Think of a story that goes in the following order. A people recognize their being through culture. They stand out, identify and make themselves recognized through it. They voice it. In a flash, however, they are robbed of that very culture. They keep flying back to it, to the remains of that suppressed, oppressed, dear-to-the-heart culture. They still find their voice in it. They fight, mobilize, call and cry in its name.

They finally win in its name.

This is the culture, the weapon and the strength, that holds unequivocal value in the light through which Amilcar Cabral viewed National Liberation.

How ‘true’ is the cultural victory is a story for another day. The chronological story mentioned above, however, is the story of the colonized peoples. One that they pride their struggles in. One that holds immense importance, power and value for them. One that is personal to Cabral and his experiences.

Culture can be identified as a sensitive, crucial reality which was immediately recognized and played with, by the colonial powers. It was this culture that was suppressed, undermined and ridiculed to an extent that eventually the reverse of it came true, that is, there was a birth, one after the other, of heroes and leaders who pulled the culture out in the light once again, to be accepted and celebrated. To be remembered, embraced and prided in. To be used as the catalyst of hope and resistance, of the past memory, that the national liberation movements would stand tall and strong on. Such was the importance of culture, and such was the attachment of Cabral with it. Such was culture in the dream of Nkrumah and the hidden fears of Sukarno, in the protest of Gandhi and the sacrifice of Lamumba. For the purpose of this essay, we will confine ourselves to the powerful thoughts of Cabral.

It is astounding how his understanding and situating of ‘culture’ instantly brings about such vivid and loud images of what was happening. He had done the near impossible, that is, to condense the aim of centuries of control and conquest into one word: culture. He made the primary prey of colonialism absolutely clear. It was a fight between cultures, except that one side was not allowed to ‘compete’ or ‘represent’ itself. How else could the rich, historically rooted, celebrated culture(s) be paralyzed to an unbelievable extent. Was it not the genocide of culture that was exercised for hundreds of years by the empires to remain in power. To suppress, and to assimilate. 

For Cabral, culture was the very identity of the society he was coming from, and the societies suffering around him. It was the best, most accurate and sensitive representation of who ‘they’ were. In the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy, what ‘they’ had and were systematically robbed of was this very reality: the reality of their culture. It was this culture, the norms and the identity, the image and the practices, which the National Liberation movements sought to reclaim and rebuild. It was this memory and attachment to culture that assembled the broken, fragmented, bleeding lands and peoples together, in the effort to give it the life it deserved and the life that it itself promised. 

It is almost poetic, and yet so crucial, how Cabral basis his entire understanding of National Liberation on just one simple thing; Culture. Poetic, because it is as if this one word accurately and wholly contains within itself, the memory of two pasts. The past that was free and the past that was dictated, robbed and controlled. This one word expresses both the pain of the struggles and sacrifice, as well as the celebration, pride and might associated with it. It is the thirst of this pride and might that the National Liberation drove on and for. Culture was both, the catalyst and the goal. 

What colonial rule did was a combination of both a subtle and aggressive suppression of culture. Subtle, when terming it as a means to civilize, polish and train the ‘natives’, and create “assimilated intellectuals” (as Cabral would call them) for their own good (of course). Aggressive, when ‘they’ were out-rightly showed that no matter how perfectly they adopted the ‘civil’ system, the European way of life, they could never merge with the people of the empires. The actions, laws, and inhuman attitudes were repeatedly and methodologically employed to show the colonized ‘their place’. The place, the tier, the stratification they would always, inescapably belong to no matter how closely they embraced the alien model of life.

National liberation was, therefore, directed against thin unfair, painful, forced domination. The fight was fought, voices were raised, and blood was spilled to reclaim the culture from the reins of domination. Staying true to his powerful wording, Cabral rightly calls it the “cultural combat”; a duel to preserve the long standing values and traditions, the identity and representation. A combat which called itself National Liberation and derived its power from the essence of culture it was fighting for. It is beautiful how the pride and unity in the liberation movements manifested themselves in the longing, and recovering of their cultures. 

In the eyes of Cabral, the idea of liberation was never an exclusionist one, or an “attribute of privileged peoples”. Far from it. What he dreamt was to preserve and promote culture while taking everyone on board, including the Africanized “petite bourgeoisie”. Thus, this culture was to bind the people together, accommodate them, break them free from the prison of a culture and system they did not belong to, and did not own. 

