Amílcar Cabral
Revolutionary Leader, Agronomist and Political Theorist · 1924–1973
Who is Amílcar Cabral?
Amílcar Lopes Cabral was born on 12 September 1924 in Bafatá, in what was then Portuguese Guinea, and raised partly in Cape Verde. He trained as an agronomist at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia in Lisbon, graduating in 1950, and his fieldwork surveying soil and crops across the colony gave him a firsthand view of the poverty imposed by Portuguese colonial rule. In 1956 he co-founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) with a small group of activists, including his half-brother Luís Cabral. After Portuguese police killed dozens of striking dockworkers in Bissau in 1959, Cabral shifted the movement toward armed struggle, and from 1963 he led a guerrilla campaign that gradually pushed Portuguese forces out of most of the countryside, while also building schools, clinics, and local government structures in the liberated zones. His writings on national liberation and culture went on to influence anti-colonial movements across Africa and beyond. He was assassinated in Conakry, Guinea, on 20 January 1973, months before Guinea-Bissau formally declared independence on 10 September 1974.
Sources: Britannica, "Amílcar Lopes Cabral" (biography) · BlackPast.org, "Amílcar Lopes Cabral (1924-1973)" · Amílcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts (Monthly Review Press, 1969)