Commodities

Abstract

Amílcar Lopes Cabral was an African intellectual revolutionary trained in Portuguese Marxism, who made a significant contribution to the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde islands.Amílcar Lopes Cabral was an African intellectual revolutionary trained in Portuguese Marxism, who made a significant contribution to the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde islands. In his monumental Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert J.C. Young says: 'From the perspective of African Socialism . . . the greatest figure of those who were forced to resort to violence in order to achieve liberation was from neither a Francophone nor an Anglophone, but a Lusophone culture: Amilcar Cabral' (2003: 283). Born in Bafat, Guinea Bissau on 12 September 1924, Cabral attained his elementary education in Infante Don Henrique primary school in the town of Mindelo, Cape Verde. His father, Juvenal Cabral, was a mulatto from the Cape Verde islands. The people of Cape Verde archipelago, unlike those of Guinea Bissau, were mulattos whom the Portuguese assimilated with their hegemonic cultural practices.Growing up under Portuguese colonialism, Cabral experienced at first hand the oppression of the common masses of Cape Verde. The colonial regime of Portugal's fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar created a virtual hell for the working classes of Cape Verde. This was the time when the seeds of revolution started germinating in young Cabral. He assumed the name Labrac, and began his political activities of resistance during his school days. Cabral graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1950 as a colonial Agronomy engineer. During university days, he founded revolutionary student movements and proposed active resistance to the ruling dictatorship of Portugal. In Lisbon he met several African students from Mozambique and Angola and inculcated the ideas of Third-World nationalism in them.