Amílcar Cabral is Assassinated (52 Years On)

On 20 January 1973, a disgruntled former PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) rival Inocêncio Kani, together with another member of PAIGC, shot and killed Amílcar Cabral in Conakry, Guinea, while he was in a process of building a People’s Assembly. The Assembly was in preparation for the independence of Guinea-Bissau, which he began in 1972.

The Portuguese PIDE (International and State Defence Police) agents’ plan was to arrest Cabral, possibly to judge him summarily, later, but facing the peaceful resistance of Cabral, they immediately killed him.

After the assassination, his half-brother, Luís Cabral, became the leader of the Guinea-Bissau branch of the party and eventually became President of Guinea-Bissau. Less than a month after the assassination, the United States concluded that then-colonial power Portugal was not directly involved in his death. Even so, the US State Department’s Information and Investigation Services also concluded that “Lisbon’s complicity” in the assassination “cannot be ruled out”.

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, who was born on 12 September 1924, was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, Pan-Africanist, intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organiser, nationalist and diplomat. He was one of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial and anti-imperialist leaders. Also known by the nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence in Guinea-Bissau.

He was deeply influenced by Marxism, becoming an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national independence movements worldwide. From 1963 to his assassination in 1973, Cabral led the PAIGC’s guerrilla movement in Portuguese Guinea against the Portuguese government, which evolved into one of the most successful wars of independence in modern military and African history.

The goal of the conflict was to attain independence for both Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. Over the course of the conflict, as the movement captured territory from the Portuguese, Cabral became the de facto leader of a large portion of what became Guinea-Bissau. Cabral’s efforts in the guerrilla war against the Portuguese military were matched by his contributions to the literature of national liberation.

Cabral’s main contribution was his study of colonised identity and leadership in the context of national liberation, class consciousness, and Marxian theory. For Cabral, culture was key to national liberation. He articulated a process of “re-Africanisation,” by which the African elite, long beholden to the colonisers for their education and employment, would re-embrace indigenous African culture and reintegrate themselves into mass popular culture.

Only by doing so could Africa’s indigenous leaders re-create an independent identity and rally an advanced nationalist spirit in the peasantry, whose lives had largely been untouched by imperialism. Colonised people could then regain control over their lives, “re-enter history,” and re-tap their “national productive forces.” This movement he called “Returning to the Source.”

In preparation for the independence war, Cabral set up training camps in Ghana with the permission of Kwame Nkrumah. Cabral trained his lieutenants through various techniques, including mock conversations to provide them with effective communication skills to aid their efforts in mobilising Guinean traditional leaders to support the PAIGC. Cabral realised that the war effort could only be sustained if his troops could be fed and taught to live off the land, alongside the larger populace.

Being an agronomist, he trained his troops to teach local farmers better farming techniques. This was to ensure that they could increase productivity and be able to feed their own family and community, as well as the soldiers enlisted in the PAIGC’s military wing. When not fighting, PAIGC soldiers tilled and ploughed the fields alongside the local population.

Despite the pain that all the African revolutionary forces, and those of the world at large, felt on the assassination of Amilcar Cabral, Yusuf M. Dadoo, the Chairperson of the South African Communist Party (SACP), maintained that:

“However, the struggles ahead call for, on our part, ever stronger unity and organisation of the masses, ever greater vigilance against the manoeuvres and machinations of the enemy, ever more determination and will to sacrifice in our efforts to exterminate the forces of oppression and win final victory. By the death of Amilcar Cabral, Africa has lost one of her great revolutionary leaders. We, the fighting black people and all the revolutionaries of South Africa salute this indomitable fighter. We shall see to it that the cause – which is also our cause – to which Amilcar Cabral devoted all his energies and ultimately gave his life, will triumph.”

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!