Amílcar Cabral was a Cape Verdean and Bissau-Guinean agricultural engineer, poet, political leader, insurgent thinker, military leader and revolutionary. He founded and led the African Party for Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), a military and political movement for a binationalist decolonial revolution in both countries. Not unlike many others of his ilk, the ruthless killing machine of the colonial secret services tragically shortened Cabral's life. In Cabral's case it was the Portuguese secret police who assassinated this Pan-Africanist, revolutionary leader at the age of 48 on 20 January 1973, only months before the independence of Guinea-Bissau.
Resistance and Decolonization is a compilation of a number of Cabral's directives to the participants of a seminar of Cadres of the PAIGC, held in 1969, translated for the first time in English, under the title of ‘Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance’. These directives are titled: political resistance; economic resistance; cultural resistance; and armed resistance. Resistance and Decolonization also includes the transcript of Cabral's speech (delivered in absentia) at the UNESCO Meeting of Experts on Questions of Race, Identity, and Dignity, in Paris, July 1972.
Completing the package, this volume also includes two elaborate and engaging introductory essays. First, Reiland Rabaka situates Cabral in the larger trajectory of Africana critical theory, in the rank of figures such as Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. De Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, Ella Baker and others, in order to unpack the essence of Cabralist praxis for the reader and introduce him as an ‘insurgent critical theorist’. The second essay is written by Dan Wood (the translator of this volume) and discusses the contemporary relevance of Cabral for anti-imperialist critical praxis.
These essays introduce us to Cabral the trans-disciplinary Africana critical social theorist, who picks up the weapon of theory not only in liberation of the wretched of the earth, but also to eradicate ‘the condition of the wretchedness’ and ‘realise anticolonial revolution, trans-ethnic working-class struggle and revolutionary humanism’.Footnote 1
To this effect Rabaka notes that even though Cabral is not a philosopher in the Eurocentric meaning of the word:
[T]he Africana tradition of critical theory is undeniably philosophical in that it articulates and actively helps to bring into being a new “conception of the world” and “new modes of thought” free from Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism and capitalism, as well as other forms of modern and postmodern fascism and imperialism.Footnote 2
In this book review I try to highlight just two aspects of Cabral's praxis. First, I extract Cabral's powerful conceptualization of land as set out in his directives. Cabral's historical and both material and immaterial understandings of land hold unique nuggets for scholars of international law who are preoccupied with foundational questions such as territory and limits of jurisdiction. Moreover, Cabral's unique understanding of the environment, preservation of soil, culture, labour and human relations as integral components of the struggle for liberation of the land is an insightful and timely account for anyone who engages with fields such as international environmental law. Second, I discuss Cabral's methodology of decolonial thinking. Cabral's commitment to the lived experiences of the colonized people and his unapologetic approach to self-examination and reflection provides a methodological guide for scholars interested in decolonial(izing) knowledge and knowledge practices.
1. Land
One major theme of Cabral's thought, which this volume brings out, is ‘land’. Land and land grabbing as the necessary requirement of imperial expansion is, quite predictably, in the centre of any decolonial praxis. Perhaps it is Cabral's training and years of work as an agricultural engineer in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau that distinguishes his conceptualization of land, and its emancipation, from the rest of the anticolonial thinkers and leaders of his time. Land, in his thought, is a compilation of its materiality – dirt and minerals – its ecosystem, as well as the people who live and cultivate that land, and the forms of relation that they foster amongst each other whilst living in the land.
For Cabral land appears as the locus of the armed struggle, as the resource for economic survival, as the site of the political administration of the colonial plunder, as well as the embodiment of the local culture. What Resistance and Decolonization offers is Cabral's distinctive conceptualization of the land. For him ‘land’ refers individually to all of those listed themes and at the same time encapsulates all of those themes. Land, in Cabral's political thought, is the site of critical and insurgent thought and practice. Unlike a standardized conceptualization, Cabral represents land as a complex, nonlinear and immensely material entity neither to be romanticized nor to be freed abstractly from colonial rule only to be subjected to local exploitation.
Lastly, whenever he talks of land it also includes the mode of production and the instruments of cultivation of the land. In short land includes both the terrain and what he calls the ‘productive forces of the land’.
As a result, when Cabral says: ‘we need to liberate our land’, he summons a complex amalgamation of material recourses and geographical terrain, what we reductively call ‘nature’, as well as the instruments, programmes and policies of extraction and cultivation of the land. He includes those who work the instruments and implement the programmes, as well as cultures and modes of living on the land, into his anticolonial praxis. This is because under colonialism the culture, the body, and the land are all rolled into one another and ruled by the economy of extraction.
