Fighting Two Colonialisms

For the women of Guinea-Bissau

who continue the struggle for a new society
and for their equal place within it
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/fightingtwocolonOOOOurda
Fighting Two Colonialisms
Women in Guinea-Bissau
by Stephanie Urdang

Monthly Review Press

New York and London
Copyright (£) 1979 by Stephanie Urdang
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Urdang, Stephanie
Fighting two colonialisms.
1. Women—Guinea-Bissau. 2. Women’s rights—
Guinea-Bissau. 3. Guinea-Bissau—Colonial influence.
I. Title.
HQ1818.U69 301.41’2’096657 79-2329
ISBN 0-85345-511-2
ISBN 0-85345-524-4 paper

Monthly Review Press

62 West 14th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
47 Red Lion Street, London WClR 4PF

Manufactured in the United States of America

1098 76543 2 1
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 7

Introduction 13
Map 42

Part I In the Liberated Zones

Chapter 1
“NoPintcha!” 43

Chapter 2
“What can we consider better than freedom?” 57

Chapter 3
“A great deal of patience” 75

Chapter 4
“First it is the women who pound. . 101

Chapter 5
“We are part of the same fight” 119

5
6 Contents

Chapter 6
“Sold for a pig or a cow” 141

Chapter 7
“Our education has to be conditioned
by our life and history” 167

Chapter 8
“At the same time fighting
for personal independence” 193

Chapter 9
“The woman of today is a new woman
from the woman of yesterday” 237

Part II After Independence

Chapter 10
“We are not fighting for a piece of the pie. . 261

Chapter 11
“For our country to develop,
it must benefit from both men and women” 285

Notes 315
Preface and Acknowledgments
I can pinpoint the exact evening that my particular interest in
the role of women in Guinea-Bissau was aroused. Squashed in
the corner of a friend’s overcrowded car, I traveled through the
cold and snowy streets of New York City one late February night
in 1969, going home from a meeting. Amilcar Cabral was the
speaker, and he talked about the revolution his people were
fighting in Guinea-Bissau. I sat wrapped in emotions of elation
and respect, still new to the reality of such struggles, inspired
both by what was being achieved in the small African country
and by the extraordinary man we had met. Around me, my
equally excited friends discussed the impression that Cabral had
made on them. “But we must admit he is a good politician,” one
voice declared. “He said just what we wanted to hear about
women! No doubt he knows that this is a big issue in America at
the moment.” Her tone made it clear that she, at least, had not
been taken in.
I felt stung. Among Cabral’s many impressive traits were his
uncompromising honesty and the clarity of his political position.
Her words made no sense to me, and I retreated into my reverie—
tinged with decided romanticism—and thought about what he
7
8 Preface and Acknowledgments

had told us. During the informal meeting he had stressed the
need for women to be liberated in the process of revolution,
explaining that women were playing a fundamental role in the
struggle. “Women and men are equal partners in our struggle,”
he had said. But the remarks of my skeptical friend echoed
behind these words, making me determined to find out more.
Three years later, Cabral returned to New York, and once
again he spoke to a small gathering of supporters. Once again he
referred to the role of women. After the meeting a friend and I
asked him for more specifics about women’s participation. He
responded by taking a fat envelope of photographs out of his
brief case, and turning them over one by one, he pointed out the
women. This woman is a political commissar for the south front.
That woman teaches in a boarding school. Yet another is in
charge of the radio broadcasts. Many are nurses, he said, many
are health workers, others are in the army. His pride and pleasure
in sharing this with us was obvious and convinced me further
that he was not pandering to the American left. But fifteen
minutes’ conversation could not go beyond the superficial.
At the time the thought of visiting Guinea-Bissau and seeing
the revolution for myself could not have been further from my
mind. That idea was planted some nine months later when I
attended the tenth anniversary of the Organization of African
Unity in Addis Ababa in 1973. It was there that I was first invited
to visit as a journalist by the head of the liberation movement
(PAIGC) delegation.
A number of journalists (although few from the United States)
traveled into the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau during the
war years and reported on the conditions they found there: the
schools, the hospitals, the people’s stores, the systems of local
and regional government. Particularly they related the support
of the people for the struggle, evidenced in numerous ways, and
they confirmed PAIGC’s claim that they controlled two-thirds of
the country, a claim so hotly denied by the Portuguese govern¬
ment and its allies. If I went, I decided, I wanted to do more than
add to these accounts. My idea was to write about the process of
the revolution and its effect on the people of Guinea-Bissau,
taking one aspect of the revolution and through it trying to
elucidate the whole process. Both the memory of Cabral’s empha-
 Preface and Acknowledgments 9

sis on the equal role of women in his country and my own

growing commitment to the women’s movement turned my idea
into intention. And it was for permission to do this that I asked in
my written application sent on my return to the United States.
My interest in Guinea-Bissau, however, had a longer history
than my identification with the women’s movement. My opposi¬
tion to the bitter oppression and brutality of the apartheid
regime had made me decide to leave my country, South Africa,
in 1967. After immigrating to the United States, I began to work
with southern Africa liberation support groups, most particularly
with the Southern Africa Committee in New York. Concerned by
the, chronic lack of information on the situation in southern
Africa and U.S. involvement there, we began to publish Southern
Africa, which over the years developed into a monthly news
magazine and through which I was able to follow events on the
subcontinent. (Although located in West Africa, Guinea-Bissau
was included within the political boundaries of southern Africa
because of its status as a Portuguese colony.)
But while my overall knowledge of the Guinea-Bissau revolu¬
tion was fairly extensive by 1974, prior to my visit I had little
concrete information about the role of women: a published inter¬
view here, a statement there, a comment in a speech of a leader.
All these pointed to an active role for women, but for me the
burning questions began with how? How does a liberation
movement in one of the smallest, poorest, and least developed
countries of the world put such a program into practice? How
does the movement begin the process of change, given the
attitudes firmly embedded in the minds of both men and women
of Guinea-Bissau that are counter to the idea of an emancipated
woman? How, on a day-to-day level, does this effect the lives of
the people?
These were questions that could not be answered from a
distance, and they led me to cable my acceptance of PAIGC’s
formal invitation, to fit myself out with surplus U.S. army
uniforms and French canvas and rubber tropical boots, to walk
miles each day through the icy streets of a New York winter in
the hope of getting fit enough for the long marches through the
hot and muggy forests of the liberated zones, and to finally set off
for the headquarters of PAIGC in April 1974.
10 Preface and Acknowledgments

I was accompanied by more than my uniforms, my cameras

and film, my small cassette tape recorder and tapes, and my new
spiral notebooks: I took my own preconceptions of what I would
find there. It may not be possible to go to another society without
taking expectations colored by one’s own experience, which in
turn color the perceptions of the society. In my case I was
traveling from a highly developed society to one of the most
undeveloped; from the core of capitalism to a small revolu¬
tionary country that had more than a few lessons to offer the
former. While preconceptions are inevitable, I hoped that I
could be open enough to learn from what I saw and adjust as I
went along.
By the time I arrived, the country had been proclaimed a state
by the liberation movement but the war itself showed every sign
of continuing well into the future. I anticipated that I would be
observing a typical few weeks in a protracted war. I was wrong.
While I was deep inside the country the fascist government of
Caetano fell, and by the time I left negotiations for independence
had begun.
I was a guest of PAIGC for two months, from mid-April to
mid-June 1974, of which five weeks were spent in the liberated
zones—three and a half weeks in the south front and ten days in
the east. The rest of the time was spent in Boke, a border town in
neighboring Guinea (Conakry)—the site of the PAIGC adminis¬
trative center, Solidarity Hospital, and a nursing school—and in
Conakry, where the movement’s headquarters had been establish
ed at the beginning of the struggle. Independence, which came
in September the same year, allowed me to return to a totally
liberated country, and for two and a half months, between June
and August 1976,1 traveled extensively throughout the country,
beginning in Bissau, the capital.
| In Guinea-Bissau I found what I had hoped to find: that the
{liberation of women is an explicit and integral part of the overall
|revolution. At the same time, it is considered a protracted
struggle to be waged by the women themselves. As such, it
would continue long after independence had been won. It was
never implied that their liberation would conveniently materi¬
alize at that time, “because now everybody is free.”
This is what this book is about: the way in which theory is put
 Preface and Acknowledgments 11

into practice so that it becomes a reality for both the women and
the men, and the way in which the women themselves have
taken up the fight against their own oppression. I have tried to
convey the special conditions of Guinea-Bissau, so that the
context of revolutionary practice can be better appreciated. Even
at times when I disagreed with a particular method, I generally
came to understand why it had been chosen consciously. I hope
in telling of this story, women in different parts of the world will
find aspects which are relevant and applicable to their own
struggle. Most particularly, I hope that they will appreciate that
without the basic principle of a total revolutionary process, true
liberation for women cannot be acheived.
What follows are my own observations and my own under¬
standing of the revolution in Guinea-Bissau. From this experi¬
ence I personally learned lessons that had a profound impact on
my view of the world and of revolution in general. For this I have
much to thank the women of Guinea-Bissau, especially those
who can be found in the pages of this book, who patiently
showed me their revolution—in and out of war—and explained
how and why they are doing what they are doing in the context
of their own experience and social conditions.
I wish I could be confident that I have done justice to their
revolution and their courage. For while the struggle is not
romantic, it is certainly heroic.

May 1979

First and foremost I want to thank the many people in Guinea-

Bissau who so patiently showed me their revolution and assisted
this project in numerous ways. Particularly, I want to thank
Teodora Ignacia Gomes, who spared no effort in her determina¬
tion to have me understand their struggle. I must, however, take
full credit for the misconceptions and misrepresentations.
It is hard to single out a few of the large number of friends who
aided this project in different ways. The manuscript was read at
various stages by Eve Hall, Hermione Harris, Janet Siskind,
Jennifer Davis, and Brian. Their comments and criticisms were
crucial in helping me shape this book into its present form. I
12 Preface and Acknowledgments

especially value their input because of the sustained support

and encouragement that came with it. Again, I must take respon¬
sibility for the failings. Thanks, too, for the same support and
encouragement—essential to get and keep me going—to my
“Friday night comrades,” to Kered Boyd, and to Suzette Abbot,
who also gave hours of her time to both print a number of my
photographs and to teach me how to do them myself. I appreciate
the care taken by Karen Judd, my editor at Monthly Review,
which enabled the final rewrite to be surprisingly painless.
This project would not have been possible without the finan¬
cial support I received from a number of sources. I want to
express my sincere gratitude to the following:
The Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, whose grant enabled
me to finish the book without having to expend precious time
seeking a salary; Carol Bernstein Ferry and W. H. Ferry, whose
generosity supported the major part of my expenses for both
trips to Guinea-Bissau. Other assistance came from the Women’s
Division of the United Methodist Church, the Center for Social
Action of the United Church of Christ, and Peter Weiss through
the Fund for Tomorrow.
Introduction
It is easy to miss the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, when glancing
casually over a map of Africa. But taking a closer look, it can be
found on the west coast of that vast continent—a small wedge of
a country, separating for a short distance the border between the
two infinitely larger territories of Senegal to the north and the
Republic of Guinea (Conakry)* to the south. Off its coast are a
spattering of small islands, while the wedge itself is cracked by
rivers that cover its surface. The jagged outline of Guinea-Bissau
on the map lends itself to a caricature of the late-nineteenth-
century “scramble for Africa’’: Portugal barely managing to grab
a bite of the enormous West African pie, spilling crumbs in its
haste, before France and Britain push their way in and greedily
slice up the area between them.
Ninety years were to pass before Portugal had to give up even
this portion of Africa. But this time it was the people who finally
pushed: led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea

*Guinea-Bissau is bordered by the Republic of Guinea, the ex-French colony,

whose capital is Conakry. In order to avoid confusion I will refer to this country
as Guinea (Conakry). However “Guinea” or “Guinean” used alone, refers to the
Republic of Guinea-Bissau.

13
14 Introduction

and Cape Verde (PAIGC), they pushed out the Portuguese in

1974, after fighting a guerrilla war for eleven and a half years.
PAIGC was founded by Amilcar Cabral and a group of his com¬
rades in Bissau, the capital, in the mid fifties, a time when
negotiations for the independence of many of Africa’s colonies
were in progress. This period formed a prelude to the 1960s,
which will be remembered as the decade of independence for
most of Africa. But markedly absent in that burst of independence
were the colonies of Portugal. Early efforts by PAIGC to negotiate
independence for Guinea failed, and both independence and
liberation had to be fought for—by protracted armed struggle.
The war began early in 1963, and ended in 1974, when Por¬
tugal recognized the independent Republic of Guinea-Bissau.
Amilcar Cabral was not among those celebrating the small
country’s victory, however. He had been assassinated just one
and a half years earlier in an unsuccessful effort by the colonialists
to stem the PAIGC successes in winning the support of the people.
Cabral’s contribution to the struggle lay not only in his excep¬
tional leadership qualities, but in his theoretical formulations,
firmly rooted in the African experience. It was these, as well as
his ability to develop the strategies to transform theory into
practice, that continued long after his death, and allowed the
reverberations of the revolution to be felt far beyond the country’s
borders, from one end of Africa to the other, and throughout the
third world.
Despite its size—only some 14,000 square miles—Guinea-
Bissau now represents a significant new stream in African history
and politics, due primarily to the nature of its liberation move¬
ment. For the first time in the history of sub-Saharan Africa
a guerrilla movement forced a colonial power to withdraw.
Moreover, that liberation movement, along with FRELIMO of
Mozambique and MPLA of Angola*, was instrumental in the
downfall of the fascist government of Portugal itself. Yet another
dimension of this movement increased the importance of its
revolution: its ideology. Armed struggle and defeat of the colo-

*The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the Front for
the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led the struggles against Portuguese
colonialism in their respective countries. They share with PAIGC a similar
ideology and practice, and all three have been closely related since their inception.
 Introduction 15

nialists was not the ultimate goal; rather, the overall perspective
of the PAIGC embraced the need simultaneously to pick up arms
and to build a new, nonexploitative society.
This dual goal required an intensive period of political mobi¬
lization, before and throughout the war, for Guinea’s people,
95 percent of whom were peasants. The war of liberation thus
enabled PAIGC to define its own terms for independence: a
revolutionary society based on a socialist path of development.
“Liberation of the people means the liberation of the productive
forces of our country,” explained Amilcar Cabral, “the liqui¬
dation of all kinds of imperialist or colonial domination in
our country, and the taking of every measure to avoid any
new exploitation of our people. We don’t confuse exploitation
with the color of one’s skin. We want equality, social justice,
and freedom.”1
This book focuses on the way in which PAIGC ideology inte- f
grates the emancipation of women into the total revolution; the!
way it emphasizes the need for women to play an equal political,w
economic, and social role in both the armed struggle and the
construction of the new society. Central to this is PAIGC’s
understanding that the liberation struggle must be waged by the
women themselves. It is an analysis which grew out of the
recognition that women suffer a dual oppression, expressed in
Guinea-Bissau as the need for women to “fight against two
colonialisms—the one of the Portuguese and the other of men.”
What constitutes oppression? I think if a group, class, or
nationality does not have control over its destiny, does not have
the possibility to fulfill its potential, then it is oppressed. If a
group, class, or nationality is dominated by another, then it is
oppressed. The key to the perpetuation of such oppression is the
ability of the oppressor to persuade the oppressed to cooperate
in their servitude. This phenomenon is not confined to male-
female relations, of course, but it remains a distinct and funda¬
mental element in those relationships in any society. And, since
oppression revolves around a calculated notion of the inferiority
of the oppressed, which serves the oppressor’s need to dominate
and exploit, it is under capitalism that one finds this cultivated
to the extreme; a marked feature of capitalism, being both male
dominated and exploitative, is sexism.
16 Introduction

This is not to suggest that socialist countries, or those in the

process of building socialism, are not male dominated: women
generally are as conspicuously absent in the high levels of
government, and hence decision-making, as they are in capi¬
talist societies. But in assessing the potential for change, it is
necessary to look at the differences between the two systems,
and the foundations upon which they rest.
The need to exploit workers is structurally inherent in capital¬
ism, which relies on a vast reserve labor pool as a device to hold
down wages. If one group becomes absorbed into the workforce—
a particular group of immigrants, for instance—there must be
others to fill the gap—migrants, say, or ethnic minorities. Because
of women’s subordinate social position in society, they are the
most threatened or vulnerable workers within any such group,
and they end up being paid the more miserable wages. Women
thus form an exploited subgroup in any labor reserve, constant
across particular ethnic or other groupings. Since it is convenient
to capitalism to have this subgroup as a cheap labor reserve,
capitalism will energetically resist equality for women. Equality
would not only remove this cheap labor reserve from the market,
it would challenge the capitalists’ ability to control production
by manipulating the workforce. Equality, moreover, is potentially
destructive to the socioeconomrc^Eric'of thfiqjatriarchal society
by which capitalism is reproduced.
The revolutionary third world society that Guinea-Bissau en¬
visions, by contrast, has no historically vested interest in sexism;
it does not need divisions among the workers, it does not need
unemployment. Rather, it needs the unified efforts of all, and
egalitarianism, both economic and cultural, is not incompatible
with its goals. Hence it is possible for women’s emancipation to
be national policy, encouraged by government and party as part
of the overall process of social transformation. Women’s organi¬
zations can be supported with government resources, and women
can participate at all levels of government and party work
and decision-making, for the very reason that their liberation
is viewed as essential for the advancement of the society as
a whole. This is by no means automatic to socialism, of course,
or to Guinea-Bissau. The conditions there make the women’s
struggle possible, but a conscious commitment is needed, from
 Introduction 17

both party and people, to counter the oppression of women

as women and to overcome attitudes inherent in this form
of oppression.
This commitment can be seen in the creativity with which the
PAIGC has attacked problems that touched on the very core of
the lives of the people. Its leaders did not stand back as moralistic
observers, passing judgment on the social relations that exist
among the people; they moved in partisan but sensitive ways to
set in motion processes of change.
In Guinea-Bissau we can see the process of liberation develop—
but the key word is “process.” The oppression of women is not
dissolving before our eyes, but slowly—“step by step,” to use a
favorite Guinean phrase—it is being overcome. The chapters
that follow look at this process during two phases in the history
of Guinea-Bissau’s revolution: the first, the period of armed
struggle, occupies the major portion of the book, while the
second and transitional stage, the period immediately after in¬
dependence, is discussed in less detail, having only just begun.
Early in the first stage, PAIGC showed a consciousness of the
fact that women’s liberation had to be fought on two fronts—
.from above and from below. Party pronouncements in them¬
selves were insufficient: it was essential that women themselves
take up the issue, so that liberation would be truly theirs. An
essential element of this is that women raise their own demands.
If they do not, it seems unlikely that the men or the top leadership
of the state and party—almost totally male—will do it for them.
From the outset this leadership stated clearly that women’s
liberation, like any freedom, is not given. It is a right, but it has to
be taken. This is probably as much as can be expected. Women
are just beginning to take men to task for their sexist attitudes.
As they grow stronger, these same male leaders might be in
for quite a shock. But their statements, that women make their
own demands, while they give a certain legitimacy to women’s
actions that no doubt threaten men, can be uttered too easily. It is
necessary to balance three elements: what the party or state
proposes; how women respond to such proposals in order to
strengthen and extend them; what the women themselves initiate
and demand from their own experience. There is a limit, for
instance, to the power of laws if women themselves do not
18 Introduction

challenge the men who can be sanctioned under them. On the

other hand, all elements together will be necessary to engineer
the profound structural changes needed to have an impact on
the relations of production—a facet of the revolution that in the
end may have the most far-reaching effect on the actual condi¬
tions of women’s lives.
My trip to the liberated zones gave me a sense of the strides
that were being made in changing the lives of peasant women—
some 95 percent of the women in the country. I felt that the
personal development of peasant women, due to conscious efforts
to liberate their productive capacities, would continue to ad¬
vance, that more and more girls would go to school, thereby
securing the trend toward liberation for the coming generations,
and that attitudes of both women and men would continue to
change. But I sensed too that the next qualitative step forward for
women could occur only when the sexual division of labor
begins to change, when men are no longer “helping” women in
their work, when the heavy burden of production is shifted to
rest more equally on the shoulders of both men and women.
Evidence of the kind of fundamental obstacles to full libera¬
tion, as well as of the efforts of women and party to overcome
them, can be seen in the changing customs considered oppressive
to women, such as forced marriage, denial of divorce rights to
women, and polygyny.* In Guinea-Bissau the labor of women
provides the foundation for the economy. Women make up the
bulk of the agricultural workforce, in a country in which agri¬
culture is the mainstay of the economy. The customs defining
their roles and rights were firmly embedded in the life of the
people, and inextricably intertwined with the village economy.
Such customs have survived not because they provided the basis
for the most efficient economy, but because the economy which
they supported was a viable one. And once viable, there was
little internal demand for further adaptation. Polygyny was not

‘Polygyny (as opposed to polygamy) refers to the practice in which a man

marries more than one wife; polyandry to that where a woman marries more than
one man. Polygamy refers to the custom in which either a man or a woman can
marry more than one spouse. Although polygyny was the norm in Guinea-Bissau,
when quoting sources that have used "polygamy,” I have retained this term.
 Introduction 19

the only way that a man gained many workers for his land, but it
was one way. The bride-price provided compensation for the
worker that a father was about to lose through the marriage and
thus fitted into the economic reality of village life. Divorce for
women was out of the question in this context, as the whole
system would founder if women were free to dissolve their
marriages. Those who ran away had to leave their children
behind. If they had no children, their families would have to
return the bride-price.
These customs not only served to produce workers and the
next generation of workers, they provided a system of social
security for village life, an environment for mutual responsibility
among the women. Women who were ill were looked after by
other women. Children whose mother had died were cared for
by her co-wives or husband’s relatives. At harvesting time all the
women pooled their labor to help each other bring in the harvest.
Such customs, while restricting, enabled a particular economic
system to work.
All of this makes it enormously difficult to bring these practices
to an end. However strongly PAIGC felt about the destructive
nature of the three customs, they could not, as Cabral was wont
to say, pass a decree and outlaw them. Instead they began the
process of political education directed toward the goal of total
social transformation, the only way to remove the conditions
which engendered oppressive social practices in the first place.
The pace PAIGC set is well reflected in a comment of the com¬
missioner of justice*: “We have to move, but we have to move
slowly or the people will turn against us.”
No simple task. For women, less willing to cooperate in their
oppression, it has been relatively easier. The awareness that comes
from oppression made many women quick to respond to the pos¬
sibility of a life that did not bind them in prescribed ways. It was
this awareness that prompted an old peasant woman to grab the
arm of a visitor and say, “If you think that our society gave us the
education to accept polygyny emotionally, you are wrong.”

