Amilcar Cabral on National Liberation and Culture

The voice of Amilcar Cabral, poet and revolutionary, continues to speak to revolutionaries around the world and especially in Africa. He was a leader of the national liberation movement of Guinea Bissau until assassinated by the Portuguese colonial power in 1973 on the eve of national independence. He was a prolific writer, but only one of his speeches is presently available on the Internet. This speech, National Liberation and Culture, delivered at Syracuse University in the United States in 1970, provides us an insight into the importance of national culture in the liberation struggle.

Cabral, like Frantz Fanon before him, expands Lenin's classic understanding of imperialism by stressing its cultural component: "History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned ... For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order fully to contest foreign domination."

For both revolutionaries and imperialists, a full understanding of the role of national culture is essential for success: "The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies. Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination--as well as the failure of some international liberation movements."

National culture is complex, as Cabral explains in the case of Africa: "In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly. It is of prime importance for the liberation movement to take these facts into consideration."

Cabral concludes that the struggle for a complex and all-inclusive national culture must be an integral part of the struggle for national liberation: "In order for culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to preserve the positive cultural values of every well defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values in the service of the struggle, giving it a new dimension--the national dimension. Confronted with such a necessity, the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and development of these values within a national framework."

Understanding, tolerance and solidarity, including respect and support for national culture is an important aspect of the culture of peace. It is not only a matter of international relations, but also the relations among peoples within a country. Cabral's analysis is important for the unity and strength of revolutionary struggle.

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