Cabral on Culture

Cabral’s speech talks about culture in the context of National Liberation Movements and how culture is an important element to be used against colonisation. Cabral can be thought of as a centre point in the spectrum of thought ranging from Nkrumah to Nyerere.  With Nyerere completely defying any effect of colonisation and advocating the possibility of going back to a glorified past such as like Gandhi whereas Nkrumah promotes modernity but Cabral has a nuanced view of how to work with modernity and culture against the colonisers. His speech is a sort of prescription for Liberation Movements as it directs on how to resist against culture domination by imperialists but he recognises that reconciling different sorts of cultures horizontally and vertically in a society is difficult and directs on how one should do that.

Cabral highlights the evolution of cultural and calls it, “fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history.” He expands upon how colonisation interrupts the natural historical development of culture of a society and its intricate relationships. He also recognises and warns against the fact that something that looks cultural on the outside is not truly cultural but can be a misappropriation of culture as in the case of Mobutu. This is how colonisers have created cultural alienation and have created an abyss between the elites and the native masses which makes it difficult for the population to relate to the elites even when they are advocating for liberation as the common denominator of culture is missing. Thus, In order to use culture to the population’s advantage it is imperative to understand the different vertical and horizontal arrays of culture present on the scale of socio-economic differences. The Liberation movement has to reconcile these differences and then carve out a new evolved version of culture that is common among the population and that acts as a unifying force between the elites and the native masses and drives the liberation movement.

Isn’t Cabral through this prescription of ‘creating’ a new culture supporting cultural domination by the centre on the periphery? He recognises that populations can have vertical and horizontal differences in culture and hence to define a ‘national culture’ is to take the positive and progressive aspects from all different elements and construct them into one. Thus, the creation of a ‘national culture’ will then render all the other cultures as secondary and might even interrupt the development of those cultures individually?