REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY
Last month, ROAPE re-posted a collection of essays from 1993 to mark the 50th anniversary of Amílcar Cabral’s murder in 1973. Continuing our tribute, Chinedu Chukwudinma interviews António Tomás, who wrote Cabral’s biography in the 21st century. Tomás speaks about Cabral’s political development as well as his abilities as a teacher, revolutionary diplomat and leader. But he also discusses his insecurities, shortcomings and the myths surrounding national liberation in Guinea-Bissau.
What motivated you to write a biography of Amílcar Cabral in the 21st century?
When I wrote the first version of the biography on Cabral, I was in Portugal, and I wrote the book in Portuguese. The introduction is different from the one in English. I don’t see Amílcar Cabral: the life of a reluctant nationalist (2020) as a translation. I prefer to say that it is the English version of the book that was written in Portuguese. When I started working on this book project in the early 2000s nobody, at least from my generation, was talking about Cabral in Portugal.
But Cabral, his generation and all the people fighting for the independence and liberation of Africa were students in Lisbon. Most of them lived in Lisbon. Cabral was married to a Portuguese. So he was pretty much part of the debate about blackness in Europe, and blackness in Portugal as a student. When I started writing about Cabral in Portuguese (O Fazedor de Utopias – Uma Biografia de Amílcar Cabral (2007) I was just trying to understand, as a black man, how to think through and engage with Cabral and his struggle in the context of race, not so much that of independence, which is the kind of stuff I became interested in after I went to the United States and did my PhD at Columbia University. I was trying to understand, the place of race and blackness in Lisbon in the context of black Portuguese or African immigrants.
Many years after, I changed a few things in the English version of the book. The initial debate on race and racism is less there. But what is interesting now is that the Portuguese version is sold out in Portugal. It has been sold out for many years. I’m now preparing a new edition where I bring back the debate on race because we have a lot of developments: A right-wing party in Portugal and an emerging and very strong black movement, formed mostly by people who want to bring debates on racism and the legacies of colonialism to the national agenda. It is a good moment to get back to these original questions that drove me to the quest of Cabral’s legacy.
In what ways do you think Amílcar Cabral’s life and work have relevance to the young people developing their racial and political consciousness in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protest?
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