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.

Your grandfather loves gardening and you spend afternoons watching him walk out into the garden, back bent over with age, cane in hand, to examine his flowers. You remember when you were younger, how terrified you were of being caught picking his flowers. The year is 2019, you think about Cabral’s metaphor of culture being to history what flowers are to plants. The way flowers (culture) carry the capacity and responsibility of ensuring continuity of history. You realize the role language specifically plays in this transmission, you realize how lost language is on you.

The year is 2009, you are a girl with big eyes who lives in a whirlwind of stories. You live in a world of fantasy, surrounded by storybooks, always looking forward to your Creative Writing classes. All your stories are about girls with blue eyes who are always named Matilda or Melanie. It will be years before you question why a Pakistani sounding name never felt appropriate to you, why you never found it worthy to name your protagonists a name that sounded not-European.

The year is 2014, you are an O’level student at an elite private school in Lahore, aspiring to attend a foreign college. You are meticulous and systematic, noting quotations on yellow flashcards just in case need be. You remember shrugging off the quote when you first read it. How it stung but only slightly, not long enough for you to question it. You are now at a point where you pride yourself on your growing collection of English Penguin Classics, you do not think twice about how you never read Urdu outside of the O’level curriculum. The irony of the O’level batch at your school appearing in the examinations with English as a first language and Urdu as a second is lost on you.

‘A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’

The year is 1835. A man from a foreign land decides how a ‘heathen’ people in British India should be educated. Lord T. B. Macaulay circulates a Minute on Education offering reasons why the British government should spend money on the provision of English language education to a people who ‘can’t at present be educated by means of their mother tongue.’ Nothing of value is left in your native tongue and so your people begin to assimilate. At the end of the day ‘imperial domination’ and ‘cultural domination’ are big talk ordinary people are not concerned with. You are more concerned with having a job to keep food on the table. Suddenly, literacy is tied to your proficiency in a language that isn’t yours; you will spend years struggling with the language, promising to send your children to schools where they will learn the right pronunciation for words that still feel strange coming out of your mouth.

The year is 1947, the British depart but cultural domination does not leave with them. In a world of globalization, Macaulay leaves the subcontinent a legacy of preferential treatment of one language over another. Cabral argues that to dominate a nation, you must neutralize and paralyze its culture. Macaulay’s reforms set in motion a series of education reforms that cut culture at its root– language. You are a country of 74 languages yet you prefer Urdu, a language only 7% of the country call their mother tongue. The division between Cabral’s ‘indigenous elite’ and ‘popular masses’ becomes generational with the cultural capital a private school offers over a government. Long after the British’s departure, the English medium schools remain accessible only to the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ who inherited the schools from the British.

The year is 2019, you think about the flowers your grandfather grows, you think about the way the way flowers are to plants what culture is to history, you realize you have picked the flowers without even meaning to. You realize that you are the amalgamation of Macaulay and those after him and their reforms. You are the child that is alienated from its own culture, a coconut, a girl writing stories with protagonists with European names because she harbors resentment for her own people and thinks names like Melanie and Matilda portray superiority. You are the child assimilated into the mentality of the colonizer without ever living in a time of colonial rule. You think of Cabral’s idea of re-conversion or re-Africanisation in his context, you hope to develop a love for gardening like your grandfathers.

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“It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world that will achieve a new and brighter future.” (Alexandra Kollontai)

Leftist revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai at the start of the 20^th century did state that their idealistic goal of a communist and socialist future can just be achieved if there is a new understanding of unity of the working class on a global level. Communism has to be understood as a global phenomena and is not just tied to the Soviet Union. These ideas did challenge dominant hierarchies along racial and gender lines within the exploitative system of imperialism and the capitalist economic structure that it is based on. Communist internationalism has therefore be understood as a promise for the working class all over the world to break free from the ties of the oppressive capitalist to be able to be represented in an autonomous way of self-determination.

Being part of the proletariat is seen as the only important division of society that is used in order to shape a collective identity of the workers and farmers beside their cultural, racial or geographical background or gender.

One can argue that there is an inversion of social hierarchies in the way of how the class background is portrayed as the greatest value of an individual although always in connection to the collective working class as a whole. Dada Amir Haider Khan is describing in his autobiography Chains to Lose how he as an individual, orginally from the subcontinent who has worked on ships all around the world, is experiencing for the first time a sense of recognition and dignity while studying at the University of the Peoples of the East in Moscow. A place of unique diversity of people from various backgrounds mainly from the eastern part of the Soviet Union or the colonial and semicolonial East. A place where male and female students from all over the world of all ages and all different kind of educational backgrounds are studying and learning how “to assist in their national liberation movements against the imperialist powers and to organize communist parties in their countries”. Especially while recalling his experiences in the interview before getting accepted into the university it can be noticed that every personal detail like his social origin or his lack of formal education that led in the past to him being looked down on are now the qualities that are not just appreciated but even glorified.

The global union of the working class which Alexandra Kollontine as well as Dada Amir Haider Khan are idealistically portraying is also one of the main themes of socialist realist art and literature as the official aesthetic of the soviet union. This art movement is characterized by putting a positive hero or heroine of the working class in the centre of story telling of the written word or the visual image. Often the hero is portrayed in a naturalistic idealized way as the well-muscled, youthful and healthy worker that is ready to fight the chains of capitalism and start a revolution to build a classless society in the name of communism and socialism. Even if the female heroine is not portrayed as often as the male, one can see an increasing representation and recognition of the role of women within the revolutionary narrative of the working class.

The postcard above is advertising celebrations to the International Women´s Day on the 8^th of March which is acknowledging women of the working class from various backgrounds. Until today this day marks demonstrations and protests of the socialist women´s movement in 1917 as an event that represents women´s participation in the Russian Revolution. The new image of women is focusing on her identity as part of the proletariat although the narrative of women in their role as mothers of the revolution is still dominant as well. They were increasingly represented in different parts of society like educational and organizational institutions of the communist regimes and movements in place. One can argue that the society that is tried to be achieved is still a patriarchal one where women are not completely free from certain roles that they are described to because of their gender but that there is still change in how women are being given importance and are seen as part of the collective union of the working class. The aesthetics of the postcard are portraying the three women of diverse backgrounds as confident representatives of the international female proletariat. Them being positioned on the same level shows the attempt that racial or cultural divisions have no space in their unity. Their positive and happy appearance while looking into their socialist future is also an example how revolutionary individuals are characterized in socialist realist imagination. Being side by side representing their sisterhood working and fighting for the same goal is also an important image to be recognized. Although the stereotypical representation of “the asian” as well as “the african” women through accessories and the positioning of the white woman at the front does show that there is still a certain bias influencing that representation.

Communist and socialist ideology and their representation in different forms of socialist realist art are not completely free from race and gender divisions but one has to acknowledge that these hierarchies are being challenged and critized while at same time trying to focus on the collective identity that is uniting the working class as a whole.

The concept of communist internationalism allowed many people to dream of an alternative future that is restructuring society and has a new understanding of the value of every human being especially of the ones who have been through struggle in order to achieve this ideal state of liberation from the oppressive system of capitalist imperialism.