In National Liberation, if one seeks to understand what is it that really drove it, empowered it, kept it breathing and willing to breathe in the face of much tyranny and tragedy. The answer lies in the longing, memory and love for culture. It was love that kept the liberation movements going. It was this longing that made the giant leaders and their followers never stop, to not allow the domination and suppression again, to live on their own terms. 

They had embarked on the journey of returning, to define, celebrate and relive their own culture. Their own personality.

The secret to the long lasting rule of the colonizers lies in their meticulous dealing with the culture of the colonized. Culture was not just a part of the lives of the people they were governing but was the part of the dominated which had to be dealt with carefully in order to sustain and strengthen their hold. Colonizers were then smart enough to use this tool of culture by both “destroying” it and supposedly “protecting” it to perpetuate their rule.

The significance of culture is beautifully captured by Cabral that ‘it is the vigorous manifestation…. of the historical reality of the society.” Hence destroying their culture meant destroying a part of their past. And by taking away their past, the colonizers aimed to erase any identity the colonized could hold onto. Their identity was strongly dependent on their glorious past-a timeless past that is not tainted by colonial influences. With their present taken up by the colonial powers, the past was all they had.

As Cabral highlighted that “culture…is perhaps the product of history as the flower is the product of a plant” Hence suppressing the culture of a population meant ripping the flower off of the plant. This divorce of the plant from its stalk is divorcing culture from its history which places people in existential crises. Through crushing their culture, the dominators not just eradicate their past, their identity, their ability to be human but also their capacity to make history.

Since culture ensures “continuity of history”, imperial domination restricts the ability of its people to make history as all their activities are then connected to the imperial power, having no roots in their past, benefiting the rulers alone.

This culture then becomes the very tool for the oppressed to liberate themselves. These liberation movements crave for a past that is oriented towards a brighter future. Since they don’t have control of their present, the colonized want to control their future through their past, advancing a certain utopia. Their quest to find their identity, their rights, and their aspiration to be a human is driven by their culture. Their culture narrates a story different from that recounted by the colonizers- a story where the oppressed are not the oppressed after all.

When the imperial powers witness the simmering of these people, they supposedly protect this very culture which they ought to destroy initially as Cabral points out that the colonizer “creates chiefdoms where they do not exist, establishes and develops cordial relations with religious leaders, builds mosques, organises trips to Mecca, etc.” This tactic allows the pets of the oppressors to be installed as the forefront of the liberators. These culturally alienated people then serve in the nationalist liberation movements. Nothing more than coconuts-brown on the outside and white from the inside- are left who sell themselves and their country to the imperial powers in the guise of culturally appropriating, putting to rest people like Patricia Lumumba, who dare to envision a different future whose beauty hasn’t been tarnished by the imperial powers.

All in all, at the heart of all national liberation is always an attempt to find the oppressed’s distinct identity . This identity is searched for in a past that is long corrupted by the colonizers as they advance imperial domination on the wheels of culture, destroying it and manipulating it to their advantage. Culture, for them, is then reduced to nothing but another weapon- a major weapon- for colonial rule.

Re-Africanisation is a term that promises a lot. It promises a return to a stolen culture, to the very state of being African. To Cabral culture operates on an “ideological or idealist plane”— a plane on which resistance is made possible through the affirmation of a “physical and historical reality” existing alongside that which the present suggests.  Cabral is clearly on to something here.

 But what are the implications of Re-Africanisation? What are the assumptions upon which this reclamation of history is based? And to what extent is this possible?

Culture is “the product of history” and simultaneously its creator. Re-Africanisation is not simply a promise to return to a mythic anti-colonial past, but also an affirmation that this past did indeed exist— that it was real. And if we think about this further, it’s clear that this is really just another way of Cabral saying that he exists— that he too is real. To me, Cabral’s speech is not important merely in terms of content. His words resonate into the present. They are laced with hope, and this is not always easy to come by. “History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society”. But it also allows us to do something else. Through narratives of culture, history “allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress”.

