Resistance and Decolonization (Reinventing Critical Theory) - Softcover

Cabral, Amilcar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178348375X ISBN 13: 9781783483754

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016

Synopsis

How can a people overthrow 500 years of colonial oppression? What can be done to decolonize mentalities, economic structures, and political institutions? In this book, which includes the first translation of the text 'Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance' as well as 'The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence,' the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral explores these and other questions. These texts demonstrate his frank and insightful directives to his comrades in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde's party for independence, as well as reflections on culture and combat written the year prior to his assassination by the Portuguese secret police.
As one of the most important and profound African revolutionary leaders in the 20th century, and justly compared in importance to Frantz Fanon, Cabral's thoughts and instructions as articulated here help us to rethink important issues concerning nationalism, culture, vanguardism, revolution, liberation, colonialism, race, and history. The volume also includes two introductory essays: the first introduces Cabral's work within the context of Africana critical theory, and the second situates these texts in their historical-political context and analyzes their relevance for contemporary anti-imperialism.

About this title

About the Author

Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) was a writer, intellectual and one of Africa's foremost anticolonial leaders. He led the nationalist movement for Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing revolution for independence in Guinea Bissau. He was assassinated by the Portuguese secret police in January 1973.

Dan Wood, the editor and translator, teaches philosophy at Dillard University and works as a patient care technician at Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans.

Reiland Rabaka is Professor of African, African American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Resistance and Decolonization

By Amílcar Cabral, Dan Wood

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 1977 Amílcar Cabral and Michel Vale
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-375-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Part I: Amílcar Cabral and Critical Theory, 1, 
1 The Weapon of Critical Theory: Amílcar Cabral, Cabralism, and Africana Critical Theory Reiland Rabaka, 3, 
2 Imbrications of Coloniality: An Introduction to Cabralist Critical Theory in Relation to Contemporary Struggles Dan Wood, 43, 
Translator's Note, 71, 
Part II: Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance, 73, 
3 Political Resistance, 75, 
4 Economic Resistance, 91, 
5 Cultural Resistance, 115, 
6 Armed Resistance, 139, 
Part III: Cultural and Political Struggle, 157, 
7 The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence, 159, 
Bibliography, 181, 
Index, 195, 

CHAPTER 1

The Weapon of Critical Theory

Amílcar Cabral, Cabralism, and Africana Critical Theory

Reiland Rabaka

The Cape Verdean and Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral connects with and contributes to the Africana tradition of critical theory in several poignant, provocative, and extremely profound ways. First, it should be mentioned that "[a]lthough he did not start out or train as a philosopher," Cabral, according to the Nigerian philosopher Olufemi Taiwo (1999), "bequeathed to us a body of writings containing his reflections on such issues as the nature and course of social transformation, human nature, history, violence, oppression and liberation" (6). Second, and as eloquently argued by the Eritrean philosopher Tsenay Serequeberhan (1991), Cabral's ideas led to action (i.e., actual cultural, historical, social, and political transformation, and ultimately revolutionary decolonization, revolutionary re-Africanization, and national liberation) and, therefore, "represents the zenith" of twentieth-century Africana revolutionary theory and praxis (20). Third, and finally, Cabral's writings and reflections provide us with a series of unique contributions to radical politics and critical social theory, which — à la W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, George Padmore, Jean Price-Mars, Léon-Gontran Damas, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Louise Thompson Patterson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, the Black Panther Party, and the Combahee River Collective, among others — seeks to simultaneously critique the incessantly overlapping, interlocking, and intersecting nature of racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism in contemporary society.

Cabral's biography has been ably documented by Mario de Andrade (1980), Patrick Chabal (2003), Ronald Chilcote (1991), Mustafah Dhada (1993), Oleg Ignatiev (1975a, 1990), and Jock McCulloch (1983) and, consequently, need not be rehearsed in its entirety here. That being said, here at the outset of Resistance and Decolonization what I am specifically interested in are those aspects of his life and legacy that impacted and influenced his contributions to the Africana tradition of critical theory. As Patrick Chabal observed in his pioneering Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War (2003), Cabral's revolutionary theory and praxis are virtually incomprehensible without critically engaging his gradual and often extremely interesting growth from nonviolent student militant to internationally acclaimed revolutionary leader. Hence, here I have been tasked with introducing Cabral and his key contributions to the Africana tradition of critical theory, where in the chapter to follow Dan Wood will contextualize and critically engage the two works, Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance and "The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence," which constitute the conceptual core and raison d'être of Resistance and Decolonization.

