Voodoo Commies of Guinea-Bissau

 

Amílcar Cabral 

As leader of the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral sought to unite the indigenous people of Guinea-Bissau and the more educated inhabitants of the Cape Verde islands in a joint struggle to bring an end to Portuguese colonialism in West Africa. In practice, Cape Verdeans (such as Cabral himself) furnished the PAIGC’s intellectuals and party leadership, while Guineans bore the brunt of the guerrilla warfare waged on the mainland – a differentiation that worsened the already-existing tension between the two populations, culminating in Cabral’s assassination by Guinean PAIGC militants in 1973. Longstanding ethnic resentments, moreover, were not the only limitations with which Cabral had to contend in attempting to forge a modern and disciplined militant movement.

Cabral’s biographer António Tomás writes that, “more than Cabral wanted to admit, China served as the template for the military uprising in Guinea”:

Cabral was certainly lectured on the Chinese experience when he visited the country for the first time in 1960, and, more importantly, some of the first groups of Guinean soldiers were trained at the Military Academy of Beijing. As such, Cabral’s military strategy was saturated with Maoism.

Cabral may also have absorbed the Chinese experience which had seeped into many other guerrilla insurrections. In 1970, in answer to a question on the strategy of his movement in an interview for the quarterly magazine Tricontinental, he said that there was not much to invent with military uprisings and that it was enough to learn from the examples of all the peoples who had previously risen up against their oppressors, such as the Chinese, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and the Algerians. All these movements, to a greater or lesser degree, had reproduced the principles laid out by Mao. [1]

In attempting to implement Maoist initiatives in Guinea’s “liberated zones”, however, Cabral came up against the nature of the men in the field:

Being a scholar of agriculture, Cabral tried to make improvements to agricultural production in the liberated zones, many of which he had promoted during his time working for the colonial government. He encouraged the peasants in the south of the country to increase the size of their cultivated areas, but the results were not encouraging. With the FARP [i.e., People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces] eating up manpower that would usually be focused on agriculture, Cabral instructed his men, in Maoist style, to help the peasants work the fields whenever possible. However, most refused to comply with the instructions of their leader. [2]

Guinea-Bissau war theaters

Most of Cabral’s Guineans were illiterates [3], and many persisted in tribal allegiances or sought to carve out personal fiefdoms, uninterested and untroubled by their leader’s ideological rigor:

Since the start of the confrontations Cabral began receiving reports that militants sent to fight in certain zones had become warlords. They refused to accept orders or comply with instructions from the party, instead torturing or murdering anyone who challenged them.

Given the circumstances, it was understandable that a number of military men had committed such grave errors. However, what Cabral and other party leaders did not expect was that the military would not show any remorse over their own failures. In fact, not only were they proud of them, but they were even trying to attract their compatriots’ esteem and admiration. Many of them came to the Congress [of Cassacá in 1964] accompanied by their griots [i.e., minstrel-storytellers], their harems of adolescents and their bodyguards. Instead of representing party authority in their zones, these rogue military men had […] become tribal chiefs. [4]

Consequently, Cabral was moved to limit the power of the military wing of the PAIGC and attempted to put checks in place through the establishment of legal frameworks for popular redress. Some of the would-be warlords were tried and executed to make examples of them [5].

PAIGC militants survey the crash site of a downed Portuguese aircraft

Cabral, who “strongly believed that war constituted a powerful means to combat ‘tribal mentality’, since fighters, sooner or later, would have to confront belief and reason”, would also be disappointed by the persistence of superstitions among the Guineans:

Before the beginning of the war, there were very few fighters who did not fear the ira – supernatural beings that were believed to inhabit the forests. Few would enter into a forest at night; even fewer would not kill a relative if they knew from a witchdoctor that the latter were the cause for their misfortunes. Initially, Cabral accepted these practices. Quite often he gave money to his men in order to buy mezinhos – amulets to hang on the waist, the inside of which were lined with pieces of cloth with Quranic surahs on them, to bring luck, or, as many believed, to make them invulnerable to the enemy’s fire. Cabral expected these beliefs to become obsolete after the beginning of the war: the fighters would learn from their own experiences, seeing other people dying, and come to know that a trench was more valuable than a mezinho in a firefight; or they could be persuaded of the nonexistence of iras if they needed to find shelter in a forest.

However, these practices did not vanish with the beginning of the war. Some of them flourished or were adapted to the new circumstances. [6]

Cabral sought to combat the people’s ignorance and generally poor standard of life through the establishment of modern healthcare and revolutionary schooling in the “liberated zones”. “All of this infrastructure – education, health, and the judicial system – was ultimately the means by which the party intended to put Guinea on the path of progress and how the party negated, or downplayed, local traditions and forms of ethnic knowledge,” Tomás writes:

In a telling description in his memoirs, [Amílcar Cabral’s half-brother and future leader of Guinea-Bissau] Luís Cabral discussed the boundaries that the party had established for itself between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, superstition and science. During a public discussion with the elders, the homens grandes, of Morés, as he tried to convince them to allow their children – especially their daughters – to go to school, Amílcar Cabral did the following: in the middle of his argument, like a lawyer in a courtroom, he flicked his cigarette lighter, brought the flame close to one of the old men and asked him if he could explain the phenomenon. Faced with the inability of the men, whose education was limited to the “Quran of the tabanka” [i.e., local religious custom], to do so, Cabral attempted to demonstrate the importance of education to explain such phenomena. It was against what he called “ancestral ignorance” that Cabral tried to build the new Guinea. [7]

Portugal would relinquish its claim on Guinea-Bissau following the Carnation Revolution of 1974, after which the new African state – like many others on the decolonized continent – would experience economic deterioration, coups, and civil war, attaining a reputation as a narco-state in the twenty-first century. Cabral’s efforts did, however, lay the groundwork for a sovereignty and a modernization of a sort, with more than half of the country’s population now able to read, for example.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Tomás, António. Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021, p. 110.

[2] Ibid., p. 144.

[3] Ibid., p. 139.

[4] Ibid., p. 124.

[5] Ibid., pp. 124-125.

[6] Ibid., pp. 122-123.

[7] Ibid., p. 148.