In the Twilight of Revolution

The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral

Jock McCulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1983. Amilcar Cabral was one of Africa's leading revolutionary figures. Universally recognised as the founding father at the independent state of Guiné-Bissau, he was also the first truly important political thinker to have emerged from Africa's two decades of revolution. This book was the first publication to present a critical analysis of his standing as a political theorist.

Born in 1925 in the then Portuguese colony of Guiné, Cabral devoted his life to the liberation of his people from colonialism and was instrumental in founding the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cape Verde. He was assassinated early in 1973, but the PAIGC continued his task and Guiné-Bissau gained independence in September 1973. Guiné's revolution came late, but it was a genuine revolution and, like all revolutions, was accompanied by a theory of its own. That theory is found in the writings of Cabral. In this study Jack McCulloch explains that, because of the conjunction of a number of historical factors, the revolution in Guiné assumed an importance for out of proportion to the size or economic significance of the country, and shows that consequently Cabral's theory has come to have an historical significance of its own.

This account of Cabral's political theory demonstrates clearly that the effect of Cabral's career was to help bring down the last of the great colonial empires in Africa and, in the realm of theory, to dismantle the central shibboleths of African socialism.

1 INTRODUCTION

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In most African states the first ten years of political independence brought to fruition none of the promised benefits of a freer and a more bountiful life. The decade closed with the death of the spirit of a once optimistic nationalism. Yet in 1970, almost ten years after the independence of West and East Africa, the colonies of Portugal, namely Angola, Mozambique and the insignificant territory of Guine-Bissau, were still fighting for the right of national self-determination. The struggle in Guiné was begun in 1956 under the leadership of Amilcar Cabral in the same year that Patrice Lumumba began his rise to prominence in the Belgian Congo. It ended in 1974, almost thirteen years after the death of Frantz Fanon and the achievement of Algerian independence.

The revolution in Guiné is not in itself important because Guiné is not important. Unlike Angola, Guiné has no great mineral wealth. With a population of a little over 500,000, a severe climate, and an economy which at best could rely upon the export of groundnuts, timber and other primary produce, Guiné has never been attractive to European settlement or capital. The sole reason Portugal invested so much effort to retain the colony was out of fear that the loss of Guiné would jeopardise the military and political situations in the other colonies.

During the 1960s the Portugese made numerous attempts to have the Cape Verde Islands covered under the NATO umbrella as had been the case with the Azores. Portugal hoped to sell her African wars to the United States with the claim that the Cape Verde Islands would provide a vital communications link into the south Atlantic and that Guiné itself was strategically important in West Africa. The United States could, however, at the time detach both the Cape Verdes and Guiné from American strategic interests in the region. Once these moves had failed, Portugal was left to defend a territory of no strategic importance to anyone but herself. To western eyes the only fact of interest about Guiné proved to be that those in the independence struggle could achieve so much against a vastly superior force.

The success of the Vietnamese people in opposing and finally defeating the French and then the Americans was remarkable because of the disadvantages under which the Vietnamese fought in terms of weapons and technology. Both Indo-Chinese wars are testimony to the predominance of human will over the weight of purely material force. Yet even by this measure the achievement of the PAIGC in defeating the Portuguese is extraordinary. According to the UN census of 1969 the population of mainland Guiné was estimated at 530,000. In 1972 the total number of Portuguese troops in the country was in excess of 35,000. The ratio of foreign troops to indigenous inhabitants was far greater in Guiné than Vietnam and still the Portuguese lost.

The revolution in Guiné is fascinating because on a small scale it demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of national liberation movements. It also illustrates in a most dramatic fashion the difficulties experienced by reactionary forces in attempting to contain such movements. The contrasts in Guiné are even more dramatic than in the case of Indo-China, for in Guiné the struggle was fought against an ancient colonial regime by a people who before the war had no national identity and no state. And yet, despite the smallness of scale of the revolution, the liberation of Guiné was instrumental in the destruction of the fascist regime in Portugal.

The revolution in Guiné is also fascinating because of its lateness. The war began at a time when France and Britain were dismantling their empires in West and East Africa and all three wars in Portugal’s empire span the whole of the first decade of African independence. This lateness, and the strategic importance of Angola and Mozambique to the minority regimes of the south, identify these wars as the prelude to the final phase of Africa’s liberation – the destruction of the minority regime in South Africa.

