Planting Seeds: Reflections on the cultural politics of Amilcar Cabral

I will never forget the first time that I heard the name ‘Cabral.’ It was during a planning session (for the inaugural Pan-African Youth Summit in early 2009 along with other Howard University students at Sankofa, the Washington, DC. bookstore owned by Haile Gerima). The great Pan-Africanist filmmaker, upon seeing what we were up to and reading our literature, gave us the look of a parent whose children had gone astray and queried: ‘Where is your discussion of culture? You have to ‘return to the source.’ Don’t you know the work of Amilcar Cabral?’ After replying, ‘No, baba,’ we were given one of those lectures that only a veteran in the struggle could give. The importance of Cabral was immediately thrust upon my consciousness and has never left. Indeed, the meaning of Cabral, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the larger struggles for African independence is at once subsumed under more dominant narratives of African political history (witness the recent memorialization of Nelson Mandela), and inseparable from the memories of the scores of freedom fighters that continue to fight — one quickly learns of the impact of Cabral’s ideas when talking with or reading the words of our elders in struggle.

Significantly, in the diaspora, the memory of his legacy has never truly abated in these circles, and as a representative of an important period in the struggle for African independence, his ideas still resonate. [1] His influence upon organizations like the African Liberation Support Committee, the African Heritage Studies Association, and the Student Organization of Black Unity helped to steady the stream of African consciousness during the tumultuous decade of the 1970s. [2] Like Kwame Nkrumah, one of his influences, Cabral belongs to Africans, no matter where they find themselves ‘on the map of human geography,’ in the words of John Henrik Clarke. Upon taking up the challenge set forth by Gerima that day, it became quite evident that both the ideas and life’s example of Amilcar Cabral constituted an important link in the global quest for African liberation, a mission, that despite certain appearances and protestations to the contrary, persists. As one of the primary definers over the last half-century of what that quest should entail, Cabral’s vision provides a theoretical roadmap for conceptualizing true freedom for the African world.

One of the principal aims of any leader is to represent the people and their interests. While in certain arenas this may appear as an overbearing, omniscient elite leading the ignorant masses, African cultural logic suggests a different view. In the era of anticolonial struggle this manifested itself into the proposition: The collective identity of the people inheres in the masses, therefore leadership must embody that identity. This is an ideal we find represented in the ideas of Cabral and the PAIGC, and one that contradicted what he considered ‘colonialist’ institutions of governance and organization. It is in this vein that Cedric Robinson considers Cabral, an assimilado, part of the renegade Black intelligentsia, that arm of the Black radical tradition, whose training, but not their motive influence was honed in Western educational and political institutions. [3] For Cabral and others in this intelligentsia, the first aim of representation was making a break with their colonial identities and training, which had its own styles and conceptions of leadership. By making this break, one eschews the cultural organization of Western-styled governance. But the break, however, was not only a break. As the title of one of his important volumes indicates, it was a ‘return.’ It was ‘the denial, by the petite bourgeoisie, of the pretended supremacy of the culture of the dominant power over that of the dominated people with which it must identify itself. The ‘return to the source’ is therefore ‘not a voluntary step, but the only possible reply to the demand of concrete need, historically determined, and enforced by the inescapable contradiction between the colonized society and the colonial power…’ [4]

In discussing Cabral briefly in his seminal ‘Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition’ (1983) and in an earlier article for ‘Radical America’, Robinson cites his oft-quoted idea that it was in culture, and in a return to its source, where we ‘find the seed of opposition.’ [5] According to the Pan-Africanist political scientist, Ronald W. Walters: ‘Cabral explained that in his experience a cultural renaissance preceded and signaled revolutionary activity, that the affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed was preparation for the act of rejecting the personality imposed by the professor, and that culture carried the seed of revolt because it was the foundation of the history of a people in its unfolding and its reaction to events.’ [6] Cabral, also an agronomist, could find no more appropriate metaphor. We must continue to plant seeds, but in soils our own.

As Robinson shows, this notion of return, this re-embrace, this homegoing, is in fact one of the defining characteristics of the renegade Black intelligentsia, particularly as its adherents grappled with the meaning and implications of their colonial backgrounds, their educational training, and even their readings of Western radicalism. For Robinson, Cabral and the PAIGC by asserting its objective of embodying and implementing the cultural logic of those Africans untouched by the vicissitudes of colonial culture, continued a practice that was also attempted by W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright (the three thinkers he profiles), and others like Claudia Jones, Aime Cesaire, and Oliver Cox. This intelligentsia with their ‘vitalizing tools’ of speech was to discover a world (the folk, the peasants, the masses) that was always around them, and a world that enabled the possibility of moving the struggle from words and ideas to the ultimate preservation of ‘life itself.’ [7] These thinkers began, as Cabral noted, to understand that national liberation required the rejection ‘of the negation of its historical process” and the regaining “of the historical personality of that people.’ [8]

