“If it is true that a revolution can fail even though it is based on perfectly conceived theories – nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.” – Amilcar Cabral
At the very beginning of the 1960s when one African country after another acquired independence and many people began to think that prospects for consistent decolonisation were more favourable than ever before, Amilcar Cabral started to speak about a crisis that had gripped the African revolution.
At the Third Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference in Cairo in March 1961, he said, “It seems to us that this is not a crisis of growth, but chiefly, a crisis of consciousness. In many cases the practice of the liberation struggle and its future prospects have no theoretical basis and are also out of contact with reality to one degree or another. Local experience and the experience of other countries accumulated during the struggle for national independence, the consolidation of national unity and the building of foundations for progress have been or still are forgotten.”
According to Cabral, the successful development of the anti-imperialist struggle depended on a concrete knowledge of the actual state of affairs in every country and Africa as a whole, and also the experiences of other peoples and the formulation of science-based strategic principles.
In Amilcar Cabral’s opinion, the essence of the crisis of the African liberation movement was that in many cou
