While culture reigns supreme in Cabral’s discourse on “National Liberation and Culture”, Cabral also develops a certain underlying ethic that he believes culture should be founded upon. Cabral places culture at the center of our realities, a center that he claims contains “the seed of protest, leading to the emergence and development of the liberation movement”. This beautiful analogy, if allowed, can be further extended to include water that nurtures and provides life to the fruit. This water is the ethic that accompanies a culture devoted to national liberation (my apologies if that was too corny).

This ethic includes a self-regulatory instinct that Cabral believes would keep culture from being exploited and falling into another cycle of oppression. Through constant “vigilance” of the type of culture being promoted, its origins, its strengths and its failings, we could gauge its impact and become more aware of our realities. But what does this extreme vigilance say about the national liberation itself?

Through this constant questioning Cabral makes the reader realize that the national liberation is always an ongoing and never ending process. Freedom is not simply handed to us once the oppressor leaves and the people are free from cultural domination. Since culture is ever-growing and evolving through the passage of time and is directly impacted by the political and economic spheres embedded in the society, the threat of it falling into the wrong hands is ever present. Thus, for Cabral true freedom is a process rather than a conclusive victory that is attained through remaining cognizant of one’s culture and history.

It is also important to note that this keen awareness of a culture’s ever changing nature shows how each nation has a different route to take on the road to liberation. It is simply not a one size fits all scenario but requires an acute understanding of the “historical and material realities” that shape that particular nation and a deeper knowledge regarding a popular culture that is present within the society.

Through this rigorous analysis, Cabral highlights one other feature of national liberation and its entanglement with culture. He points out how harmful the unwillingness of accepting the “positive contributions from the oppressors’ culture” can be and how the blindness towards the negative elements of one’s culture can hurt the movement. Essentially, there is no ‘perfect’ culture but through constant vigilance one could reach a safe middle ground.

Cabral’s view of culture is rooted heavily in the means of production of a nation. If simplified the idea is as follows: if you can dominate a nation’s means of production you can destroy their culture which inevitably leads to the domination of the entire people. And this is exactly what colonizers do according Cabral. He believes there are a number of routes the dominating nation can take. They can either annihilate the people entirely so there is no culture left to be threatened by or they can reconcile their economic and political beliefs with the existing culture of the colonised. But neither of these two routes has been taken by the dominating people in an attempt to create a successful colony. The route that is always taken is one of total annihilation and overpowering of the nation’s culture.

But culture for him is not as simple to unfold. It is not only rooted in the economics of a nation but also within its politics and history. It is the fruit that forms through the years of struggle of a nation. It is the outcome of the entire historical process a people go through since the beginning of time. So it’s a twofold phenomenon. It is part of the present of the people rooted in their economic condition just as much as it is a part or product of their past. It is the essence of a nation’s existence.

If a population gives up their own values and beliefs to adopt those of the coloniser then we know that the coloniser has won. The dominators launch an ideological attack on those they want to overpower. The sad reality of the situation, Cabral points out, is that more often than not this strategy works. The great powers of the world had figured out that this course costs them much less than a physical attack would, but in turn costs the dominated every part of their identity. History teaches us that colonisers adopted a policy of ideological domination. They would work on deepening the existing rifts within the society they start to rule while also creating entirely new rifts in the process. The different parts of the nation which helped to move the culture of the country along now start to mistrust one another. There begins to form a sense of hatred for “the other”, while simultaneously an acceptance of intellectual inferiority of one’s own culture brews in their minds. Mostly a specific class starts to adopt Western values and mannerisms in an attempt to mimic their Western lords, to please them and gain favour from them. This idea slowly poisons the mind of people from all strata within the nation. An apt example would be the situation of the subcontinent (the gora complex). This belief still lingers on to this day. At this point the people willingly give up their own culture, let go of their identity to adopt an entirely new one making the job of the coloniser that much easier. The willing acceptance of the superiority of the white man is what led several nations to their doom.

According to Cabral due to the essential place of culture within a nation’s identity it is impossible for any national liberation movement to become successful or even begin without a step back towards the nation’s own roots. Any successful movement requires that the people embrace their culture fully and find guidance within. Culture helps bind people together around one final cause of freedom of their people from the oppression of the Western powers. Nations find cultural symbols and individuals who embody those symbols and values to rally the people around the cause. Many nations use their culture even after they gain liberation to keep individuals interested in the cause of the state and to keep nationalist feelings alive and burning within their hearts. They do it to find a direction to adopt after being given “a fresh start”, which is what Mobutu Sese Seko did exactly. It may not be the best path to adopt or even what Cabral meant when he talked about culture being the backbone of nationalist or liberation movements, but it the route many choose. Thus nationalism without culture is entirely impossible.

