Claim No Easy Victories: the legacy of Amilcar Cabral ed. by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr. (review)

The assassination of Amilcar Cabral in Conakry in January 1973 was a tragedy on multiple levels, and its repercussions are still being felt today. For fifteen years Cabral had spearheaded the remarkable liberation movement in his native Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, a movement that, by the time of his death, saw the Portuguese dictatorship on the verge of defeat. During this time he had also become a leading theorist and intellectual on decolonization and the movement to re-Africanize recently liberated nations. His loss has proved devastating not only to Guinea-Bissau, but also to a world in desperate need of theoretical tools to counter neoliberal hegemonies. Thus the book under review is a timely reassessment of Cabral as a revolutionary, as a thinker, and as a pan-African activist: today, Cabral’s ideas still offer an important opening for challenging discourses of power both through their insistence on intellectual and cultural autonomy, and through the way in which they emphasize the importance of the relationship of unique historical experiences to knowledge, knowledge production and land use.

Claim No Easy Victories seeks to pull together a variety of important strands in Cabral’s life and work to showcase his importance for contemporary concerns. Thirty-eight essays by historians, social scientists, activists and community organizers in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and the USA, including works by seminal thinkers such as Samir Amin and recognized experts on Guinea-Bissau such as Miguel de Barros, Brandon Lundy and Stephanie Urdang, are testament to the ambitions and scope of the book.

The book begins with chapters focusing on Cabral’s life, work and thought. Several of these stand out in reconsidering how innovative Cabral’s movement really was. In particular, Carlos Schwarz’s essay on Cabral as an agronomist is an important piece of work. Schwarz illustrates that Cabral’s recognition of the farmers’ perspective was vital to his understanding of both the economic and ecological limits of the colonial cash crop economy. Another excellent essay is that by Helmi Sharawy, a prominent Egyptian pan-Africanist, who gives a fine reading of the theoretical importance of Cabral’s work in building a cultural framework for anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial directions. Indeed, following Sharawy, many of the essays in the book place a strong emphasis on Cabral’s work on culture. As many of the authors note, Cabral explicitly grounded the modus of resistance to colonialism and imperialism in cultural frameworks. By denying the colonial power’s ability to deride African cultures, Cabral asserted the fact that resistance needed to be grounded in cultural and historical understanding. Far from being ‘frivolous’ or ‘unproductive’, work on culture and its historical roots is in fact vital in the formulation of resilient alternatives to the status quo.

Related to Cabral’s interest in culture was his educational programme. An important chapter by Brandon Lundy reflects on Cabral’s discussions with the seminal pedagogist Paulo Freire, who was asked in the immediate postcolonial period by the first president of Guinea-Bissau, Luís Cabral, to develop programmes that matched the country’s cultural and social needs. A further fine chapter by Miguel de Barros and Redy Lima shows how, although forgotten by the political establishment of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Cabral lives on in the lyrics of a new generation of rap musicians, who do the real work of historical memorialization in the countries today. Two further chapters assess Cabral’s commitment to gender equality and his contribution to the transformation of gendered structures of authority in Bissau-Guinean society before his assassination; both these areas of activism were closely linked to his educational ambitions.

While most of the book focuses on the importance of Cabral within his homeland, its concluding part assesses his contribution to the broader movement of liberation of which Guinea-Bissau’s struggle was a part. Several...