*In Guinea-Bissau the term commisdrio (commissioner) is used in place of

“minister.” This has been adopted to avoid the sense of overall authority which
PAIGC feels is implied in the term “minister.”
20 Introduction

For men it was a totally different matter. They had everything

to lose and, as far as they could see, little to gain. For a peasant
boy growing up in a village both his social experience and his
social expectations were determined by what he saw around
him; the way he would choose his wife, the status he would gain
through the inferior position of women as well as his status in
relation to other men, the wealth he might accumulate, or the
political power he might acquire. The pattern was set early and
was acceptable to him. After all, it was all he knew, all he
expected. And it was satisfying. The economy was organized in
his best interests, with the consequence that women were re¬
duced as low as men rose high.
With the political mobilization undertaken by PAIGC, all this
was challenged. What started as a struggle to overthrow the
brutal and oppressive colonialist regime quickly developed into
a process of total social transformation, and men began to see
that so long as they had a vested interest in maintaining the old
social order, they would lose out. The social structure which
had been the secure foundation of their everyday life must
have suddenly seemed fragile. PAIGC supported women in
challenging this older order, and women, in return, actively
sought support from PAIGC.
The changes that occurred in the years that followed—and
described in the body of this book—might look insignificant to
an outside observer. But in this context, they are dramatic.
Dramatic, yet only the beginning. With independence came
the urgent need to wrest an impoverished nation from a condi¬
tion of almost total underdevelopment. What models did the
leaders have? One might imagine they could look to those
African states that had achieved independence a good ten to
fifteen years earlier, but such examples tend to be negative,
showing what not to do. Before considering the direction that
PAIGC and the state are taking in their development programs,
therefore, it may be useful to look briefly at the experience of
neocolonial Africa, particularly as it relates to the effect of
development on women.
Throughout Africa the new nations continued for the most
part along the paths of development laid down by the colonizing
 Introduction 21

powers, that is, directed primarily toward export production. At

best, the new rulers were granted a small share in the wealth that
kept flowing into Europe and the United States. This orientation
has consequences for education, industrialization, and other
aspects of development. For many this is a surprising realization.
To most people, the concept of development connotes the idea of
“improvement.” “Modernization” should free the peasants from
backbreaking toil. Education should help those unfortunates in
illiterate societies to join the wide world. But it is becoming
increasingly apparent that while “development” has benefited
the elites of neocolonial countries, not to mention the capitalist
investors, it has done little to improve the lives of the peasants—
i.e., the majority of Africa’s people. And, as is also becoming
clear, development has done even less to improve the lot of the
women, those most responsible for agricultural production.
Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, continues to be de¬
pendent on the labor of women to feed the people. But it is not
the women who have benefited from the training programs.
Seldom have they had their heavy burden lightened by mecha-
j nized methods of production, or have they been educated for
alternative work. Rather, they continue to work as their mothers
and grandmothers before them, using time-honored, if generally
j inefficient, techniques to produce barely enough to feed their
families. Despite women’s greater role in agricultural produc¬
tion, it is the men who are placed in specially designed training
programs and who apply their newly acquired skills to the
production of cash crops rather than subsistence crops. These
methods enable the male cultivators to increase their produc¬
tivity and to gain access to cash. Women, on the other hand,
continue to produce food to feed their husbands and children,
get no cash rewards, and hence become even more dependent on
the men as their society changes its role in the world market.
The new techniques, along with cash payment for their crops,
serves to increase the gap in status between men and women.
For instance, it is the women who continue to spread manure to
fertilize their crops, just as they continue to carry loads on their
heads as they make their way on foot over long distances. Nearby
the men are quickly spreading chemical fertilizers, and when
22 Introduction

their field work is done can be seen riding bicycles and even
trucks to transport their goods.
An important part of development is education. Most neo¬
colonial states have managed to improve upon the poor record
of the colonial powers in providing schools, and along with
schools have come new training programs. But the schoolrooms
see far more boys than girls. The girls are needed at home to help
their mothers with women’s work, so that parents are less than
eager to send them to school. This is compounded by the fact
that girls are expected to marry young and to bring in a bride-
price. What use then, a girl’s parents will argue, is education to a
daughter who will leave her father’s village for her husband’s
village and so take the benefits of her education away with her?
The investment made in her education will not help the parents
when they grow old, as will the education of her brothers.
The percentage of girls in school has remained very low in the
rural areas of Africa. Those who do go to school find a divided
curriculum, with different subjects for girls and boys. This edu¬
cation and the assumptions of a girl’s inferiority reinforce the
attitudes that the girls take with them into the classroom from
their homes, namely, that men are superior, have more initiative,
and are expected to take on positions of responsibility and
authority. Such attitudes continue to plague them when they
leave school and try to enter the labor market.
Few women can be found in the growing industrial sector
because jobs are being reserved for men. There is a widespread
belief in many countries that industrialization must reach a
certain level before “womanpower” can be utilized. Otherwise,
women will be taking jobs away from men. But in fact, the
planners need hardly worry. Without the education or political
education that emphasizes the right for women to join the
productive forces outside of the village, there are not large
numbers of women waiting to push men out of their jobs.
Women have been conditioned sufficiently not to venture too far
outside the home. When they do enter the industrial sector, it is
as lower paid workers, doing the most unskilled of work, filling
vacancies left by the advancement of men. With insufficient
education or training provided to equip them with the kind of
 Introduction 23

skills needed to secure jobs in the modern sector, a pattern

emerges in which men are becoming more qualified, while
women lag further and further behind.
Those few women, particularly urban-born or -raised women,
who do break into the more skilled professions tend to gravi¬
tate almost exclusively toward the two professions considered
socially appropriate for respectable young ladies: nursing and
teaching. The work of nurses—taking care of people—is regarded
as an extension of women’s role as mothers, while that of
teaching keeps them in the school, in contact only with their
pupils and the few other teachers. It does not bring them into the
predominantly male life of the towns.2
The recurring lack of emphasis on the need for development
programs to benefit women is linked to the poverty of these
nations and to women’s role in agricultural production. Sub¬
sistence agriculture based on women’s unpaid labor feeds most
of the people, but produces no visible income for the individual
or the state. Cash crops, on the other hand, particularly such
crops as cotton, coffee, or peanuts, can be exported to bring in
foreign exchange. Any form of assistance that a government
gives the cash-crop farmers—who are invariably male—is seen
as an investment. Most governments want to be sure that this
sector shows increasing returns, and so are willing to provide
farmers with such incentives as seeds, mechanization, fertilizers,
and loans for improvements. So long as women’s work continues
to feed the workers and their children, however badly, without
outside incentives, many governments are happy to leave them
to their own devices.
This depressing pattern can be traced through most of Africa,
as one surveys the effects of the first few decades of independence
from British and French rule. But while these manifestations of
“development” are so widely prevalent, they are not inevitable.
To look for more hopeful programs we must look away from the
Senegals, the Ivory Coasts, the Kenyas of Africa, and toward
such countries as Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau,
trying—or beginning to try—against huge odds to reconstruct
their war-torn economies while improving rather than sacrificing
the conditions of the masses of the people.
24 Introduction

Since the percentage of peasants is particularly high in Guinea-

Bissau, the battle to increase rural production is crucial. Growth
has had to begin, however, from a devastatingly underdeveloped
situation. When the Portuguese finally left, the PAIGC govern¬
ment inherited an economy that was one of the poorest in Africa,
and peculiarly distorted by colonialism, having come to depend
for its viability on infusions of cash from Lisbon. This relatively
recent paradoxical situation stemmed from Portugal’s last-ditch
efforts to compete with the guerrillas, who in the latter years of
the war set up an alternative economy, based on agricultural
self-sufficiency, in the liberated zones. The Portuguese counter¬
attack, which paid inflated salaries to Guineans connected with
the administration even as the prices of basic commodities were
set artificially low, drained the treasury. Meanwhile, whereas
the movement had managed to feed its supporters in the liberated
zones and even to export small quantities of rice, the colonialists,
having lost most of the rural areas and hence both staple and
export crops, had been forced to import rice to feed the half of the
population they controlled. This left the new regime with still
another credit problem, because the Portuguese had been paying
fifteen escudos per kilo of rice and then reselling it for seven
escudos, in response to competition from PAIGC.
Compounding the fiscal morass, independence also brought
massive relocations of the population: refugees returned from
Senegal and neighboring French Guinea: peasants who had
fled to the towns to avoid the bombing returned to their old
villages; and the people in the liberated zones, who to lessen
the impact of the bombs had established their villages in frag¬
ments in the forests, moved back onto their own land. The
priority of all these groups was to reestablish their homes, and
agricultural production suffered a great setback as a result.
Thus, in the first year of independence, PAIGC had to import
90 percent of the national food supply—and this without any
way of earning foreign currency.
In every area then—education, justice, public works, com¬
munications, people’s stores and town markets, health, housing,
city and town government—new systems have to be developed.
The bureaucracy inherited from the colonialists had to be dis-
 Introduction 25

mantled and replaced with a government based on the ideology

of PAIGC. As I was shown the difficulties confronting PAIGC, in
every sector of the society I recalled words of Amilcar Cabral,
which took on sharper meaning for me now that I could attach
them to real conditions:

Keep always in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for
things in anyone’s head. They are fighting . . . for material benefits,
to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee
the future of their children. National liberation, war on colonialism,
building of peace and progress, independence—all that will remain
meaningless for the people unless it brings a real improvement in
conditions of life.3

On, another occasion, speaking to a visitor to the liberated

zones in 1967, Cabral identified who precisely should be the
main beneficiaries of the fruits of progress:

We shall put our whole priority on agriculture. That means more

than cultivation. That means realizing what people can do, can
actually do. That’s a question of village democracy, of village
schools, of village clinics, of village cooperation. . . . The general
approach that we have is that all structural decisions are to be
based on the needs and conditions of the peasantry, who are the
vast majority of our people.4

In order to implement Cabral’s vision, PAIGC now insists that

even though it has the greatest concentration of population, the
Bissau urban area should not be made the focus of development,
draining the resources from the rural areas. Consequently, while
the administration and the government have been centralized
in the capital, the regions have been given considerable autono¬
my, and the development of the rural economy is seen as para¬
mount. “We have seen how capitals have been developed in
other parts of Africa,” one leader told me, “to the detriment of
the people. Where just kilometers outside of the towns people
have never seen a car or hardly know that the government has
become ‘independent.’ We must be able to learn from other
people’s mistakes.”
The decentralization of the country and the deemphasis of the
city of Bissau are now the subjects of policy speeches by mem-
26 Introduction

bers of the government. “What we want to do is to develop our

country from the villages to the towns, not the other way round,”
Luiz Cabral, president of independent Guinea-Bissau said at
independence. “We intend that our reconstruction shall continue
to give primacy to the people of the villages. First and foremost,
we also want them to see concrete gains from their struggle in
their own villages, in the lives of their own families. For it
is they who have fought hardest and suffered most during this
long struggle.”5
The liberation struggle now continues on a different front.
The priority has shifted from winning a war to increasing agri¬
cultural production—not only to feed the people but to provide
necessary capital for agricultural and industrial development.
Despite the long, hard hours spent in the fields, Guinea-Bissau is
still unable to produce enough to feed all of its people. While
the problem has decreased considerably since that first post¬
independence year, the goal of reaching prewar production of
120,000 tons of raw rice (representing about 90,000 tons for
internal consumption, the balance for export) has not yet been
achieved. The year 1977 was projected as the one in which
sufficient rice would be grown for domestic needs. But the
vagaries of nature intervened and 1977 brought a severe drought.
Despite this, rice imports did not exceed those of the previous
year, but the goal of self-sufficiency had to be put forward a few
years. This graphically illustrated the unavoidable risks involved
in depending on agriculture in such an undeveloped situation.
Such dependence may lessen in time, when systems of irrigation
are extended throughout the country.
In the years immediately following independence three forms
of agricultural production could be discerned: subsistence,
state farms, and state supported cooperatives. The basic unit of
production remained the village, much as it had been during the
war. While collective work was seen as a future goal, the precise
form it would take was not yet spelled out. Other innovations
were instituted but were still very much in experimental and
embryonic stages.
Today, while subsistence agriculture remains the work of
women, PA1GC has begun transforming the traditional methods
 Introduction 27

of cultivation as well as providing impetus for increased pro¬

duction—in particular, by sharply increasing the price of rice
and peanuts. One of the ways that PAIGC’s approach to change
stands out from that of their neocolonial neighbors lies in politi¬
cal mobilization. As in all work of PAIGC, political education is
seen as an essential part of the process of introducing new
techniques and an essential element in preparing the people for
future collectivization.
The introduction of small dams to supplement the natural
irrigation of the rice fields is an example. In each case a party
political worker would go to the proposed site and call meetings
of the villagers who worked the rice fields. The discussion
would not be limited to the benefits of dams to production, but
would stress the building of solidarity and unity among the
villages. Since dams were to be used by the different villages of
the district, the party worker stressed the need for collective
construction. Once the project was begun it would present a
concrete lesson in the advantages of such work.6
While collective work is seen as an eventual goal, movement
toward that goal has been slow. During the armed struggle
Cabral stressed the move to collective agriculture as fundamental.
He told a group of cadres:

Regardless of their specific responsibilities, comrades everywhere

in our organization should help our people to organize collective
fields. This is a great experiment for our future, comrades. Those
who do not yet understand this have not understood anything of
our struggle, however much they have fought and however heroic
they may have been.7

Cabral’s concern notwithstanding, the way in which collective

fields will be organized has not yet been specified. PAIGC’s
stated intention is to use the examples provided by dam construc¬
tion as well as those provided on state farms and cooperatives
to demonstrate slowly to the peasants the value of collective
work. Their experience has shown that transformation will take
hold only when the peasants fully understand the need for
change in a particular area—be it picking up arms, relinquishing
polygyny, or working collectively. PAIGC leaders express hesi-
28 Introduction

tation in rushing the process, referring to the fact that among the
people’s very recent memories of Portuguese colonialism is the
practice of forced labor. Cautious about the risk of failure and
intent on preserving people’s support, PAIGC is approaching
such problems of transformation “step by step.’’
Meanwhile the government is beginning to establish state
farms, with the goal of one per region. The farms will be run
by technical directors appointed by the government and staffed
by paid workers from the locality. Both traditional and experi¬
mental crops will be grown, the proceeds from sale going
directly to the government, which in turn covers the costs of
wages and running the farm. By 1978 a number of state farms,
still relatively small in size, were in operation.
The organization of the state-supported cooperatives differs
from that of the farms, as workers are not paid but will generate
their own incomes from the sale of crops; this money will also
support the cost of the cooperative. In the initial stages, until the
farms can be self-sufficient, the workers will be remunerated by
the state. Cooperatives were still in the planning stages in 1978,
with only one or two in operation. Similar cooperatives, how¬
ever, have been set up for members of the national army. The end
of the war meant a much smaller army was needed to defend the
country, but because of extensive unemployment and the desire
to build upon their political commitment, PAIGC soldiers were
not simply demobilized. Instead they have the opportunity on
state cooperatives not only to work productively but also to
demonstrate the benefits of shared work to the population.
The emphasis of preparatory political work has meant that
the government has been moving slowly in implementing tech¬
nological changes, and economic problems have also hampered
the process in both the agricultural and the industrial sectors. In
the agricultural sector electrification projects, irrigation schemes,
new techniques when viable (such as tractors) are being intro¬
duced with foreign aid. A number of schemes are getting off the
ground, but most are still in the planning stages.
In the industrial sector the state has had little choice but to
proceed slowly. It did not have the option of expanding existing
industry in the hope of increasing exports. There was no industry,
 Introduction 29

or as good as none, and the few factories that did exist were
ill-suited to building a new society.* The new government has
resisted the temptation to rush ahead and industrialize some
more obvious resources, such as the considerable bauxite reserves
left untouched by the Portuguese. Guinea-Bissau planners have
avoided seeking an infusion of foreign finance capital to establish
export-oriented industry, recognizing that although this may
quickly produce profits and foreign exchange it also introduces
new inequalities. The preference has been to seek foreign aid to
assist in carefully planned industrial development that will
support the policy of giving priority to the rural areas and
agriculture. Projections include small factories in the rural areas
rather than only in the towns. Some new factories will be tied
into agriculture—a new fruit juice and preserve factory is one—
while others are designed to produce goods that will reduce the
need to import commodities. The commissioner of industry,
Filinto Vaz Martins, explained the planning perspective to
a visitor:

Previously rice was the most important import article. But because
production has increased strongly it does not play such an im¬
portant role any longer. The third largest group of commodities
that are imported are clothes and cloth. But we shall try to do
something about that. Cotton in itself is cheap, but the finished
cloth is very expensive. We will start by building a factory (for
which Norway has promised us money), that can weave cloth
from imported thread. In two years time, we will build a factory
that can spin thread from imported raw cotton. Later we hope the
development of agriculture will enable us to produce the cotton
we need. There are good possibilities for growing cotton in
Guinea-Bissau. Originally the peasants grew some cotton, but the

*The most prized of the Portuguese factories was the one producing beer,
completed just before the end of the war. Employing seventy people, it had the
capacity to supply a never-ending stream of beer to the 40,000 bored and
disgruntled Portuguese troops stationed and fighting in the country. The only
other factory dated back fifteen years, employed one hundred and forty people,
and processed peanut oil, well below production capacity of the country.
Besides these one might add the few small rice and peanut shelters, a number of
saw mills, a few carpentry and furniture shops, a small brickmaking concern that
supplied bricks for the shipyards, and one seamstress shop with twenty-seven
sewing machines for shirts and other clothes.8
30 Introduction

Portuguese forced them to grow groundnuts instead. In this way

we hope gradually to eliminate clothes and cloth from our imports.
Agricultural tools and iron for construction work have also been
important import commodities. We shall try to change this first by
building a small foundry that can utilize the scrap that was left by
the Portuguese. We have 20,000 tons of scrap iron from, e.g., cars
that were left over the whole country as a result of the war. We will
produce quite simple, non-automatic agricultural tools. And when
the scrap has been used up, we will import raw iron which is not so
expensive. In this way we can get a local technical development,
and we only need to import cheap raw materials.9

A number of factories have been established and others have been

planned, geared toward simultaneously promoting industrializa¬
tion and saving foreign currency.* In addition, the establishment
of fisheries is planned to produce fish for both internal consump¬
tion and export, as the coastal waters are particularly rich in fish.
The handling of bauxite exploitation provides an example of
the party approach to industrialization. Bauxite is the only known
mineral resource that the country has in any quantity, although
there has been some exploration for offshore oil. The government
is not hurrying to mine what promises in the future to be a good
source of income, but has concentrated on developing a strategy
for the entire region that surrounds the bauxite deposits. This
includes the building of dams on a major river and the construc¬
tion of a railroad to a planned coastal port. The dams will generate
electricity for the production of semi-finished aluminum (the
finished product will not be produced because of the excessive
amounts of energy required) and provide irrigation for agricul¬
tural schemes. The railroad will carry not only bauxite but agri¬
cultural produce and passengers, and in this way stimulate
development of that southern region of the country. As of 1978
only the first step had been taken, with the signing of an agree¬
ment for prospecting and general geological explorations with
the Soviet Union.11

*These include a factory that will produce wooden tiles for export as well as
coordinate the work of a number of saw mills and carpentry shops in various
parts of the country (Guinea-Bissau has vast forests); the fruit juice and preserve
factory; an import-substitution factory for foam mattresses; a major peanut- and
rice-husking plant, the husks to be burnt for power which in turn will supply
electricity for both a peanut oil and a soap factory.10
 Introduction 31

Other choices appear at this point, and from a distance, to

be less wise. For instance, an agreement was signed recently
with the French company Citroen for the establishment of an
assembly plant, albeit a small one, that will produce between
250 and 500 cars annually, all restricted to internal use. This
decision stimulated considerable debate in the government,
critics questioning Citroen’s motives and the benefit to the
country. The view ultimately prevailed that the cars were needed
and that local assembly would provide training and jobs for
workers, while the Guineans would remain in control of any
decision to expand.
The problem of reliance on foreign aid and grants is an ex¬
tremely tricky one for any developing country with limited
resources. Guinea-Bissau at present relies more heavily, per
capita, on foreign aid than do most countries in Africa.*
Yet it can be argued that no country in such a fragile economic
situation as Guinea-Bissau can afford to refuse aid because of a
desire for economic independence. Indeed, such a stand could
strangle growth and reverse the gains made so far in the revolu¬
tion. For a small country such as Guinea-Bissau it might be more
imperative to integrate itself into the modern world than it is for
larger socialist countries, and this will require modernization.
Yet a balance must be kept: too heavy reliance on foreign capital
will most certainly mean the end of independence, as the history
of neocolonial Africa has made clear.
So far the government has approached the problem somewhat
pragmatically. It has spread its donors over many countries, both
socialist and capitalist, to avoid heavy dependence on one or
two countries, at the same time giving preference to aid agencies.
Limited multinational investment has been accepted, and most
aid comes in the form of grants, not loans, thus minimizing the
need to cope with repayment and high interest rates at a later
stage.13 At the same time, aid has not always been accepted
simply because it has been offered: in general it has been taken

*The largest amounts of aid and/or grants come from (and not necessarily in this
order) the United Nations, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Sweden, the European
Economic Community. Smaller donors include Portugal, Norway, Algeria,
Holland, France, Brazil, the United States, Britain, East Germany, West Ger¬
many, Libya, China, Abu-Dhabi, Kuwait, and Italy.12
32 Introduction

for projects designed by the Guineans themselves. As a result, a

number of specific aid offers from foreign governments have
been turned down.*
From the above discussion it is apparent that Guinea-Bissau is
basing its development strategies on socialist principles, at least
at this juncture. The state is controlled by a revolutionary party
which has the support of the broad masses of the people; the
state in turn controls the direction of the country’s development,
despite the present dependence on foreign aid; the surplus
generated through the resources of the people is invested on be¬
half of all the people, rather than benefiting certain individuals.14
However, while the programs and policies of the present can be
evaluated, they cannot form guarantees for the future. Too many
forces are at work, both internally and internationally, for such
projections to be meaningful. What is certain is that unless
socialism is achieved, the liberation of women cannot be realized.
And so as we look for the trends and dynamics that edge the
society in the direction of socialism we are looking at the same
time for the potential for a successful struggle for women’s
liberation. How then do the development strategies described
above relate to the role of women in the new society?
The development strategies of PAIGC began to take this aspect
of the revolution into account from the onset, long before the
country had won its independence. The party’s stated goal of an
equal society was more than rhetoric, and this goal was expressed
in practice through numerous programs established in the lib¬
erated zones during the war.
While the village remained the basic economic unit in these
areas—and hence women remained responsible for the major
portion of agricultural work—political education and new pro¬
grams focused on and gave impetus to the changing role of
women in the society. At the same time men were encouraged to
join more actively in all aspects of the work of production. This

