Amílcar Cabral
Amílcar Cabral built the most effective liberation movement in Portuguese Africa, brought Portugal's army to the edge of defeat in Guinea, and was shot by his own men eight months before the country he had made was recognised. He was born in 1924 in Bafatá, in Portuguese Guinea, to Cape Verdean parents, and studied agronomy in Lisbon on a scholarship with the other students - Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane - who would lead the wars in Angola and Mozambique. He went home as a colonial agricultural officer to conduct the census of Guinea's soils, which meant that he walked every district of the country and knew its villages as nobody in Lisbon did. He founded the PAIGC in Bissau in 1956 with five others. The massacre of striking dockers at Pidjiguiti in 1959 convinced him that petitions were finished, and the war began in January 1963 from bases in Guinea and Senegal. It was fought his way: political education before weapons, a liberated zone with schools, clinics and people's stores behind the front, discipline about the treatment of prisoners, and a theory - set out in speeches in Havana and at the United Nations that are still read - that the petty bourgeoisie who led such movements had to commit class suicide or become the new colonists. By 1972 the PAIGC held two thirds of the territory and had shot down Portuguese aircraft with Soviet missiles; the Portuguese governor, Spínola, concluded the war could not be won and said so in a book that helped bring down the regime. On 20 January 1973 Cabral was shot outside his house in Conakry by PAIGC members who had been turned by the Portuguese secret police, in a plot that also aimed at the Cape Verdeans in the leadership. The independence he had planned was declared unilaterally that September and recognised by Portugal the next year, after the officers who had fought his war overthrew their own government in Lisbon. His half-brother Luís became the first president.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Bissau-Guinean
- Roles: revolutionary, political_leader, agronomist