CABRAL — HIS BACKGROUND AND HUMBLE BEGINNINGS: THE ETHICAL AND INTELLECTUAL FORMATION OF A FUTURE REVOLUTIONARY

Cabral was born to Cape Verdean parents in Bafata, Guinea-Bissau, on 12 September 1924. His parents exerted an enormous influence on him. His father, Juvenal Antonio da Costa Cabral, was born on São Tiago Island, Cape Verde. Cabral senior's family was primarily made up of landowners and, therefore, considered "well-to-do" by local socioeconomic standards. As a result, he was afforded a "proper education," as with the other members of his family (Chabal 2003, 29). Juvenal Cabral had early ambitions to become a priest and, as a consequence, was sent to seminary in Portugal following a glowing stint in secondary school.

It is not clear whether Juvenal's studies in Portugal awakened his sense of anticolonialism and Africanité, or whether it was the racial climate and rigid religious curriculum of seminary. However, what is certain is that he became a "politically conscious man who did not hesitate to speak his mind" (30). For instance, on one occasion he sent a letter to the Minister of Colonies deploring what he understood to be the complete absence of government assistance in alleviating the catastrophic effects of drought, going so far as to suggest several remedies. Juvenal's environmental interests and critique of environmental racism should be noted, as they seem to have been handed down to his precocious son Amílcar, who, as Wood's subsequent chapter strongly stresses, was "[d]eeply moved by Cape Verdean droughts and the massive toll taken on lumpenproletarianized and racialized lives." In fact, Wood ultimately argues that Cabral was "always quick to point out that the devastation caused by these droughts was not merely 'natural' in any simplistic sense, but largely a result of colonial policy." On another occasion, Juvenal wrote an article expressing his disdain with the colonial government after a house collapsed in an overcrowded part of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. He went further to criticize the inhuman conditions in which Cape Verdeans had to live because they were forced to flee the countryside and come to the already overcrowded city in search of food, shelter, and work.

Chabal persuasively argued that it was Amílcar Cabral's father who gave him his first lessons in political education, a point further corroborated by Mustafah Dhada (1993, 139–140). Juvenal Cabral also instilled in Amílcar a profound sense of the shared heritage and struggle of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. He wrote poetry, polemics, and expressed an uncommon and long-lasting interest in the agricultural problems of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Juvenal, ultimately becoming a renowned and well-respected schoolteacher, possessed a deep "sense of intellectual curiosity and rigor, a respect for academic pursuits and for the written word," which he consistently stressed to Amílcar and his siblings (Chabal 2003, 30). While it cannot be said that Juvenal Cabral was a revolutionary nationalist by any measure, it does seem clear that he may have planted, however nascent, the seeds of nationalism in the fertile soil of his young son's heart and mind.

As it was with his father, Cabral's mother, Iva Pinhal Evora, was born on São Tiago Island, Cape Verde. However, unlike his father, she was born into a poor family — a family that strongly stressed hard work and piety. If Cabral's father bequeathed to him political education, a love of poetry, and an interest in agriculture, then it can be argued that his mother provided him with a very special sense of self-determination, discipline, purpose, personal ethics, and an unshakeable iron will. For a time, Mrs. Cabral made a good living and was an entrepreneur, the proprietor of a shop and a small pensão (boardinghouse).

When Iva and Juvenal Cabral separated in 1929, things took a turn for the worse financially. She lost her business and worked as a seam-stress and laborer in a fish-canning factory to support her family. Even still, her earnings were "barely sufficient to feed the family and there were days when they went without food." Chabal (2003) poignantly observed that although "Amílcar's family did not starve like so many Cape Verdeans, they were very poor" (31). He went on to importantly emphasize, "Cabral never forgot the difficulties of his early years and later spoke of poverty as one of the reasons which had led him to revolt against Portuguese colonialism" (31). The hardships he witnessed his mother endure and overcome while caring for him and his siblings undoubtedly influenced Cabral's views on gender justice and, most especially, women as cultural workers and bona fide revolutionary comrades in the national liberation struggle.