Re-Africanisation is a struggle for just that— survival. It infers that progress can occur at multiple levels, and that is not unidimensional as western culture seems to suggest. But it must be realized that this idea of a unified culture comes at a cost. How do you create just one definition for what it means to be African? The problem here is one of identity. If identity is going to be defined through the quality of being resistant to domination, then what will it mean to be African in a time when there is no need to resist? The term Re-Africanisation is based on an assumption— the prefix “re” suggests a return to the past, which Cabral insists can only happen through an enforcement of popular culture. Yet in a land which is so diverse, to whose past will he be returning. Can multiple cultures really be collapsed into one that easily? Will they not also resist?

Cabral puts the need for national liberation via cultural resistance very succinctly when he says the following: “it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture”. This is true insofar as it suggests culture as a weapon against imperialism. But who will decide which culture in Africa is the one which justly represents all its people— which culture takes on the shape of a weapon best?

According to Cabral, while “it is true that the multiplicity of social and ethnic groups complicates the effort to determine the role of culture in the liberation movement… it is vital not to lose sight of the decisive importance of the liberation struggle”. Yet of what use is this struggle if it robs the very people it exists for, of their individual cultural identities?

Re-Africanisation promises the answer to a fundamental question— Who am I? Yet, Re-Africanisation also threatens to merge the possibilities of that answer into each other until the question itself changes from ‘Who am I?’ to ‘Who are we?’.

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?

In this piece, I will be analyzing how Cabral viewed culture in the context of national liberation. Although I agree with how he deemed culture to be a constantly evolving entity, I will attempt to argue that culture in itself was perhaps a significant hindrance in the struggle for liberation. The culture that he was trying to save turned out to be his own reckoning because of divergent class interests. This was because of a plethora of complex horizontal and vertical social structures present within Africa which were evidently acknowledged by Cabral in his speech. The almost incomprehensible cognitive changes that occurred as a result of cultural domination can be linked to the imposition of changes in terms of both geographical demarcations and productive forces. I will be focusing on the impact that the change in the mode of production had on the native population which prevented the emergence of a streamlined mass culture against the oppressor’s culture. An enforced shift from subsistence-based agriculture to monoculture had implications beyond the generation of revenue for metropoles. Cabral perhaps underestimated the extent to which cultural domination had pervaded native culture, turning it into a pale imitation of the colonizers themselves. As a consequence, he also underestimated how much this obscured culture had reified the class divisions that had been constructed by colonialism, making the emergence of a mass culture quite improbable. While he did acknowledge that the creation of a native elite was deliberate on behalf of the colonizers, he unfortunately placed too much faith in the altruistic capacity of his own people which is elucidated when he refers to the process of ‘re-Africanization’ which would involve previously alienated native elites becoming reintegrated into their own culture amidst the struggle for liberation.

Before further delving into a critique of his speech, it is important to be cognizant of the fact that a speech cannot give us a crystallized sense of his convictions and understanding. Keeping this in mind, it can be said that Cabral placed a lot of importance on culture and the role it plays in the development of societies. He understood culture to have a responsibility for assuring the continuity of history which means that it is essentially shaped by the past and shapes both the present and the future. According to him, culture was inextricably linked to the material base of a society – the level of productive forces. What I found particularly percipient was his identification of culture not being uniform in all sectors of society. It is this differentiation which results in the divergence of attitudes amongst social group. It is evident that his understanding drew on Marxist ideals which is further elucidated when we discern what he believes the objective of national liberation should be – to regain control over productive forces. Even though we can assume that regaining control could lead to the cultural domination of the oppressor diminishing, it does not restore your organic culture. This happens because the disruption that occurred due to colonial enterprise, cannot be undone merely by ending colonial control. With the advent of colonization, it is almost as if Cabral is implying that their culture was put in a state of flux, which was not the case. With the passage of time, it was a process of replacing native culture, but rather it was a process of obfuscating it and eventually overriding it.

To deal with this problem, Cabral believed in the efficacy of liberation movements embodying popular culture. As stated earlier, this is his undoing – placing perhaps too much faith in the capacity of individuals to converge on a mutually agreeable way forward which would redefine productive forces to cater to the interest of the majority. Although he is suggesting that cultural degradation occurred because of productive forces being seized by the colonizers, perhaps he should have confronted a fundamental question: what would happen if the same mode of production was to be retained? We cannot blame Cabral for not identifying this issue simply because it is easy for us to make this judgment based on what events transpired. For him, all he sought was a way out for him and his people. We have to give him credit for identifying how oppressors systematically used cultural domination as a political tool designed to effectively subjugate masses and facilitate imperium. Irrespective of which colony we might be looking at, we can identify a recurring pattern of cultural dominance in the modus operandi of the colonizers to influence and alter social dynamics. This is perhaps one of the greatest insights that Cabral gave.

