Amilcar Cabral - search results

ROAPE’s Mike Powell introduces a selection of Amílcar Cabral’s writings, speeches, and interviews. Cabral was one of the most important revolutionaries of the 20th century who led and founded a movement which not only led to the liberation of Guinea Bissau but prepared the ground for a revolution in the colonial power itself. This selection of Cabral’s speeches and interviews, and other writings, is provided in the hope that some readers will find in them inspiration and hope for the revolutionary struggles to come.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral's  murder in 1973, over the next four weeks, ROAPE will be re-posting a collection of essays paying tribute to Cabral. The collection was first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, and reflects on the extraordinary achievements of Cabral and his organisation PAIGC (the Partido Africano de Indendencia de Guine e Cabo Verde).

In ROAPE's latest tribute to Amílcar Cabral, Chinedu Chukwudinma interviews António Tomás, who wrote Cabral’s biography in the 21st century. Tomás speaks about Cabral’s political development, as well as his abilities as a teacher, revolutionary diplomat and leader. But he also discusses his insecurities, shortcomings and the myths surrounding national liberation in Guinea-Bissau.

In the second of three essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Shubi Ishemo celebrates Cabral’s original contributions to revolutionary theory and practice. He argues that Cabral importance as a thinker is found in his creative application of Marx’s method to understand the local and international economic, social, and cultural realities of imperialism and fight that system. His ingenious approach remains relevant in the neo-liberal era.  

Ezra Otieno reflects on a recent meeting in Nairobi celebrating the lives of important revolutionaries and activists. On 29 January at the Kenya National Theatre, the politics, theories and lessons of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Rosa Luxemburg, and Titina Silla were remembered.

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.

In the final essay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Basil Davidson provides a personal portrait. Davidson’s piece contains fascinating detail and insight on Cabral’s principles of organising, as well as how Cabral and his comrades started their successful anti-colonial struggle in the early 1950s, all of which retains its relevance in the context of ongoing struggle and revolt across the continent today.

In the first of three essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s  murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Lars Rudebeck celebrates Cabral’s extraordinary writing, speeches and interviews. The piece includes reflections on personal conversations Rudebeck held with Cabral at various points. While celebratory, Rudebeck also perceives in the writings and politics of Cabral inadequate attention to the post-colonial situation and the question of how to democratise power over the economy and transform the relations of production.

One hundred years since the birth of the Mozambican revolutionary-intellectual Aquino de Bragança on 6 April 1924, his friend and comrade, Colin Darch, writes about this “man of anguish” – constantly battling to understand what it meant to be a Marxist in the twentieth century. Darch writes how Aquino spent his adult life committed to the struggle for the liberation of Mozambique and for the rest of southern Africa. In 1986 he died in the plane disaster alongside President Samora Machel.

Pascal Bianchini interviews Ahmed Salem El Moctar, also known as Cheddad, who was a leader of the Mauritanian student movement in the early 1970s, as well as an underground activist with the Kadihines movement. Cheddad recounts his activism in Mauritania during the late 1960s and 1970s, providing insight into the period's school movements, strikes, and the fight against neocolonialism. He offers insight into the complexity of Mauritanian post-independence politics, the significance of the Kadihine movement, and the National Democratic Movement.