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