Cabral's significant theorization of land emerges from this interconnected ecological mode of thinking and praxis: decolonial resistance is a practice of both survival and fruition, which can only be realized through the undertaking of a network of resistance that includes economic, political, armed and cultural resistance. This square of resistance, inspired by Cabral's academic training, is captured as ‘Revolutionary Anticolonial Mesology’. As Dan Wood explains ‘mesology – a synonym for ecology – signifies the attempt to understand the relations of living things to their environment’.Footnote 3
What Cabral understood as an inseparable relation between the preservation of the soil and its productive forces – the interconnectedness of human and non-human liberation – as part of his theory of decolonization, has only recently come into Western political thought under the auspices of theories of new materiality.Footnote 4 In this sense Cabral pioneers an environmental conceptualization of political struggle. ‘The land must really be liberated’:Footnote 5 not a nation, not a people but the nation with its land and all that is embodied, materially and immaterially, by the land. For Cabral decolonization is not complete unless the country's soil, pattern and method of agriculture are also liberated. As he says, the fundamental objective is:
to liberate our land's productive forces from oppression, from imperialist colonial domination, but one question: Are we doing this to return to where we were, to return to Cape Verde as slaves, or as serfs, or with people serving as servants? . . . No we're liberating our land to advance like other peoples of the world, for progress, for a life of dignity, for our land's unity – nationality – so we can help to raise up a new and better Africa. That's the objective of our struggle in the context of the world and of humanity, to which we belong as human beings.Footnote 6
‘Resistance’ for Cabral ‘is to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.’Footnote 7 What form does this resistance take in theory and practice? As I read Cabral, revolution is fought on a variety of fronts. The freedom of land is not achieved by merely kicking the colonialist out, it also requires the colonial structures and practices to be shaken off, superstitious beliefs to be challenged, and the restructuring of the land and the undoing of colonial agricultural practices from a method of plunder to planned cultivation of the land. In resisting foreign colonization, Cabral reminds us that ‘a return to one's origin is not, nor can it be, in itself an act of struggle against foreign domination (colonial and/or racist), nor does it necessarily mean a return to traditions’,Footnote 8 since those traditions are also situated in their own histories that also contain structures of oppressions. It is from this view that Cabral does not seek haven within religion or native culture as a means of resistance. Instead religion and culture themselves can become objects to resist. In his anticolonial political consciousness nothing is essentially good or evil. Or for that matter, anticolonial praxis is not simply about acting contrary to the deeds of the colonizers. ‘This is because colonialism doesn't only have things that are useless’.Footnote 9 The task of resistance is ‘to combat colonial culture and leaving in our heads that aspect of human, scientific culture that the tugas (Portuguese) brought by chance to our land’.Footnote 10 What Cabral is getting at is not a celebration of colonialism – for the good of colonialism is brought by chance or as a prerequisite of exploitation – but to devise a relentless criticism of the existing native cultures, specifically the religious and superstitious belief of his people. He refers to the eradication of specific beliefs, such as ‘lightning is a sign that God has become enraged or that a thunderstorm is the sky's voice when a furious “spirit” speaks’.Footnote 11 Engaging in a politics of decolonization is not premised upon the idea that the entire good of the world is accumulated on our side. Resistance must also be accompanied with a persistent self-critique and reflection. Resistance involves a conscious practice towards a clear political horizon. Or as Edward Said puts it: ‘there is always the question of goal which, even in the thick of battle, entails the analysis of choices’.Footnote 12 Cabral does such analysis quite clearly:
[O]ur cultural resistance consists of the following: while we liquidate the colonial culture and the negative aspects of our own culture in our spirit, in our midst, we have to create a new culture, also based on our tradition, but respecting everything that the world has won today for serving people.Footnote 13
There is no romanticism involved in the liberation of the land or in a return to ancestral culture and tradition. Instead, much like what the Libyan author Hisham Matar observes on his return to his homeland, after 33 years, in 2012 in the wake of the revolution in Libya, home is a ‘conviction that the world [is] available to [one]’ and returning to home is to return to a place ‘from which the entire world is suddenly possible’.Footnote 14 In other words, resistance and critique must be seen as productive and affirmative practices; as struggles for new beginnings in order to realize clear political ambitions.
For an international law scholar, Cabral's complex and ‘mesological’ understanding of land challenges the conventional understanding of the international responsibility and accountability of states as emanating from either the territorially bound notion of jurisdiction or the more recent, yet limited, notion of extraterritorial application of a state's international responsibility. Cabral leaves us wondering; what would jurisdiction, states’ international responsibility, or for that matter international law, be like if we saw land and territory as the material and immaterial continuation of its history and the labour – both at home and overseas – that is put in its development, as well as the inward and outward mobility of its population, either as part of the colonial adventure or in fleeing from it? How would international legal thinking change if we understood foundational concepts, such as land and jurisdiction, and all that they entail, not as naturally isolated individualities, that from time to time may forge connection between each other through treaties and wars, for instance, but together, in an ecologically interconnected multiplicity?