*For instance, a Brazilian government offer of considerable funding and expertise

to build schools and supply literacy teams was turned down. Instead, exiled
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was invited to help plan and advise on the
literacy campaign, which has been established with the help of a number of
Brazilian exiles and without special funding.
 Introduction 33

was more than practicing an ideal of equality; it was made

essential by the need to compensate for the disruptions in food
production that came from living in a war zone. In order to
produce enough food all members of the society had to exert
themselves to the fullest, accelerating the possibility of changes
in the sexual division of labor. No foreign exchange to buy food
from the outside was being earned by exports, and the gifts from
friendly nations could not fill the breach. Besides, everything
was carried in on foot, as this was the only means of transport.
Soldiers in the army helped with production, working in the
villages at various stages of the season while growing food for
the army at the military bases. Their work in the fields provided
an example to the men who remained in the villages.
Education for girls as well as boys was given high priority.
Progress has been made in equalizing the numbers of girls and
boys in school, although people continue to resist the idea of
educating girls, and by the end of the war the ratio of girls to boys
in school was at best one to three. There is one curriculum for
all students, and both teachers and subject matter focus on
eradicating attitudes that regard boys as superior to girls. When
the students emerge at the other end of their schooling there is a
much better chance that they will be equally equipped to enter
the workforce, without being confined to sex-defined occupa¬
tions, than there is anywhere else in Africa.
At the same time, the government is trying to reserve some
jobs for women as the labor market begins to open. For example
at SOCOTRAM, a state-owned project established in 1976 to
produce wooden tiles for export, 40 percent of the several
hundred jobs have been reserved for women. The new state has
also begun to put into practice the view that women must be
given equal treatment in employment, and must be encouraged
to take their place in the paid workforce in order to contribute to
the reconstruction of their society.
Because of this general emphasis, a visitor to Guinea-Bissau
will find women at all levels of work outside the agricultural
sector. While this is nowhere near the 50 percent mark, with a
particularly low number in prominent government leadership,
one does see a trend and a commitment to this goal voiced by
34 Introduction

both women and men at all levels of the government and party.
Only time will tell whether the goals will be achieved. One
exception is the field of nursing, which boasts close to a 50 per¬
cent representation by each sex, matching the situation else¬
where in Africa. While no doubt part of the rationale for this
emanates from the belief that such occupations are suitable for
young women, it has been a conscious decision by PAIGC to
use this attitude in order to encourage women into the paid
workforce. If parents are willing to allow their daughter to train
as a nurse, but would be very disturbed if the party suggested she
train as an engineer, then this can be used as a starting point.
That it is not only seen as an end in itself is demonstrated, for
instance, by the number of women political workers who began
their careers as nurses.
Many of the changes that have been implemented successfully
are primarily a result of the continuing and intensive campaigns
of political mobilization undertaken by PAIGC. But in the long
run, in order to ensure a more penetrating attack on women’s
oppression, more fundamental changes must be made in the
economy, which now depends on unpaid agricultural labor of
women to feed the people. Without such changes it will be more
difficult to make a long-lasting break in the tight relationship
between the customs of the people and the economic structures
of the village. The village economy remains the basis on which
the independent state stands, and it is the village economy
which perpetuates the customs oppressive to women, not to
mention maintains their unduly heavy workload. .
In projecting the changes needed to ensure women’s equal
role in society, one of the party leaders, Teodora Gomes, spoke to
me of the need to reorganize the village economy: “Women had
to work at home, cooking, taking care of the children, and
preparing everything for the men when they were working on
the land, as well as work on the land themselves. They could do
nothing but sleep at night and the next day work in the village
and in the fields; sleep, work at home, and in the fields. They did
not have the time or the opportunity to learn, to study, to do
anything else.
“In the future the peasant woman will have a place to leave her
 Introduction 35

children so she will be free from the constant care of babies and
children. Agricultural technology will be introduced and this
will give much freedom to women, and to men as well. They will
organize cooperatives which will free women and men from the
hard, endless work they have been doing. All the needs of the
peasants will be met within the community. Besides working
cooperatively, there will be child-care centers, schools, medical
services, facilities for cultural entertainment. Women will have
time to learn and study many things. Only at that time can the
peasant women be free. Yes, only at that time.”
To break the stranglehold on the village economy, therefore, it
is necessary to devise a program to both increase productivity
and phase out the unfair division of labor based on sex; other¬
wise men will continue to rely on more than one wife to provide
sufficient food for the community. In the same way, the new
willingness on the part of many fathers to allow their daughters
free choice in marriage and to forego the bride-price will be hard
to sustain. State farms and cooperatives represent such a pro¬
gram, but they have yet to be extended to the entire country. The
problem of producing enough to eat, however, means that it is
not possible to simply shift to cooperatives or collective farming
without considerable prior preparation. For one thing, by con¬
centrating on cash crops there is the danger of a situation in
which men and women work together on the production of
commercial crops—such as food, cotton, tobacco—and women
somehow manage to produce food for the family as well.
Until changes really do take root in the village economy and
alter the division of labor, one can only assume that it will be the
women who perform a double task, unable to do justice to either.
Moreover, given the poverty of Guinea-Bissau, it is not feasible for
women to be paid wages for their work. Neither is this particularly
desirable, as it could serve to entrench the present system of pro¬
duction and not alleviate their workload. In trying to increase
production and build a surplus, cash crops need to be encouraged.
Giving men the responsibility for this work keeps the division of
labor unequal. If both men and women are involved in the pro¬
duction of cash crops, but women remain responsible for sub¬
sistence farming, the burden of women’s labor simply increases.
36 Introduction

Perhaps most importantly, women need political power com¬

mensurate with their productive contribution, while integrating
men further into the agricultural work. At the same time women
need to play a more positive role in the work of social transfor¬
mation. Many of the leaders I spoke with showed a general and
well-articulated consciousness about the need for change, but I
felt that there remains a gap between theory and practice. I did
not find a specific plan for future transformation of the village
economy. While not anticipating on my return to Guinea-Bissau
just one and a half years after independence the welcome sight
of women and men sharing equally in all aspects of agricultural
work, I did hope to find developing strategies that would help
make these changes a reality for the future.*
This seemed to be lacking on a state level. Despite the third
party congress in 1977 and the assessment of general goals for
the future at the time, the years since my second visit apparently
have not seen many changes on this score. Recent speeches such
as those delivered by President Luiz Cabral—including the
latest state of the nation message—tend to emphasize technical
modernization and gloss somewhat lightly over the need for
structural transformation.
There are no simple solutions to these needs. But as long as a
country’s agricultural work remains based in the present village
economy as it has done in the past, there can be no solution to
women’s unpaid labor and no long-term solution to some funda¬
mental causes of women’s oppression.
The road ahead is not smooth. In the first place, the revolu¬
tionary process must be expanded to include the entire Guinean
population, that is, a good 50 percent who were not in the
PAIGC areas during the war, many of whom collaborated with
the Portuguese or accepted Portuguese propaganda that charac¬
terized the guerrillas as terrorists and bandits. Maybe the horrors
of yesterday’s wars are today’s memories, but, in terms of politi-

* With the reorganization at a government level that came in October 1978. the
signs are that concrete planning will be stepped up. A new ministry for rural
development was established, headed by Mario Cabral, a dynamic and talented
young leader, who set up the Ministry of Education, one of the best organized
and programmatically exciting of all ministries.
 Introduction 37

cal mobilization and national reconstruction, the task ahead is

even more difficult.
Moreover, there are psychological factors to overcome in con¬
tinuing revolutionary transformation, affecting even those com¬
mitted to the process. The Portuguese colonialists represented a
visible and common enemy who for decades had oppressed the
people and, during the war, dropped bombs upon them daily.
Mobilization was easier then. But once colonialism has been
defeated and the wartime sense of urgency dissipated, it is more
difficult to maintain the rate of change and the integrity of the
revolutionary process. Underdevelopment is not as patently
oppressive as colonialism, and people have a tendency to revert
to what they know.
In addition, with independence coming as abruptly as it did,
PAIGC had been forced to devote practically all of its time and
resources to consolidating power and settling into the tasks of
government. Thus, for the first time in its experience, and all of a
sudden, the party had to begin functioning on a national scale.
And although the population under its administration had
nearly doubled, the number of trained cadres (relatively few of
whom were women) remained about the same as during the
armed struggle.
There were other, more subjective reasons why the women’s
struggle seemed to have lost some of its momentum. In as much
as the struggle was part of the larger revolution, it confronted the
same post-independence problems—the doubling of the female
population to include those that had not been politicized during
the war, in conjunction with a tendency on the part of some
partisans to relax. The effect of this in terms of slowing down the
progress of women’s emancipation cannot be underestimated.
For a period of time that cannot be calculated very precisely
there will be regional disparities. And, until the varying levels of
consciousness begin to approximate each other, PAIGC will
have to establish a balance between mobilizing women for the
first time, on the one hand, and making sure, on the other,
that the gains achieved in the liberated zones are reinforced and
not diluted.
Moreover, a superficial look at the post-colonial situation
38 Introduction

might give rise to a question which related only to women’s

emancipation, and not at all to the overall revolution, and
which would have its impact only after the women’s struggle
has moved into a more programmatic phase. The question is
whether or not Guinean men as a whole will continue to support
the idea of sexual equality, particularly now that the war is no
longer there to serve as a force for unity.
The plain fact is that men have much to gain from national
reconstruction, while women’s liberation, now as never before,
poses the “clear and present danger’’ that they will lose the last
of their male privileges. Women’s emancipation means that
Guinean men, in the future, will have to work harder, both
inside and outside the home, and to share political and decision¬
making power evenly. In this context, the war, for as long as it
employed men as soldiers, also served to postpone really deep¬
going and radical changes in men’s way of life, their traditional
social roles, and their relationship to production.
Cadres tried to illustrate the need for an intensification of the
struggle after independence when speaking at mass peasant
meetings. “You know how a woman sweeps the front of her
house,” a political worker told one such meeting in an area that
had previously been under Portuguese control. Then he picked a
large leaf off the ground and bent over double as he swept the
earth. “The woman will sweep and sweep but the broom can
only remove the surface dust. The stones stay behind, embedded
in the ground. It is necessary to use a bigger instrument to
remove the stones. Now we must work harder to change the
society further. We must not be satisfied with only sweeping
away the surface dust.”
This commitment is based in a new reality now that the war is
over. And the current situation introduces both a new necessity
(overcoming underdevelopment) and a new national target
(building a nation-state) around which to organize the unity of
men and women.
To put it another way, since PAIGC ideology generally holds
that women’s liberation is a necessary feature of a democratic
society in each phase of development, the post-colonial situa¬
tion has caused the party to alter the form of the struggle, but not
 Introduction 39

the principle itself. The principle remains that the emancipation

of women is ensured through their equal involvement in the
process of social transformation.
It is a process that has but begun and is progressing piconino,
piconino—“little by little.” In the pages that follow I will try
to bring to the reader, much as the Guineans brought to me, a
sense of the achievements, the difficulties, the setbacks, the
disappointments, above all the spirit—all part of a day’s work in
the process of starting anew.
'

'
Fighting Two Colonialisms
Part I
In the Liberated Zones

Chapter 1
“No Pintcha!”
My first experience of revolution, and revolutionaries.
Everyday life in the liberated zones had to be adapted
to the reality of living in a war zone. Out of this
experience, new leaders—young and old—developed
with a deep commitment to the struggle that the
revolutionary liberation movement was waging and
the new society that was envisioned. Out of it too
emerged a special quality of friendship, comraderie,
and support.

43
44 Fighting Two Colonialisms

It was late in the afternoon when the Candjafara River finally

came into view. We were hot, sticky, and covered with a not-so-
fine layer of red dust. Our large Russian-built truck slowed down
as it neared the water’s edge and came to a halt. Behind us
stretched the bumpy earth road we had traveled from Boke,
through the alternately hilly and flat countryside of the Republic
of Guinea (Conakry).
Ahead of us, way across the mile-wide river, lay the liberated
territory of Guinea-Bissau. Through a bluish haze I could discern
palm trees and forests, a mirror image of the scene on our side of
the river. While we rested, a small dilapidated ferry could be
seen making its slow way toward us from the opposite bank.
The banks themselves were thick, deep mud, now exposed as
the river receded with the tides of the ocean bordering this
low-lying coastal nation. This meant trouble for the driver of the
truck who, expert though he was, could not maneuver his vehicle
through the stubborn mud and onto the metal ramps of the ferry.
Back and forth, back and forth he went, shouts from onlookers
helping him on his way. In the end he had to admit defeat. But no
sooner had we resigned ourselves to the long wait for the tide to
return, than a black minibus/ambulance came along the road
toward us, just ahead of a cloud of dust. Aboard were a number
of PAIGC military men heading for the liberated zones. Because
it was relatively light, this vehicle successfully negotiated the
mud and made its way up the ramps.
There was room for two more passengers, and so I found
myself one hour later aboard the ferry as it chugged its way back
across the river, aiming for the road which picked up again on
the other side and disappeared into a forest. The vibrating ferry
was carrying me on the last lap of my journey to Guinea-Bissau. I
stood silently next to my “guide,” Teodora Gomes, as she sup¬
ported herself against the rickety bar that served as a rail. We
were dressed almost identically. Dark olive green army pants
and short-sleeved cotton T-shirts of the same color. They could
have come from the same place, although mine were bought
at an army-surplus store in New York. On her feet were black
leather Adidas-type running shoes; on mine were French rub¬
ber and canvas boots, also bought in New York, but which I
 In the Liberated Zones 45

discovered were identical to those worn by many guerrillas.

Teodora’s thick African hair was covered by a mottled emerald
green and black turban, neatly twisted above her ebony face.
The similarities ended, however, with our uniforms. Looped
onto Teodora s military belt, so that it rested against her right
hip, was a large black leather holster holding her revolver. Slung
over my shoulder was my camera inside its black leather case.
The two instruments were symbolic of our very different rela¬
tionships to the revolution we were about to enter. Teodora was
a participant; I was an observer.
The ferryman guided his craft into place and lowered the
metal ramps onto the mud. We got back into the ambulance,
and the driver revved the engine. Without stopping, but with
precarious sliding and skidding, he managed to reach the
dry road—the same dry earth road that we had left behind in
Guinea (Conakry). In fact, everything looked the same. Normal
and very calm. Nothing immediately noticeable that would
differentiate it from the ex-French colony we had just left
behind that day in April 1974. As the ambulance bumped its
way along the road, I noticed the same trees, the same bird calls,
the same heat.
“Look,” said Teodora, suddenly leaning forward from the
back of the vehicle to tap my shoulder. “People of Guinea-
Bissau!” Stepping out of the dense forest that lined the road
was an elderly, wiry man, followed by a ten-year-old girl.
They balanced large bundles of chopped wood on their heads,
and the man rested slightly on a worn-looking axe, waving
to us with his free hand as we passed. A scene from any
West African country. Maybe. But I had to contain feelings of
both romance and rising excitement; these were people of
the revolution.
As we drove on, the difference between the independent
nation of Guinea and the liberated territory of Guinea-Bissau
became more apparent. It was a far bumpier ride, and much
slower, as the driver carefully picked a zig-zag path between the
large holes and cracks gouged out of the road. Opened only eight
months earlier—after Guilege, a major Portuguese base some
twenty miles inland, was routed by guerrilla forces—the road
46 Fighting Two Colonialisms

had not been repaired in years. For while the colonial base may
have straddled the road, the surrounding area was in the hands
of PAIGC, whose troops effectively denied the Portuguese further
use of it. The trees of the forest had grown over, the branches
meeting above and conveniently providing a cover for vehicles
such as ours. This was the only road that could be used by
vehicles in the whole south front, I was told, and it was safe for
only about thirty miles. After that, and from one end of the
country to the other, the sole method of transport would be on
foot. And so dissolved any lingering impression I had that life in
the two countries was the same.
We had not been traveling long when the ambulance veered
off at a right angle, along a wide path cut through the bush and
leading to Simbel, the first military base inside the borders of
Guinea-Bissau. We made a one-day stopover here, a prelude to
the trip 1 was about to begin. Reunited with our truck the
following day, we prepared to depart Simbel in late afternoon,
and leave behind the cluster of tents, hidden under trees, that
represented “home” for many PAIGC soldiers. “For us camping
is not a vacation, not something we do to relax,” one of the
military commanders commented to me with a laugh. “We have
‘camped’ for the past thirteen years.”
I was given the front seat next to the driver, while everyone
else—soldiers, a few young peasant women, Teodora and Espirito
Santo Silva, the young Cape Verdian school teacher who would
be our interpreter—piled into the open back of the truck, some¬
how finding seats amid the ammunitions, medicdl supplies,
boxes of condensed milk and dried soup, not to mention a few
live chickens. The condition of the road made it impossible to
drive at even a moderate speed and so the truck kept at below
fifteen miles per hour as the driver aimed for the firmer and
flatter portions of the road. The din was terrific. The engine
roared and the truck rattled. As we worked our way through the
tunnel of trees, the overhead branches swished and scraped and
cracked and every so often a springy thin branch would whip
through the window of the cab and sting my arm.
Suddenly: Para! para! (Stop). There was an energetic banging
on the roof from the people in the back and some shouts in
 In the Liberated Zones 47

Creole, the most widely spoken language.* The driver brought

the truck to a quick halt, grabbed his rifle from the ledge behind
him, and jumped out. Some of the soldiers stood up in the back
and took aim. I looked around in horror. Portuguese? But every¬
one else seemed unperturbed. A few shots were fired. At birds.
They missed and we proceeded, having failed on this occasion
to alleviate the food supply problem in the liberated zones.
As darkness fell, the lights of the truck were switched on to
illuminate the jagged holes in the road ahead of us. The noise
continued as before. Surely the bombers would spot our lights
before we heard their engines, I thought nervously. “Parapara-
para!!” This time the banging on the roof was urgent. “Avion!”
In an instant, the engine was cut and the lights switched off. We
all jumped out of the truck and walked a little way down the
road. The drone of the circling plane could be heard for some
time, but at a distance. It got no louder, and no bombs were
dropped, before the drone receded into the silence of the night.
In the weeks to come I would learn that the sound of the ap¬
proaching jet bombers, however faint, could be heard above the
most active noise of village or base life—over pounding, laughter,
even blaring radios.
When we set off again, after waiting a while to make sure the
bomber did not return, the driver fairly careered along the road
until we were at the end of the drive. The contents of the truck
were distributed among us and we set off for the half-hour walk
to Donka, which served as base for Carmen Pereira, political
commissar for the south front, and which also harbored a school
and a hospital headed by a Cuban doctor. As I walked I could
barely contain my anticipation. In the coming weeks I would
experience a life I could not have imagined, however closely I
followed the liberation struggle from America.
One of the first things that struck me was the special language
that had evolved out of the struggle. I had entered a revolutionary
world in which such words as “militant,” “political commis-

*Creole, the lingua franca, is spoken by about 60 percent of the population on the
mainland (nearly 100 percent on the Cape Verde Islands) and is a mixture of
Portuguese and African languages which has evolved into a language in its own
right.
48 Fighting Two Colonialisms

sar,” “responsavel,” “mission,” “cadre,” were part of the every¬

day language, each with a meaning particularly adapted to the
work of PAIGC. At first, they sounded strange to my ear, but after
a few days’ immersion in my new environment, I too began to
find them commonplace. I learned that cadre referred simply to a
member of a party in training for leadership or already taking a
leadership role; that responsavel meant a party militant who
was responsible for a particular task. And so in the days to come I
would meet education responsavels, health responsavels, and
come to understand that the term connotes the principle of
people being responsible for something, as opposed to being
leaders in the hierarchical sense. Political commissar, a literal
translation of politico comissario, had no convenient English
equivalent but referred to a responsavel whose task was political
work and who had taken on a high level of leadership within the
party. Mission was any party assignment whatsoever, and could
include an attack on a Portuguese camp, attending a conference
abroad, or being responsible for a visitor to the liberated zones.
All members of the party were militants regardless of their
relation to the army and whether or not they carried arms. And
everybody was your comrade or, rather, camarada.
These terms both dispensed with, and reflected the lack of,
hierarchy within the liberation movement. There were no mili¬
tary ranks, no badges, no saluting. In fact, I found that the only
(but not always reliable) way of distinguishing party cadres with
higher responsibility was to check whether or not they were
wearing a wristwatch, and if it was a very sophisticated one, I
could safely presume they were in the military.
Then there were other words, such as mato, Tuga, tabanca,
and especially no pintcha. Mato literally means forest, but had
come to mean liberated zones; Tuga means the Portuguese,
particularly the army, and was adapted into Creole from “Portu¬
gal”; tabanca means a village. But no pintcha is a phrase con¬
veying a variety of emotions and could crop up in any number of
different situations. Although literally meaning “let’s go,” and
as such interchangeable with no bai, it had come to have a
very special significance in the Creole language: implicitly and
symbolically a call to continue the struggle, to fight to victory.
 In the Liberated Zones 49

No pintcha! Forward! It was the PAIGC slogan, one to which

even the most weary would respond.

Life in the liberated zones was frugal, arduous, and danger

filled. Its joy lay first in the sense of solidarity people shared as
they worked together for the same cause, and also in the vic¬
tories, large or small, over the colonialists. Its pain was in the
continual loss of compatriots and close friends in bombing raids
or guerrilla action. In addition to the external threat, it was
necessary to be constantly on the alert for subversion from within,
whether in the form of counterrevolutionaries working as spies
and saboteurs, or carelessness on the part of those not totally
committed to the struggle. For even in the latter case, the con¬
sequences could be disastrous.
There is nothing romantic about armed struggle and I soon
relinquished any such notions. The romance springs from the
fantasies of the onlooker and is not intrinsic to the struggle itself.
It arises from the hero-worshipping—unfortunately prevalent in
the West—of guerrillas as bands of selfless young men, and
perhaps women, accepting the grateful veneration of all their
countrypeople, whom they have miraculously liberated by force
of arms. These ideas place undue emphasis on the role of the
gun. But the gun wins victories only when the people have first
been mobilized behind it. In the war of liberation in Guinea-
Bissau it was not only the soldiers who struggled. In fact, they
were regarded not as heroic figures, but as people carrying out
their work for the revolution much as anyone else. Every man,
woman, and child participated, whether or not they bore arms. It
was only through mass participation of the peasant population
that total victory was possible. Everybody risked their lives
daily, grieved at the deaths of family and friends, made in¬
numerable sacrifices. There is nothing romantic about the con¬
tinual hail of bombs, the scarcity of food and other necessities,
the severe testing of one’s emotional and mental resources, and
the grinding physical exertion.
The reminders that life was being lived in a war zone were
omnipresent. An ear was always tuned for the faintest sound of
the bombers which, at any time of the day or night, might be
50 Fighting Two Colonialisms

circling above one or another area, dispensing their bombs. I was

introduced to this state of reality soon after I entered the interior.
“Can you walk?” Teodora asked me as we sat finishing break¬
fast outside the hut we had slept in at Donka. She “walked” her
index and middle finger across the small table for emphasis.
“Oh yes,” 1 replied quickly. A little too quickly. “For two
months I have walked for hours every day in preparation.”
Teodora was unimpressed. She looked at me hard, raising one
eyebrow. “Ah, but can you run?” she responded, and her fingers
picked up speed. This jolted me. I was not on an exciting jaunt. I
had entered a real war zone.
A few days later there was no doubt about it. I was already
accepting as routine the trips to the trenches whenever the
bombers could be heard overhead. They would come so often—
sometimes several times in a single day—that even I began to
pick out the sound of the jets above the noises that were the
regular backdrop to any village or base we might be in. The
trenches, about two feet wide and about four and a half feet deep,
were dug out of the orange earth, sometimes straight, sometimes
L-shaped. The few earth steps at either end were usually ignored
during raids, as people jumped right in. Much of the time I was
sent to the trenches alone; sometimes a mother and baby would
join me. But on one particular afternoon the sound of a plane
grew so loud that we knew it was heading in our direction.
Teodora grabbed my hand and we were all rushing for the
trenches. People came flying out of huts. Children were hastily
picked up by whoever was nearest. Women came running from
their pounding. About twenty of us stood next to each other in a
single trench, all our senses straining toward the sound of the
engine which was getting louder and louder. Demonstrating as
she spoke, Teodora told me: “Crouch down when you hear the
bombs being released. Comme pa!”
Crack! Crack! The plane spat out two of its bombs, the harsh
sound reverberating through the air. We waited, crouching, our
heads down, arms pressed against the walls for balance. The
explosions came, and then two more. Meanwhile, the militants
discussed the bombing, estimating the distance and the direction,
trying to work out what might have been hit. From the tone of
 In the Liberated Zones 51

their voices, they might have been discussing an everyday affair.

