“Cabral’s encounter during his high school years with the Claridade literary movement — which aimed to define and affirm the specific creole identity of the people of Cabo Verde — motivated him to write poems and prose. While the poets and prose at the time focused on the existential crises generated by the recurring drama of drought, famine, poverty, insularity, and emigration, Cabral’s poems and short stories, as well as his critique of the emergent nativist literature, underscored the need to transcend hopelessness and escapism and engage in profound transformational change.
Cabral argued that the weaponization of culture was imperative because colonial domination entailed cultural oppression. National liberation, he concluded, “is necessarily an act of culture."
“Their active engagement in the clandestine anti-regime activities enabled some of them — like Cabral, Agostinho Neto and Mario de Andrade from Angola, and Marcelino dos Santos from Mozambique — to have access to literature provided by the Portuguese Communist Party.”
“As an agronomist, Cabral was well aware of the negative impact of colonialism on land and the environment. He studied and reported on environmental degradation and especially soil erosion resulting from intense cultivation of export commodities in Cabo Verde, Portuguese Guinea, and Angola — impacts that adversely affected the lives and livelihoods of the colonized populations.
The colonial economy of Portuguese Guinea was basically a peasant agrarian economy that produced commodities such as peanuts, rice, palm kernels, and rubber for export. The landmark agricultural census conducted by Cabral in 1953 showed that these export commodities were cultivated and gathered without the introduction of advanced technology, without any fundamental dislocation of traditional institutions, without significant expropriation of land, and without major population displacements.
Nevertheless, peasant livelihoods were disrupted by the obligation to pay colonial taxes in cash, which necessitated engagement in an export economy and put food security at risk. Although rice was (and remains) the most important staple crop, it was also a major export commodity. The export of rice caused shortages in some parts of the colony. Cabral underscored the importance of rice cultivation for the food security of the indigenous population, and cautioned about the production of peanuts that caused soil degradation and undermined traditional farming.”
“Cabral’s firm abhorrence of what he called “gratuitous violence” is well-documented. He strongly condemned the Portuguese massacres in São Tomé and Príncipe in February 1953, Mozambique in June 1955 and December 1972, in Portuguese Guinea in August 1959, and Angola in February and March 1961.
He favored dialogue, but the Portuguese were intransigent. The use of violence was a last-resort measure, and the violence used was selective to avoid or minimize collateral damages.”
”Is it correct to say that Cabral helped trigger the fall of the Estado Novo in Portugal?
Cabral’s revolutionary ideas and conduct of the armed liberation struggle influenced some of the Portuguese soldiers fighting against his army. The “movement of the captains” that later became the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was born in Bissau in August 1973 and was led by war-fatigued junior officers who admired Cabral and accepted the radical idea that Portuguese colonialism in Africa must end.
The MFA staged a coup d’état on April 25, 1974, which toppled the forty-eight-year-old Estado Novo dictatorship, restored liberal democracy to Portugal, and facilitated the dismantlement of the Portuguese empire in Africa.”
“However, during the first decade of independence, in its drive to consolidate sovereignty over the national economy, the PAIGC ruling party implemented an urban-biased development plan that reinforced rural-urban disparities. With a disincentivizing price system and poor transport infrastructure, agricultural production declined.
The resulting economic crisis compelled the ruling party to abandon Cabral’s strategy and adopt liberal economic reforms, including structural adjustment programs advised and largely funded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Efforts to restructure the Bissau-Guinean economy in favor of “free market economics” had little impact on the profound crisis of development, which was characterized by decaying physical and social infrastructure.”
“Cabral’s revolutionary theory was aimed at ending colonial domination, but he believed that this objective would only achieve “flag independence.” He made a distinction between the struggle for independence that ends in neocolonial dependency and national liberation struggle that entails mental decolonization and profound socioeconomic transformations that favorably impact the lives of people.”