The past decade has seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the life and work of the “founding fathers” of decolonization. In this literature, Lusophone African intellectuals and activists have been accorded limited attention, at least in the English language literature. The Angolan-born and South African-based anthropologist António Tomás now offers a valuable contribution in his nuanced and non-hagiographic account of the life and times of the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral.

Amílcar Cabral was born in Bafatá in what is now Guinea-Bissau in 1924.  He died at the hands of a group of his own Guinean PAIGC soldiers led by the disgruntled Inocêncio Cani, in neighbouring Guinea-Conakry in 1973. Having spent his formative years in Cape Verde, from where both his parents hailed, he was educated as an agronomist in Portugal under the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Cabral’s father, Juvenal, was arguably part of the intellectual elite of Cape Verde, but was expelled from the seminary of Sáo Nicolau after a brawl with a fellow Guinean student, and forced to take up a lowly position as a primary school teacher in Guinea-Bissau. His mother, Iva Pinhel Évora, having duly expected more from marriage to an educated man, had to work several jobs in order to stave off poverty after the couple’s return to Cape Verde. As Tomás correctly notes, Juvenal Cabral did in effect work for the colonial state, and was as such part of the Cape Verdean elite of “subaltern colonizers” who “made up large parts of the military units and occupied the majority of posts in the public administration in Guinea-Bissau.” Juvenal Cabral was also “a staunch defender of the colonization of Guinea by the Portuguese” and saw the appointment of António de Oliveira Salazar which followed in the wake of the military coup in Portugal in 1926 as “an act of divine intervention.” It is no doubt one of history’s manifold ironies that two of Juvenal’s sons, Amílcar and Luís Cabral (1931-2009), would later lead the movement to free Guinea and Cape Verde from colonial domination.