Then it occurred to me they were discussing an everyday affair.
The consensus was that the bombs had been released on
targets about a mile away. To my inexperienced ear it had
sounded more like yards. We continued to crouch in the trench
and heard two more bombs dropping. Finally the sound of the
plane began to recede, and a militant came over to us from a
second shelter. “You can get out now,” he said. “It was a small
plane and can only hold six bombs.” Then he added, looking at
me: “But stay near the trench. The Tuga don’t warn us in advance
when they are going to bomb us!”
The next day we learned that the militants had guessed cor¬
rectly, and that the bombs had been dropped indiscriminately.
Nothing was hit. Just a few weeks earlier, however, the Portu¬
guese had been more successful. A twelve-year-old student of a
school less than a mile from the base was killed by an exploding
bomb as he went on an errand. On our way to visit the school,
Teodora pointed out the spot where he had died—a charred hole
ripped out of the forest floor.
Another night, while marching to our next destination, we
had to contend with larger bombers that literally rained bombs
down. This type of plane was invariably referred to by a word
that sounded like “beekmun,” and it took me a little while to
realize the militants were not indicating some German-type jet,
but using the Creole rendering of “big man.” Still, when we
heard them approaching, and if we were lucky to be near a
village, we would join the peasants in the trenches they had
constructed. If not, we ran for the nearest trees for cover. The
shout of “la luz” meant bombers had been detected and was an
instruction to turn off our flashlights immediately. (The flash¬
lights were mainly for my benefit in the first place. After years of
marching at night, my companions had learned to make their
way without artificial aids.)
The way, the only way, to travel in the liberated zones was by
foot, regardless of whether the destination was a mile, fifteen
miles, or over one hundred miles away. The pace was brisk.
Soldiers had to keep up a faster pace than others, their marching
spurred by the pressures of a military mission, or the necessity of
52 Fighting Two Colonialisms

transporting from one camp to another vital arms and ammuni¬

tion. This sense of extreme urgency did not apply to marches of
PAIGC militants involved in political work or those transporting
nonmilitary goods. Nonetheless, there were considerable dis¬
tances to cover, and being out in the open, or in the forest but
away from trenches, exposed them to bombing raids. Keeping
up a fast pace meant survival. Although African peasants were
used to walking long distances on foot, they had to learn how to
march. As Nino Vieira, the top PAIGC commander and strategist
of many of the war’s victories (and now prime minister), put it:
“Although the average African is a born walker, a soldier must
learn what we call disciplined marching. This means reaching a
level of nine hours daily, nonstop, for four days, at four miles an
hour with arms and pack. He must also learn to go hungry at the
same time.”1
In order to reach the furthest point on the itinerary planned for
me, our group marched for six to eight hours a night for the first
five days, sleeping at schools or hospitals or political bases along
the way. We always set off after five, when the oppressive heat of
the day gave way to the relative cool of the evening. In the south,
the land was blissfully flat—I was spared the mountains and
hills of the north front—and I could generally keep up with the
steady pace, although I presumed they had slowed it somewhat
out of consideration for their city-dwelling visitor.
“At night, I walk ahead,” Espirito instructed the first time we
set out. The vision of his springy strides in front of me, and his
off-white canvas rucksack hanging from his back‘seem forever
embedded in my mind. For hour after hour after hour, night after
night, we walked like this, sometimes talking, sometimes silent,
sometimes joking, and occasionally angry, as on one night,
when after only two hours’ sleep, I was so tired that I could
hardly place one exhausted foot in front of the other. Espirito
was a cheerful and considerate companion and I found the
marches far less taxing because of his presence.
We followed the narrow paths through the forests, where
branches grew in twirls and twists on either side of us, and I
marveled at how easily my companions found their way through
the maze. Every now and then we would break out of the forest
 In the Liberated Zones 53

onto the open plains, bordered with stands of palm trees. At

dusk the brown grass would glow golden under an incandescent
red setting sun as it disappeared behind the differently shaped
fronds of the various palm trees. Many times we had to dash
across the rice fields, or bolanhas as they were referred to in
Creole, stepping up and down over the sunbaked ridges. I was
relieved that it was not the rainy season, when the heavy and
constant tropical rains transform this dry, brown, and dark green
land into a spectacle of luscious colors; when the mud is deep
everywhere and the grasses grow to shoulder height; when the
hard, cracked earth surface dissolves into marshes and mangrove
swamps, and rivers overflow their banks. Throughout September
it rains virtually nonstop. The forests, even in the dry season, are
thick, but with the rains they become tightly knit webs of dense
undergrowth and new leafy vines. Hiding from the bombers in
that season could mean hours up to one’s shoulders in water,
under cover of the mangroves. One time, as I scrambled to
the bottom of a dry river bed in order to make the crossing, I
looked above to see militants effortlessly skimming across a long
tree trunk which straddled the creek and served as a bridge.
Stumbling over stones and clumps of dry earth, I congratulated
myself on having avoided the rainy season. But I could not avoid
the makeshift pranfas that had been strung across the many
narrow but gently flowing rivers. Every time we neared one of
these bridges made from loose planks and logs, with no poles or
rope for support, I found my heart sinking. 1 was thankful more
than once for Teodora’s sturdy presence as she held my hand in a
firm grasp and guided me across, urging me to look ahead and
not down. Despite my fears, I never actually managed to fall into
the water below.
Accompanying Teodora, Espirito Santo, and me were ten
members of FAL, the local armed forces, and at various times
political responsavels from different regions or sectors we were
visiting. The guerrillas, marching with their guns, bazookas,
and ammunition as well as sacks of food and clothing, also
carried my heavy bag of cameras, lenses, and tape recorder. The
responsavels carried their rifles and whatever they needed with
them. But whenever I picked up something of mine to carry, it
54 Fighting Two Colonialisms

was whisked away from me onto someone else’s shoulder. They

did this not only out of kindness, but also of necessity. PAIGC’s
experience had been that those unused to marching would find
any item a tremendous burden after an hour or two and slow
down the column.
Nonetheless, the kindness and hospitality shown me by the
many different people I met became a mark of my visit. Hos¬
pitality in Africa generally evinces a particular generosity, but
in the liberated zones it had an even deeper quality. It was
directed not only toward me as a visitor, but also toward PAIGC
militants, constantly on the go, when they arrived at a village or
base. For me, hospitality on the part of militants was expressed
in a great gentleness and concern for my well-being, the under¬
side of which was appreciation of the fact that all visitors to their
war-torn country braved conditions that were anything but ideal.
There were numerous and daily instances: an anonymous
shoulder in the dark hoisting me through the deep mud of a
riverbank toward a waiting canoe—although the additional
weight must have sunk my slightly built helper up to his thighs;
an exclamation by a militant when he caught sight of my boots,
still muddy after I had washed them in a stream, and who
proceeded to fill his canteen with water and meticulously wash
away the residue; a gift of three fresh eggs from an elderly,
wizened peasant woman who had carefully nursed them in the
palms of her hands throughout a three-hour meeting; a gift from
a nearby village of a gourd full of ripe mangoes and a chicken—
despite the scarcity of meat—brought by a member of their
village council who traveled specially to the school to present it;
fresh oysters steamed just right by a responsavel who also saw to
it that the eggs were soft boiled; the care taken so that I had the
best seat, that I was not sitting in the sun, that I got plenty of
rest—even when I felt it unnecessary.
But the most lavish display of generosity came from Teodora.
At mealtimes she took delight in choosing the meatiest part of
the chicken or stew and piling my plate high with food. I would
inwardly groan as I battled to consume the mound of rice and
supplements placed before me, a battle I lost more times than
once. Teodora was not one to let this go by without comment.
“You say you like our food, but you don’t eat!”
 In the Liberated Zones 55

Rice was the staple diet. Everything else was peripheral. If I

did not eat the mound of rice she heaped in front of me, she
inferred that I had not liked the food and therefore must still be
hungry. My protestations that I was incapable of finishing the
amount she expected fell on deaf ears. The food was good. The
average meal prepared when guests were present included a
large bowl of vegetable soup, made from packages sent as a gift
from the German Democratic Republic. At lunch and supper the
main dish consisted of as much rice as Teodora could maneuver
onto my plate, topped with a tasty stew of chicken, fish, or wild
meat. Breakfast too was substantial: a rice porridge or rice-flour
bread, called cus-cus, and a large mug of coffee with condensed
milk. I was never hungry, yet Teodora was never satisfied that I
had eaten enough. On one such occasion she tried another tactic
on her overfed visitor. “Food is not a luxury for us,” she cajoled.
“Without food we cannot march.”
I felt uncomfortable, even guilty. In a few weeks I would
return to the abundance of America, while the militants with me
would have to continue living their spartan lives, including the
necessity to march on empty stomachs, sometimes for days at a
time, on those occasions when food was simply not available.
Thoughts such as these would not have deterred Teodora; hard¬
ship was the reality of life. What did concern her was that her
guest be made to feel as comfortable, as healthy, and as welcome
as possible. Everyone who knew her was familiar with her
generous spirit. She would express it in whatever way she could,
and although in the liberated zones there was not much to give
other than food, she still found ways.
But a special quality of friendship was reserved by the militants
for each other. In a war zone it was never certain that a “good-by”
was not the last one. People were constantly on the move so that
friends did not see each other for months, even years at a time.
A coming together was always full of spontaneity and joy,
expressed in hearty and loving hugs, so that I often saw men in
long embraces, breaking to slap each other’s back. It was as
common to see men, as it was women, holding hands with each
other as they walked, or with arms around each other’s shoulders
or waists.
The life that dictated infrequent time together for friends
56 Fighting Two Colonialisms

applied no less to lovers and husbands and wives. It was rare for
a couple to share the same base, and where they did there were
always regular partings due to missions, along with the chance
of prolonged separation should party work call one or the other
to a different area.
For PAIGC cadres and those working outside of their village,
the concept of “home” was a very loose one. Generally, it meant
a reed hut at a political or military base, and then moving every
six or eight months to avoid detection by the Portuguese army.
A picture cut out of a magazine, an embroidered cloth placed
over a table constructed from stripped branches, or a larger
cloth to cover a straw mattress—these were the only personal
items a militant had. Since everything had to be brought in
from the outside on someone’s head or back, the accumulation
of personal things became a luxury no one could afford. Because
it was also necessary to give up the need for a home base,
security was sought in feelings of solidarity among those sharing
the revolution.
For three weeks in the south front and ten days in the east
front, as well as a number of weeks in Conakry and Boke, I
was a guest of this revolution. The women and men I met shared
with me their difficult life without ever dwelling on its hard¬
ships. Instead, they conveyed to me feelings of excitement,
of challenge and joy in the rewards gained from collectively
working toward—“step by step” as they would say—a totally
new, humane, and equal society.
Chapter 2
“What can we consider better than freedom?”

Against the backdrop of brutal colonialist oppression

the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and
Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded in 1956. After efforts
to bring about a peaceful transition to indigenous
rule failed, the liberation movement turned to armed
struggle. Their ideology—encompassing the need to
build a new revolutionary society—was founded on
the analysis of the conditions in Guinea-Bissau done
by their founder and leader, Amilcar Cabral.

57
58 Fighting Two Colonialisms

For the Guinean peasant, daily life under Portuguese colonialism

was very harsh. The harshness permeated every aspect of life
and work, never ending.
When the territory that is now the Republic of Guinea-Bissau
first came under the Portuguese imperial sphere five hundred
years ago, the Portuguese did not venture beyond scattered
coastal trading posts. The trade they came for, and which they
were the first to develop on a large scale, was the trade in slaves.
And as long as they could ensure this without political control,
they had no need to penetrate into the interior.
While the direct presence of the Portuguese (and other Euro¬
peans) was not felt inland, their avarice for the riches provided
by the slave trade resounded far into the interior. They had little
difficulty in finding Africans willing to enter into the selling of
their fellow men and women, causing disruptions in the social
structure of many peoples over a vast area.
By the beginning of the 1940s transportation of slaves across
the Atlantic was outlawed for the seamen of most European and
American nations. Anticipating the suspension of this lucrative
trade, the imperial powers of Europe turned to the prospect
of exploiting the continent’s natural resources, which they
imagined as bursting out of the earth. The “scramble for Africa”
was on. At the Conference of Berlin in 1884-1885, Britain,
France, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal sat down to agree on
how Africa should be divided among them. Noticeably absent
were the Africans themselves, whom the Europeans considered
irrelevant to decisions about their future. Although Portugal
came away from the conference with less than it had hoped for, it
did have Angola, Mozambique, “Portuguese” Guinea, and the
islands of Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and Principe carved out in
its name.
During the years that followed, the European powers set about
entrenching themselves politically in their new possessions,
while at the same time extracting wealth. Portugal, no exception,
cracked down hard, realizing that without tight political control
over its colonies it ran the risk of losing out to Britain and
France, both of which coveted the entire area. But years of
resistance by different ethnic groups forced Lisbon to fight mini-
 In the Liberated Zones 59

wars in all of its colonies. In “Portuguese” Guinea, the wars of

peasant resistance were extensive. Only by the late 1920s—when
the colonial era began in earnest—could the Portuguese seriously
claim to have pacified this small West African nation.
Up until then, the peasant family had eked out a subsistence
living, growing only what it needed in order to survive. The
staple product was rice, cultivated during a four-month season
when the heavy tropical rains poured down virtually nonstop,
and the corrugated fields retained the water that nurtured the
rice plants. In addition, some of the groups raised cattle, and all
kept some livestock, such as goats, pigs, and chickens. Their
daily meal of rice was supplemented by the thick nutritious
sauce of palm oil and by fish, game, and wild vegetation. It was
not an easy life, but hard work would guarantee enough to eat,
since the climate, ever hot with an abundance of rain, seldom
varied from year to year.
With “pacification” came the intensification of the erosion of
the precarious relation between the individual peasant and the
village economy that had begun with the slave trade. The Portu¬
guese, having reluctantly ended their lucrative trade in slaves a
few decades earlier, now sought other ways to exploit their
colonies. In Angola and Mozambique the quest for wealth was
relatively straightforward. Natural resources were extensive and
the climate was attractive, leading the Portuguese to emigrate in
large numbers. It was not long before they had settled in and
established coffee and cotton plantations cultivated by forced
labor. Guinea-Bissau was not blessed with such resources; the
hot, humid climate and the small size of the territory made it
unappealing to prospective settlers, which exempted the poten¬
tial for large plantations. Other methods had to be utilized to
make the colony profitable. First the Portuguese imposed the
cultivation of peanuts on the peasants’ own land, which provided
the metropolis with an export commodity more profitable than
rice. (By the end of the 1950s an estimated fifty thousand families
were cultivating the crop.) At the same time, heavy taxes were
imposed on all aspects of life in the colony.
The concentration on peanuts had a dire effect on the already
fragile system of subsistence farming, as cultivation of this
60 Fighting Two Colonialisms

cash crop prevented the peasant farmers from producing suf¬

ficient food for their daily needs. Poverty and malnutrition
increased as the years went by. The land too was being adversely
affected. Impatient for short-term profits, the colonialists forced
the farmers to disregard traditional crop rotation, whereby the
land was left fallow. Instead they would harvest, burn off, and
replant immediately, each year turning more land into waste.
The exploitation was continued by obliging the peasants to
trade peanuts at Portuguese stores at fixed, rock-bottom prices.
In this way the colonialists had access to a cheap supply of
peanuts, the export of which provided sixty percent of all foreign
trade revenue by the beginning of the guerrilla war. Rice was
procured for export in much the same way, but because it gen¬
erated less satisfactory profits, most of the crop was used for
home consumption. In fact, exports and imports were under the
monopolistic control of one Portuguese company, the Companhia
Uniao Fabril, hence the largest beneficiary of the profits.
In order to pay their taxes, the peasants depended on the
trading stores to transform their crops into money. The system
was a double-edged sword which the colonialists wielded very
effectively indeed, gaining as they did both income from the
produce—after selling it abroad—plus taxes that were paid from
the income generated by the trade in the first place. So to fill the
colonial coffers, they expanded taxation to touch every aspect of
peasant life: not only personal taxes on huts, every pound of rice
grown, every palm tree on a plot of land, palm wine, palm oil,
and livestock, but also on weddings and other celebrations,
festivities, dances, burials, and so forth. But the real hardship
was that the pittance received from the trading stores was seldom
sufficient to cover the taxes, in which case the peasants faced
forced labor, jail, beatings, confiscation of livestock and other
property, or a combination of these.
“My family were peasants,’’ a Balanta peasant woman told me.
“They worked in the rice fields and grew rice. When they needed
something, they took rice to the Portuguese store some distance
from our village, and traded it. But they had no knowledge of the
actual value of the rice, and the Portuguese paid them what they
pleased. If you argued you would be beaten. With the little
 In the Liberated Zones 61

money we received, we had to pay taxes for things like palm

trees, pigs, domestic animals, land. My father was often whipped
because he could not pay.”
If was not possible for peasant family members to supplement
their income by taking odd jobs in the rural areas; there were
none to be had. Road building contributed the only major activity,
but work was done by forced labor, by peasants who had not
been able to pay taxes.
‘‘When I was very young,” the same Balanta woman said, ‘‘I
was taken with many girls and boys to work on the construction
of a road. We were paid nothing. The older girls had to collect
water all day long and the younger girls carried sand. We slept in
the forest. They didn’t give us any food, so we had to carry our
own rice as well. To make things worse, there was a famine at the
time and not even the people in the villages had enough to eat.
Those who tried to run away were severely beaten.”
A much younger woman who had grown up in a Balanta
village and was a party responsavel told me of a similar experi¬
ence she had had as a child.
‘‘After my father had paid the taxes, there was barely enough
rice left for us to eat. The Portuguese administrators did what
they pleased. They would take men, women, and children and
force them to work for nothing, on such things as building roads.
I remember once when ships had to be loaded with rice, they
came to our village and rounded up a group of children, in¬
cluding me, to load the ship. We worked from early morning to
late at night, every single day. When the day’s work was over
they would decide what they were going to pay us, maybe one
escudo* today, a handful of sugar tomorrow. ‘That’s it for today,’
they would say and order us home. We could do nothing about
it. If we refused to work we would be beaten.”
Such stories of life under colonialism were the shared experi¬
ence of peasants throughout the liberated zones.
Of all the colonial powers in Africa, Portugal did the least to
develop its colonies, and Guinea-Bissau was without doubt one
of the most underdeveloped countries on the continent. Portugal

The exchange rate for the escudo is roughly thirty escudos per one U.S. dollar.
62 Fighting Two Colonialisms

extracted labor and wealth and put very little back, so that the
people of Guinea-Bissau had even less in terms of social services
in comparison with other colonies in Africa. There was no
attempt to provide education or health services in the rural
areas. Both were available in the towns for the few Portuguese
settlers and the very few Africans who could afford to pay—the
three percent of the population considered wealthy enough,
educated enough, and Christian enough to be classified as
second-class Portuguese citizens.
The total lack of education facilities for the population was
reflected in an illiteracy rate of ninety-nine percent at the begin¬
ning of the war of liberation. The absence of health services
could be seen in the wide variety of debilitating diseases that
affected the population. Even the Portuguese official, Texeira da
Mota, working in Guinea-Bissau, found the extent of ill-health
excessive. Reporting in 1954, he said that the majority of the
population was infected by hookworm; sleeping sickness affected
two-fifths of the rural population, while malaria, bilharzia, and
dysentery were chronic. Malnutrition was the cause of other
widespread ailments. The infant mortality rate in the rural areas
was six out of ten.1
All attempts to organize against these conditions were thor¬
oughly crushed. With political repression so shamelessly prac¬
ticed in Portugal itself after the establishment of the fascist
regime in the 1930s, the administration met little opposition to
the naked exploitation of their colonies.
Set against this reality were the claims of the fascist govern¬
ment that life in their so-called overseas territories was excep¬
tionally good. They were not colonies, it insisted, but provinces,
extensions of Portugal itself, and boasting all the benefits thereof.
Even after the armed struggle had begun, the Portuguese foreign
minister asserted that “we alone before anyone else brought to
Africa the notion of human rights and racial equality. . . . Our
African provinces are more developed, more progressive in every
respect, than any recently independent territory in Africa south
of the Sahara, without exception.”2
As he spoke repression was reaching unprecedented levels in
the so-called African provinces, in response to the decision by
 In the Liberated Zones 63

the liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-

Bissau to take history into their own hands and to fight for
their freedom.
During the fifties, when independence movements proliferated
throughout the colonies of Africa, France and Britain began
negotiations to ensure that their economic interests remained
intact under African rule. A host of neocolonial governments
came to power, led by elites carefully nurtured by the old colonial
administrations. Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Europe,
did not have this option: a virtual economic satellite of the Euro¬
pean powers itself, it could not have maintained its economic
hold in Africa once it had relinquished political control.
In September 1956—after Lisbon turned deaf ears to calls for
independence—a small group of compatriots, called together
by Amilcar Cabral, met clandestinely in Bissau to form the
African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde
(PAIGC). The goal was the eventual independence of both
Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, some four hundred
miles off the coast, linked to the mainland through culture,
language, and history.*
On that rainy September day, they mapped out a course
of action that would join them to the tide of independence

*For the purposes of this book, I have excluded discussion of the Cape Verde
Islands, despite the close connection between the two territories. There was
extensive underground organization on the islands for the duration of the war on
the mainland. Conditions did not permit the onset of armed struggle on the
islands, however. A future PAIGC goal is the unification of the two republics into
a yet unspecified form of federated state. Lars Rudebeck, observer to the third
party congress, notes:
There are several reasons for [unity] beside the old historical ties [since
the fifteenth century). Guineans and Cape Verdeans struggled together
against Portuguese colonialism. Their common liberation and future
union was always an important point in the program of PAIGC. Many
Cape Verdeans had important functions within the liberated areas of
Guinea during the war. Without the military victory on the mainland, it
would not have been possible to force the Portuguese out of the islands.
But there are also important objective differences between the two coun¬
tries with regard to economic and social structure. These make it essential
that the future union be prepared carefully and thoroughly. The union is
thus probably a long-term political project, although it was strongly
reaffirmed as a political goal by the third congress. For the time being,
however, the PAIGC remains the political party of two independent but
closely cooperating countries.3
64 Fighting Two Colonialisms

movements throughout Africa. But they had to work under¬

ground, for political parties, demonstrations, and gatherings
were forbidden. PAIGC’s initial tactics were peaceful. Demon¬
strations and workers’ strikes, they felt, would indicate they
were serious about independence, and force the colonialists to
the negotiating table.
This approach was met with increased repression, brutality,
and violence, culminating in the “Pidgiguiti massacre” of August
1959, in which the colonial army opened fire on workers demon¬
strating peacefully at Pidgiguiti docks in Bissau. Twenty minutes
later, when the hail of rifle fire ceased, fifty dockworkers lay
dead, more than one hundred wounded. The young party turned
to the one remaining avenue: armed revolt. It would meet the
violence of the Portuguese colonialists with counterviolence.
Once this decision was made, the party set itself on a revolu¬
tionary path based on an analysis and ideology formulated in the
most part by Amilcar Cabral, who proved to be an extraordinary
leader and a brilliant theoretician.
Armed struggle not based on mass participation of the people
would fail, according to Cabral’s analysis. Since ninety-five
percent of the people were peasants, the movement turned away
from organizing the workers in the towns, concentrating instead
on the rural areas. To protect the leadership, and in order to work
more freely, PAIGC moved its headquarters to Conakry, not long
after neighboring Guinea had gained its independence from
France. Hundreds of young recruits left the towns of Guinea-
Bissau to join PAIGC in Conakry, many escaping arrest by the
security police. From these were chosen the mobilizers who
would go into the countryside and begin an intensive campaign
to win mass support for a war of liberation. But only when mass
support turned into mass participation could the war itself begin.
Three years were to pass before the first shots heralding the
armed struggle were fired in January 1963 in the south. It took
six more months before actions began in the north and an addi¬
tional six months for it to spread to other key regions. Even by
the end of the war there were areas that had never been won over
to PAIGC’s view of a new society.
PAIGC’s successes throughout the war were possible only
 In the Liberated Zones 65

because the liberation movement was a mass movement. This

was not simply a result of charismatic and talented leadership,
but evolved from ideology and practice, the provision of a solid
foundation upon which the revolution could be built. A point
often stressed by Cabral was the need for an indigenous theory.
Basing his analysis, which was Marxist in essence, on the reali¬
ties of the situation in Guinea-Bissau,* he once wrote:

National liberation and social revolution are not exportable com¬

modities; they are, and increasingly so every day, the outcome
of local and national elaboration, more or less influenced by
external factors (be they favorable or unfavorable) but essentially
determined and formed by the historical reality of each people,
and carried to success by the overcoming or correct solution
of the internal contradictions between the various categories
characterizing this reality.6

*Cabral always used the term '‘Marxist” sparingly, shying away from applying
such labels to the Guinean revolution.
Is Marxism a religion? I am a freedom fighter in my country. You must
judge from what I do in practice. If you decide that it’s Marxism, tell
everyone that it is Marxism. If you decide it’s not Marxism, tell them it’s
not Marxism. But the labels are your affair; we don’t like those kind of
labels. People here are very preoccupied with the questions: are you
Marxist or not Marxist? Are you Marxist-Leninist? Just ask me, please,
whether we are doing well in the field. Are we really liberating our
people, the human beings in our country, from all forms of oppression?
Ask me simply this, and draw your own conclusions.4
Minimal use of Marxist terminology is still favored today. Rudebeck points out:
The long-term, overriding goal of the PAIGC has always been the classically
socialist one of abolishing, once and for all, “the exploitation of man by
man.” In spite of the explicit long-term goal, clearly reaffirmed at the 1977
party congress, the word “socialism” appears very rarely in authoritative
declarations of PAIGC ideology. It is found neither in the original party
program nor in the various documents of the 1977 congress. The theoretical
reason for this is that Amilcar Cabral was always careful to make a clear
distinction between the concrete goals attainable for a society in the
historical situation of Guinea-Bissau, and the type of theoretical thinking
necessary to come to grips with the reality of such a society. According to
Cabral’s view, which is still the party’s official view, the goal of a socialist
society in Guinea-Bissau is distant, as Guinea-Bissau is still an eco¬
nomically and technologically underdeveloped agricultural country,
marked by the mechanisms of colonial dependency. The social and politi¬
cal analysis applied to the situation of Guinea-Bissau can and should,
however, be socialist in the sense of using Marxist points of departure and
consequently viewing socialism as a natural and desirable goal for the
development of society. In this perspective socialism is simply synony¬
mous with human emancipation and liberation from exploitation.5
66 Fighting Two Colonialisms

One of Cabral’s first tasks was to make a thorough analysis of

the social structure of Guinea-Bissau. This provided the basis
for devising strategies for a successful revolution, and for ap¬
preciating the revolutionary potential of the different classes.
Cabral separated the population first into two groups: the ninety-
five percent living in the rural areas, and those who lived in the
towns. Meanwhile, the population of under one million was
divided into a large number of ethnic groups. There were eight
major groups, with the Balanta comprising thirty percent of the
population, followed in size by the Mandjak (fourteen percent),
the Fula (eleven percent), Mandinga (ten percent), Pepel, Man-
cagne, Felupe, Bissagos, and another ten or so small groups
related to the larger ones. The Fula, Mandinga and a few of the
smaller groups are Muslim, together representing thirty percent
of the population, while the rest practice their own African
religions and are referred to by PAIGC as “animists.”7*
In discussing the social structure, Cabral refers to the Balanta
and the Fula peoples as representing opposite limits of a spec¬
trum. The Fula were a highly stratified, hierarchical society,
divided into three groups. At the top of the pyramid were the
chiefs, nobles, and religious leaders: next came the artisans and
itinerant traders. At the bottom were the peasants, the most
exploited group, and described by Cabral as semifeudal because
they had to work part of each year for their chiefs. The chiefs
owned the land and the labor of the peasants.
The Balanta, on the other hand, were essentially egalitarian.
Decisions were made by a council of elders, often in consulta¬
tion with the people of the village. The land was owned by the
village, with portions allocated to each family for cultivation
according to their needs.