Guiné’s road to independence was unique, because only in Guiné had Portugal been successful in engraving the image of her own lack of economic and cultural development. This lack of development was an important factor in the liberation struggle and this, as much as any other single influence, set the horizons for the type of war waged by the Partido Africano da Indepêndencia dâ Guiné e Cabo. Verde (PAIGC). The very novelty of the situation made it necessary for the national movement to confront a number of theoretical questions about social structure, class alliance and international political forces which in aggregate came to represent a new interpretation of contemporary imperialism. It is certain that if the PAIGC’s answers to these questions had been misconceived and, if the party had entered the struggle armed with the wrong theory, the war against the Portuguese would soon have been lost. A strategy such as that suggested in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, relying upon peasant leadership and spontaneous eruptions in the cities, could not possibly have succeeded. Under such circumstances the nationalist movement would have been destroyed in a matter of months.

Amildar Cabral was born in mainland Guiné in 1925. He received his secondary education in the Cape Verde Islands and later trained as an agronomist in Lisbon. Upon returning to Guiné, Cabral was employed by the Provincial Department of Forestry and Agriculture. As a result of his opposition to the colonial administration, Cabral was expelled from Guiné in 1955 but returned for a brief visit the following year during which time he was instrumental in founding the PAIGC. Over the next four years Cabral worked as an agronomist in Angola. He also made regular visits to Guiné and Portugal and published a number of important studies on agricultural practice.

Cabral was the leading intellectual force within the PAIGC and it was his analysis of the social structure of Guiné, based largely upon his understanding of Guiéan agriculture, which formed the basis for the success of the party in its fourteen-year-long struggle against the Portuguese. During 1959 the party suffered early reversals for, in attempting to organise strikes among the dock workers of Bissau, the movement made itself vulnerable to the savage repression the Portuguese immediately imposed. The reasons why the PAIGC finally arrived at the correct strategy can be found in part among Cabral’s earliest writings, published while he was working for the Department of Forestry and, in particular, in that cluster of articles arising from the survey of agriculture he conducted for the Department in 1953. During his work as an agronomist Cabral had the opportunity to explore at first hand the relationship between Portuguese colonialism and the dominant features of Guiéan agriculture. This, in turn, led him to examine the relationship between social class, indigenous culture, and the political economy of colonial rule. In the period prior to the outbreak of armed struggle in 1963, Cabral had already arrived at a theoretical understanding of the principal elements defining social and economic activity in the country.

THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT

The speeches, essays and other writings of Amilcar Cabral represent an attempt to think of imperialism and the colonial relationship in a new way. Superficially, Cabral’s writings don’t present any new or particularly complex interpretation of colonialism. With the exception of a few rather brief essays, most of his work appears to be merely a description of a guerrilla war fought against the last of the great colonial powers. Yet the appearance in these essays of the terms ‘mode of production’ and ‘productive forces’ suggests that his understanding of imperialism was founded upon a new set of presuppositions. Cabral employed these terms before they became fashionable among the ranks of the avant garde and at a time when the concept of the mode of production was still largely a possession of Soviet Marxism. It is important to remember that during the 1960s Soviet visions of the Asiatic Mode of Production were achieving much the same effect as modernisation theory in the west. Both schools tended to reflect the difficulties in defining exactly what was happening in post-colonial Africa in terms of the working out of broader historical forces. The fact that most of Cabral’s important essays were written at this time only emphasises the innovative quality of his work.

The classic theories of imperialism presented in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin and Luxemburg were addressed to understanding changes internal to the European economic and political orders. Lenin, who is the best-known and also the most typical of the classic theorists, was concerned to expose the causes of the Great War and to destroy the accepted myths about the colonial empires. In none of the classic theorists is there anything approaching a social psychology of imperialism or a compelling analysis of imperialism as an ideology. This proved to be a significant omission in the development of African socialism, because of the importance of imperialist sentiment and overt racism to that generation of colonial intellectuals educated in Europe after the war. It was these men and women who were to lead the nationalist movements in Africa.

