Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Portuguese” Guinea

160 Pages·1971·0.507 MB·English

by  Gérard Chaliand, Basil Davidson

Armed Struggle in Africa
With the Guerrillas
in “Portuguese” Guinea
Gérard Chaliand
Introduction by Basil Davidson
$1.95/90p • PB-179 MODERN READER
Armed Struggle
in Africa
Copyright © 1969 by Monthly Review Press
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-81789
First Modern Reader Paperback Edition 1971
Third Printing
Originally published as Lutte armée en Afrique,
copyright © 1967 by Librairie François Maspero,
Paris, France
Monthly Review Press
116 West 14th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
33/37 Moreland Street, London, E.C. 1, England
Manufactured in the United States of America
To the memory of my father
/
Contents
Introduction by Basil Davidson ix
Author's Foreword xiii
1. Introduction
General Considerations 3
Economic Survey 5
Society and Social Structure 12
The Struggle of the PAIGC 21
2. With the Maquis
On the Other Side of the Farim 29
In the Oïo Forest 50
Djagali 83
3. Armed Struggle in Africa
The African Experience and Context 101
The Objective Conditions of the
Armed Struggle 111
Political Strategy of Guerrilla
Warfare 116
Appendix
Portuguese Psychological
Warfare Circulars 127
Foreign Interests in
“Portuguese” Guinea 132
Other Firms Operating in Guinea 136
Bibliography 141

vii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Exports from “Portuguese” Guinea 5
Table 2: Major Crops 6
Table 3: Trade with Principal Countries
and Territories 8
Table 4: Metropolitan Portugal's Balance
of Payments with Its Overseas
Provinces in 1965 11
Table 5: United States Economic Relations
with Africa 112
viii
Introduction
by Basil Davidson
“There is no new entity born of colonialism,” wrote Frantz Fanon
back in 1958; and everything that has happened since then seems
to have confirmed this. Many peoples today need a renewal
of their civilization, but none so obviously and urgently as the
colonized peoples. Whatever colonialism, imperialism, capitalism
may or may not have achieved, one thing is certain about them.
They have utterly failed to raise those structures—whether social
or moral, political or economic—upon which the deprived peoples,
the abused peoples, the “underdeveloped” peoples as they are
sometimes if odiously called, can carry themselves into a new
civilization capable of standing and evolving on its own founda­
tions.
Nowhere is this more plainly true than in the Portuguese colo­
nies. Forty years of Salazarist rule, of clerico-fascist stagnation and
strangulation, have most desperately mocked the “civilizing mis­
sion” that was once so often advanced as the justification for
Europe’s “African trusteeship.” Not only no schools except for
the favored few—the favored one half of one per cent of “the
natives”—not only no social services in any way commensurate
with the scientific and financial possibilities of the twentieth cen­
tury, and no democratic institutions of any kind. Not only all
that, but, beyond all that, no scope for self-respect, for decent
hope in life’s possibly becoming better, for even the most minimal
participation in the tides and movements, triumphs, aspirations
of the rest of mankind. Truly, from these aspects the position of
the colonized peoples of Portugal may be said, in some words of
Amilcar Cabral’s eight years ago, to be absurd.
Absurd, but not mysterious, not accidental. Colonies have not
ix
x / Armed Struggle in Africa
been for nothing. Portuguese colonies have proved handsomely
profitable to the large trading companies whose boards of direc­
tors have been filled with the beneficiaries of Salazar’s “New
State.” These colonies have provided closed markets for Portu­
guese exports such as textiles, wine, and manpower for whom
there were no jobs at home. They have brought in useful “colonial
products” such as cotton and groundnuts, cultivated by forced or
semi-forced labor paid at the cheapest price. They have fed the
imperialist nostalgia of a regime whose ideas and myths were
rooted in the Middle Ages.
Absurd, but also not defeated, not tragic. Gérard Chaliand’s
vivid little book tells the story of how a handful of brave men and
women took their fate in their own hands, and, against bitter odds,
prepared and led a people’s struggle for the new civilization that
they need. This African epic is one of courage; but it is also one
of success. Nothing is more remarkable in Chaliand’s pages than
the portrayal of the awakening consciousness of ordinary men
and women, of their understanding of the need to accept any and
every personal sacrifice in order to change not only their own lives,
but the lives of their whole people. Nothing is more heartening
than the progress that he shows them as having made.
In these last few years, as Chaliand now reminds us, not far
short of forty percent of the Portuguese budget had to be spent
on “defense,” while the period of obligatory military service has
lately been increased to four years.
To anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the Portuguese
scene it will be obvious that this down-atthe-heel little country,
kept afloat by NATO military aid (now mainly from West Ger­
many) and by the grant of a privileged economic status within
the European Free Trade community, is being steadily impov­
erished even further by its three colonial wars. And the main
reason for this can only lie in the fighting success of the liberation
movements in Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique.
But the main reason why Chaliand’s book should be read is for
its eyewitness account of two weeks spent inside “Portuguese”
Guinea during the early summer of 1966. Together with the
leader of its liberation movement, the forceful and ever-realistic
Introduction by Basil Davidson
/ xi
Amilcar Cabral, Chaliand crossed Senegal and Gambia (and then
Senegal again) into the northern forests of Guinea on a tour of
inspection, moved around in the area northwest of the Geba River,
saw many guerrilla units and much of the movement’s political,
economic, and cultural work, and was able to record the views of
a number of rank-and-file fighters, commanders, and civilians.
The resulting picture, rich in detail, is a most valuable account
of a resistance movement in full and confident action. To the ex-
»
perienced eye, I think, this picture convincingly reveals a growth
and expansion of resistance (“terrorism,” in Portuguese terms)
from the early heroism of small and isolated handfuls of hopeful
men, hard-pressed and often terribly alone, to the installation of
strong “interior bases” and the concomitant appearance of civilian
organization in a liberated country.
To anyone who may still doubt whether Africans are “able” to
organize guerrilla warfare and to exploit their successes right
across the political spectrum, Chaliand’s book will prove a surprise.
What comes out of it is precisely the political competence of the
movement’s leadership and especially that of Cabral himself. There
was, according to this sober factual account, no mere plunging
ahead in the vague hope that the walls of Jericho would fall
before a trumpet blast. Armed resistance was launched in 1963
only after years of political study and preparation.
Cabral and his fellow leaders carried out a most careful analysis
of who was who, of the position of the Fulah and Mandingo
chiefs vis-à-vis their village clientele, of the social structure of the
town populations, of the opinions of those peoples who live in
segmentary societies without chiefs, notably the Balantes, and
of the ways in which Portuguese colonial exploitation actually
affected the daily life of the country.
When Chaliand wrote this book in 1966–67, the African Inde-
«
pendence Party of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC)
already controlled large rural areas from which they had chased
the Portuguese police and army, and where they were installing
their own new structures of independence. Now, two years later,
the PAIGC has extended this control and reconstruction to at
least two-thirds of the whole territory, and are driving the Portu­
guese out of their defensive camps and fortified garrisons. For