*The way the Muslim religion is practiced in West Africa differs from North
Africa and the Middle East. As Cabral points out: “There are still a lot of
remnants of animist traditions even among the Muslims of Guinea: the part of the
population which follows Islam is not really Islamic but rather Islamized: they
are animists who have adopted some Muslim practices, but are still thoroughly
impregnated with animist conceptions.”8 The small number of Christians, about
two percent of the population, who lived only in the towns, reflected the limited
Portuguese penetration into the rural areas and the lack of missionaries com¬
pared with other colonies in Africa.
 In the Liberated Zones 67

The Fula chiefs were closely tied to the colonialist regime,

which nurtured that support with privileges and special treat¬
ment. The artisans and traders, being dependent on the chiefs
for their livelihood, represented a second section of the pyramid
which was resistant to any idea of national liberation. On the
other hand, the Fula peasants, like all peasants of Guinea-Bissau,
initially appeared to have everything to gain from it. However,
the rigid authority the chief exercised over the laboring stratum
minimized its early integration into the independence move¬
ment. The less stratified groups, the Balanta in particular, were
the first to rally their support, partly due to their lack of hierarchy.
But the difference also resulted in the degree of suffering under
the colonial yoke.9
It took an intensive carhpaign on the part of PAIGC to convince
the peasants, regardless of ethnic group, of the need to struggle
for national liberation. Cabral was specific in his assertion that
the peasants of his country were not a revolutionary force:
[In Guinea] . . . the peasantry is not a revolutionary force, which
may seem strange, particularly as we have based the whole of our
armed struggle on the peasantry. A distinction must be drawn
between a physical force and a revolutionary force; physically, the
peasantry is a great force in Guinea: it is almost the whole of the
population, it controls the nation’s wealth, it is the peasantry
which produces; but we know from experience what trouble we
had convincing the peasantry to fight.10

Cabral underscores this point by contrasting the peasantry of

his country with the revolutionary peasantry of China, noting that
the Chinese masses, due to their long history of revolt, readily
supported and participated in the revolution. But Guinean history
was different, less marked by outside intervention (because the
Portuguese had not penetrated the interior until more recently),
less feudal, less divided along class lines, and lacking in instances
of national revolt because it had not evolved into a nation-state as
a result of its own internal dynamics. Thus, Cabral reasoned,
mobilization in the rural areas was a precondition for armed
struggle: “In certain parts of the country and among certain
groups we found a very warm welcome, even right at the start. In
other groups and in other areas, all this had to be won.”11
68 Fighting Two Colonialisms

In fact, the initiative for the liberation struggle did not begin in
the countryside where it took solid hold later, but in the towns.
The urban population totaled some one hundred thousand
people. Three-fourths lived in Bissau, the capital, most of the
others in Bafata, the second largest town, but one-fifth the size of
Bissau. The rest were dotted in even smaller concentrations,
earning the right to bolder lettering on maps of “Portuguese”
Guinea, towns such as Cacheu, Catio, Gabu, Fulacunda, Teixeira
Pinto, Farim. None of these towns, not even Bissau, could be
considered vast urban centers in the way that the cities of
Mozambique and Angola are. As the majority of the townspeople
had close links with relatives in the rural areas, with constant
movement back and forth, it would be more accurate to think
of them as linked to the rural areas rather than as strictly
urban people.
Cabral distinguished a number of categories among the urban
dwellers. The small European population in the towns corres¬
ponded to the class divisions in Portugal and consisted mostly
of high officials and shop owners. The only Europeans in the
rural areas were those who ran isolated trading stores here and
there. With few exceptions, the settlers were united in their
opposition to the idea of national liberation.
There were three groups of urbanized Africans—the petty
bourgeoisie, the wage earners, and the declasse. The petty bour¬
geoisie itself comprised three groups: the high and middle
officials, and members of the liberal professions whom Cabral
hesitantly placed among the petty bourgeoisie; the petty officials;
and those workers employed in commerce on contract.
The difference between the paid workers of the petty bour¬
geoisie and the majority of workers who fell into the category of
wage earners was the precious contract. With it, a worker had job
security; without it, he or she was likely to be paid an unlivable
wage while subject to firing at a moment’s notice. Dockworkers,
boatworkers, domestic workers (mostly men), shop and small
factory workers (there were no large factories in the country),
performed the bulk of the uncontracted work.
The declasse were also divided into subgroups. The first was
described as lumpenproletarian, although, as Cabral comments,
 In the Liberated Zones 69

there was no real proletariat in Guinea in the first place. The

second represented a large proportion of the urban group, and
merited special attention from PAIGC. They had some educa¬
tion, spoke Portuguese, but were unable to find work in the
towns. Many had grown up in the rural areas and still maintained
close links with family there. In the towns, they lived with
relatives from the petty bourgeoisie or worker families, following
West African custom which requires that a close relative living
in a town support his younger relatives. This group provided a
lot of support for the national liberation movement.
The economic interests of the different classes in Guinea-
Bissau were a major determinant of their support, or lack of it, for
the national liberation struggle. The high and middle officials
among the petty bourgeoisie were totally committed to and
compromised by colonialism. Among the rest there were those
who swayed between support and antagonism. But most impor¬
tantly, there was what Cabral called the “revolutionary petty
bourgeoisie,” composed of people who were nationalist and from
whom the idea of a national liberation struggle first emanated.
The wage earners gave strong and immediate support to the
struggle—it was the dockworkers, for instance, who were behind
the strike which led to the Pidgiguiti massacre—with notable
exceptions among those who had managed barely to establish
themselves economically. Desperately wanting to defend the
little they had acquired, these workers aligned themselves with
the petty bourgeoisie.
The “lumpenproletariat” supported the Portuguese, often
working as spies and informers. But it was the youth of the
declasse which proved a major source of support for the struggle
from the first, and it was from this group that most of the early
mobilizers and cadres of the party emerged. Their militancy
grew out of their ability to compare the standard of living of the
Africans and that of the Portuguese settlers. Meanwhile, the
peasant, who rarely had experience outside the village, and
whose only contact with whites was at the trading post, con¬
tinued to bear his lot in life uncritically. Social mobility, in other
words, was a key element in the raising of consciousness—a fact
emphasized by Cabral:
70 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Many people say that it is the peasants who carry the burden of
exploitation. This may be true, but so far as the struggle is con¬
cerned it must be realized that it is not the degree of suffering and
hardship involved as such that matters: even extreme suffering
in itself does not necessarily produce the prise de conscience
[dawning of truth] required for the national liberation struggle.
In Guinea the peasants are subjected to a kind of exploitation
equivalent to slavery; but even if you try to explain to them that
they are being exploited and robbed, it is difficult to convince
them by means of an unexperienced explanation of a technico-
economic kind that they are the most exploited people. Whereas it
is easier to convince the workers and the people employed in the
towns . . . that they are being subjected to massive exploitation
and injustice because they can see.12

Nor could the question of land reform be a rallying point for

the revolution. In countries where peasants had been robbed of
their land, the call for return of the land to the people was enough
to win quickly the support of the masses. As the Portuguese had
not expropriated the land in Guinea-Bissau, it remained the
communal property of the village. “Telling the people that ‘the
land belongs to those who work it’ was not enough to mobilize
them, because we have more than enough land, there is all the
land we need. We had to find appropriate formulae for mobilizing
our peasants instead of using terms that our people could not
yet understand.”13
Once this social analysis was made, it could and did provide a
jumping off point for action, and, through action, the theory
could again be reassessed in light of experience. A fluid and
continuous process, it enabled PAIGC leaders to seek militants
from among the declasse, to understand the need for a long and
intensive period of mobilization among the peasants, to see that
the leadership of the movement would initially come from the
so-called revolutionary petty bourgeoisie. But it enabled them
also to understand that the revolution would fail if the leader¬
ship remained there. Everybody working in the revolution
would have to develop what Cabral saw as a working-class
mentality in order to make up for the lack of a working class per
se. Those from privileged positions and hence alienated from
the masses of the people, specifically the “revolutionary petty
 In the Liberated Zones 71

bourgeoisie,” would have to rediscover their roots, their history,

their culture. In order not to betray the objective of the struggle
for national liberation, ‘‘the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie
must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be
reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the
deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.”14
National liberation meant many things to PAIGC: regaining
and revaluing the culture and history of the Guinean people;
freeing of the productive forces from colonial and imperial
domination; freeing the people from all forms of exploitation;
building a new society and a new nation based on the full
participation of the people, both men and women; liberation
of women from their dominated and oppressed state within
the society. The form of struggle was a vital factor in deter¬
mining whether these goals could be attained, and the only form
that would ensure independence on Guinean terms was armed
struggle. The years of passive resistance, the demonstrations
and strikes, had led only to increased repression on the part of
the Portuguese colonialists. This violence, part of the society for
decades, could finally be met only by counterviolence, according
to PAIGC. Fully aware of the hardships it would cause the
people, the party adopted this course out of necessity, and as a
last resort.
Cabral explained this as follows:

In our present historical situation—elimination of imperialism

. . . —there are only two possible paths for an independent nation:
to return to imperialist domination (neocolonial, capitalism, state
capitalism) or to take the way of socialism. This operation, on
which depends the compensation for the efforts and sacrifices of
the popular masses during the struggle, is considerably influenced
by the form of struggle and the degree of revolutionary conscious¬
ness of those who lead it. The facts make it unnecessary for us to
prove that the essential instrument of imperialist domination is
violence. If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is
revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the
national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see
that there is not, and cannot be national liberation without the use
of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the
criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. . . . The important
72 Fighting Two Colonialisms

thing is to determine which forms of violence have to be used by

the national liberation forces in order not only to answer the
violence of imperialism but also to ensure through the struggle
the final victory of their cause, true national liberation. . . . The only
effective way of definitely fulfilling the aspirations of the people,
that is to say of attaining national liberation, is by armed struggle.15

There were benefits from this form of struggle other than

the ousting of the Portuguese colonialists from Guinea-Bissau.
“While the armed fight demands sacrifices, it also has advan¬
tages,” Cabral told an informal meeting in New York in 1972:

For us now, it [armed fight] is a good thing in our opinion . . .

because this armed fight helped us to accelerate the revolution of
our people, to create a new situation that will facilitate our
progress. . . . Through this armed fight, we realized other things
are more important than the size of the liberated regions or the
capacity of our fighters, such as the irreversible change in the
attitudes of our men. We have more sacrifices to make and more
difficulties to overcome, but our people are now accustomed to
this, and know that for freedom we must pay a price. What can we
consider better than freedom?16

The “irreversibility” that Cabral referred to in the changed

attitudes of men and women was a phenomenon immediately ap¬
parent to visitors to the liberated zones. It was reflected in the sup¬
port for PAIGC, the political consciousness of the peasants, and
the unity that had been forged among the many different ethnic
groups comprising the Guinea-Bissau nation. The armed struggle
provided an impetus for unity—an essential element for true
liberation—that could not as easily have been attained through
other means. When people are facing death every day and when
they need one another’s support and strength to fight the enemy,
differences based on ethnic group, religion, and sex begin to play
a much more muted role in the life and culture of the people.
“Life is so different now,” a Fula peasant woman told me
when I visited her village. “Before it was not possible to think
like this, but now I see more light and know that everybody is my
brother and my sister. Today we do not think about color or
ethnic group the way we did before. We know one thing now:
everybody is from Guinea-Bissau.”
 In the Liberated Zones 73

The armed struggle proved to be just one phase of the revolu¬

tion. The mobilization of the people that began even before the
beginning of the guerrilla war was concerned even more with
preparing the people for the building of a new society than with
preparing them for war. And once areas were liberated, plans for
social reconstruction were immediately put into effect.
The armed struggle also set in motion a two-way process, a
kind of revolutionary osmosis, vital for the future of the new
society. On the one hand, it brought the leadership closer to
the peasants. On the other, because it encouraged and was
dependent upon mass participation of the people, it also meant
that peasants rose to the ranks of leaders. As Cabral explained in
a lecture he gave in the United States:

The leaders of the liberation movement. . . all have to live day by

day with various peasant strata in the heart of rural populations.
They come to know the people better. They discover at the grass
roots the richness of the people s cultural values (whether philo¬
sophic or political, artistic, social or moral). They acquire a clearer
understanding of the economic realities of their country and of the
problems, sufferings and hopes of the masses of their people.
Not without a certain astonishment, the leaders come to realize
the richness of spirit, the capacity for reasoned discussion and
clear exposition of ideas, the facility for understanding and as¬
similating concepts on the part of populations who yesterday
were forgotten, or else despised as incompetent by the colonizer
and even by some nationals.17

The “osmosis” in the other direction—peasants gradually

acquiring the prerequisites of leadership—meant that a popula¬
tion ninety-nine percent illiterate began to understand the po¬
tential for a totally new life, and to begin to live it. Cabral
continued:

On the other side, the working masses and in particular the

peasants, who are generally illiterate and have never moved
beyond the boundaries of their village and their region, lose, in
contact with other groups, the complexes which constrained them
in their relations with different ethnic and social groupings. They
realize their crucial role in the struggle. They break the bond of
their village universe. They integrate themselves, progressively
74 Fighting Two Colonialisms

in their country and in the world. They acquire an infinite amount

of new knowledge that is useful to their immediate and future
action within the framework of the struggle. They strengthen their
political consciousness by assimilating the principles of national
and social revolution postulated by the struggle. And so they
become more able to play a decisive role in providing the prin¬
cipal force of the liberation movement.18

That PAIGC based its revolution on a clearly thought-out

theory, which in turn was affected by the practice, can be seen in
the preceding pages. The question remaining is how did PAIGC
set about the day-to-day task of making revolution, of putting
their theory into practice.
Chapter 3
“A great deal of patience”

For three years prior to the launching of the war of

national liberation an intensive and critical campaign
of political mobilization was undertaken to win the
support of the peasants. During the eleven-and-a-half-
year war, two-thirds of the countryside was liberated.
A system of social services was established throughout
the liberated zones together with elected local and
regional councils and people’s courts. A new society
was fast emerging despite the hardships of living under
conditions of war.

75
76 Fighting Two Colonialisms

It was one of those crisp, clear Conakry nights that come only in
the middle of the dry season. The whine of the Volkswagen
engine cut through the stillness as Amilcar Cabral and his wife
Ana Maria drove home from a reception at the Polish Embassy.
Although it was nearly eleven, Cabral was not returning home
to bed. He would drop Ana Maria at home and head for the party
office for a meeting with Aristides Pereira, another of the top
PAIGC leaders. Like most of his nights in Conakry, this one
promised to be a long one.
Cabral and his wife were alone in the car. The PAIGC leader
shunned guards, despite the number of attempts on his life. If he
had to live under protection and in constant fear of his life, he
reasoned, he might as well not live. His motto was to trust
people. There was a guard at his house always, and many times
the party insisted that he not travel alone. But now he was in
Conakry and he felt safe. He did not even bother to carry his gun.
He had reason to feel good that night, January 20, 1973. The
war was going well, the People’s Assembly was about to proclaim
the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, and President Sekou Toure, Presi¬
dent of Guinea (Conakry), had special guests: Samora Machel,
president of FRELIMO, the Mozambican liberation movement
and other FRELIMO leaders, including Joaquim Chissano. The
solidarity between the two movements was strong, and their
leaders welcomed the exchange of ideas about their respective
revolutions. In fact, at that moment, Chissano was addressing
PAIGC cadres and militants at the PAIGC Training Center.
Suddenly, bright headlights blinded the driver.'Surprised to
recognize a party Jeep, Cabral stopped his car and got out.
“What is the matter?” he asked, with no trace of suspicion in
his voice.
Three men climbed out of the army vehicle and pointed their
guns at the secretary-general.
“Follow us,” said Kani Inocencio, a PAIGC member.
Cabral refused and called to the guard posted at his house.
There was no guard. He had been the one to inform the conspira¬
tors of the evening’s program and that Cabral would be alone.
“Get in,” he was ordered, “or we’ll have to force you.”
“You can’t get me that way,” snapped Cabral. “Nobody can
 In the Liberated Zones 77

ever tie me up. I never accepted the tying up of others. We are

fighting precisely to break such chains.”
Fear and dismay swept Kani’s face. But it was too late. He
hesitated a moment, then raised his gun and shot, practically
point-blank.
Hit in the liver, Cabral collapsed, bleeding profusely. Kani
left the scene, and Cabral tried to rise from the ground, where
a pool of blood was spreading. The leader was still conscious.
In a final effort, he addressed the other two men who were
standing motionless:
Why, comrades? If there are differences, we must discuss
them. The party has taught us . . .”
What? You’re still talking?” shouted Kani, who had suddenly
reappeared. He turned to the men: “Finish him off. Quickly.”
There was a brief burst of gunfire and Cabral, hit in the head,
fell back dead. The glasses he always wore lay next to him.
Terrorized and powerless, Ana Maria witnessed the whole
scene from the car. She was then taken prisoner.
The swift response of Sekou Toure averted further disaster. By
the next day the putschist assassins had been arrested and the
seized PAIGC leaders, including Ana Maria Cabral and Aristides
Pereira, freed. Pereira had been forced aboard a PAIGC boat en
route to Bissau when his abductors were overtaken by a govern¬
ment naval patrol ship. The putschists were discontented party
members in search of an accommodation with Lisbon and
personal gain.1
The Portuguese who contacted these men anticipated that by
killing Cabral they would cause the disintegration of the libera¬
tion movement. It did not. Nor did it set back the war; if anything
it provided an impetus to push harder toward victory. Cabral
had laid the foundations of the party well; it could continue
without his leadership. However, his death robbed not only his
country, but also Africa and the entire third world, of a truly
remarkable thinker and revolutionary.
Amilcar Cabral’s parents were Cape Verdeans who moved to
Bafata in Guinea-Bissau before his birth in 1925. As his family
was assimilado, Cabral was fortunate in getting a complete
education. In the 1940s he studied in Lisbon, where he came in
78 Fighting Two Colonialisms

contact with other young students from the colonies. Their

informal discussions soon brought them to a thoroughly anti¬
colonialist consciousness, but attempts to organize themselves
were hampered by the Portuguese injunction against forming
political groups. Undaunted, the students obtained government
permission to establish a cultural club, ostensibly to look into
the culture of their homelands—Mozambique, Angola, and
Guinea-Bissau. It never served this purpose. Their political dis¬
cussions and debates went on late into the night as they integrated
what they were learning of left politics in Europe with their
understanding of the oppression of their own countries. It was
here that the ideas for founding the liberation movements—
FRELIMO, MPLA, and PAIGC—were sown.
When Cabral returned to Bissau in the early fifties, he was
employed by the administration as an agronomist and instructed
to conduct an agricultural census of the whole country. The
administration could not have done the future revolution a more
valuable service. For two years, between 1952 and 1954, Cabral
traveled from one end of his country to the other, from one
village to the next. It gave him a unique opportunity to talk with
the peasants and to find out about their lives. He listened closely,
asked sympathetic questions, and absorbed enough information
to form a comprehensive picture of the various forces at work in
the society. He could now adapt the theoretical framework he
had acquired in Europe to the realities of the situation in Guinea-
Bissau. Meanwhile, the contacts enabled him to break down the
barrier which had separated him, as an assimilado, from his
people. But he was not only a listener, and was already organizing
youth in Bissau.
It was not long before the Portuguese administration began to
single out Cabral as a troublemaker. Fortunately, the governor at
the time had some liberal instincts. Instead of arresting him
outright, he called Cabral into his office and gave him the choice
of stopping political agitation or leaving the country, making it
clear that noncompliance would lead to jail.
Cabral left and went to Luanda, but his political work did not
stop; it was simply transferred. Not long after settling in the
Angolan capital, Cabral joined Agostinho Neto in founding
 In the Liberated Zones 79

MPLA, of which Neto remained president until independence.

