The Politics of Biography in Africa: Borders, Margins and Alternative Histories of Power by Anais Angelo

Author:Anais Angelo [Angelo, Anais]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367544249
Google: E0tVzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57422985
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Cabral’s anti-colonial consciousness: Neither premature nor linear

The commemorative discourse first attributed Cabral’s anti-colonial stance to the socioeconomic problems of Cabo Verde during the colonial period: “The confrontation, in his youth, with the spectacle of famine on the islands of Cabo Verde blossomed in him an awareness and revolt, and an attitude of rupture with the politics of assimilation.”31 Cabral was certainly aware of the famine crises that took place in Cabo Verde throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In May 1949, he published a paper on an accident that had happened a few months earlier, in February, in Praia city, the colony’s capital: a wall of the Assistance Canteen collapsed onto people waiting for food aid, thus causing the death of hundreds of women, men, and children.32 Cabral criticized the fact that Portuguese newspapers had barely reported on this event. He believed that “the matter surely deserved a front page” and lamented: “Shame that in the metropole the Press did not debate, nor even comment on the event.” Had the matter been amply highlighted, “it could have enlightened many”: the news would have revealed “the just measure of its significance and would show” to the people in the metropole “that the Cabo Verdean problem was no longer merely local, but national.”33

Though the famines which took place in the archipelago during the 1930s and 1940s certainly left a mark on the worldview of the young Amílcar Cabral, the statement that “the spectacle of famine in the islands” aroused his consciousness and sense of revolt against colonial politics is rather dubious. According to the biographer Julião Sousa, the sentiment and the revelations in Cabral’s writing during that period of youth and adolescence (between 1930 and 1950) did not contemplate any such rupture with the colonial regime, nor did they envisage the end of colonial politics. Even if the tragedy of famine and misery generated in him feelings of “revolt,” this revolt did not include the desire or the plan to see the colonial regime abolished.34 Another biographer, Patrick Chabal, advances a similar argument; Cabral’s writings from that period do not foreshadow any type of anti-colonial revolt, nor political nationalism. It was in the beginning of the 1950s (more precisely between 1951 and 1953) that Cabral started to produce texts that reveal a certain political and social conscience influenced to some extent by his agronomic studies (with texts dealing with land issues, for example).35

Before then, it is not possible to foresee any anti-colonial attitude because, according to his own writings, Cabral desired and wanted to see a more engaged action on the part of the Portuguese colonial authorities in the resolution of the social and economic problems of the archipelago and the Portuguese empire at large. Similarly, across the French colonies in Africa at this point of the late 1940s, African political discourse focused on urging social and economic development of the colony through political reform rather than demanding the overthrow of imperial rule.36 Thus, prior to his public and openly anti-colonial stance, which

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