For Cabral, culture holds immense value as a tool of resistance by the colonised against colonial oppression, while also serving as a gateway to a “firmly entrenched domination” by the coloniser. It is cultural assimilation which largely enables the perpetuation of colonial rule in Africa, and it is cultural oppression which poses a challenge to it. Amilcar Cabral defines culture as the “materialist and historic reality of society being dominated” — a reality upon which the evolution of society is contingent upon. In pursuit of national liberation, culture serves as an essential armour against an erasure of history. Each society is afflicted with conflicts, and the antidote to them is found in the “dynamic syntheses” produced by its culture, which offer solutions to them. In the perception of national liberation employed by Cabral, the three main prongs of what culture entails — “continuity of history; progress of society in question, and a perspective of evolution” prove to be instrumental in establishing control over a society. The cultural personality of the colonised becomes an expression of either implicit collaboration with the coloniser, or of rejection of foreign invasion. The notion of liberation at a national level encompasses a story of a nation in a manner that the parts which make the whole do not lose their individual weight. According to Cabral, “culture is not the prerogative of one faction of the society” — and for the struggle against colonial domination, it is imperative to recognise that culture is not an overarching umbrella which paints the society with the same brush, but exists in various forms which need to be kept distinct, with a common thread of national liberation unifying them. Culture allows for an “understanding of, and integration with the environment, an identification with the fundamental problems, and an acceptance and possibility of change in the direction of progress.” Therefore, culture plays an integral role in striving towards liberation. 

Another distinction attributed to the notion of culture by Cabral is that of its ability to unify, but also to alienate. In Cabral’s view, culture can be expressed through assimilation with a foreign culture, which serves as a way of silencing dissent, and as a form of alienation in which the elites absorb cultural values of the invader, and in the process create a distance between them, and the masses. The road to liberation is paved with acquiring a consciousness which identifies this distance as a problem that ought to be addressed. To acquire this consciousness, building on the indigenous cultural values, beliefs, and norms, a “reconversion of minds” is necessary to become “reAfricanised.” What precedes national liberation is cultural domination exercised by the coloniser, which is embedded in the “class nature” of culture, that becomes more palpable and evident in the rural areas. In order to attain liberation, this dichotomy between the repression of the culture of the masses, and support and protection of the cultural influence of the ruling elite ought to be challenged and subverted. This is because in the context of rural areas, it becomes apparent that actual power is concentrated in the hands of the colonial administration, who exercise it with the collaboration of the native ruling class. This class of indigenous native elites come to be seen as black skins, wearing white masks. Culture holds a dualistic role for Cabral, who advocates its fundamental position in perpetuating domination, and its value in strengthening resistance. Culture acts as a potent tool of resistance, and as an integral part of national liberation movements because, in the words of Cabral, “not understanding the culture of Africa was a grave mistake that the Portuguese committed.” This blatant negation of an African culture by the Portuguese resulted in three subsequent wars of colonisation. This claim of establishing culture as an undeniable fact, lends credibility to the material reality of a society seeking liberation. 

Lastly, it is not sufficient to merely be cognisant of foreign domination resting on cultural oppression, because it is equally important to critically analyse, assess, and reevaluate aspects of native culture which do not contribute towards national liberation. A demarcation ought to be produced between the positive and negative aspects of African culture; its strengths and weaknesses; its essential and secondary characteristics, and between what is blindly accepted and exalted, and what ought to be embraced, cherished, and celebrated. It is easy to think of culture as all-embracing, but in pursuit of national liberation, the parts which make the whole need to be given their due weight and attention. These constituents of an overarching culture, each pertaining to a distinct social category, need to coalesce into a “single natural culture” which expresses itself in an armed struggle. For Cabral, culture is important when it manifests into an armed struggle, which functions as both a “cultural fact”, and as a “builder of culture.” Instead of transposing foreign methods of attaining national liberation onto a context where they might not be applicable, it is essential to increase political awareness, through a restructuring of native cultural values. This finds an expression into forms of popular, national, and scientific cultures, which then begin to oppose, challenge, and potentially subvert foreign domination. 