In the period beginning with the end of the Second World War there was for the first time a perceived need within Marxist scholarship for a new approach to the theory of imperialism. By the early 1960s Marxist thinking had become inadequate, as most Marxists clung ferociously to Lenin’s ‘Imperialism’ as the definitive text on capitalist expansion. When Cabral began his intellectual career he was faced with these verities which dominated thinking on the left about colonial societies. But by chance Cabral was placed in an advantageous position; his intellectual life began at the end of the 1940s within the context of the antique colonialism practised by the Portuguese in Guiné and Cape Verde and stretched well into the post-colonial era or, as Cabral preferred to call it, ‘the age of rationalised imperialism. In terms of the development of Cabral’s own theory it was fortunate that the war in Guiné was fought against the first of the great colonial powers which, because of its economic and social backwardness, was the last to décolonise. Portugal’s backwardness taught Cabral two important lessons: it taught him that economic and political control were not one and the same thing. It also taught him that the absence of capitalist penetration could be as debilitating as the pathologies arising from the impact of foreign capital.

In 1960 at the opening of Africa’s decade of independence, modernisation theorists and most European Marxists could at least agree on one thing: the lack of human achievement on the African continent. This prejudice infected both Soviet and Western Marxist thought throughout the 1950s and 1960s and found expression in various guises such as schematic presentations of categories of modes of production. In its most crude form this allowed the integration of African societies into a Marxist perspective as instances of the Asiatic Mode. Leaving aside the numerous problems inherent in this concept, problems such as the absence of hydraulic works, this tack reinforced the prejudice that African societies were stagnant and that Africa was a continent without a history. Unfortunately such theorising only served to hold back the development of African socialism.

In contrast to these Eurocentric theories of imperialism, Third-World theorists have tended to flounder at the point where their analyses approach the question of class theory and class struggle. This has been particularly obvious in African political theory in the past decade. The chief problem appears to derive from the fact that it is necessary on the one hand to analyse primitive or communalist social formations (which are so very different from social strata in Europe) and to integrate this material into a sophisticated analysis of the internal dynamics of later capitalism. This area of difficulty has been compounded by the preoccupation of both First- and Third- World theorists with the question as to how Marx himself conceived of the transformation of primitive societies. All too often an account extrapolated from the pages of ‘The German Ideology’ describing the process of transformation would be matched against the pattern of capitalist developments which have taken place in Black Africa. This in turn would be identified as being typical of underdevelopment. These kinds of adaptations within the boundaries of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory serve to illustrate the problems which arise from the interlocking of First- and Third-World economies and raise numerous questions about the concepts of class and the mode of production, as well as throwing into question basic assumptions about revolutionary strategy.

As a result of these kinds of problems, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of imperialism have tended to be conflated with theories of underdevelopment which are, in turn, particularly weak and unsubtle in their approach to class analysis. Consequently, the construction of theories about class conflict and theories of underdevelopment have become separated.

The evaluation of the status of pre-colonial societies is one major area in the approach to African history which has a direct bearing on the development of theories of imperialism. For too long the Marxist concept of the Asiatic mode of production absolved researchers from the responsibility of exploring the evolutionary trends present in African societies, in the period prior to effective colonial control. Consequently, little effort was made to discern either the differences between modes of production common to Africa and those common to European societies, or to distinguish between categories of social class, which are historically and functionally different in the two environments. In consequence the possibility of the existence of an endogenous reflex to change, bringing in its wake the development of more sophisticated economic and social formations, was ignored entirely. This neglect was reinforced by the attitude toward the African past adopted by the new nationalist elites. So much African political theory of the last twenty years owes its existence to the twin mythologies of negritude and the African personality. All too often any question directed to an evaluation of the pre-colonial past was resolved by reference to the myth that colonial rule had not altered in any significant way the foundations of African societies. Supposedly, colonialism had not affected that unique Black African ontology which would provide the basis for an African socialism. Consequently, for more than thirty years, the all-pervasive influence of negritude and the myth of the African personality preoccupied intellectuals with what were ultimately personal questions of meaning and identity. This influence was so deeply ingrained that until quite recently class theory was often clumsy and invariably ill-conceived.