While we can agree with his identification of the systematic use of cultural domination by the colonizers as a method to oppress, his prescription is perhaps undone by two complications: one of misdiagnosis and the other of idealism. While he intends on being critical of colonialization, he might be inadvertently accrediting it because of how he views development to exist on a linear path. If you are to believe that the level of productive forces indicates the stage of development of a society, then you are subconsciously acquiescing to the colonial narrative of natives being inherently inferior and primitive. Cabral envisaged the objective of national liberation to be an attempt to reclaim the process of development of productive forces. Keeping this objective in mind, it can be argued that to reclaim was simply not enough. To reclaim was to inherit. Reclaiming should not have been seen as the end of colonial domination but the beginning of a new struggle – to diminish the influence of deeply entrenched colonial structures which existed under the guise of productive forces. A deficiency in Cabral’s speech pertains to a lack of emphasis on the correlation between the degradation of native culture and the existence of colonial productive forces. What was inherited after liberation were deeply entrenched colonial remnants which were constructed for imperium, not ‘development.’ It is almost as if he is fine with the notion of ‘development’ as long as natives are at the helm. Would that really change anything? Not only did these structures create and reify divisions along the lines of both class and gender, they also resulted in the disruption of a formerly unhindered organic progression. While he did stress on the significance of culture, Cabral failed to realize that his conceptualization of liberation would mark the beginning of a new struggle due to their ‘inheritance.’

I will try to further develop this idea by relating it to two distinct social groups which Cabral highlighted in his speech – the Balante and the Fula, which had a horizonal and vertical social structure respectively. For such structurally opposing cultures to synthesize, you have to keep in mind that their essence could be lost in that process. Furthermore, a vertical social structure would be more adept at recalibrating itself to use the body politic and its productive forces as a tool to promote its interests which would result in a greater importance being ascribed to the protection of that social group’s interests in the post-liberation phase. Perhaps the most glaring contradiction is made evident when he refers to the liberation movement embodying a mass culture which represents majoritarian interests. If it is difficult to find uniformity within your own culture, mass culture would probably be dictated by the prioritization of the interests of a specific social group. This results in the culture of a social group being viewed as inherently superior to other native cultures. The clout that might be gained or lost by a social group would be based on their material reality which was distorted by colonial intervention. This is the inconsistency within Cabral’s identification of mass culture as a means to overturn the oppressor’s culture. If we are to assume that this mass culture was to hypothetically succeed in its endeavor, the resulting productive forces would be shaped in the interest of a specific social group because of the power they would exercise as a byproduct of their material reality. While Cabral did indeed have a nuanced understanding of culture, the emergence of a mass culture which would represent the majority was an idea which was quite utopian keeping in mind how much colonial domination had altered native culture to begin with.

Cabral envisions culture in neatly organic terms – A seed of history, rooting itself in a material and economic reality, shaped by external factors, and, in turn, affecting the external world. It reflects the conflicts, contradictions and compromises of a society through age, much like, if you follow the metaphor, a tree’s rings might reflect periods of drought and strife.

There’s something of a perpetual life cycle within this analogy, where culture is the product of history but also the vehicle for the continuance of history, in a way that is not precisely cyclical, in as much as it exists in all stages at all time, but definitely manages to convey the concept of flourishing, inexorable life despite the odds that Cabral seems to be arguing for.

Within this conception, Cabral argues that a liberation struggle must necessarily be a ‘seed’ of popular, mass, indigenous culture (an organism best suited for its own environment that will shake off everything harmfully foreign, different and less suited for the particular environment, simply by being thus better suited, should this ideal national liberation be successful).

This, of course, is based on what he sees as two ideal-types of successful imperialist domination: genocide or complete cultural assimilation of the dominated peoples. As genocide would be counterproductive to a form of imperialism that relies on the labor of indigenous people, Imperialism turns to various halting attempts to destroy the culture of their subjugated peoples.

