[Amilcar Cabral was assasinated 50 years ago. His influence
stretched far beyond the Portuguese colonies, profoundly influencing
the political struggle in South Africa, past and present.]
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AMILCAR CABRAL AND THE SOUTH AFRICANS  
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Phethani Madzivhandila
January 24, 2023
Africa is a Country
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_ Amilcar Cabral was assasinated 50 years ago. His influence
stretched far beyond the Portuguese colonies, profoundly influencing
the political struggle in South Africa, past and present. _

Amilcar Cabral,

 

In 2021, the South African government was provided with funding of
around €700 million (ZAR13 billion), from the German government to
decommission its coal-based power stations in order to transition to
green energy. True to their hypocritical nature, the Germans quickly
reverted back to coal-fired plants when Russian president Vladimir
Putin stopped supplying Russian gas to the rest of Europe. This
dynamic is terribly familiar to countries of the global south. The
Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, already said in 1971:
“Imperialism—as you know better than myself—is the result of the
gigantic concentration of financial capital in capitalist countries
through the creation of monopolies, and firstly of the monopolies of
capitalist enterprises.”

Cabral was assassinated, in January 1973, by fascist Portuguese just
months before the PAIGC (Guinea Bissau’s anticolonial movement)
succeeded in achieving Guinean independence. His influence at the time
reached beyond Portugal’s colonies in Africa (he had a hand in the
formation of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA,
and the Liberation Front of Mozambique also known as FRELIMO). He also
inspired other liberation movements which combined mass and armed
struggle in Southern Africa, especially in South Africa. There, the
Pan-Africanist Congress and African National Congress of South Africa
were contemporaries of the PAIGC and fashioned themselves in the same
image, though not with the same success. Cabral also influenced the
Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steve Biko.

At the time of Cabral’s murder, Yusuf Dadoo, a leading ANC
ideologue, wrote
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life lessons for the ANC and its allies. “Cabral saw the task of the
national liberation movements as not merely to usher in Black rule
replacing white faces with black ones; it was not only to raise a
different flag and sing a new anthem but to remove all forms of
exploitation from the country.” Dadoo added, “ Cabral was careful
to distinguish the color of men’s skins from exploitation and
repeatedly emphasized that the struggle was against Portuguese
colonialism and not against the Portuguese people.”

Biko, who emerged as a political leader around the time Cabral was
murdered, would himself die at the hands of apartheid police in 1977.
Drawing parallels between these two anti-colonial thinkers one cannot
help but notice how their insistence on using culture as a tool of
anti-colonial mobilization was a key component of their political
thinking. For Cabral it was vital that for people to free themselves
of foreign domination they must first understand their own culture and
that of the oppressor. Biko, in turn, argued that culture must be
defined in concrete terms. “We must relate the past to the present
and demonstrate the historical evolution of modern Africa. We must
reject the attempts by the authorities to project an arrested image of
our culture.”

These days, it is clear that the kind of cultural revolution desired
by Cabral and Biko is less straightforward and fraught with
appropriation. As the Angolan anthropologist Antonio Tomas puts it,
Cabral’s life and work illustrates the striking gap between
“revolutionary hopes and postcolonial realities.” In post-1994
South Africa the comprador bourgeoisie in the ANC have betrayed the
people’s sacrifices and aspirations for their own material benefit.
This present class of leaders plays the intermediary role between the
first world and the third world—they facilitate oppression on behalf
of their masters in the first world. At the same time, they are also
bound to co-opt revolutionary ideals in service of their own economic
advancement. South Africa’s energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, has
described the worldwide pressure to decarbonize as a colonial,
anti-fossil fuel agenda. It’s one thing to take aim at the
double-standards of global elites, but it is another thing—as
Mantashe has—to call opposition to land dispossession for
extractivism by rural communities “apartheid and colonialism of a
special type.”

As the academics Maurice Taonezvi Vambe and Abebe Zegeye summarize
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what Cabral sought through cultural renaissance was “first and
foremost a people’s renewal.” Unless culture sinks its roots into
the creative humus of people’s experience, the discourses of
Africa’s renaissances that are authored by Africa’s elite will
surely wilt.