A cultural (re)turn was the projection and reification of personhood and by extension, and for Cabral most importantly, the path toward the destruction of colonialism and imperialism. In some ways this cadre of thinkers, on the road to discovery of the self, ended up departing from the Western dualism in philosophy, that considers ideas as separate from materiality. In this conception, either ideas exist independent of reality, or ideas only exist to affect reality. Lived experiences and ways of knowing exhibited by Africans, however, appeared to betray this neat divide, and the intelligentsia subsequently had to alter their understanding of this supposed universal binary. African culture had to be understood on its own terms — just as liberation had to be pursued on its own terms. No doubt, ‘culture’ continues to be a term of derision in historical materialist circles, and it indeed has a malleable nature in intellectual circles. Culture is everything, and nothing. [9] It is possible however, that these ‘academic’ discussions of culture assume faulty premises. ‘Returning to the source’ for this elite is not an ethnographic process, an intellectual or ideological game of chess—it is more, it is a restorative project, a cleansing. And also a prerequisite to victory. In the words of Cabral: ‘A reconversion of minds—of mental set—is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion—re-Africanization, in our case—may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by struggle.’ [10]

The current issues facing the African world today, whether it be the role of the International Criminal Court or the Africa Command on the continent, the treatment of African migrants in Israel, or the continued use of both legal and extralegal violence on Africans in the United States, are profoundly political, but also cultural crises. Much of the African world is mired in a Stockholm-syndrome like relationship with the West on both political and cultural terms. Following Cabral, then, requires us to recognize the political implications of events around the African world, but also to take stock of how broad African cultural ideals are and can be increasingly implicated in resolving them—to allow the practice of the peasants, what Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls the ‘collective griot’ [12] to inform theory—an idea beautifully modeled in Wole Soyinka’s Of Africa (2012). This is arguably the only true role of Africana Studies, the discipline founded by African students in the United States, influenced by Cabral and others, and it should be the only true role for African universities across the continent (as well as Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the US and the Diaspora). As Cabral asked of the folk, the research agenda of African ‘humanists’ (a term of convenience) must revolve around their conceptions of reality, these ways of knowing must be then used to change how African is governed and how Africans interact with non-Africans, indeed how it contributes to the human world. On this score, Cabral sounds much like W.E.B. Du Bois in his seminal ‘Conservation of the Races’ asserting that: 'It is important to be conscious of the value of African cultures in the framework of universal civilization, but to compare this value with that of other cultures, not with a view of deciding its superiority or inferiority, but in order to determine, in the general framework of the struggle for progress what contribution African culture has made and can make, and what are the contributions it can or must receive from elsewhere.’ [13] Among his many contributions, Cabral establishes the idea that the production of knowledge will inform the ways in which the freedom of Africans is attained. Thinking and doing are not contradictory; they are complementary. It is past time for African elites throughout the world to do as Cabral did, to make a similar break, to return to the source, for it is the source of our strength.

* Joshua Myers is a lecturer in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and a board representative of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. He can be reached at [email protected]

END NOTES

[1] The latest major volume on Cabral, Claim No Easy Victories (2013), edited by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher, Jr. was recently published by CODESIRA.
[2] See the discussion of Cabral’s visit and influence on Africans in the United States in Ronald W. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 61-64.
[3] See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 2000), 175-184 and Joshua Myers, “The Scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson: Methodological Considerations for Africana Studies,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 5 (June 2012): 46-82, Accessed http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol5no4/54-4Scholarship.pdf
[4] Amilcar Cabral, “Identity and Dignity in the Context of National Struggle,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, ed. Africa Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 63.
[5] Amilcar Cabral, quoted in Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, 122. See also, Cedric Robinson, “Amilcar Cabral and the Dialectic of Portuguese Colonialism,” Radical America 15 (May-June 1981): 39-58.
[6] Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora, 62 (emphasis in the original).
[7] Robinson, Black Marxism, 183-184. On the conceptualization of this discovery, Robinson asserts in a seminal passage: Robinson states: “In the twentieth century, when Black radical thinkers had acquired new habits of thought in keeping, some of them supposed, with the new conditions of their people, their task eventually became the revelation of the older tradition. Not surprisingly, they were to discover from a Black historical experience nearly grounded under the intellectual weight and authority of the official European version of the past, was to be the foundation upon which they stood. From this vantage point they could survey the theoretical, ideological, and political instrumentation with which Western radicalism approached the problem of revolutionary social change”
[8] Amilcar Cabral, quoted in Robinson, Black Marxism, 276.
[9] For this critique, see inter alia, Peter James Hudson, African Diaspora Studies and the Corporate Turn,” ASWAD Forum 1 (2013): 1-2, Accessed, http://www.aswadiaspora.org/images/Forum%201%20HUDSON-AFRICAN%20DIASPORA%20CORPORATE%20TURN.pdf
[10] Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 45.
[11] See his Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas, 2009), 50.
[12] See his Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas, 2009), 50.
[13] Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 52.

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