Thus, where Imperialism must see threat, Cabral sees potential for liberation. As he says, ‘If imperialist domination necessarily practices cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.’

His liberation struggle must first understand the culture in which it is entrenched, and thus understand its own weaknesses, faults and flaws, and thus march on making allowances for this. Thus every liberation struggle will be unique to every culture, and every liberation struggle shall thus, in seeking to mobilize the masses, to address their faults, and their not-so-‘progressive’ aspects, shall also be a ‘veritable forced march on the road of cultural progress’.

Thus culture is both organically intertwined with history in a conception of the past that allows for a pride born of reclamation of denied fact under colonization – and must be driven forward on the linear march for progress.

In either case, a liberation struggle must be born from a mass indigenous culture, and must create a liberated culture, if liberation indeed be true, and not hijacked by the assimilated classes of the intellectuals and the elites who sold out to colonizers.

Cabral’s ‘culture’ avoids idealizing a past, despite acknowledging – even emphasizing – the role of history in shaping an essentially indigenous culture, conceptualizing a future shaped by cultural and historic forces in the present – that is a liberation struggle. He even acknowledges diversity in this struggle, making a point of disclaiming an ‘all-African’ culture.

He displays an interesting tendency to ignore or sideline the immediate history of colonization and its possible long term effects on ‘organic’ culture in Africa. If anything, his analogy shows a tendency to imply a period of dormancy in which African culture simply went into pristine refuge in the (familiarly idealized) villages and forests, untouched by the storms of colonization. Even counting the conditions under which African culture has been evolved, he prefers to focus on material reality and harsh environment, as in the context of the organic analogy.

However his attempts at pragmatic non-idealization are scrupulous, refuting all claims that African culture is perfect in anyway – other than as a vehicle for a liberation movement, for which it is essential flawed as it might be. And his concern about the liberation movement remaining true to this culture despite its flaws, as something of a shield against colonial assimilation, can explain his attempts to idealize it despite pragmatic disclaimers.

In either case, an indigenous culture is essential, in his view, to the rejection of alien Imperialism. This culture isn’t, and need not be – in fact, cannot be – static, but it must be essentially indigenous, born from their history and shaped by their circumstances, for true liberation, according to Cabral.

Amilcar Cabral’s view of culture is twofold. In his essay, “National Liberation and Culture”, he outlines the need for a realization of the colonized nations’ culture to oppose the colonizer. He looks at the importance of a distinct culture from the oppressors’ in order to stand up against it. Yet, in his view of the integrity of culture in for the colonized, he never solely propagates a look at the past alone. His idea is not based at the realization of a ‘break in history’, a going back to an untainted time before the colonizer ever came and find it untouched. Instead, he propagates that culture is grounded in both history and the material reality of the people. Furthermore, he puts it upon the Liberation Movement to be the flag bearer of cultural progress.

When Cabral talks about culture rooted in both history and culture, he converges two diverging ideas. He argues that history is influenced by the economic and political forces of society and thus the history of a people cannot be removed from the present time. He asserts: “The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign rule lies in the fact that, in the ideological or idealistic context, it is the vigorous manifestation of the materialist and historical reality of the society already under domination, or about to be dominated”. Therefore, for Africa, to imagine a virginal past, untouched by the colonizer at all would harm the struggle against the colonizer. On the other hand, to completely forget the history and be ‘assimilated’ in the culture of the colonizer would also discourage this struggle. Cabral argues that this assimilation has been sued as a tool by the colonizer to increase parity and divisions among the social strata of the colonized nation. Thus, “On the cultural as well as political level, vigilance is thus indispensable”.

Another major argument in Cabral’s essay is the role of the Liberation Movement in taking forward culture while maintaining reflixity. He acknowledges how African culture has been deemed irrational and forgotten to the point of invisibility by colonizers like the Portuguese, however, he warns against the uncritical acceptance of one’s own culture as well. He argues that to imagine a culture free from all flaws would be naive and so would be to lose sense of the particularity of culture. Not every social group would have the same culture, he says, and thus it is important to realize the diversity within the movement and the culture of people at large. While encouraging reflixity, Cabral also proposes that it is the Liberation Movement that could take culture forward. This is because by default, the movement requires some sort of education of those involved for the disciplined use of the machinery, along with the ideas of democracy, leadership, and equality of women. Therefore, it lies on the Movement’s soldiers to realize the complexity of the idea of culture and to ground it in the material reality and also take advantage of the progressive ideas they have evolved into.