Simultaneously, the Guinean patriot continued his work toward
the liberation of his own country. In September 1956, he returned
to Bissau for a brief visit, ostensibly to see his family, but actually
to form a clandestine party, grouping the anticolonial forces in
the country.
A month after the Pidgiguiti massacre in 1959, he returned a
second time to Bissau. At a historic meeting in a house in a
bairro (district) a small group of PAIGC leaders decided that “in
light of the Pidgiguiti experience and the nature of Portuguese
colonialism . . . the only way to liberate the country is through
struggle by all means, including war.”2 They also decided to
transfer the leadership of the party outside the country, to
guarantee its security and provide the mobility to prepare for the
war. After bidding farewell to his mother and friends, Cabral left
as quietly as he had entered. Exiled in Conakry, he established
the PAIGC headquarters where it was to remain until the end of
the war.
The policies of PAIGC, and their successes in struggle, have
much to do with the outstanding leadership qualities exhibited
by Cabral. But his main talent lay precisely in his ability to
develop these qualities in others, so that the weight of the revo¬
lution was distributed among numerous cadres. Believing in the
capacity of those about him to do the work as competently as he,
Cabral never saw himself as indispensable. “I am a simple African
man, doing my duty in my own country in the context of our
time,” he once told an audience in London, adding: “We have no
heroes in our country—the only heroes are the African people.”3
On another occasion, perhaps anticipating the eventuality of his
death, he said: “In our country we do not believe in the capacity
of one man to liberate the people. Liberation is the job of all the
people.”4 The fact that the armed struggle was spurred on to new
victories after his assassination is testimony both to the impact
Cabral had on people and the party’s understanding that people,
not individuals, are the motors of history.
Cabral’s wit, his intense honesty, his uncompromising sense
of justice and humanity, have become almost legendary. He
could be stern, teasing, or kind, depending on the situation. All
80 Fighting Two Colonialisms

who met him came away with the sense of his being a great yet
simple man.
Homage to him both as a leader and as a person respected and
loved by the people throughout Guinea-Bissau could be elicited
easily by any visitor to the liberated areas after his death. Dis¬
cussion of the revolution inevitably meant discussion of Cabral.
Whenever people were gathered together and could indulge in
the rare luxury of just sitting and talking, they would begin to
tell endless stories and funny anecdotes, slapping their sides
and laughing as they recalled him. Among the many unsolicited
tributes that I heard, one stands out in particular. It came from a
Balanta peasant woman. As she talked she would rub her fingers
and palms together in a nervous, jerky way, and I could not help
noticing the skin of her bony hands, dry and cracked and cal¬
loused, evidence of many years of pounding rice and hard labor
in her village. She spoke with a simple eloquence, looking at me
directly, her voice swelling with emotion:
“We were exploited by the Portuguese. They stole everything
from the people of Guinea for centuries. They massacred our
people. They stole all our products. They took our people
as prisoners.
“Before our eyes were closed and we could not see the world. It
is the comrade Cabral who opened our eyes and showed us a new
world so that we could stop this Portuguese domination, so that we
could stop all this exploitation. Cabral has cleared the road where
we must walk. Cabral has cleared our minds to help us understand.
“And now we are able to see how important the Work of Cabral
is. We are in a new world. For this comrade Cabral gave his life.
They killed Cabral but Cabral is not dead. His work continues.
“This war is very important. It is not for one day. If it was for
one day, we could not learn our story. This war must go slowly
for the people to learn how important they are.
“We will fight until we kill the last Portuguese soldier. We
will fight until our country is free. And we know why we are
fighting. We don’t want to fight, but the Portuguese came to our
country and started the war. We did not go to Portugal to fight
a war. We have a reason to be free. We are fighting in our
own country.
 In the Liberated Zones 81

“The fight goes forward, never backward. A luta continua—

the struggle continues.”

While Cabral was obviously comfortable dealing with abstrac¬

tions, he was eminently capable of practical work as well. The
PAIGC leader himself conducted the political preparation of the
mobilizers. Drawn largely from the urban youth of the declasse,
hundreds of these young men came to Conakry, some fleeing
arrest, all inspired by the goals of the liberation movement
and wanting to commit themselves to its work. About one
thousand militants passed through the training “school,” no
more than an old, dilapidated cement house, small and always
overcrowded. Some of the graduates would later become leaders
of PAIGC, but one thing they all had in common was that they
were all men.
There were reasons why none of these first mobilizers were
women. The most obvious one is that, given their relative free¬
dom in the society, it was easier for the men to leave Bissau and
join PAIGC in Conakry. Women had virtually no mobility, in
keeping with tradition, and were less likely to break from the
patterns set for them by their socialization. The fact that many of
the first mobilizers were from the declasse gives another clue.
Only young men left the rural areas to live with relatives in the
towns. For while uncles would feel duty-bound to support their
young nephews, they were unlikely to consider doing the same
for nieces. It was beyond the call of custom, and such behavior
by women would never have been condoned in the first place.
The third reason is a very practical one, relating to how mobili¬
zation itself took shape. It was essential to win the trust of first
one peasant, then another, and slowly widen the contacts until
the whole village was won over. This trust would never have
been given to a woman, particularly one making the first contact
between the party and a given locality. In the mind of the
peasant there could be no good explanation for a woman to
“happen” to pass through his village, and he certainly would
not have responded to her questions about his life, much less
any call for the overturning of his oppressors. This initial and
very delicate task thus could be handled only by men.
82 Fighting Two Colonialisms

The training given at the political school for activists was

thorough. Cabral described it in an interview in 1969:
In 1960 we created a political school in Conakry, under very poor
conditions. Militants from the towns—Party members—were
the first to come to receive political instruction and to be trained
in how to mobilize our people for the struggle. After comrades
from the city came peasants and youths (some even bringing
their entire families) who had been mobilized by Party mem¬
bers. Ten, twenty, twenty-five people would come for a period
of one or two months. During that period they went through
an intensive education program; we spoke to them, and night
would come and we couldn’t speak any more because we were
completely hoarse. . . .
We performed in that school as in a theater, imagining the
mobilization of the people of a tabanca, but taking into account
social characteristics, traditions, religion—all the customs of our
peasant population. . . .
We could never mobilize our people simply on the basis of the
struggle against colonialism—that has no effect. To speak of the
fight against imperialism is not convincing enough. Instead we
use direct language that all can understand:
“Why are you going to fight? What are you? What is your father?
What has happened to your father up to now? What is the situa¬
tion? Did you pay taxes? Did your father pay taxes? What have you
seen from those taxes? How much do you get for your groundnuts
[peanuts]? Have you thought about how much you will earn with
your groundnuts? How much sweat has it cost your family? Which
of you has been imprisoned? You are going to work on road¬
building: who gives you the tools? You bring the fools. Who
provides your meals? You provide your meals. But who walks on
the road? Who has a car? And your daughter who was raped—are
you happy about that?”
In our new mobilization we avoided all generalizations and
pat phrases. We went into detail and made our people preparing
for this kind of work repeat many times what they were going
to say. This is an aspect which we considered of great importance,
in our specific case, because we started from the concrete reality
of our people. We tried to avoid having the peasants think that
we were outsiders come to teach them how to do things: we
put ourselves in the position of people who came to learn with
 In the Liberated Zones 83

the peasants, and in the end the peasants were discovering for
themselves why things had gone badly for them. They came
to understand that a tremendous amount of exploitation exists
and that it is they themselves who pay for everything, even
for the profits of the people living in the city. Our experience
showed us that it is necessary for each people to find its own
formula for mobilization for the struggle; it also showed that
to integrate the peasant masses into the struggle, one must have
a great deal of patience.5

The period of mobilization continued for three years before

the beginning of the armed struggle. This period was stressed as
the most important element in laying the foundation for the
future revolution. Without this foundation, the armed struggle,
more particularly, the active part played in it by the peasants,
would not have been so successful. To have been lacking in
patience, to have expected a spontaneous response from the
peasants, would have entailed a dangerous naivete on the part of
the mobilizers. The peasants knew only too well how tightly and
brutally the colonial administration governed Guinea-Bissau.
The laws were formulated and justice controlled by the colonial¬
ists. How could they hope to change this? “We’re blacks,”
they would say. “We don’t even know how to make a safety-
match. The whites have guns, airplanes. How ever can we
get rid of them?”6 But the mobilizers were persuasive, and
they were persuasive partly because they had patience—a very
reassuring quality in the eyes of the peasants, of people whose
very lives depended on the recognition of the practical. And
so over the months of mobilization they began to develop a
new and more confident image of themselves, ignited by the
idea that they themselves might throw their oppressors out
of the country.
Among the many mobilizers I met (some of whom are now
leading members of the party and government) were Braima
Camara and Cau Sambu. Braima was a political commissar in
the army during the war, Cau a member of the Superior Council
for the Fight and regional political commissar in the Balana-
Quitafine region in the south.
84 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Braima was scarcely a teenager when he was mobilized by

Cabral, even before PAIGC was founded.* He came from a very
poor family and grew up in one of the bairro slums of Bissau,
spending his childhood out on the streets with his friends from
the neighborhood. Braima’s father had died when he was an
infant and his mother, sickly and aging, never had any regular
employment. Education was out of the question; he seldom had
enough to eat and dressed in little more than rags.
When he was twelve he set out in search of employment and
eventually found it on an experimental government plantation
in Bissau which grew peanuts, as well as such fruit as oranges,
mangoes, papayas, and palm kernels. He joined one hundred
other adolescents whose work was to carry water to the workers
in the fields for drinking and watering the crops. The pay was
three escudos per day. A pittance, but to Braima, twenty-one
escudos at the end of a seven-day week felt pretty good. A
change from nothing. He worked hard and made a lot of friends
among the boys.
No sooner had he begun to work than an African agronomist
was hired—Amilcar Cabral. And no sooner had Cabral sized up
the appalling conditions than the boys were out on their first
strike. Their foreman, Bakar Cassama,** was Cabral’s close friend
and it was he who spoke with the young workers about protesting
their bad wages. All one hundred stayed away from work and
the following day presented their demands to their highly agi¬
tated boss. “We did not come to work yesterday,” they told him,
“because you pay us very little money. And for three months
now, we have not been paid at all. We have no money to buy
food. We are hungry. We refuse to work here any longer under
these conditions. We would rather go and find work elsewhere.”
The boys refused to budge from their position. Finally, with
much reluctance and no small amount of anger, their employers
agreed to increase their salaries to five escudos per day, and to

*1 interviewed Braima Camara after independence when he was based in Quebo,

a small town in theCatio region in the south. He was the political commissar of a
division of FARP, the national army stationed in barracks evacuated by the
Portuguese.
**Bakar Cassama is now a leading member of both PAIGC and the government.
 In the Liberated Zones 85

pay one month’s back pay at the higher rate. They were paid that
afternoon, but only after they had been rounded up by the
plantation’s armed guards who tried to intimidate them into
telling who had instigated the strike. “We have nothing to tell
you,” they insisted. “You can kill us if you want to. We are not
afraid. But we have nothing to tell you. We did it ourselves.”
The success of this strike led to another, equally successful, a
few months later, but this time all the plantation workers, young
and old, took part.
Cabral was watching these young workers all the while, testing
them for their political potential. In particular he favored Braima,
and took him along on occasion when he traveled into the rural
areas to work on the census. Meanwhile, he organized a football
club among the youth, and he and the boys worked hard to clear
land for a field. After the agronomist had purchased T-shirts of
one color—their “uniform”—they began inviting other teams to
play against them. Cabral’s endeavors were supported by his
employers who thought this was a fine idea to keep the boys out
of trouble. But, like the cultural club in Lisbon, the sports club
was largely a cover for political discussion, in which Cabral
would talk for hours about the conditions in Guinea-Bissau. Not
long after the Clube Africano was formed, its initiator had to
leave Bissau. But Bakar Cassama took over where Cabral left off
and continued to raise the young workers’ consciousness.
Braima avidly took in everything that was being said and
vowed that he would fight for the liberation of his country. As
the years went by he and a group of friends spoke to young
people of their age about the need for a national liberation
struggle, and, after the party moved its headquarters to Conakry,
he distributed pamphlets that had been sent clandestinely into
the country.
When Cabral was in Bissau for the last time, Braima went to
his house to see him. Cabral showed interest in the political
work his young recruit was carrying on, asking many questions.
“Braima, I have to leave Bissau,” Cabral said to him before they
parted. “But I will continue our work in Conakry. If you want to
come and join us, you will find me there.”
Braima mulled over these words during the ensuing weeks
86 Fighting Two Colonialisms

and months. It was becoming clear that he could not go on with

his political activities without being arrested. Besides, he knew
that the only way to win freedom was by armed struggle. And so,
at the beginning of 1960, he and a small group of comrades left
for Conakry. For the next three months he trained under Cabral
as a mobilizer before going into the interior of his country. He
was one of the many mobilizers who formed the core of the
revolutionary cadres.
Not all those who went into the interior became cadres. Some
encountered suspicion and fear in the village they were trying to
mobilize—all it took was one antagonistic peasant—and were
turned over to the Portuguese authorities. Their fate was always
the same: interrogation, torture, and imprisonment or summary
execution. Other mobilizers, meantime, successfully carried out
their assignments, and then proceeded to use their weapons to
tyrannize the villagers for personal profit.
“These militants considered that the areas they mobilized
‘belonged’ to them,” explained Cau Sambu, “and they did not
want to collaborate with the rest of us. They thought they ruled
the area. They used their guns to give themselves power. This
was possible due to the fact that there were so few cadres, and
mobilizers had to act as both political and military responsavels.
Without revolutionary consciousness, they began to get caught
up in their own power. One of the main items dealt with at the
first Party Congress at Cassaca in 1964 was to rid the party of
these attitudes. The responsavels in question were relieved of
their positions and dismissed from the party. The worst offenders
were arrested and detained in military bases. It took longer to
develop political consciousness and mobilize people in the areas
that these militants had worked.”
Cau Sambu,* one of the movement’s most successful mobi¬
lizers, was born in Campara, a village in the Quinara region of
the south. At the age of ten he went to Bissau and became a
tailor s apprentice. By age seventeen he had his own corner of

*Cau Sambu s story emerged out of a number of interviews and discussions I had
with him both during the war, in the Balana-Quitafme region of the south front
where he was political commissar, and after independence when he was regional
secretary-general of PAIGC for the Catio region.
 In the Liberated Zones 87

the veranda of a house where he sewed for his clients. He

remained in this work for many years and left for Conakry only
after the Pidgiguiti massacre, to train as a mobilizer.
It did not take long for him to become one of the party’s most
trustworthy and talented cadres. Loved and respected by all the
people he mobilized and worked with, he was often called “man
of the people.’ He wore that label proudly—there was no false
humility about Cau—but it in no way belied his record, which
spoke for itself. And the record grew more impressive with each
year that he worked, driven by his unbounded energy and dedi¬
cation to the liberation struggle. Although he was a member of
the Superior Council and had numerous opportunities to leave
the liberated zones, he remained inside from the time he first
went in as a mobilizer to near the end of the war.
Cau arrived in Xitole, his first assignment as a mobilizer, with
the name of just one potential contact. He set about winning this
man’s support in the way that became his general pattern:
“I arrived at the man’s house, as if by chance, and asked if I
could stay there a little while, giving some excuse as to why I
was in the area. With the initial contact I had to be very cautious.
I could not begin to discuss the war immediately, or even mention
anything political. No, I just sat there, talking about this or that.
I told stories, joked, talked in a friendly way—for one day,
two days, three days, maybe even a week. It depended on the
responses I got. All the time I was trying to size up my host
and only when I felt the atmosphere between us was right,
did I begin to mobilize Alfredo or Mamadou or Joao. A wrong
judgment could be fatal, so I had to be extremely careful.”
Slowly Cau would bring the conversation around to politics,
to living conditions, to the need for change. Once his contact
showed interest in the idea of national liberation, he would
begin to divulge more details about PAIGC and its plans, and
then suggest that the peasant bring two people that he trusted
from his village to speak with him. At this point, Cau would
leave the village as a security measure—an informer might have
picked up wind of what was happenng—and go to live in the
forest, where he had meetings with his first contacts.
“When this first group of people came to speak to me in the
88 Fighting Two Colonialisms

forest, I would say things like, ‘Ah, I understand that in Bissau

people are beginning to organize,’ or, ‘In Cubucare, I hear that
there are people living in the bush who want to fight the Tuga.’ I
would say, ‘Huh, if this is true, then tomorrow I will go and fight
them. But I don’t have a gun. So what! I’ll just fight them with
what I can find.’ While I spoke I would watch the expressions on
their faces. If they reacted sympathetically to my bravado, then I
could push a little harder.”
Once the initial group was mobilized, they would speak with
a few more and in this way the numbers would grow until
everybody in the village was mobilized. Then Cau would hold a
meeting of the whole village in the forest, making sure that one
or two people remained behind to keep watch for Portuguese
soldiers. He would also make sure they all had an alibi in case
the villagers were questioned about where they had been. All the
women brought their baskets and gourds to make it appear they
had been to the forest to look for fruit, while the men carried
their axes, so that they could say they had been to chop wood.
In his speeches, Cau would talk about oppression by the
Portuguese colonialists and the need to take the fight into their
own hands; he would talk about plans for the armed struggle and
the need to build in the process a society that benefited all. He
would also urge the women to participate in the struggle, in¬
sisting that achievements of the liberation movement would
come to nothing if it meant that only men joined the fight.
Meanwhile, addressing the men directly, he would cajole them
into understanding this radical departure from tradition, into
encouraging their wives and daughters to work together with
the men.
Cau, like the other mobilizers, had come to understand from
his training with Cabral that women did not have the same rights
as men. Because the party recognized the crucial productive role
of women, mobilization was directed consciously at both men
and women, with the insistence that all Guineans be treated as
equals and that men learn to respect women.
The women themselves, however, initially were hesitant about
attending meetings and taking responsibility, and Cau experi¬
enced the difficulty of setting this aspect of the revolution in
 In the Liberated Zones 89

motion. There were noticeable exceptions, though, and one of

the first people he mobilized was a woman. She was the wife of
his first contact in a village he went to soon after he began his
work. Every day the woman took food to him in his hiding place
in the forest, and to avoid raising suspicion, hid the food at the
bottom of a basket. With the excuse that she was going to the rice
fields or to get water, she would set off toward her supposed
destination and, as soon as she was out of sight, switch direction.
“When she arrived,” Cau related, “I talked to her about the
party while I ate the food. We would talk like this every day. I
showed her the documents I had and the PAIGC flag. She was
very eager to help. Back in the village she began to talk with a
few people she trusted most. At first she did not tell them about
me, only talked in a general way about the oppression and the
need to fight against it. When they responded sympathetically,
then she began to tell them about me and the plans for beginning
the war of liberation.”
Once a particular village was won to the cause of national
liberation, Cau would move on to the next. Sometimes he would
have to proceed differently, by laboring with the peasants, as
opposed to waiting around the forest. He would go with them to
the rice fields, or to the forest to chop wood, talking all the time
about general things, winning their trust. Then, as they worked,
he would begin to talk more concretely.
Cau’s charismatic qualities, his skill in a singularly African
way of oratory, and his ability to explain things so that they
related directly to the lives of the peasants made him very
effective. He soon became known to the Portuguese authorities,
who placed a huge price on his head. Once, the Portuguese
administrators of a town near Cau’s area of responsibility called
together the people of the sector and took them in trucks to
Bafata, on the pretext of holding a festivity. After a few perfunc¬
tory ceremonies, the police and army assembled the people
together for the real purpose of the festivity, to instruct them on
how to capture Cau and the other terrible bandidos.
“The terrorists are destroying the villages,” they said. “They
are your enemy. They live like monkeys in the forest, eating only
fruit. But they are very greedy and they love lots of food.
90 Fighting Two Colonialisms

“The worst of these bandits is Cau Sambu. Now if he comes to

your village, you must kill a nice, big chicken and prepare it well.
“How does he eat?” the commander then asked the crowd.
“Ah, he always eats with his hands,” one man shouted back,
with encouragement from those around him. “But he holds his
pistol in one hand, while he eats with the other. He never puts
his pistol down.”
“OK,” the Portuguese commander rejoined, “you must put
the chicken in one bowl, the sauce in another, and place it on his
right side. Then place a bowl of water to his left side. When he
wants to drink water while he is eating, he will have to put down
his pistol. Then someone can say, ‘Ah, what a beautiful pistol
you have,’ and pick it up and pretend to look at it. Then you’ve
got him. Hit him over the head until he begins to bleed. When he
loses consciousness, you can kill him by cutting his throat.
Whoever brings us the head of Cau Sambu will get fifty thousand
escudos and twenty cows.”
The commander then appointed one man, Tunga Labadna, to
be responsible for overseeing the capture of Cau. “OK,” replied
Tunga, adopting a subservient air, “we can surely do this.” In
fact, Tunga was the first man Cau had ever mobilized, and it was
he who helped the mobilizer gain the support of many people in
his area. He always welcomed Cau in his home and looked after
him in the forest.
When they returned home, Cau called a large meeting, where
the peasants reported to him in minute detail what had happened
in Bafata. Punctuated by the appreciative guffaws of the audience,
the whole scene was acted out for his benefit.
A similar incident occurred a while later. But this time Cau
was sitting in the crowd, clean-shaven and dressed like the
peasants he had accompanied, having reluctantly parted for the
day with the black T-shirt he always wore. The meeting had
been called to the town of Xitole, where the Portuguese army
was about to establish a camp. Cau was sent by PAIGC to
find out as much as possible about it. When the commander
addressing the crowd singled Cau out as the most dangerous
bandit, the people around turned to look at him aghast. But the
mobilizer kept a deadpan face, instructing them in their own
 In the Liberated Zones 91

language, “Don’t look at me. He doesn’t recognize me. Nothing

will happen.” The commander, ten feet away, continued the
meeting, oblivious.
As Cau listened to the tirade against “terrorists,” he noticed a
small car nearby; the driver was a Portuguese soldier with a very
fine rifle. Even as he began to scheme a way to steal the rifle, the
car stalled, and when an African guard called for people to come
and help push it, Cau jumped up at once. But as he neared the
vehicle, the African guard shouted at him, “We called the young
boys only. Go away! Go away!”
At first Cau was puzzled, but looking more closely, he realized
the African was gesticulating furiously, not out of anger but in
an attempt to warn him of danger. And then he recognized him.
The guard had been a regular customer when Cau was tailoring
in Bissau.
Cau would laugh heartily as he recounted these stories. But he
could switch in an instant to a serious tone.
“The time of mobilization was a difficult one. A great number
of mobilizers were captured and killed by the Tuga. Others were
arrested. Many peasants were killed or tortured because they
would not give information about us and about PAIGC. Also
there were times when we went without food. Sometimes we
had to manage off the fruit we gathered in the forest, and these
were hard to find during the rainy season.”
The last thing PAIGC wanted to do was rush the process of
mobilization. Only when they felt sure they had the solid sup¬
port of those they had mobilized did they move to the next vital
step—the military. Armed revolt was begun three years later
when the peasants themselves began pushing for it. Tired of the
discussions and talk, they wanted action.
“In Xitole region, where I was, it was the people who directed
the war,” Cau told me, his forehead puckering in a slight frown
as he remembered back. “If it was not for the commitment of the
people, nothing would have happened. The people kept asking
me when they could begin to fight. I wrote a letter to comrade
Cabral telling him that the people were eager and ready. A small
group of us then were sent across the border to fetch guns. But
the arms were not to be utilized in the tabancas. No, attacks had
92 Fighting Two Colonialisms

to be made as far from the tabancas as possible so that the

peasants would not be implicated.
“Those early actions were very important. We knew if they
were successful that we would have all the people on our side.
We had for so long just been using words. Now we had to show
the peasants that the Portuguese were vulnerable and not in¬
vincible. Many were still skeptical, so our first combat missions
had to be carefully chosen. I remember how one group of village
militia came running back into the village after their first am¬
bush displaying Portuguese army rifles high above their heads:
‘We’ve attacked the T uga! The Tug a fled from us! We have won
against the Tuga!’ They were so excited. They had managed to
achieve something they had once thought impossible.
“We had very few arms, at first. We felled trees and placed
them across the road. When the Portuguese army truck came to a
standstill we shot the soldiers and took their weapons. Or we
dug a large hole in the road and then covered over the top to
camouflage it. When a truck fell in we would attack and take the
arms. In this way, in the beginning, we were able to amass more
weapons and so increase the number of ambushes.
“In this way the war of liberation began. Without total support
of the people, it would never have been won.’’*

Throughout the areas liberated by PAIGC, a program of social

and national reconstruction was already under way, providing
services where none had existed before. Schools, hospitals, clinics,
people’s stores were established in every region and every sector,
and I visited those in the regions and sectors of the south and east
that I traveled in. I met people who had been elected to serve on
village councils, sector councils, and regional councils as well as
members of the People’s National Assembly, and judges who had
been elected by people in the villages onto the people’s courts.

