On 16 March 2023 ROAPE published a collection of essays on the revolutionary Amilcar Cabral with an introduction written by the editorial team on roape.net, Leo Zeilig, Chinedu Chukwudinma, and Ben Radley

“To mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s  murder in 1973, over the next four weeks, ROAPE will be re-posting a collection of essays paying tribute to Cabral. The collection was first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, and reflects on the extraordinary achievements of Cabral and his organisation PAIGC (the Partido Africano de Indendencia de Guine e Cabo Verde).

By Leo Zeilig, Chinedu Chukwudinma, and Ben Radley

In 1973, fifty years ago, Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the national revolution in Guinea and Cape Verde was murdered. For the next three weeks roape.net will be celebrating his contribution to radical political economy, Marxist and liberation politics in a series of blogposts. We will be republishing a tribute to Cabral that first appeared in our print journal thirty years ago.

Cabral was a unique thinker and fighter for African liberation, and emerged as a leading figure in the ‘second liberation’ struggles against Portuguese colonialism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the battle to liberate Guinea, Cabral argued for the need to detail one’s own reality and any revolution must be grounded in a concrete understanding of conditions on the ground.

Cabral’s Marxism emerged in part as a reaction to the failures of an earlier wave of national liberation in Africa. The apparent freedom of the first wave of independence had extended and, in some respects, strengthened foreign control of the continent…”

Read the full introduction and collection here.