only a few non-academic members. I stayed on the group for about 12 years and still contribute where I can.
You have been fascinated by the work, activism, and politics of Amilcar Cabral. Recently on roape.net we have serialised your 1993 special issue on Cabral, which you put together twenty years after his murder. Can you talk us through your interest in Cabral, and what elements of his activisms, his revolutionary politics, originally caught your attention?
Coming across Cabral the first time was a complete revelation. He was really the first person anywhere I had come across who seemed to be able to understand the interaction of political, cultural, and social processes, analyse them, and develop ideas for effective political practice. It was also obvious that, whilst he was informed by and able to engage with wider political and intellectual currents, he was unusually able to recognise when these did not meet the demands of the Guinean struggle and to develop original thinking, based on detailed knowledge of local social, political, and environmental realities. And all of this was before one took into account the incredible achievement of starting a revolution in a small and almost entirely illiterate country and defeating the 35,000 strong colonial army of a NATO member.[1]
It wasn’t until after Cabral was murdered, that you visited liberated Guinea-Bissau later in the 1970s. What were your impressions of the country, the liberation movement – PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde) – that was now in power and its leadership?
It was quite disappointing really. I spent most of the time in Bissau itself, in the bit the Portuguese had built. It was a very sleepy place with bored youth hanging out on the street and complaining that nothing happened. There was some society wedding taking place in in the cathedral and much of the party leadership turned up in suits in a succession of new Volvos. It was hard to imagine anything less revolutionary.
I had, though, a series of meetings which were more encouraging. It was definitely still possible in 1977 to work progressively. There were some very creative experiments in education for example.
I met Carmen Pereira, chair of the National Women’s Commission, and she and her office were clearly trying to build on the important roles that women had taken up during the struggle. However, it was also clear that much of the development work was fairly technocratic. The growing health service was concentrating on hospitals and doctors and was nothing like as tailored to the needs of the rural majority as the health system developed in Mozambique.
Leaders and functionaries seemed to be embedded in the city, spending their time in meetings in the ministries and losing touch with the people they had fought with in the jungle. I spent an incredible afternoon with Mario de Andrade, the Angolan poet and founder of the MPLA, who argued that the biggest danger for a socialist government was the growth of social divisions between the people and the leaders. He was referring to the Eastern bloc, but he must have been aware that there was a similar process underway in Bissau.
I think this process continued until the coup in 1980. There were other problems, in particular with the different social and political realities between Guinea Bissau and the Cabo Verde islands and the actual practical difficulties in the same party trying to run two countries, with very different socio-economic realities, and planning a union between them, which created further divisions.
The process of a growing loss of communication between leaders and the (especially rural) masses is well described by Carlos Lopez in his book Guinea Bissau: from liberation struggle to independent statehood which was published in 1987. Early post-independence history is also covered in Antonio Tomas’ book O Fazedor de Utopias: uma biographia de Amilcar Cabral’, which has since been translated into English. Both make for fairly depressing reading. A different perspective, albeit one also illustrating growing problems, comes from a series of articles by Lars Rudebeck published in ROAPE no’s 41, 49 and 71. What is very interesting – and unusual – about these is that they document a series of visits to the same village by an external researcher over many years.
In the ways that national liberation movements and parties have degenerated across the continent, what are the lessons we need to draw about state power, imperialism, and the failure of national liberation in the Global South, and Africa in particular?
Well, the problem always encountered is that of economic progress. The choice is either to de-link from the global economy or to try and negotiate a better position within it. Delinking is very difficult. It carries many hidden costs and often attracts violent opposition from imperialist forces, be they states or financial institutions. Negotiation can generate some extra income for social programmes but does nothing to challenge unequal structural relationships. Zimbabwe, post land reform, Mozambique, immediately post-independence, and, at some stage, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia have all tried the former.[2] Zimbabwe, to start with, South Africa and Lula’s Brazil have tried the latter. None were that successful. I think that is because it is a very difficult problem.
A problem which is more in our hands to deal with is that of internal political relationships. As indicated by Mario de Andrade and Carlos Lopez, a growing post-liberation gap between the leaders and the masses seems a common phenomenon. How it happens varies according to the local political context. It can happen slowly over quite a period of time. For example, the internal democracy of Frelimo in Mozambique functioned quite well for at least a decade after independence. There can be many factors in play. Greed and ambition play their part but so also do the distractions of administration, of operating in a more technical environment, of having to pay attention to a mass of new external relationships. But also, there are the hidden social dynamics of moving from a period of all pervasive struggle, of 24/7 engagement, to whatever is possible in terms of a normal life.
I remember talking to Eritrean fighters, still in intense struggle, about the transition process to government which I had witnessed in Mozambique. People, even leaders, do not adapt at the same pace or in the same direction. Political and social dynamics change. If this is not openly recognised and discussed, new political tensions emerge. Claiming to be the authentic voice of a liberation movement whose achievements are in the distant past has less and less meaning and does not I think, nor should, cut much ice with the younger generation.