"This account by Cau Sambu illustrated how the foco theory of revolutionary
practice would not have suited the conditions of Guinea-Bissau. This theory,
effectively applied by the Cubans, for instance, emphasizes the launching of
armed struggle as a mobilizing technique in itself, and dispenses with a period of
prior political mobilization, which PAIGC found so critical to the development
and ultimate success of their war of liberation.
 In the Liberated Zones 93

The school system in the liberated zones was built from scratch,
dispensing with colonial influence and establishing a new
syllabus to reflect the conditions of Guinea-Bissau and the revo¬
lution. The school system included village schools, boarding
schools, semiboarding schools, and two secondary schools out¬
side the country, one—the “Pilot School”—in Conakry, and the
other in Ziguinchor, Senegal.
Before the beginning of the war there were twelve thousand
students in the whole country, the majority concentrated in
the towns. Toward the end of the war there were over fifteen
thousand pupils in the liberated zones alone, despite the enor¬
mous difficulties that had to be overcome in establishing schools.
Hospitals and health posts, like the schools, were buried
in the forest and consisted of huts constructed from branches,
vines, and palm fronds. The most severe medical cases were
carried on stretchers to the border and then by ambulance to the
Solidarity Hospital in Boke, which had been built with the help
of friendly countries. All other cases—wounds from battle,
illnesses, and injuries—were treated at the small hospitals in the
interior which, although they lacked electricity, had facilities
for minor surgery. Emphasis was placed on preventive medi¬
cine, and health brigades visited villages on a regular basis.
They brought with them, for the first time in the experience
of many peasants, scientific knowledge and relief from the
enormous health problems that persisted from colonial Guinea-
Bissau. Equally important, they provided the people with con¬
crete experience of the changes the revolution could bring.
But at first these services were widely greeted with suspicion.
Women were particularly hestitant to undergo a medical exami¬
nation and to take their illnesses to the health posts. Only
persistent education, as well as concrete results on the part of
PAIGC, began to win support for these services. One health
responsavel who worked in the north of the country recalled
these early problems. “I remember how we tried so hard to get
the people in the village to go to the hospital or medical post
when they were ill,” she told me. “Huh! They would have
nothing to do with these newfangled ideas about medical care.
We had to talk and talk and talk in order to encourage them to
94 Fighting Two Colonialisms

use these services. And then what happened? We could not stop
them from going to the medical posts. Every little headache,
every sneeze. . . !”
People’s stores were another aspect of social reconstruction,
operating throughout the country. The surplus produced in the
fields (and, despite the war, there was a surplus) was traded at
these stores for basic necessities. Peasants no longer had to
submit to unfair trading practices at Portuguese-owned stores.
In exchange for their rice, palm oil, as well as beeswax, crocodile
skins, and livestock, peasants had access to such basic necessities
as salt, sugar, soap, cloth, matches, batteries, flashlights, blankets.
No money was used in the transaction; instead, a slip of paper
indicating the value of the goods would be given the trader, who
could exchange it then, or at a later date, for needed items. The
stores, sometimes resembling small market places where people
would gather and talk, also provided a place for political educa¬
tion, particularly in relation to the economy.
The people elected their own five-member councils at the
village, sector, and regional level, and at the end of 1972 elec¬
tions extended to the People’s National Assembly. Meanwhile,
the village councils were at the core of the administrative and
political structure of the liberated zones. Each of the five elected
members of a village council was responsible for a specific task:
the president for the overall leadership; the vice-president for
security and defense at a local level; another for “social affairs,”
ensuring that the sick got to the hospital, that the children
attended school; another organized the delivery‘of food to the
party and army, and provided meals for visitors to the village;
the fifth was responsible for keeping a register of births, mar¬
riages, and deaths, with the help of the local schoolteachers if he
or she could not write.
PAIGC tried not to influence the election of the village coun¬
cils, unless a candidate supported the colonialists or was being
chosen because he had been a leader in the area before the war.
At times the party found it had to explain to some peasants new
concepts of authority, that it was not a possession to be inherited,
or forever attached to a given individual. Just because someone
had been in authority before liberation did not mean he must be
 In the Liberated Zones 95

elected onto their new councils. “In principle the peasants’

choice is respected,” explained a regional political commissar
in 1966:

If in our opinion, they have chosen badly, we leave the candidate

in office. We wait for the peasants to realize their mistake them¬
selves. Naturally, the party deserves the right to remove those who
use their prerogatives in their own interests. We don’t want a new
chieftainship system. A new committee is elected at the peasants’
request; and elections are also held periodically just to avoid what
you might call hardening of the arteries.7

In the last years of the war, elections for people’s courts were
held throughout the territory. Three members were elected in
each village, or set of villages, depending on their size. Prior to
this the execution of justice in the liberated zones had been the
responsibility of the political commissars. They were terribly
overworked as a result.
“With the election of people’s courts,” Fidelis Cabral d’Almada,
the commissioner of justice, told me, “we could solve the
problem of shortage of cadres, and also give new value to the
traditional customs. This is very important in the political field,
because the people could realize that much has changed and
that they have the power and responsibility to make justice.”
The members of the court were responsible for all the “small
quarrels” among the people. This included petty theft, land
disputes, family rights (such as forced marriage and divorce),
and other aspects arising out of daily life. Their principal func¬
tion was one of reconciliation, and their judgments made in
accordance with the traditional law of the area, provided these
were not in conflict with the progressive principles of PAIGC.
The courts could not sentence an offender to prison, but imposed
fines or other punishment commensurate with the crime.
“We are very encouraged by the people’s courts,” d’Almada
told me with obvious pride. “Since they have been in existence
the rate of crime has decreased. And we are able to educate our
people through the courts, by the practice of real justice.”

The war continued for eleven and a half years. During this
time PAIGC liberated two-thirds of the countryside. They exer-
96 Fighting Two Colonialisms

cised such effective control that in September 1973, a year after

elections were held for a People’s National Assembly, they
proclaimed Guinea-Bissau a state, partially occupied by Portugal.
All attempts by the colonialists to counteract these successes
failed. General Antonio Spinola had arrived in Bissau in 1968,
exuding confidence and proclaiming he would reverse the
insurrection in no time at all. He set in motion a program dubbed
“Better Guinea” in an attempt to improve the level of social
services and to lure the Guineans away from struggle. It was
simply preposterous, he thought, a matter of a few escudos
unspent, that a terrorist organization had managed to achieve so
many victories against the Portuguese army.
At the end of his four-year term, PAIGC was entrenched more
than ever. Support by the masses of the people had grown
steadily each year, and so had the military actions. Spinola
extended his term of office for another two years, extra time to
reach his goal. Before this deadline, however, he was removed
due to “bad health.” In a word, he had failed. Totally. He began
to assert that there could be no military solution to the Portu¬
guese wars in Africa. In acknowledging that the solution would
have to be a political one, Spinola was also acknowledging the
strength of PAIGC.
Some eight months after his dismissal as governor of Guinea-
Bissau, young officers in the Portuguese army staged a coup,
overthrowing the forty-nine-year-old fascist dictatorship of Por¬
tugal, and placing Spinola at the head of the new government
(temporarily, as it turned out). The coup was a direct result of
Portugal’s failure to win the guerrilla wars in Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, and Angola: the wars had so drained the already
fragile Portuguese economy and caused so much disillusion¬
ment among the Portuguese people, that the dictatorship finally
cracked under the strain.
In September 1974, the independent Republic of Guinea-Bissau
was formally recognized by Portugal and became the newest
member of the United Nations. Meanwhile, the foundations for
the new society and for the state had already been effectively
laid inside the liberated zones.
All these programs were not conceived only as matters of
 In the Liberated Zones 97

necessity, pure and simple. Each one both reflected and put into
practice the principles of PAIGC and, as such, furthered the
goals of the liberation movement—to do away with exploitation,
to encourage mass participation, to help the people control their
own lives and their own destinies.
The struggle to end all forms of exploitation, furthermore,
did not refer solely to colonialism and neocolonialism, or to
exploitation based on ethnic differences or religion. PAIGC
spoke also about an end to the exploitation of women. And when
it encouraged mass participation, the party understood that
women had to participate in the revolution equally alongside
the men.
This special emphasis on women, the revolution within the
revolution, formed the basis for my decision to visit Guinea-
Bissau. In this small tropical country I found that behind the
words and the rhetoric a practical program for women’s libera¬
tion, in the context of the total revolution, actually exists. In
discussing the one, I mean to illuminate the other.
Top: Maria Sa, sector committee member: “This is how all women are suffering. . . Bot¬
tom: Kumba Kolubali, Fula village councillor: “A boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy.”
Top: Bwetna N’Dubi, regional councillor in the south and one of the first women mobilized.
Bottom: Fatima Buaro. who fled from the restriction of Muslim customs to join PAIGC.
Top: Stephanie Urdang talking with Mario Ribeira (left) in a Fula village. Bottom: Amilcar
Cabral (right) visiting a PAIGC child-care center in Conakry, with a U.N. delegation
(courtesy of the United Nations).
Chapter 4
“First it is the women who pound. .

PAIGC recognized that despite women’s intensive role

in production and the greater input their work rep¬
resents in the village economy, their status is consis¬
tently lower than men’s and their contribution to politi¬
cal affairs minimal. It is among the Muslim group—
thirty percent of the population—that women are the
most restricted. The differential position of women
and men in the society is not lost on peasant women
themselves. At the same time, they know there was no
hope for change before the revolution.

101
102 Fighting Two Colonialisms

It was midday and the sun beat down relentlessly as we marched

single file across the flat, open plain of the east front during the
last week of my journey. Kumba Kolubali walked in front of me,
her body swinging effortlessly in rhythm with her long strides.
On her head she balanced a white enamel basin (which remained
in that one spot throughout the march as if glued in place). A
transparent plastic bag, patterned with orange and blue flowers,
rested in the basin. A picture of a running soccer player was
printed large onto the material of her long blouse, covering the
top of the cloth that wound, West African style, around her
waist. On her upper arm, just below her shoulder, a thin leather
thong had been tied so tight it dented her flesh. In contrast, two
silver bracelets clinked on her wrist as she walked.
It was all I could do to put one resisting foot in front of the
other and try to keep up with her pace. On my heels came Fina
Crato, the young woman accompanying me on my trip to the east
front; N’Bemba Camara, a nurse who worked in the area; my
interpreter, Mario Ribeira, as well as four armed militants. Hard
as I tried, the heat was taking its toll, and my pace began to
slacken. After two and a half hours, the soldiers, concerned
about my weariness, insisted that we take a break. We stopped at
one of the sparse clumps of trees that every so often broke the
monotony of the open plain. I sat down in the spot Kumba had
chosen for me as the most comfortable, and leant back against a
tree. I reached out for Mario’s metal canteen and took a mouthful
of water. I spat it out instantly. It seemed hot enough to brew tea.
“Are we halfway yet?” I asked gingerly.
The question was translated from English into Creole to Fula.
Kumba contemplated a moment. Yes, she thought it was half¬
way. Mario, remembering the destinations that were ‘‘just over
the hill” but which required ten to twelve more hours to be
reached, cautioned me not to hope too much. I thought longingly
of the marches in the south where I had begun my visit to the
liberated zones. There, seven or eight hours’ marching would
easily be forgotten in the cool of the evenings and the shelter of
the vine-draped forests. But I recalled too the times when Teodora
told me, ‘‘We’re nearly there,” and how my pace would liven at
the news, only to fall off again as I found myself marching for
another couple of hours.
 In the Liberated Zones 103

The stop was short—a necessity if we did not want our muscles
to stiffen and cramp. “No pintcha! No pintcha!” urged my
companions, and I got heavily to my feet and began again.
Kumba seemed as fresh as when we had begun, although she
had already walked the distance from her village in the early
morning to meet and escort us. Despite the fact that she had
given birth to ten children, her body was erect and strong.
N Bemba and Fina talked and laughed together as they walked
and I marveled at their energy.
Through the trees and out into the open. The landscape was
beginning to change as the soft hills that edged the plain grew
closer. Larger clumps of trees alternated with the palms. We
soon began to descend into a long ravine. Below us was a
striking and unexpected view of a sprawling valley with a small
village nestling in it. Kumba turned round and looked at me
with a smile. “Senta Sare,” she said. Fler village. We followed
her down a narrow path which led straight into a cluster of huts.
I looked at my watch. Less than half an hour had passed since we
resumed our march. It struck me that halfway marks were alien
concepts to peasants who seldom wore watches and who, with¬
out opportunity for formal education, were not instructed in the
elements of linear measurement. For Kumba, who marched for
hours and for miles each week, she started when she started, and
got there when she got there.
There were about six or seven huts in the village or, rather, the
segment of the village. Ever since the area had been liberated,
villages had been subdivided into three or four segments. This
way it was easier to camouflage the living areas from the Portu¬
guese pilots as they flew overhead seeking bombing targets. It
meant too, if the village were hit, that fewer people would be
affected. Even with the division of the villages, they were
moved approximately once a year as an additional precautionary
measure. This was no small task in a Fouta Fula village where
huts were intricate constructions. The walls were made of thick
mud bricks, covered with woven thatch. The beehive-shaped
roofs were swept down within a few feet of the ground. Adults
had to bend to enter the huts through the low doorways.
As soon as we arrived we were greeted by the few people who
were in the village. Most of the adults were tending the fields or
104 FightingTwo Colonialisms

doing other chores, and they arrived back in groups later in the
afternoon. Reed mats, brought out for us to sit on, were placed
under a tree which afforded some shade. We were given cool
water to drink. Children came and stood shyly to the side,
looking on with curiosity. It was still very hot and even the
chickens sat sleepily in clumps in the limited shade offered by
the huts.
During my visit to Senta Sare and other Fula villages in the
predominantly Fula area of the east front, I was able to observe
women’s work.
I woke up early in the morning to the swishing sound of brooms
made from reeds or branches tied with vines. The women, bent
over double, were sweeping the ground around the huts, re¬
moving leaves and small loose stones that had accumulated the
day before. The sun was just rising and the men were still asleep.
The fire was already lit and breakfast of boiled rice was being
prepared. Soon the swishing sound gave way to the steady thud,
thud of the pounding, as three or four women stood in front of
large wooden mortars which had been carved from the trunks of
large trees. It was a sound that would provide a background
noise to village life for hours on end. Concentrated in the first
two hours, but present at all hours of the day and early evening,
the pounding took many forms: pounding to husk the rice;
pounding to make rice flour; pounding peanuts to a smooth
butter for peanut stew; pounding manioc; pounding wild berries
and fruits.
It is strenuous work. On each stroke the long wooden pestle,
which broadens out at both ends, is lifted high above the head
with both hands and brought firmly down into the mortar. The
full weight of the woman’s body is behind the rhythmic swinging
motion. Up, down. Up, down. Thump, thump. Thump, clap,
thump. Sometimes only one hand would be used, and then,
without breaking rhythm, the other hand would take over. Or
the woman would let go and clap her hands as the pestle
descended, to give her arms a rest.
Pounding was a task that could be done alone or communally.
A group of women would sometimes stand over their individual
mortars or, for more strenuous work, two women would share a
 In the Liberated Zones 105

single mortar, one woman’s arms high in the air, while the other
was hitting the grain. Then the speed of the thumping would
double. From the age of about six, girls would begin to learn
from their mothers, and it was not uncommon to see a slight
eight- or nine-year-old pounding with the older women. Young
girls, sometimes young boys, would even incorporate it into
their play. I watched a girl toddler, who could barely walk,
trying with her still uncoordinated movements to “pound” into
a small rusted enamel bowl with a short stick. She kept falling
over and then resorted to “pounding” while sitting, the bowl
between her chubby knees. I knelt down to take a photograph
but she burst into terrified tears as I came close. Her mother
leaned down and in a single movement grabbed her by the arm
and swung her onto her hip. The child stopped crying but
looked at me crossly.
Water had to be fetched almost every day. I noticed three
young women in their mid teens set off from Senta Sare carrying
buckets and gourds. They returned three hours later—I timed
it—balancing the containers heavy with water on their heads. I
asked whether they had stopped on the way to the well. No, it
had been a brisk walk there and back. This was the dry season
and we were in one of the few areas of the country that had no
rivers. During the rainy season, throughout the country, water
was taken from the wells as it was purer. And in the wetter areas
of the country some of the deeper wells continued to provide
water during the dry season, while the rivers could be used if
necessary. In the east, people were not so fortunate. The wells
tended to dry up, and those that did not could be far away. Many
miles might have to be traveled to get sufficient water for cooking
and drinking.
Women worked with their babies tied to their backs—in the
fields, at pounding, while cooking. They also looked after the
younger children, too big to carry on their backs. By the time a
girl was about six years old, she would begin helping to care for
her baby brothers and sisters, carrying an infant on her back or
balanced on a hip jutted out to support the baby’s weight. There
were many more responsibilities that a woman had to undertake
each day. Besides caring for the children, there was washing to
106 Fighting Two Colonialisms

do at the well or river, food to be cooked, and, during the

six months of the agricultural season, work in the fields from
morning to late afternoon. Field work for women involved
clearing the land, planting the seeds, transplanting the seedlings,
tending to their growth at all stages, harvesting. In addition,
they often had to return to the villages to prepare food to take to
the fields for the men at midday, and take care of their children’s
meals and their own.
It is a full day’s work, every day of the week, every week of the
year. This is not a situation peculiar to Guinea-Bissau. It is a
pattern repeated throughout Africa. Not only do women have
the full responsibility for child care, cooking, and housework,
they frequently bear the major responsibility for food produc¬
tion. As one writer put it, “Africa is the region of female farming
par excellence.”1 Women are responsible, on average, for well
over half the work in agriculture. In Guinea-Bissau this varies
from one ethnic group to another, but, nonetheless, the burden
of agricultural production and a great deal of other work still
falls more heavily on the shoulders of the women than the men.
This has been a subject of concern for PAIGC. Addressing a
meeting of Mandinga (Muslim) peasants, Cabral said:
“We can praise a person who works, but the work somebody
did yesterday is not about to give him special privileges today.
You have got to work every day. . . . When I come back here there
has got to be rice and a lot of it. The only people who work
around here are the women, and that has got to stop. They will
help you and that’s all.”2
Hence, when we talk of women as providers of food, it is not
simply a question of going down to the local market, buying
foodstuffs ready for cooking, or often precooked, and coming
back to do the final preparation. For the African peasant woman,
it means involvement in the entire productive process, from
clearing the land through harvesting, and then pounding until
the rice is ready for cooking. Even at this point, it is not a case of
filling a saucepan with water from the faucet; it may mean
walking a few hours to collect water from the well. And then,
there is no knob to turn so that a stove can provide instant heat;
rather a fire must be built and tended, which in turn requires that
wood be collected from the forest beforehand.
 In the Liberated Zones 107

Despite the fundamental importance of the provision of food—

the most basic human need—PAIGC confronted the fact that
women in Guinea did not have equal decision-making power
in village life. In terms of women’s affairs, yes. In terms of
influencing men's decisions in an advisory way, yes. But for the
ultimate decisions that had to be made for the whole village,
decidedly not. These were made by the chiefs or the councils of
elders, depending on the social structure of the particular ethnic
group, and such positions were always held by men. The less
stratified the society, the more discussion there tended to be
before final decisions were made. Nonetheless, regardless of
ethnic group, women lacked political power or real authority in
their society. This is spelled out clearly by PAIGC. “In spite of
the importance of women in the life of African peoples,’’ states a
PAIGC document, “it is only rarely that they take an active part
in political affairs. In our country, women have almost always
been kept out of political affairs, of decisions concerning the life
which they nonetheless support, thanks to their anonymous
daily work.’’3
Along with women’s lack of substantial authority over village
life, there went a general lack of status. Men’s work, whatever
it was, acquired higher status than women’s work, a pattern
repeated through much of Africa, where the division of labor
based on sex is strictly adhered to. Women in Guinea-Bissau,
like their African sisters, were held in considerably less esteem
than men of the same age group. This did not mean that they saw
themselves actually as inferior to men, but to a greater or lesser
extent they were expected to play a role subservient to men.
The variety of different ethnic groups in Guinea-Bissau re¬
sulted in considerable variation of women’s roles and the degree
to which they were submerged by men. Cabral’s discussion of
the social structure of Guinea-Bissau notes specific differences
in the roles of women among the Fula and the Balanta, the two
groups he presented as being at opposite ends of the spectrum in
terms of social stratification in the rural areas. “Among the
Fula,” he stated, “women have no rights; they take part in
production, but they do not own what they produce. Besides,
polygamy is a highly respected institution and women are to a
certain extent considered the property of their husbands.”4 By
108 Fighting Two Colonialisms

contrast, the Balanta were generally monogamous, although

polygyny was practiced to a limited extent. Women participated
in production, but owned what they produced, giving them,
according to Cabral, “a position which we consider privileged,
as they are fairly free.”5 He went on to state that one way in
which they were not free was in matters involving custody of
children in a marriage. Children were regarded as belonging to
the head of the family, that is, the man. “This is obviously
explained by the actual economy of the group,” Cabral said,
“where a family’s strength is ultimately represented by the num¬
ber of hands there are to cultivate the earth.”6
Cabral’s analysis showed the close relationship between owner¬
ship of land, the level of stratification of the society, and the
level of the oppression of women. The women in the highly
hierarchical society of the Fula were the most oppressed in
Guinea-Bissau. Being “Islamized” rather than “Islamic,”* these
women were not as restricted as Muslim women in Muslim
societies outside West Africa. They were not veiled or secluded
like their counterparts in Algeria or the Middle East, and had
more freedom of movement. Nonetheless, they were regarded by
their men as inferior and expected to behave toward men in a
submissive manner. There was little they could do without
permission or approval of men and, in comparison to Balanta
women, their behavior was heavily circumscribed.
Whenever I entered a Fula village I was struck by the distinct
separation of the sexes. There was the praying area, carefully
marked out with rocks or tree trunks, where the men sat at
various times of the day. In another part of the village the
women clustered around the fire—the “kitchen”—with infants
and toddlers of both sexes. From the age of four or five, boys
began to spend most of their time with the men, receiving their
informal, traditional education much as the girls were receiving
theirs from the women. What was transmitted to the children
established the roles of both sexes for later life.
In one particular village we visited—it was a little bigger than
the others—the Muslim men themselves brought out mats and
stools for us to sit on, placing them alongside the praying area.
The women brought us water to drink. After greeting us, the
 In the Liberated Zones 109

women some young, others much older—stood to one side,

and looked on somewhat shyly. Mario Ribeira said to me quietly,
“I am going to conduct an experiment.” Turning to the women,
he said in a friendly way, “Sinta, sinta'' (sit down), and pointed
to a long bamboo bench standing alongside the praying area,
and therefore in the men’s area. The bench was empty. According
to custom, an invitation to sit is difficult to refuse, as it could be
interpreted as rudeness. There was slight embarrassment on the
part of the older women, who looked down, but did not move.
After a moment’s hesitation, a young woman did take up the
offer, walking over to the bench and sitting down with a confi¬
dent air. After a polite interval the older women returned to
their work at the fire. The younger woman remained seated for a
while and then followed them. But she had been able to do what
the older women could not—go against custom. The incident
showed both how deeply seated the traditions are, and how the
younger generation is accepting them less readily.
On another occasion we arrived in a village unexpectedly
and although we were made to feel welcome, the women were
noticeably disturbed about whether or not to give us food.
Feeding guests meant killing chickens and they did not want to
act without approval from the village council president who was
away at the time. And yet how could they express their welcome
without giving the visitors food? The dilemma was eventually
resolved after much discussion between the women and the
cadres in our group. Instead of the usual two, three chickens
were killed for us as a way of compensating for an initial
hesitancy which could have been interpreted as unfriendliness.
It had not been an easy decision for the women to make.
Of the Fula villages I visited, I spent the longest time in Senta
Sare, Kumba Kolubali’s village, which was also the furthest
away from the base where we were staying. The president of the
village council appeared extremely put out by the fact that we
had traveled all that way to his village and spent our time
speaking to the women. He fussed about and ordered the women
around, including Kumba, a strong and outspoken woman, a
member of the village council herself. The fact that she had
walked for miles alone to escort us to her village was noteworthy
110 Fighting Two Colonialisms