This is a key postcolonial dilemma: how to cultivate a truly mass,
national culture. It was arguably #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall
that first challenged the post-apartheid cultural order by exploding
the myth that the new South Africa had brought equality and
opportunity. The ideology of rainbowism that founded this myth was
imposed from on high. But, as Cabral emphasized, “Culture is not a
superstructure, but is deeply rooted in the economic and social
reality of a people.”

The question, therefore, cannot be answered in the abstract, and has
to be grounded in the real struggle for emancipation waged by the
people. Franz Fanon, just like Cabral, would later predict that the
leaders of national liberation movements on assuming power would seek
to fill the shoes of colonial masters and oppress the rest of the
population. Still, Cabral believed that the post-independence role of
the petty-bourgeoisie leadership holds the key to the potential of
successful revolutionary socialism in the continent.

Any serious electoral politics from the African left must confront
this terrain. Much as the labor movement and social movements are the
bread and butter of successful left-wing political organizations, the
precarious middle classes on the continent are an important
constituency to target. It is this group that has the most reason to
be disgruntled with the vagaries of neoliberalism, having originally
been promised that the integration of Africa into global capitalism
would issue steady economic growth and furnish all with opportunity
for security and flourishing.

Yet it is precisely this that renders the petty bourgeoisie
contradictory: on the one hand, disillusioned with the promise of
individual success made by contemporary capitalism, and on the other,
allured by it. In Cabral’s words, it is “a vacillating class, with
one foot in the camp of the bourgeoisie and the other foot in the camp
of the proletariat.” The #FeesMustFall moment planted the seeds of
revolutionary consciousness across the burgeoning, professional
managerial class, but these were quickly snuffed by the pressures to
join the labor market and adopt individual strategies of pursuing
upward social mobility. Fees Must Fall activist Lufefe Sopazi, notes
that it was Cabral’s legacy and dedication to liberation that
inspired them to remember that the struggle for liberation was not
over and it was betrayed as the lives of the majority of the African
people in South Africa were not liberated.

Nonetheless, the task of a revitalized left in Africa is to appeal to
the middle class squeezed by neoliberalism. In Africa, the working
class lacks the sufficient numbers to constitute a formidable
political force. A counter-hegemonic coalition requires the vast ranks
of the unemployed and under-employed, as well as progressive wings of
the middle class. As junior partners of these broad-based coalitions,
enthusiastic youth can bolster movements with their energy, capacity,
and technical skills, as Cabral did in Guinea-Bissau.

For South Africa, 29 years after democracy, the question of
post-apartheid remains an illusion, reinforced and spurred by native
elements controlling political or state power. It remains an illusion
because the ruling class as predicted by Cabral in _Tell No Lies,
Claim No Easy Victories_
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whims and impulses of imperialists. This pseudo bourgeoisie, however,
strongly nationalist during the struggle for liberation, cannot
fulfill a historical function; “it cannot freely guide the
development of productive forces, and in short, cannot be a national
bourgeoisie.” Evidence in South Africa today points to the
inevitable destiny of another failed state, as we have witnessed in
the past few years the total collapse of state owned enterprises such
as PRASA (the passenger rail service), SAA (the national carrier) and
Eskom (the state power utility).

For Cabral, national liberation is the restoration of a people’s
historical personality through the eradication of imperialist
domination. In South Africa, this has not yet been realized. He argued
that only when the national productive forces are entirely liberated
from all forms of dominance can there be national liberty. National
liberation must acknowledge the right of the people to have their own
history because imperialism usurps it via violence.

Any liberation organization that ignores this is undoubtedly not
engaged in national liberation. That is the challenge for South Africa
now.

_Phethani Madzivhandila is a pan-Africanist historian and activist
based in Azania (South Africa)._

_Africa Is a Country is a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing
on and from the African left. It was founded by Sean Jacobs
[[link removed]] in 2009. Unless otherwise noted, all
the content on Africa Is a Country is published under a Creative
Commons [[link removed]] license.  Donate
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* Amilcar Cabral
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* national liberation
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* South Africa
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* Steve Biko
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* imperialism
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* Pan Africanism
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