Linked to this are the politics of gender. All the liberation movements I have seen have paid at least lip service to the idea that liberation will be for everyone. In Eritrea and Guinea Bissau, forging new gender roles was an integral part of the struggle itself. However, nowhere has this been a serious and developing priority post liberation. This is obviously frustrating for women militants, but I believe it also has a damaging general effect on the possibility of maintaining progressive and inclusive social dynamics in the new phase of the struggles.
Can we usefully compare Cabral’s revolutionary theory, and his contribution to national liberation and the dynamics of social movements, with Frantz Fanon’s work, for example? Cabral was much more firmly rooted in Marxist debates, and writings.
I haven’t read much Fanon for a long time. Cabral, because of his role, gave more attention to the actual political dynamics of struggle, the purpose of theory, and, in his focus on the mode of production as the key dynamic of pre and post capitalist societies, made an important and necessary contribution to Marxist theory. I don’t think, though, that he was that bothered about how Marxist he was. For him, the most important element of theory was whether or not it helped the struggle he was engaged in. He was interested in and sought to learn from the experiences of other liberation movements such as the Vietnamese and the Cubans. He also needed to tend to his relationships with communist countries who, particularly when it came to arms, were vital allies of the PAIGC.
Where I think Fanon and Cabral’s work can be most usefully compared is in their deep reflection on the psychological experience of being colonised and what this meant for different groups within African societies. In this their views were quite closely aligned even though they seemed to arrive at them through different routes and with different emphasis. Both made important contributions to the class analysis of emerging independent nations, the local dynamics of neo-colonialism, and the implications of unresolved ontological questions for decolonial thought and action. This is discussed in detail by Dan Wood in his recent book Epistemic Decolonization.
In terms of Cabral’s work, his significance, and relevance, what do you think remains to be written, researched, and debated? What should activists and researchers be studying of Cabral’s writings, and politics?
Well, the first thing is for him to become much better known, particularly in the Anglophone world. Even those few who do refer to his work, such as Mamdani and Ndlovu Gatsheni, do not appear to have read his work in full.
As I wrote 30 years ago, the first step is to be aware of the historical record. What the PAIGC achieved in Guiné was just remarkable. We all need reminding that such victories are possible. We also need to understand why it was possible: the level of organisation, the clear communication with the fighters and the populations in the liberated areas, the attention to the role of women, to agriculture, to health, to education. What was actually done was sometimes rudimentary, but it demonstrated a commitment to address people’s needs, to make people believe that it was a freedom worth fighting for.
With regard to current debates, I believe Cabral, with Fanon, should be the starting point for work on epistemic justice and the decolonisation of knowledge. Cabral’s was an entirely un-academic approach. As with all theory, his interest was in how it could advance the struggle. With regard to knowledge, he was aware of and open to learning from the deep understanding that the rural masses had of the realities – natural and social – in which they lived. He could also be critical of what he regarded as misplaced and unhelpful traditions which had become detached from current realities. As a trained agronomist, he was proud and optimistic of what his acquired knowledge could do for the socio-economic development of his country. But he was very aware of the racist attitudes and the deep colonial ignorance which prevented modern science being effectively used to help local farmers in Guiné. Where this led him was not into a set of binaries, a talking shop of what knowledge was colonial or Eurocentric, but what was needed to make things go forward. Both in his professional area of expertise, as with political discussion, this would involve a process of respectful dialogue between the lived experiences of the rural masses and the new technical experts which the PAIGC was keen to train, training which, when done in country, would include involvement in village discussions and co-operative farming plots.
The vision was of a people who would regain the capacity to act on their reality, to make their own history. This capacity would be based on people’s understanding of their own realities, their own cultural achievements plus whatever they decided to adopt and adapt from – as well as contribute to – what Cabral described as universal knowledge. This vision seems to me to be almost identical to that proposed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his book Globalectics. That is one where every society on earth should build confidence in its own knowledge, taking from and contributing to a universal knowledge, which is universal in its value to and acceptance by the people who want to use it, not by the dictat of cultures still crippled by an unreformed coloniality.
Secondly, Cabral’s approach to knowledge had ecological foundations, which are of particular relevance in our current times. Being an agronomist, being a political leader in a country where nearly everyone was a farmer, gave Cabral an ecological understanding which was almost ontological in nature. For him, the natural environment was an integral and dynamic part of the realities in which socio-economic relations between people played out. Again, this was not an academic conclusion that he came to but was an understanding of life formed by seeing the effect on his family of serious droughts in Cabo Verde, followed by his experience of studying and talking to farmers in Portugal, Angola, and Guinea Bissau.
As Dan Wood and Filipa César have shown in more detail, this ecological understanding did inform his intellectual work, but it was also very evident in his conceptualization of people as part of their environment and in the actual language he used to talk about the struggle. His talks and his writing are full of references to planting, to harvest, to seeds, to the cycles of agricultural life, of things coming to fruition and to decay. For Cabral, nothing was static, everything was in a process of dialectical change, processes which could be consciously influenced by people acting together on the basis of well-grounded theory and continuous, open reflection. By definition, ‘Cabralism’ could not be a dogma. It remains, in my view, an essential approach to the challenges we face, intellectually, practically and in terms of the relationships, with people and with nature, necessary to go forward.
