How Amílcar Cabral shaped Paulo Freire’s pedagogy

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Frantz Fanon’s influence on Paulo Freire’s thought is well known, but the Brazilian educator also drew considerably from Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary intellectual from Guinea-Bissau.

This is a lightly edited excerpt from an article originally published by Liberation School on 20 January 2021.

Amílcar L Cabral was born 12 September 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. He was murdered on 20 January 1973 by fascist Portuguese assassins just months before the national liberation movement, in which he played a central role, won the independence of Guinea-Bissau.

Cabral and the other leaders of the movement understood that they were fighting in a larger anticolonial struggle and global class war and, as such, that their immediate enemies were not only the colonial governments of particular countries, but Portuguese colonialism in general. For 500 years, Portuguese colonialism was built upon the slave trade and the systematic pillaging of its African colonies: Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Angola and Cape Verde.

Despite the worldwide focus on the struggle in Vietnam at the time, the inspiring dynamism of the campaign waged in Guinea-Bissau – together with the figure of Cabral – captured international attention. In the introduction to an early collection of Cabral’s writings and speeches, Basil Davidson described Cabral as someone who expressed a genuine “enduring interest in everyone and everything that came his way”.

As a result of his role as a national liberation movement leader for roughly 15 years, Cabral had become a widely influential theorist of decolonisation and non-deterministic, creatively applied re-Africanisation. World-renowned critical educator Paulo Freire, in a 1985 presentation about his experiences in liberated Guinea-Bissau as a sort of militant consultant, concludes that Cabral, along with Ché Guevara, represent “two of the greatest expressions of the 20th century”. Freire describes Cabral as “a very good Marxist, who undertook an African reading of Marx”. Cabral, for Freire, “fully lived the subjectivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorised” as he led.

Although not fully acknowledged in the field of education, Cabral’s anticolonial theory and practice also sharpened and influenced the trajectory of Freire’s thought. Through the revolutionary process led by Cabral, Guinea-Bissau became a world leader in what could now be termed decolonial forms of education, which moved Freire deeply.

Cabral knew that the people must not only abstractly understand the interaction of forces behind the development of society, but they must forge an anticolonial practice that concretely, collectively and creatively see themselves as one of those forces.

Cabral knew that to defeat Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau, the liberation struggle could not merely reproduce the tactics of struggles from other contexts, like Cuba. Rather, every particular struggle has to base its tactics on an analysis of the specifics of its own context. For example, while acknowledging the value of the general principles Guevara outlined in his Guerrilla Warfare, Cabral commented that “nobody commits the error, in general, of blindly applying the experience of others to his own country. To determine the tactics for the struggle in our country, we had to take into account the geographical, historical, economic and social conditions of our own country.”

Cabral focused on the political developments required for building a united movement for national liberation. In his formulations, he argued that the armed struggle was intimately interconnected with the political struggle, which were both part of a larger cultural struggle.

Resistance, for Cabral, is also a cultural expression. What this means is that “as long as part of that people can have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation”. In this situation then, “at a given moment, depending on internal and external factors … cultural resistance … may take on new (political, economic, and armed) forms, in order … to contest foreign domination”. In practice, the still living indigenous cultures that led centuries of anticolonial resistance would organically merge with, and emerge from within, the political and national liberation and socialist movements.

In practice, Cabral promoted the development of the cultural life of the people. Cabral encouraged not only a more intensified military effort against the Portuguese, but a more intensified educational effort in liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. Again, while the anticolonial movement and the educational process of decolonising knowledge are often falsely posed as distinct or even antagonistic, Cabral conceptualised them as dialectically interrelated:

“Create schools and spread education in all liberated areas. Select young people between 14 and 20, those who have at least completed their fourth year, for further training. Oppose without violence all prejudicial customs, the negative aspects of the beliefs and traditions of our people. Oblige every responsible and educated member of our party to work daily for the improvement of their cultural formation.”

A central part of developing this revolutionary consciousness was the process of re-Africanisation. This was not meant as a call to return to the past, but a way to reclaim self-determination and build a new future in the country.

“Oppose among the young, especially those over 20, the mania for leaving the country so as to study elsewhere, the blind ambition to acquire a degree, the complex of inferiority and the mistaken idea which leads to the belief that those who study or take courses will thereby become privileged in our country tomorrow.”

Cabral encouraged a pedagogy of patience and understanding as the correct approach to winning people over and strengthening the movement.

This is one reason why Freire describes Cabral as one of those “leaders always with the people, teaching and learning mutually in the liberation struggle”. As a pedagogue of the revolution, for Freire, Cabral’s “constant concern” was the “patient impatience with which he invariably gave himself to the political and ideological formation of militants”.