Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories

Amilcar Cabral

Description

‘Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…’ – Amílcar Cabral
Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories showcases the intellectual foundations and practices underpinning the liberation of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. From the importance of culture in decolonisation, to biting critiques of Portuguese colonialism, and strategies for guerrilla warfare in tropical forests, this new collection brings together select interviews, official speeches and PAIGC party directives from 1962 to 1973. Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories reveals Cabral to be a skilled diplomat and lively and pragmatic thinker, concerned with national liberation in the context of Pan-Africanism and international struggle.

Sujets

• Post-Colonialism
• Political Science
• Colonialism

Informations

• Publié par: Digital On Demand
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781776421503
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories
Amílcar Cabral



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No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
This edition published October 2022
ISBN 978-1-77637-880-7
eISBN:978-1-7764215-0-3
© Inkani Books, 2022
Edited by Efemia Chela
Design by Ryan Honeyball
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Inkani Books is the publishing division of The Tricontinental Pan Africa NPC
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A Note On Attribution
The texts in ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’ were first published in English by Penguin, in 1969, in Basil Davidson’s The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution , apart from ‘The Relevance of Marxism-Leninism’ which was first published in 1972 in Our People Are Our Mountains: Amílcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution.
The chapter ‘Analysis of Different Types of Resistance’ was translated by Jethro Soutar in 2022


Abbreviations
CLSTP Comité de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (Committee (later, Movement) for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe)
CONCP Conferéncia das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas
(Conference of the Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies) CUF Companhia União Fabril
ECM European Common Market
FRAIN Frente Revolucionária Africana para a Independência Nacional das colonias portuguesas (African Revolutionary Front for the National Independence of the Portuguese Colonies)
FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front)
FUL Front Uni de Libération (United Liberation Front of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands)
MING (Movement for National Independence in Guinea)
MLGCV Mouvement de Liberation de la Guinée Portugaise et des Iles du Cap Vert
(Movement for the Liberation of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands)
MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation OAU Organisation of African Unity
OSPAAAL Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina
(Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America)
PAIGC or PAI Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cape Verde)
PDG Parti Démocratique de Guinée (Democratic Party of Guinea)
PIDE Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International Police for the Defence of the State