As a socialist interested in Africa in the early 1990s, I was intoxicated by the writing of the great historian Basil Davidson. You knew Basil personally, and he was intimately involved in the struggles in Portugal’s colonies, and admired Cabral deeply. Can you describe Davidson’s contribution to ‘rewriting’ African history, and his own engagement in Guinea-Bissau?
The key point about Basil is that he wasn’t an academic. He was an individual who took a keen and intelligent interest in the world around him and, following his experiences in the Second World War fighting fascism, wanted it, in ways which seemed quite loosely conceived, to be a fairer and more equitable place. Not being bound by discipline gave Basil licence to look more broadly and more openly than many academics at what was going on. In particular, his focus on people, on how events were affecting them and how they responded, their motivation, brought a liveliness to what he was describing. This was greatly enhanced by the quality of his writing. You may or may not agree with everything he wrote, but it was never less than clear and never dull.[3]
Like many of his generation, he found it hard to find a role for himself after the war. He became interested in Africa in part because of his anti-colonial politics but also because, in a stopover in Kano during the war, it had grabbed his imagination. He very quickly realised, from his own observation and from reading the output of the small number of historical and archaeological researchers working on Africa’s past, that received wisdom about African societies, both historical and present, was seriously wrong. This had it that Africa had no history, no culture, no philosophy, no experience of governance at a large scale, no technological innovation. Basil was keen to challenge this ignorance because of his interest in and respect for the actual historical record, but he also, explicitly, saw the necessity to do so for the process of building support for decolonial movements. If we recall that his first book on African history, Old Africa Rediscovered (1959), was greeted by Hugh Trevor Roper, professor of history at Oxford University, with the comment that there was no history of Africa except that of the European in Africa, we can see how trailblazing and important his work was.[4]
It also illustrates the point that for Basil, as for Cabral and, as it happens, also for some of the other founder members of ROAPE, there was always a purpose to his intellectual labour. Some supposed intellectual purists throw up their hands in horror at such an approach, claiming that it promotes bias and even propaganda. Cabral’s response is evident in his famous instruction: ‘Tell no lies, claim no easy victories’. As the example of African historiography shows very well, Basil would have seriously undermined his purpose if his historical writing had been shown to be false. Instead, nearly 75 years later, its core premises may still not be widely known, but they are accepted by all serious historians.
Cabral visited London in February 1960, which is when he and Basil first met. They remained in close contact, including visits to the liberated areas by Basil, up until Cabral’s assassination. I wish I had asked Basil more about their friendship and what they talked about. Recently, re-reading Old Africa Rediscovered, the sketch of the relationship of African knowledges to external ones in the introduction and the vision for the future in the final chapter, ’History Begins Anew’, I was struck by the massive confluence of Basil’s thoughts with those expressed by Cabral in his Return to the Source speeches. I have no idea if one was taking from the other or both arriving at the same point independently. What is clear is that there was a deep mutual admiration and solidarity between them. Basil was very active in building external political support for the PAIGC’s struggle, and those of FRELIMO and the MPLA, and was a leading member of the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea in the UK.
They would also have talked a lot about guerrilla war. These conversations would have covered tactics and strategy, of which Basil had had experience in Yugoslavia and Italy. They would, I am sure, have gone further. There is a section in his book Special Operations Europe, where Basil describes his time with Yugoslav partisans in contested areas far away from their ‘liberated areas’, including being hidden from German patrols by sympathetic farmworkers.
Cabral must have had similar moments as he prepared for the armed struggle. This shared experience, of utter dependence on strangers who you hoped were your comrades, must have provided an additional and almost unique bond between them. Both were intellectual giants. Both remained fully alert to the demands of practice, in all their manifestations.
On Thursday, 12 October, roape.net will be publishing Mike Powell’s primer on Cabral’s speeches and writings to give our readers a brief taste of the breadth of Cabral’s ideas.
Mike Powell is a long-standing member of ROAPE’s editorial collective and was involved with ROAPE first as a co-operative business advisor and then, from 1994–2010, as a member of the Editorial Working Group. He is currently a Contributing Editor.
Featured Photograph:Culture center in João Galego, Cape Verde (12 April, 2011).
Notes
[1] In the 1993 issue I put 70,000. I now think this referred to the total Portuguese military strength in Africa at some time during the wars. The correct maximum figure for Guinea Bissau was 35,000.
[2] I am referring here to the ideas proposed by the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray in 1985.
[3] A 1994 issue of Race and Class, celebrating Basil’s 80th birthday gives a better picture of the full range of activities Basil pursued to shape intellectual and political perspectives on both contemporary and historic processes in Africa – see A. Sivanandan’s editorial, 1994.
[4] BBC interview 1965, quoted by Kwame Anthony Appiah ‘Africa: the hidden history’ in the New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998.