Cabrals understanding of cultural resistance is nuanced and inclusive. It accounts for various intricacies such as class, race and heterogeneous groups. He however recommends a counter intuitive action to his analysis; the selection of popular culture as the primary basis of the national liberation struggle, he states:

“…the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country”

This assertion rooted in practicality would not be problematic if Cabral in the very next paragraph did not emphasize the need to create a national framework where all kinds of cultures and peoples can be preserved, specifically:

“In order for culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to preserve the positive cultural values of every well defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values in the service of the struggle, giving it a new dimension–the national dimension”

In the initial quote Cabral discounts the need to account for diversity in creating popular culture; this empowers majority culture, whilst relegating minority cultures. History has shown us countless examples of the tyranny of the majority, in this case the imposition and domination of the popular culture against the sub-culture. Cabrals recommendation of creating the diversity-blind popular culture ignores the treatment of the Sunni-male, white American and communist towards the Shia-Female, African American and revisionist. The fact that inclusivity comes after the creation of the movement means that there is much room for exploitation and suppression. Even the example Cabral cites

 “the first phase of the liberation movement–can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist (revolutionary) “petite bourgeoisie” who have been re-Africanized  or who are ready for cultural reconversion”

This caters to class-geographical groups i.e. rural-urban/ working class-bourgeoisie. Multiple identities are ignored, e.g. linguistic, religious, ethnic and gender. By creating a narrow, national, popular culture Cabral opens the door for a closed group that would claim to represent the voices of an entire mosaic of people. Furthermore it also provides the popular culture the opportunity to impose its will onto the minority sub-cultures. An abstract diverse national-framework seems like an afterthought and a rhetorical ploy, especially when contrasted with the specific and practical, popular culture. One could further postulate that it is a form of pacification of other groups; delaying urgent questions that require immediate answers to when after liberation is achieved.

Cabral throughout his piece is aware of class dynamics and sycophants- who may disguise themselves in the fervor of liberation. This perhaps signals that for Cabral a cultural liberation may transcend identity. Re-Africanization may mean unparalleled co-operation which moves beyond individual and group interests. He posits that culture is the underlying cause of varying levels of resistance/co-operation to the colonizer by members of the same ascendant class (e.g. the bourgeoisie). Culture makes a bourgeoisie work for liberation, despite it being against his self-interest. Does that mean that a cultural awakening would constitute a greater consciousness just as it would for an awakened proletariat? Cabrals Marxist roots are well known, so perhaps this is a hint of that influence. There is a strong emphasis on class throughout his analysis. A cultural awakening might have prevented exploitation or marginalization due to its higher consciousness. The weakness in this analysis however is the consistent inclusion of the bourgeoisie in the liberation struggle; class is second to cultural awakening?

If this theory does not hold, why then does Cabral ignore the potential tyranny of the majority that may result from a popular culture? Does he see the identity of African as so powerful that it would fuse all cultures into one overarching national culture? Is this why the term “Africanized” is used? However what can be established is that this tension in is not resolved in the text. Cabral attempts to reconcile this issue with the incorporation of a national framework but he fails to truly flesh it out, especially with this framework coming after the creation of the liberation movement. What stops the popular culture from dominating the minority, ignoring it all together? What stops the change from being cosmetic? What prevents the masters from simply changing the color of their skin?

Cabral potentially falls for the same pitfalls that he warns against, i.e. the liberation must not be anti-colonial. It is likely that in the struggle against the colonizer, unrepresented sub-groups would be supportive due to anti-colonial sentiments, as opposed to cultural. This is because the primary liberation movement would not grant the same cultural space to the smaller sub-cultures, meaning the major incentive to support the movement would be to oust the colonizer.  In fact a sign that even those people would be culturally awakened would be if they questioned the lack of representation in the popular and national culture. Belief in the equality and power of one’s own culture in relation to all cultures and subsequent rejection of subservience would mean that no sub-culture would allow itself to be sidelined. How then does Cabral expect culturally awakened people to step aside for the creation of a popular culture? If they do so are they still culturally awakened? Have they not allowed their people to become sidelined in the first instance of the liberation fight?

In an ideal world Cabral would be present, to respond. In a beautiful world Cabral would have the answer.

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?