Foreword
LENIN’S QUESTION
‘With the means we have, we can do much more and better.’ Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973),
‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’, PAIGC Directive 1965.
There is a tendency to make of Lenin’s most famous and enduring question a rhetorical device. Lenin’s question, ‘What is to be done?’, is posed only to be left unanswered. Not taken up in the least, as if the question itself signals political and theoretical familiarity not only with Lenin but with Marxism, writ large.
In our moment, where a former taxi driver turned imperial czar threatens the international community, when a former anti-apartheid activist become head of state, Cyril Ramaphosa will not condemn the war crimes committed by Czar Vladimir Putin. In our moment, when Narendra Modi, the leader of one of the founding countries of the Non-Aligned Movement is transforming a historically secular democracy into a Hindu nationalist state, Lenin’s question echoes with ever greater intensity. Indeed, what is to be done?
If we are to begin to answer Lenin’s question, which is also a plea for history-making action, then those who hold political leadership must confront the situation in which they find themselves honestly. Leaders must be truthful with their people. To do what must be done we must, as Amílcar Cabral urges us, ‘tell no lies’. 1 Present the situation as it is. Recognise what requires doing, urgently. Ask of the people that they do their share. Demand of the leadership that they behave always in a responsible and exemplary fashion. Identify with a careful eye the opportunists in the ranks of the oppressed, those who are fluent in the language of resistance but learn this language only to later, at a more convenient moment, turn the situation to their own advantage. Cabral warns us clearly against what he correctly denounces as the ‘mentality of petty ambition.’
Sadly, of course, as people in many postcolonial states can attest, the ‘mentality of petty ambition’ can in the blink of an eye become wholesale state capture, looting of the state’s coffers at the expense of the poor. All this occurs in the name of ‘the struggle’, a struggle long forgotten by elites except when it can be used to manipulate the public, when ‘the struggle’ can provide a shield against legitimate criticisms of the party’s failings. This is to say nothing of failed states, which Cabral did not live to see but anticipated. Cabral knew that the postcolonial state was doomed to fail its people if revolutionary movements turned into national governments that refused to understand their own shortcomings. He feared the failure of the postcolonial state through the abandonment of the revolution or, as he defined it, ‘rationalised imperialism’ – neo-colonialism, along with the extraction of a nation’s wealth, given ideological cover by self-serving native elites.
In this way, perverse as it is to say, we find ourselves grateful that Cabral did not live to see the triumph of petty ambition across the continent. Petty ambition, as exemplified by the multi-million-dollar expropriation of state assets by Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, was neither what Cabral nor poet and revolutionary Agostinho Neto intended for the people of Guiné, Cape Verde, and Angola, respectively. Cabral, whose vision of the world was decidedly global, was of course a determined pan-Africanist, always speaking with great feeling about movements on the continent fighting for liberation from colonial rule. Yet he was also deeply dedicated to the cause of Lusophone liberation, locating the PAIGC’s work within the context of its battle against the ‘criminal Portuguese colonialists’; recognising intimate links between the PAIGC in Guiné and Cape Verde and FRELIMO in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola.
Cabral operated with the lessons of Moïse Tshombe, the State of Katanga’s secession, as well as the brutal fate of Patrice Lumumba often at the forefront of his thinking. As a result, his words try to caution us about what can happen if party discipline shows any sign of slackening. Cabral did everything he could to prevent party members from self-enrichment and spoke repeatedly against it. He reminds us of this in what is surely his favourite phrase: ‘Rice is cooked inside the pot and not outside.’ All the hard work is crucial to hold the revolutionary movement and the revolutionaries who lead it accountable for all their actions, including their failings. In turn the people are made accountable for supporting the party. He describes this as the kind of work that begins with each and every individual in Guiné and Cape Verde. The work begins within; it is a ceaseless task. To invoke the spirit of Cabral’s rice metaphor: the revolution begins right there at home, in the kitchen.
Cabral, in the several addresses that compose T ell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories , is a strong advocate of self-sacrifice and self-discipline of the spartan variety. It is ok to drink, but never to excess, he advised his cadres. Behave with respect towards yourself, the people and your comrades, he urged
PAIGC members. Study, keep mind and body in equally good shape. To win the war against Portuguese colonialism, it is necessary to win every battle, to come out victorious in every skirmish. The first battle in that war is the battle within. Continual self-improvement is the only way. Political work is a permanent task.
LENIN’S QUESTION, ANSWERED
A strain of strict moralism runs through Cabral’s speeches. The work of the democratic revolution is to make, if not quite a virtuous person, then certainly a considerate one. A human being who having overcome the oppression inherent to colonialism behaves with a political thoughtfulness in relation to those around them. A mode of behaviour must mark the relations between self and other because that is the surest barometer of the newly liberated society as one of equals. A society in which everyone, regardless of gender, ethnic affiliation, religion, regional origin (Guiné or Cape Verde, it matters not) has the same right of access to the nation’s resources. There is to be no distinction in school admissions between boys and girls nor Christian or ‘Moslem’. At the end of Black Skins, White Masks , Frantz Fanon calls for the coming into being of a ‘new man’. Fanon conceptualises a different way of being human, of being in the world, in the relation between the colonial and the imperial worlds.
Fanon’s is a concept. A call to the future. However, whatever reservations there are to be had about Cabral’s moralistic streak, there can be no denying it is well-rooted in everyday praxis. Cabral’s attention to detail, his insisting on codes of revolutionary behaviour, are in fact a manual for how to achieve not only a postcolonial subject, but the citizen of Guiné and Cape Verde who has emerged out of the struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Cabral is explicit. This is what you must do, PAIGC cadre. That is how you must adjust your thinking on women, PAIGC regional leader. Fanon may have given the anti-colonial wo