CABRAL AND THE CABO VERDIANIDADE MOVIMENTO: FROM INNOCUOUS ANTICOLONIAL STUDENT ACTIVISM TO REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST AFRICAN NATIONALISM

In discussing Cabral's early life, and especially the influence of his parents on the evolution of his thought, it is also important to point out that he was homeschooled until the age of twelve. Although he did not enter primary school until he was twelve, Cabral is reported to have "thrived on education and from the very beginning he was clearly an excellent student." One of his former primary school classmates, Manuel Lehman d'Almeida, recalled that Cabral was "by far the best student and that he passed his secondary school entrance exam with distinction" (Chabal 2003, 31). His school records support d'Almeida's claims and lucidly illustrate that Cabral completed his studies at the liceu by the age of twenty, which would mean that he finished four years of primary school and seven years of secondary school in an astonishing eight years! During the last couple of years of his studies at the liceu, Cabral became aware of the Cape Verdean literary renaissance and cultural movement commonly known as the Cabo Verdianidade Movimento (the Cape Verdeanness Movement), which was primarily an outgrowth of the journal Claridade (Clarity). In many senses, the Cabo Verdianidade Movimento was the Cape Verdean and Luso-phone version of the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude Movement, and Negrismo Movement, each of which significantly influenced the Cabo Verdianidade writers.

Cabo Verdianidade was unique in that its writers, for the most part, broke with Eurocentric models and themes and, in a move that must be understood to be extremely bold for the time, turned their attention to Cape Verdean subjects, particularly ordinary people's life-worlds and life struggles: from drought to hunger, from migration to mild critiques of colonial miseducation, and from starvation to other forms of deprivation. Even so, more similar to the Negritude Movement than the Harlem Renaissance, Cabo Verdianidade was limited by its intentional aim at readers well-versed in colonial history and culture, and, to make matters worse, it was essentially escapist, expressing an intense cultural alienation that did not in any way promote anticolonial consciousness or decolonization, nonviolent or otherwise. Much like the early issues of Negrismo's Atuei or Negritude's Présence Africaine, then, Cabo Verdianidade's Claridade explored ethnic, racial, and cultural politics in a vacuum, as opposed to connecting the intersections and political economy of ethnicity, race, racism, and colonialism with the machinations of modern capitalism and class struggle.

The first generation of Cabo Verdianidade writers established their journal, Claridade, in the 1930s, but by the 1940s, a new cohort of Cape Verdean writers founded the journal Certeza. The Certeza writers introduced two elements into Cape Verdean consciousness that fore-shadowed the future emphasis on national liberation, national culture, and national identity. The first element involved their unapologetic calling into question of Portuguese colonialism in Cape Verde and an unswerving emphasis on the necessity for political action, although not necessarily decolonization as later conceived by Cabral and his revolutionary nationalist comrades. For the Certeza writers, Marxism, rather than neo-realism, provided their theoretical framework and political orientation. The second element, connected in several ways to the first, revolved around this group's stress on returning Cape Verdeans to the source of their history, culture, and struggle: Africa.

As we have witnessed with the writers of the Cabo Verdianidade Movimento, at this time most Cape Verdeans understood themselves to be Europeans (Portuguese in particular) and the Cape Verdean archipelago to be Portugal's most prized overseas islands (à la Honório Barreto, whom Cabral and Wood discuss in greater detail in the chapters to follow). The Certeza writers went beyond the Claridade collective by unequivocally emphasizing their African ancestry and long-standing connections with continental African history, culture, and struggle (and Guinea-Bissua's history, culture, and struggle, in particular). Ironically, Cabral had completed his studies and had left Cape Verde by the time this new movement was underway. Nevertheless, he eagerly kept track of it from abroad and noted that it had the potential to lead to anticolonial consciousness and an openness to nationalist (if not binationalist) ideas.

