relatively high literacy rate in Cabo Verde (22 percent in 1950) provided Portugal with a reservoir of willing collaborators—a collaboration conditioned by the prevalent poverty and limited employment opportunities. With a seminary established in 1866, a secular high school opened in 1917 (the first in Portuguese Africa), and several primary schools, Cabo Verdeans were indeed the main beneficiaries of Portuguese colonial education. This factor largely accounted for their significant presence in the colonial administration of Portuguese Guinea—about 75 percent of the colonial officials before the beginning of the armed struggle. Such preponderance gave rise to their pseudo-status as “co-colonizers” or “proxy colonizers,” notwithstanding the fact that Cabo Verde was a colony and Cabo Verdeans a colonized people with a history of brutal exploitation and callous abandonment to recurrent droughts and famines. With the Cabo Verdeans arbitrarily classified as civilizados (civilized), the colonial authorities endeavored to ensure that “to Guiné go only those with literacy skills who are going to fill public and business appointments.”8 For poor Cabo Verdeans, the main attraction to Portuguese Guinea was the territory’s reliable agriculture and enhanced food security. As one Cabo Verdean writer and colonial official noted, the colony was the “blessed land of rice and nuts and palm oil, where hunger is unknown and there are no beggars.”9
Portuguese Guinea was (and remains) a multiethnic and multicultural country inhabited by Balantas and Biafadas, Brames and Bijagós, Fulas and Felupes, Mandinkas and Manjacos, Pepels, Nalus, Susus, and several other minor groups that, altogether, have more in common than the sum total of their differences. Desperate to establish the pax lusitana, the Portuguese exploited the differences of language and culture and played off one group against the other, constantly making a distinction between the Islamized “neo-Sudanese” Fulas and Mandinkas of the interior, the “builders of strong states,” and the “animist paleo-Sudanese” of the coastal region, the “more backward peoples.”10 Applying a racist anthropology, colonial officials-cum-social scientists considered the neo-Sudanese to be of Hamitic/Semitic racial origins, which supposedly made them superior to all the other groups regarded as paleo-Sudanese. This strategy of divide and conquer would constitute a formidable challenge facing Amílcar Cabral as he and his comrades embarked on mobilizing the people for the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial domination.
Juvenal Cabral first worked as a clerk at the Bolama city hall, followed by two other low-level clerical positions in the colony’s treasury department and the office of the secretary-general of the colonial government. In January 1913, he became a primary school teacher in Cacine, in the southern region of Tombali, where he taught half a dozen children in a one-room school. He also taught in Buba, Bambadinca, Bafatá, and Geba. Forming the background to his teaching trajectory were the brutal “pacification” campaigns waged by Captain Teixeira Pinto’s mercenary soldiers, led by Senegalese warlord Abdul Injai. Juvenal supported the war against the Pepels of Bissau in 1915 and regarded Captain Pinto as “a great Portuguese” whose “patriotic work” was for “the good of civilization.”11 Such sentiment outraged the members of the Liga Guineense (Guinean League), founded on 25 December 1910 as “an assembly of the natives of Guinea.” Reacting to the antiwar position of the Liga, the colonial authorities dissolved the emergent protonationalist organization in 1915.
The wanton brutality meted out to the Pepels of Biombo, one of the petty kingdoms on the island then known as Bissau, resulted in thousands of deaths and the capture of hundreds of fighters, including the ruler, N’Kanande Ká. Defiant in captivity, the king reportedly told Teixeira Pinto that he would never surrender, that as long as he was alive he would always fight to expel the Portuguese from his realm, and that “if he should die, and there in the other world he should meet whites, he would wage war on them.”12 Captain Pinto proudly reported that the Pepel king was promptly condemned to death, then “tied up, mutilated, his eyes plucked out, and buried alive.” Luiz Loff de Vasconcellos, the outraged defense lawyer of the victims of the Bissau war, pointed out that after the defeat of the Pepels “the real carnage started,” as “men, women, old people, children, and the crippled” were “mercilessly killed,” their dwellings sacked and burned and their livestock looted, resulting in their homeland being “in the greatest desolation and misery.”13 That was just nine years before Amílcar Cabral was born. It would take two more brutal pacification campaigns, in 1925 and 1936, to subjugate the last resisters, the people of the Bijagós Islands.
Thus, when Cabral was born, Portuguese Guinea was simultaneously undergoing a brutal war of conquest and the consolidation of colonial domination by a weak imperial power that itself was experiencing tumultuous political upheavals following a bloody revolution that abolished the monarchy in 1910 and established a liberal republic, which was overthrown sixteen years later. In 1932, when eight-year-old Amílcar moved to Cabo Verde, António de Oliveira Salazar became prime minister of Portugal. As the effective dictator of the established New State he would maintain a brutal, repressive regime in the African colonies until his incapacitation by a stroke thirty-six years later. Cabral would devote his life to breaking the stranglehold of this harsh colonial order on the lives of the millions of Africans it subjugated.
Meanwhile, in Bafatá, two years before his son Amílcar was born, Juvenal made a passionate plea to the visiting governor for the provision of more schools for the natives, who were “still wrapped up in the plain cloak of their primitive ignorance.”14 Juvenal was indeed an outspoken advocate of the expansion of education in the territory, pleading strongly in 1915 for “the light of education to be shed on this people so desirous of lights” and insisting that, “as is already proven, the gentio is not devoid of intelligence, needing on our part to know only how to encourage him to love education.”15 His son Amílcar would inherit such passion for education, but as a weapon for liberation, “to combat fear and ignorance, to stamp out little by little submissiveness before nature and natural forces.”16
When Amílcar was born, his father registered his first name as Hamilcar, to honor the great Carthaginian general whose son Hannibal was also a famous general. Bafatá was then a relatively new settlement, elevated to the status of a town in 1917, but would soon after become the second most important trading center (after Bissau) in the territory. Of the population of about 1,500 residents, half were Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, and numerous civilizados—mostly Cabo Verdeans. The local economy was dominated by the production of export crops such as peanuts, cotton, and rubber, which were exported to Portugal and France by Portuguese and French trading companies including the Union Manufacturing Company (CUF), Casa Gouveia, Barbosa e Comandita Limitada, and the French West Africa Company (CFAO).
Notwithstanding his strong emotional and spiritual attachment to Cabo Verde and Portugal, Juvenal nevertheless recognized Portuguese Guinea as “the land where the genealogical tree of my ancestors grew and flourished,” and declared that since his youth he had struggled for the “dignification of the black race to which I belong.”17 This firm identification with Portuguese Guinea and his ready recognition of his black African ancestry undoubtedly had an influence on his offspring, particularly Amílcar and his brother Luís Severino de Almeida Cabral (born in Bissau on 10 April 1931), who would later embrace their dualities of birthplace and ancestral home and subsequently adopt binationalism as a strategy for the liberation of their two countries.
In November 1932, Juvenal retired to Santiago, taking with him Amílcar and his twin sisters. Iva stayed in Bissau to recover the loss she suffered from a burglary, returning a year later to take custody of her children. Thus, Amílcar Cabral only spent about seven years in Portuguese Guinea before returning, for the second time, to Cabo Verde. Very little is known about his life during those tender years he lived in his terra natal. Neither he nor his father—whose autobiography, Memorias e reflexões (Memories and reflections), was written when Amílcar was a second-year agronomy student in Portugal—has left any written account of those early formative years.
Amílcar was conscious of the hard life his mother had, of the long hours she had to work to ensure that her four children did not go to bed hungry. The sacrifices,