2. Methodology
The image of Cabral as insurgent social theorist does not only emerge in his conceptualization of resistance and land but most significantly it stems from, as Rabaka eloquently reminds us, his methodology.Footnote 15 This volume also introduces us to Cabral, the epistemological insurgent, who – even though he has clear Marxist affinities – does not shy away from dismissing what he calls the left's deviance, as much as he rejects the deviance of the right. Meanwhile his political project and liberation struggle is not conducted from a cosy middle ground: ‘One can't do anything in the middle’, rather ‘what is good is knowing how to join things from one side and the other in order to move forward . . . in seeking the just path in a land’.Footnote 16 In seeking this just path, two aspects of Cabral's methodology can be highlighted.
First, it is precisely because of Cabral's disregard of the arbitrary disciplinary territorialization of the Western academic thought that he can comfortably merge his political, economic, military and cultural analysis within his agricultural knowledge. This allows him to devise a comprehensive theory of struggle that covers issues today filed under climate change and environmental racism as part of the decolonization struggle.
Second, Cabral's critical praxis transcends Eurocentric disciplinary classifications of knowledge in that it does not confine the borders of the thinkable within predetermined epistemic fields. Instead, it makes theory effective by taking seriously the lived experiences of the colonized people as another constituent element of his resistance.
In short, as Rabaka writes, Cabral's thought depends ‘on a high level of intellectual independence and uncompromising commitment to the wretched of the earth’.Footnote 17 This methodological mixture allows him to locate his critique within the delicate intersection between knowledge and emancipatory action. In this context then knowledge is not an end in its own right and certainly is not a vocation. It is inseparable from revolutionary and emancipatory action. In this right, he considers the foundation of PAIGC, among others, a unique achievement within Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean cultural resistance. Elsewhere insisting on the importance of the lived experience as the basis for shaping the struggle, Cabral writes:
Knowledge of the struggle shows how utopian and absurd it is to pretend to apply methods adopted by other peoples during their wars of liberation and the solutions which they found to problems with which they were or are faced, without considering the facts of the locale (specially cultural reality).Footnote 18
I find a valuable lesson somewhere along the path of Cabral's epistemological insurgency and his attendance to lived experiences of the colonized people, for the need of the involvement of this methodological framework within the knowledge formation process of a field such as international law.
Resistance and Decolonization, as already mentioned, is a compilation of speeches. Therefore, sometimes the reader can find herself navigating from one topic to another quite rapidly. Discussions such as the necessity of personal hygiene, or why is it important for comrades to wear clean clothes, comb their hair, and clean their rooms and trenches are dealt with in the same breath as the importance of culture for resistance, and insightful accounts of the dynamic between the colonized people and land. Although this is a consequence of the genre of this book, it still fits within the universe of struggle that Cabral envisages: a universe that is a combination of the seemingly mundane and everyday lived experiences and necessities together with theoretical elaborations of one's political horizon. For Cabral, anticolonial praxis requires attendance to the most banal, tedious and seemingly irrelevant practices, while it is channelled through complicated polemical and political struggles.
Decolonizing a field of knowledge such as international law, so pertinent to global order, cannot consist of grand gestures and pompous articulations. First and foremost, it involves giving attention to everyday events and routines that pave the foundation for grand structures of exploitation, alienation and humiliation of the colonized people. It also requires paying attention to those practices that allows the fostering of spaces through which the justification of plunder was (is) made possible within the confines of an academic discipline.
Although Cabral sees scientific advances as achievements of mankind in general, for him, it is simply impossible to pursue a decolonial and critical agenda if the historical and particular situated-ness of the wretched of the earth is not accounted for and schemes of liberation are produced elsewhere, by people busy with their own resistance and caught up in their own epistemic universes.Footnote 19
Decolonizing a field of knowledge, in a Cabralist frame, involves reconsideration of the ways in which its participants shape the field. It also includes questioning the mechanisms, visible and invisible, that present a group as the participants of that field of knowledge. Which forms of articulation are given space to speak for the struggle? To what extent do the critical knowledge practices distribute and allocate spaces of appearance to expressions of the lived experiences of the plundered people? What epistemological frames are considered prioritized and which ones are only found in the periphery of the knowledge practices of international law? Which institutions, where, and in accordance with which political objectives, get to devise schemes of emancipation? And most importantly what long-term goals our scholarly projects affirm? These are some of the questions that reading Cabral brings up for an international lawyer.