In the autumn of 1945, at the age of twenty-one, Cabral trekked to Portugal to pursue a five-year course of study at the Instituto de Agronomia da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (the Agronomy Institute at the Technical University of Lisbon). He attended university on a scholarship provided by the Cape Verdean branch of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI) (the House of Students from the Empire) a colonial government–financed social development center for students from Portugal's colonies. His scholarship remitted his tuition and supplied him with a very modest stipend of 500 escudos, which was later increased to 750 escudos. His meager stipend, of course, was not enough to live on, so Cabral tutored and took various odd jobs to supplement his income, all the while consistently maintaining the highest marks of his cohorts. Even in light of all of this, Cabral found the time to participate in university affairs, metropolitan politics, and sundry extracurricular activities, most notably: the Radio Clube de Cabo Verde (the Radio Club of Cape Verde), Comissão Nacional para Defensa do Paz (CNDP) (the National Commission for the Defense of Peace), Lisbon's Maritime Center and Africa House, the Center for African Studies (CAS), Movimento Anti-Colonialista (MAC) (the Anti-Colonial Movement), and Comité de Liberação dos Territórios Africanos Sob o Domíno Português (CLTASDP) (the Committee for the Liberation of Territories Under Portuguese Domination), among others.

Indeed, Cabral was a multidimensional student activist, although an extremely cautious one. For instance, Mustafah Dhada (1993) contended that Cabral may have "stayed clear of subversive politics, largely for cautionary reasons — perhaps for fear of losing his scholarship or being hounded by the Portuguese secret police, Policía Interncional pela Defensa do Estado (PIDE)" (the International Police for the Defense of the State), the very same secret police who would, two decades after he earned his degree in agricultural engineering, mercilessly orchestrate Cabral's assassination (141). Perhaps Cabral sensed his imminent future fate, but even still, harassed and hounded by the Portuguese secret police, he managed to graduate at the top of his class on 27 March 1952. This was a real feat, especially considering the fact that he was the only student of African origin in his cohort. Out of the 220 students who began the rigorous five-year course of study with Cabral, only 22 were awarded degrees as agronomists or, rather, agricultural engineers.

One of the students with whom Cabral developed a lasting rapport was Maria Helena Rodrigues, a silviculturist (i.e., a tree specialist) who was born in Chaves, northern Portugal. One of only twenty women admitted in Cabral's initial cohort of 220 students, Rodrigues became Cabral's study partner and, after they earned their degrees, his wife. With his studies completed and a new wife by his side, Cabral applied for a position in the Portuguese civil service and was "ranked as the best candidate," according to Chabal (2003), but "was denied the post because he was black" (39). This insult served as yet another reminder that Portuguese colonialism was inextricable from Portuguese racism. Cabral then did what so many colonial subjects are forced to do when their dreams of escaping the hardships of their colonized homelands have been dashed (à la the triumvirate of the Negritude Movement: Damas, Césaire, and Senghor): he returned to his native land convinced that he could make a special contribution to its development. In a word, he was doggedly determined to decolonize Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

Cabral gained employment as a "grade two agronomist" with the Provincial Department of Agricultural and Forestry Services of Guinea at the Estação Agrária Experimental de Pessubé, a research complex not far from Bissau. He was second in command and, from all the reports, seems to have thrown himself into a Lisbon-based Ministry for Overseas Territories–commissioned agricultural census of Guinea-Bissau. It was through this massive undertaking that Cabral became intimately familiar with the people and land in whose interest he would soon wage a protracted people's war for national liberation. He began the study in late 1953, traveling more than 60,000 kilometers and collecting data from approximately 2,248 peasants. By December 1954, he presented his and his team's findings to the colonial authorities. The report was subsequently published in 1956 as a 200-page document. It featured statistics and analysis pertaining to Guinea-Bissau's agricultural demography, which the colonial government promised the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization it would use to better grapple with droughts and famine, among the other issues, besetting Guinea-Bissau.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Resistance and Decolonization by Amílcar Cabral, Dan Wood. Copyright © 1977 Amílcar Cabral and Michel Vale. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178348375X
• ISBN 13: 9781783483754
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204