Thus, Cabral’s idea of culture in his essay is holistic and wholesome. He acknowledges the urgency of realizing this culture in order to oppose the colonizer, yet he reminds people to take advantage of the positive aspects that have trickled down to them from that domination. In poses the Liberation Movement as central and instead of promising an African utopia, he encourages reflection and a merging of the past and the future within the present.

Cabral conveys culture as a means to resist foreign domination and views National Liberation through movements as “an act of culture.” His analysis produces a nuanced understanding of the nature of culture as dynamic and constantly evolving- and yet, becomes starkly particular when it begins to play a role in National Liberation movements. In essence, Cabral’s explanation of culture in the context of imperial domination and exploitation leaves us with a sense of tension between the dynamics of culture as distinct human experiences and the merging of cultural commonalities for unity essential to liberation.

            This dynamic understanding of culture encapsulates observing the entity to be constantly interacting with the evolving society to emerge in new and changing forms. In essence, culture has the ability to keep shifting its physical embodiment, to remain uncontained despite repression, to burst out in growth like the roots of a tree that is denied its natural space. This is how African culture survived by taking “refuge in villages, in forests and in the spirits” of the oppressed. It seems almost convulsing and tactile, unpredictably changing shape, moving in and out of sight and never dying- unless the humans who experience it are obliterated.

The constant movement and evolution therefore suggests the continuity of an interaction between cultural elements and the “social and political realities” of its environment. Essentially, culture emerges as ever growing, eternal and ever changing because the place of its manifestation is also the place where resistance to colonial rule emerges. This co existence gives culture a “dynamic synthesis” and the “seed of the continuation of history.” It creates a link between culture and the “mind” of society- the mind, with its capability to engender responses, reactions and perceptions that characterize this perpetual interaction, rather than the body, the “color of skin” or the “shape of the eye.” Moreover, the social mind then consists of many minds, all with different perceptions and experiences- a fact that Cabral shows that Liberation efforts absolutely must understand. It is the reality of shades of culture that enables the existence of “several Africas” at the same time as when Portugal has difficulty in acknowledging the existence of even one Africa. Distinguishing between superior and inferior cultures is then an illusion- the only reality is the cultural interactions that shape human encounters.

The point where culture is realized as an all-encompassing, nuanced human experience, is where Cabral thinks, “the importance of culture is reached.” It is an experience that is characterized by degrees of similarities and differences amongst perceptions and actions, by constant variations with time and space, by encounters with conflicts and means to reach solutions, and by integration in the living environment. This point of importance, therefore, is also the point of unpredictability and infinity.

However, when the cultural outgrowth of resistance becomes a National Liberation Movement propagating armed struggle and a liberated future, the struggle imbibes the dynamics of culture. The understanding of culture as an entity in constant motion now serves to amalgamate cultural commonalities to mobilize for the sake of armed struggle. It is the struggle which now must be equipped well enough to deal with the inconsistencies and differences which will emerge from it itself. The armed struggle becomes the “builder of culture.” In an effort to convey what a successful National Liberation Movement must do, Cabral almost lists down a set of requirements including “developing a popular culture”, creating a “national culture grounded in history and on the victories of the liberation struggle itself” and the “development of a universal culture.” Culture is then crafted, shaped by human minds- the requirements are concrete, specific, and stagnant in time. They show a sense of a fixed history, time and thus identity, as a means to unite the oppressed and give them courage- not to remind them of a culture they already experience themselves, but to engender a very specific, monolithic response. It becomes finite.

In essence, liberation freezes culture at a specific moment in time for specific causes. There is nothing dynamic, mercurial or interactive about “national culture.” It becomes like an unchanging spoken and heard story. And yet, the reality of cultural interaction cannot be destroyed- it will still hide in the villages and forests, it will still sprout out in the form of differences to this one story that most generations know and will be told. The construction of popular culture does not change the existence of shades in culture, and thus they must exist side by side- a tension that is seen when one observes culture to not only give birth to liberation movements but also pay the cost of becoming its subject.