The shallowness of African political theory is apparent even in the work of Frantz Fanon, who in other ways did so much to free political theory about Africa from the dead end into which the winds of change had driven it. But even in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ the foundations of Fanon’s class analysis are drawn from the ideology of the cultural renaissance movements which, in turn, have their ancestry in the writings of E.W. Blyden and Marcus Garvey. The work of Fanon, a West Indian, shows just how destructive this influence could be, for it contaminates almost all of his writings on the subjects of race, class and revolutionary strategy.

The need for a new approach to the theory of imperialism was brought about, above all else, by the political and economic degeneration which accompanied the first years of African independence. The growing repressiveness of most nationalist governments and their apparently inevitable decay into military regimes raised important questions about the relationship between political and economic autonomy. It. also posed the equally important question as to the composition of the new ruling classes. Unfortunately the response to the need for an innovative theory was extremely slow in arriving.

The dimensions of an adequate theory of imperialism for Africa should refer to the issues of contemporary production, class formation, and national culture. Such a theory must also contain an account of Africa’s historical evolution in the period prior to colonialism. Each of these questions, in turn, needs to be examined from the perspective of Africa’s historical experience, rather than from the vantage point of the political and economic evolution of Western Europe. In the case of production and class theory it is necessary to accommodate an analysis of primary production with an account of class. During the later half of the 1960s the search for the origins of Africa’s lack of development was revived through the application of underdevelopment theory and in the use of Latin American models, which traced the process of economic retardation to the dominance of European capital. Within socialist theorising about Africa in the period before the publication of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, this meant little more than the search for a national middle class. Since Fanon it has often meant the search for a comprador bourgeoisie.

In underdevelopment theory higher levels of technology are associated exclusively with increasing economic and political repression. The abandonment of the belief in the liberative effects of technology, which is so central to the history of Marxist thought, has gone unquestioned. This has, in turn, led to a widening gap between Marxism and what is now sometimes termed neo-Marxism. In Marx, as in Hegel, there is no allowance for the occurrence of abortions in history. To Marx, as to Weber or Hegel, a model such as Fanon’s superfluous national middle class, a class which achieves absolutely nothing, would appear quite absurd. Yet in underdevelopment theory in general and in Fanon’s work in particular, the idea of pathological development is seen as normal. Underdevelopment theory treats capitalism itself as the special case.

In the works of African nationalists and in particular in the writings of such people as Sékou Touré, Lumumba, Mondlane, and Nkrumah there are a number of common elements which when taken together constitute an African theory of imperialism. Rather ironically these shared elements are most clearly codified in the writings of the West Indians, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Both Fanon and Césaire viewed imperialism and European civilisation as essentially barbaric. Imperialism, they believed, had a distorting effect upon colonial societies and a peculiarly corrupting influence upon the metropoles where it ran hand in hand with the rise of reactionary elements and, in particular, with the emergence of fascism. Although conceding that imperialism was an outgrowth of capitalism, Fanon and Césaire rejected completely the idea that there is a necessary connection between higher levels of technology and the quality of a civilisation. Fanon, in particular, has a tendency to see the relationship as inverse and to identify higher technology with cultural degeneration. Both Fanon and, to a lesser extent, Césaire emphasised two elements which place them at odds with Marxist belief; they rejected the primacy of class conflict within the metropoles as the determinant of contemporary history and they rejected the idea of a natural and effective solidarity between the metropolitan working classes and the nationalist movements. Fanon, in particular, was convinced that the European working class was reactionary. These two points, which are found in one guise or another in most African socialist literature, establish an irrevocable separation between such theory and Marxism.

From the vantage point of the 1980s the immediate response of African socialism to the challenge of the independence decade seems little more than an inverse reflection of the myths of Africa’s social and cultural backwardness etherealised. The existence of rich traditions in sculpture, the visual arts, music and the dance were presumed to reinstate the African into the human family, if only at the cost of perpetuating the prejudice this posture was intended to destroy. Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ is not really a convincing argument as to the strength of African civilisation. Certainly the traditional Marxist theory of imperialism was quite inadequate in analysing colonialism from within, but the intertwining of certain aspects of Lenin’s essay with an unsubtle inversion of several of its central propositions only weighted down the development of an adequate interpretation of the colonial experience. It is now apparent that African ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The struggle for Guiné
• 3 The agronomic writings
• 4 The class analysis of African society
• 5 Culture and personality
• 6 The state
• 7 The forces of production
• 8 Imperialism
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index