and something a Muslim woman would not have done easily

before the war. The one night we spent in Senta Sare was a
particularly beautiful one. The air was fresh and cool, the at¬
mosphere relaxed. A blind traveling musician, having heard
there were visitors in the village, came to entertain us. He played
his flute and other Fula instruments well into the night, while a
group of young women stood in a row near him and provided a
high-pitched chorus as background. Kumba came over to me as I
stood among the people gathered around the musician, and put
her arm around my waist. We stood close together, listening to
the music. But not for long. Showing irritation, the president
called her aside and spoke to her sharply, in a tone that one
might use to scold a child. Perhaps he thought she was bothering
me. Perhaps he did it as an outlet for his unhappiness at my
special effort to communicate with Kumba rather than the presi¬
dent. Whatever the reason, she did not challenge his authority.
Looking upset and embarrassed, she joined a group of women at
the fire. I left the musician and went to join them, placing my
stool close to hers. She looked at me and smiled.
Compared to their Fula counterparts, Balanta women certainly
had much more control over their own lives. They could travel
unrestrictedly and participate in village decision-making, albeit
in indirect rather than direct ways, since the council of elders
made the final decisions and its members were always men. In
relation to men, however, the situation was different. A Balanta
woman recalled the relationship between her parents:
“Balanta women are not free. I can give you an example from
my own mother and father. My mother had to always ask my
father’s permission for the smallest thing, although she did such
necessary tasks as cooking rice, fishing, pounding, caring for
children. But this was considered merely women’s work—she
could do nothing else.”
In discussion with Francisca Pereira, one of the leaders of the
party and government, I asked about the position of women in
the Balanta society. “The Balanta woman is freer than the Fula
woman, but she is free up to a point. She does not choose her
husband, for instance, and her husband can marry more than
one wife.” She added that a Balanta woman, however, was able
 In the Liberated Zones lit

to leave her husband for months at a time and travel to another

area. What is more, it was accepted that she had lovers if she
wished a custom known as cundunka. Another government
member, when commenting on the practice, laughed and said,
Ah, but if the wife is away at the beginning of the rainy season
when the work in the fields begins, then he will go and look for
her and make her return to work. That is when he needs her the
most.’ The only other limitation on her behavior in relation to
cundunka was that any children resulting from such a relation¬
ship would belong to her husband and not the father.
Francisca stressed the heavy burden of work on Balanta
women. While women of most ethnic groups played a greater
role in agricultural production, as compared to their men, the
Balanta woman’s share was greatest of all. And this did give
them considerable say over the distribution of rice. However,
she added, when it was a question of selling the rice in order to
pay taxes to the Portuguese, or for such necessities as clothes, it
was the men who took over responsibility. This inequality
extended to other areas, Francisca emphasized: “In the Balanta
village the ho mem grandes [old men, respected because of their
age] make all the decisions. The older women are not respected
like the homem grandes. They cannot make decisions and women
in general are considered in need of protection by the men.”
Fina Crato, the young party militant who accompanied me on
my ten-day trip to the east front, became very heated whenever
she spoke about the role of women in peasant society.
“The greatest difference between men and women comes out
when a woman gets married,” she said. “Before you don’t feel it
as much, but when you get married, ah, then it’s clear. Among
some groups, for instance, the men have four or five wives and
they choose these wives when the women are still babies maybe
three or four years old.
“And the women have to work so hard. Take for example the
time we spent in Lala. [Lala was a village across the border in
Guinea (Conakry) in which we stopped on our way into the
liberated zones.] You remember the little boy who ran crying
after a group of men? The men were only going to look at the
fields, not to work. The women were busy doing all the necessary
112 Fighting Two Colonialisms

work, cooking and so forth, and the men were only going to
drink hard and look over the fields. And even then, do you think
they would take the little boy with them? The mother had to
leave her work to fetch the child away from them.
“The women work like slaves, you know, for the men. They
work very, very hard. But the worst is among the Fula and
the Mandinga. The men sit at home and do nothing. Nothing,
nothing. The women do all the work. The Fula live in a very poor
area of the country. Sometimes a woman has to walk five, six
hours to get some manioc or something like that. And her man?
He just sits at home and waits for her. When she returns he takes
the best food for himself. Ah, the women have to be very servile.”
N’Bemba Camara, head nurse of the hospital at the military
base where Fina, Mario, and I stayed on our visit to the east front,
accompanied us on all our trips to the villages. She herself had
grown up in a Muslim village, and echoed Fina’s words:
“Muslim women are very badly treated by the men. Especially
once they are married because they must do everything in the
home. They must work in the fields as well. A woman cooks her
husband’s food and does everything for him. When he eats, the
wife must wait outside until he is finished. Then he calls to her,
‘you can come now.’ She takes him water to wash his hands and
face. She stands nearby waiting for him to finish and only when
he says ‘OK, you can go now,’ does she leave. Really, they are
just like servants, just like slaves.”
Peasant women did not accept their unequal role in the society
without complaining or with blind subservience. Many women
were highly conscious of the fact that they were considered
inferior by the men. They would discuss it among themselves in
the villages and express their bitterness to each other, often in a
joking way. But, as one militant expressed to me, what could
they do? They saw that their husbands were oppressed by the
Portuguese colonialists, as indeed they themselves were, and
felt there was no way they could begin to make demands for
change. So they continued to grumble about their hardships,
and do nothing about it. Fina explained: “Take for example the
woman who wants to revolt against the situation. All she gets for
her efforts is her husband's whip. There is no possibility of
change within that system.
 In the Liberated Zones 113

“If she is fed up with being his servant she cannot just return
to her parents. Her husband has rights over her now. He has paid
for her, with a cow or something like that, no? If she doesn’t want
to stay with him, she has absolutely no place to go. Her children
belong to her husband, so if she left, she would have to leave
them behind. This is especially true among Muslim groups. Of
course, it exists among the other groups as well, but much less
so. Among the other groups the domination of women is more
subtle; it is not so obvious to the observer. But the Muslims are
proud of these customs and will show them openly. So I tell you,
what could a woman do to change this?
“When it comes down to it, though, among the Balanta it is no
different. When the woman gives birth to a child and is breast¬
feeding it, they say, ‘Now you are a woman. This is your destiny.’
If I am a married man, however, and after a number of years I get
tired of the wife I married when she was fourteen, I can say, ‘Now
you must go. I want a young wife.’ And I’ll simply take a wife of
fourteen again.”
Njai Sambo, a Nalu, one of the first women I interviewed, was
in her early thirties and a member of the Gambona village coun¬
cil in the Catio region of the south. The interview took place at a
political base in Catio. It was seldom that women traveled from
their villages alone when they came to meet me, and Njai was
no exception. Sometimes they would be accompanied by male
members of the village council; other times they would come, as
Njai had, with their husbands. This was Njai’s second husband.
Her first, a Muslim like herself, had died a few years after the
wedding. At the time of the marriage, which had been arranged
when she was still a child, Njai was only in her mid teens and her
husband already an elderly man. She married her present hus¬
band shortly before the beginning of mobilization.
Njai was shy and nervous in my presence. Perched on the edge
of a bamboo bench, her hands clasped together on her lap, she
sat straight and still throughout the interview. She wore a bright
red chiffon scarf tied across her forehead and around her head.
Her face was serious, showing little expression other than
nervousness. When she was not answering a question she looked
into her lap.
“Muslim men are very strict,” Njai told me. “Muslim women
114 Fighting Two Colonialisms

do not understand anything, because their men do not allow their

women to really live. They feel they are more important than
women and therefore the women must respect and obey them.
My second husband is not Muslim. I married him just before the
beginning of mobilization and, although I was not really free
then, I was much freer than in my previous marriage.”
Her first husband, the elderly Muslim, already had three
wives when she married him, Njai said, adding, ‘‘I think this
custom of men marrying more than one wife is very bad. I am
much happier being the only wife. 1 have experienced both and
can compare.”
When I asked if her first husband had treated all his wives
equally, a smile momentarily brightened her angular, attractive
face. “No,” she replied. “But I was the favorite! The other wives
were always jealous of me. We did not get along well at all.”
Maria Sa, a Pepel and non-Muslim, came from Cassaca in the
south front and had been a member of the sector committee for
her area for many years of the war. She had begun to work for
PAIGC at the beginning of mobilization.
Maria was of an older generation than Njai, probably in her
fifties. She had greeted me in a friendly manner, but remained in
the background when men were around. I interviewed her late
in the day when time was limited because we had to return to the
place where we were to spend the night. The regional political
commissar and the president of the sector sat with us during the
interview. The president had actively participated in PAIGC and
the armed struggle from the beginning and was a mine of infor¬
mation about the early days and the first party congress at
Cassaca. The men presumed I had more to learn from the presi¬
dent than from Maria and got agitated when they felt 1 was
taking too much time talking to her.
The presence of the two impatient men did not help Maria to
relax. She would stop speaking if either of the men intervened,
showing deference to them. She seldom looked toward them
when she spoke. Despite all this, she held her ground. In her
low-key but firm voice she told me what she felt about the role of
women. Every now and then a look of anger would flash across
her gentle face as she emphasized a point about the way in
 In the Liberated Zones 115

which women were oppressed. Her manner might have changed,

because of the presence of the men, but the substance of what she
had to say apparently did not.
“We women really suffer,” she began. “First it is the women
who pound, it is the women who go to fish, it is the women who
cook for the men. And then sometimes they say, ‘Ah, your food is
not well prepared.’ With all the work we have to do, and they
protest! It is these things, these kinds of discrimination that we
have suffered and continue to suffer from. When there is a lot of
work to do, we women go and help the men. When the men are
tilling the land, we have to cook fast and take it to them. And we
must be sure that we are not late with the food! It is our responsi¬
bility, also, to find food supplements such as fish.
“It is very hard, our life. In addition to all of this, if his clothes
are dirty, it is we women who must wash them. Very nice and
clean. Because if the man walks in the village or the street
wearing dirty clothes and people see him like this, who does it
reflect on? Why, the women! Not the men. We do not like this or
want this. All these things are ways in which women suffer. As
for the men, the only thing they do is till the land. Once the men
have tilled the land and the rice begins to grow we are then
responsible for everything after that. The women alone harvest
the rice and we have to transport it without their help to
the village.This, I tell you, is how all women are suffering.”
When I was told in Guinea-Bissau that it was the women who
responded first and most strongly to mobilization, I could ap¬
preciate it. “Go and join the fight,” women would tell their
husbands. “If you don’t, I’ll wear the pants and go.” The next
level was for the women themselves to become active partici¬
pants in the struggle.
Women carry the heaviest burden of both agricultural and domestic work. Top, left: women
pounding in Quebo, a small town in the south. Hight: preparing for a peanut crop. Bottom,
left: washing in the river, flight: men's work: repairing a thatched house in Bissau.
Top: Muslim girls in a Fula village. While girls tended to be covered up by wraparound
skirts, blouses, and turbans, the younger boys often wore no clothes. Bottom: members of the
Young Pioneers, a PAIGC youth organization, at a mass meeting in the liberated zones.
"Children are the flowers of the revolution and the principal reason for our fight." Top: an
army militant with a child from a village in the south; bottom, left: a mother and child in a
Fula village in the east. Bottom, right; a member of a village council of a Fula village in the
east.
Chapter 5
“We are part of the same fight”

From the beginning, PAIGC integrated the need for

women’s liberation into their ideology and practice.
There were many women among those first mobilized,
supporting the work of the movement in many ways. An
important step in the process of entrenching PAIGC’s
position that women participate equally in the struggle
was the stipulation that at least two of the five-member
elected councils—village, sector, and regional—be
women. Progress was uneven from one area to another,
with the difference in rate of involvement most marked
between Muslim and animist women.

119
120 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Every day Bwetna N’Dubi did the work that was expected of
her.* She pounded rice with the other women in her Balanta
village until the callouses on her hands were hard and embedded.
She fished. She cleaned the hut she and her husband slept in and
swept the ground outside. She worked in the fields. And although
she had no children herself, despite her thirty years, she helped
care for the children of the village, carrying infants on her back,
scolding them, comforting them. Her husband had been imposed
as “chief” of the village because the Portuguese could never
understand how to relate to the whole council of elders, the very
core of local authority. What is more, the Balanta society was too
democratic to allow a truly efficient exploitation on the part of the
fascist regime. So Bwetna’s husband, reluctantly acting as a single
go-between, was responsible for tasks such as rounding up workers
for the Portuguese and making sure that the taxes were paid.
The years went slowly by, with hatred for the Tuga increasing
with each and every provocation. But the daily pattern of Bwetna’s
work and life continued much as it had been for her mother and
her grandmother. The years ahead must have seemed to her to be
cast in the same mold as those that had already passed. Nothing
would ever change.
However, it did.
One hot day, early in 1961, a young man, barely more than
twenty, arrived unexpectedly in their village. He was quiet-
spoken and polite. After being welcomed as a visitor for a few
days, he left, and the villagers assumed he had traveled on to
another area. But he had not. “Nino” Vieira was in fact a PAIGC
mobilizer, and, after having contacted a few people in the village
he could trust, he had gone to live in the forest. Bwetna was
among the first four people he mobilized. Later she would recall
with pride that it was Nino himself who first came to her village,
for by the end of the war he was something of a national hero.* *

*Bwetna N'Dubi told me about her life when I interviewed her in the Balana-
Quitafine liberated region of the south front.
*‘Bernardo “Nino" Vieira was a dynamic young mobilizer who quickly rose to
top leadership of PAIGC. As commander of the people's revolutionary armed
forces (FARP) he was the strategist behind many of PAIGC's key military actions.
He was the commissioner of defense from the declaration of a state in 1973 to
mid-1978 when he became prime minister (comissario principal] after the tragic
death of Francisco "Chico" Mendes in an automobile accident.
 In the Liberated Zones 121

While he was working as a mobilizes she took him food every

day and listened with tremendous excitement to his words. The
ideas filled her head and she could think of little else. That they
themselves could change their lives! When he talked it seemed
so obvious, so possible. Soon Bwetna was beginning the work of
mobilizing other people in her village. Like many women, she
joined PAIGC before her husband, and it was she who mobilized
him, convincing him of the need to begin the struggle against
the Tuga.
It did not take more than a few weeks for the whole village to
rally behind the idea of fighting colonial oppression, making it
safe for Nino to call meetings of all the villagers in the forest.
Within a few months the seemingly unchanging rhythm of
village life had been totally disrupted. Guerrilla camps were
established in the forest, filled with men and women who had
come from the villages, some to train as guerrillas, others to
carry out the different supporting tasks.
Bwetna’s husband was one of the first to leave for the camp,
spurred on by the fact that the Portuguese were on his trail. The
Portuguese had asked him, as “chief,” to inform on the move¬
ments of the “terrorists,” and when they suspected his involve¬
ment, sought to arrest him. Bwetna remained in the village and,
with other women, organized the cooking and transport of food
to those who had set up base in the forest.
Those early days were hard going. It was one thing to support
the idea of liberation, quite another to risk one’s life for it.
Because once they got wind of what was happening, the Portu¬
guese retaliated by attacking villages indiscriminately, and
massacring the peasants living there. Bwetna was challenged to
work even harder. Organizing the cooking of the rice was rela¬
tively easy. The more difficult task was to recruit people to
transport it. The journey took two days and meant crossing a
major river. For security, it had to be made under cover of night.
If no one volunteered she would sit down and think: “My hus¬
band is in the forest. He is fighting for our country. Why don’t I
sacrifice a little and take them the rice?” She would then set off
with the rice herself, even if she had transported it the time
before, and the time before that. The women in the village felt
responsible for providing the guerrillas with enough food. They
122 Fighting Two Colonialisms

appreciated that life was difficult enough for them without the
additional hardship of going hungry. But while they spared no
effort, there were times that those in the forest went without food
for two or three days at a time.
In addition to the staple diet of rice, the women would try to
take the guerrillas fish and even meat, along with water for
drinking and washing. And although these were time-consuming
tasks, they never questioned the sacrifices they made. “We know
well what the guerrillas are fighting for,” Bwetna would say to
herself. “My husband is in the forest. Our sons and daughters are
in the forest. I too must make an extra effort to see that they get
enough food. We are part of the same fight.”
It was not long before the Portuguese soldiers began to harass
the peasants of her village. They arrived one day, demanding to
know where Nino was. Only four people, including Bwetna,
knew his hiding place. They said nothing. Bwetna argued with
the soldiers, finally convincing them that they had no idea of his
whereabouts. But the Tuga were put off only for a short while.
They returned to the village on a later occasion and went straight
to Bwetna, their rifles in firing position.
“Where is your husband?” they asked her.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“If you do not tell us then we’ll all go together and look for
the camp.”
“But it is you yourselves who say that the people of the forest
are terrorists and kill people,” she replied. “They will kill me.”
“No, they won’t,” they sneered. “They know you.”
She held her ground, thinking all the while of the many
women like her who had been shot for refusing to comply.
“Kill me if you want,” she retorted. “I won’t tell you anything.”
Bwetna was lucky. The soldiers finally left the village without
harming her. But other women she worked with, and whom she
had in fact mobilized, defied the Tuga at the cost of their lives.
Once, after the guerrillas had ambushed and annihilated a Por¬
tuguese column, angry soldiers from a nearby base came to the
village seeking information—and revenge. Bwetna was away
taking food to the camp, but two other women were cooking a
large amount of rice when the troops arrived. And when they
 In the Liberated Zones 123

refused to divulge the location of the camp, the Portuguese

riddled them with machine gun fire.
On another occasion, after Bwetna and the women from her
village had made a number of consecutive trips to the base, she
organized two volunteers from a neighboring village in order to
share the responsibilities. The two women were crossing a bridge
on their return from the camp when they were spotted by soldiers
waiting nearby. No warning was given. The volunteers were
shot off the bridge and killed.
While Bwetna’s bravery would still be recalled with respect
and pride many years later by those who knew her, she was not
unusual among Guinean women. Many like her responded with
excitement and dedication to the call for national liberation.
They too risked their lives in their work. They gathered informa¬
tion on the movements of Portuguese troops and prepared food
which they carried to the guerrilla bases; they marched for hours
transporting supplies to the front, and went into the bases to
train as guerrillas and to fight in the militia.
Freeing their country from Portuguese colonialism was suf¬
ficient reason to spur many women to support PAIGC. But it was
not the only reason. Teodora Gomes and others told me that
many women initially began to support PAIGC because they saw
in it the potential for their own liberation. They were angered by
their oppressed situation but at the same time impotent to
bring about change. Suddenly they were presented with the
opportunity to radically affect the unequal balance of power.
National liberation became for these women almost incidental
to the promise of equal social status, and the right to play a
political role previously denied them.
Women are potentially a formidable revolutionary force. They
are so totally oppressed that once they do begin to move for
change the momentum begun in order to unload the burden of
their own oppression may simply keep on going until the struc¬
tures that support both their oppression and the oppression of
the whole society under colonialism is toppled.
“It was the women who were the easiest to mobilize,” said
Francisca Pereira, in an interview. “They realized that this was a
great opportunity for their liberation. They knew the attitudes of
124 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the party, and understood that for the first time in the history of
our country, they would be able to count on political institutions
to safeguard their interests.”1
The development of these institutions was not accidental. The
position that women must be liberated in the process of overall
revolution had been a clear and integral part of the ideology of
PAIGC from before mobilization. In all guerrilla wars women
have been the supply line—be it Yugoslavia during the Second
World War, Vietnam, Algeria, Angola, or Mozambique. It is
the women, given their historical condition, who have provided
the food.
However, there is a distinct difference between the involve¬
ment of women in the guerrilla wars in countries such as Algeria
on the one hand, and in countries such as Vietnam, Mozambique,
and Guinea-Bissau on the other. This difference lies in the politi¬
cal ideology of the movements. In the case of the latter group the
liberation of women is emphasized in order for socialism to
become a reality. In Algeria, women played a very active role in
the revolution, although it was generally restricted to tasks that
men could not do, such as smuggling bombs out of the Kasbah.
But there was no ideology to back it up, no policy that saw the
liberation of women as an end in itself. Once colonialism was
defeated, women were encouraged to don their veils again
and return to their traditional roles in the family and to pro¬
duce more children. The fight for the emancipation of women
was stillborn. *

The involvement of women in the Guinean revolution was not

an afterthought brought about through necessity. This can be
seen, for example, in a PAIGC directive of the early 1960s,
which states:

Defend the rights of women, respect and make others respect them
(whether as children, young girls or adults), but persuade the
women of our country that their liberation must be their own
achievement on the basis of their work, dedication to the Party,
self-respect, personality and decisiveness toward everything that
can act against their dignity.2

There are, of course, some pragmatic reasons why the involve-

 In the Liberated Zones 125

ment of women was encouraged in Guinea-Bissau. Every mem¬

ber of the society—man, woman, and child—was needed to fight
against the tremendous force of the colonialists. But armed
struggle was never viewed as the final stage of the revolution; it
was seen as a springboard for the creation of a completely equal
society. And so the concept of equality was integrated into the
ideology of PAIGC at its inception, and then put into practice in
numerous notable ways.
Party mobilizers launched the battle for women’s emancipation
necessarily on a most elementary level. They began by talking.
The need for the liberation of women, the fact that they were
doubly oppressed by the Portuguese and by men, and what
should be done about it—these were the subjects of many
meetings in the rural areas. An address by Cabral to a mass
peasant meeting was recorded by a journalist in 1966:
Comrades, we are going to place women in high-ranking posts,
and we want them at every level from the village committees up to
the party leadership. What for? To administer our schools and
clinics, to take an equal share in production, and to go into combat
against the Portuguese when necessary.
. . . The women and girls will go into the villages as nurses or
teachers, or they will work in production, or in the village militias.
We want the women of our country to have guns in their hands.
. . . Comrades, young girls are going to be coming into the
villages from our bases. But don’t anybody think that these girls
are up for sale as brides. They will get married if they wish, but
there will be no forced marriages. Anyone who does that is worse
than the Portuguese. These young girls are going to work in the
villages, go to school, be in the militia and the party will exercise
complete control.
. . . The women must hold their heads high and know that our
party is also their party. Our party repeats to everyone of you that
the road we have taken is like the Fai'im River: it never returns to
its source but flows toward the sea. Likewise the PAIGC will reach
its goal, which is the true independence of our people.3

Years before, Cabral had given lectures such as this while

training mobilizers in Conakry. He had insisted that the mo¬
bilizers understand and accept the need for the liberation of
women before going into the interior.
 126 Fighting Two Colonialisms

“When we first arrived in Conakry we did not understand

this,” admitted Cau Sambu with a laugh. “Both men and women,
we just didn’t understand it. But Cabral explained these new
ideas to us carefully, at the same time being very emphatic about
the need to accept these ideas. He was very strict with us.”
When the mobilizers began to call the village meetings in the
forest, few women attended. They saw this as the man’s domain
and stayed away. So the mobilizers would insist that at least a
few women attend to represent the others in their village. These
would return to the village and discuss what had been said at the
meeting. The next time, a few more women would attend. Slowly
the numbers grew until the whole village was meeting in the
forest, except for those who were responsible for security and
remained behind. “The women understood quickly what I was
talking about,” Cau told me, “because they knew from their own
experience that they were dominated by men.”
The party’s practice, however, went even beyond all the words.
In order to achieve the emancipation of women, PAIGC believed
an ongoing struggle had to be waged by the women themselves.
It was not seen as something that would be conveniently realized
at the time of independence “because now everybody is free.”
“The people began to understand how serious PAIGC was,”
said Cau Sambu, “when the party began organizing the work,
and insisted that both men and women take on the same respon¬
sibilities. Through our practice, not only through our words,
women understood more clearly why they had to fight for their
rights as women.”
v' One of the most important steps the party took initially was to
stipulate that at least two women be elected to the five-member
village councils. These councils were established soon after an
area had been liberated to carry out local party work, to handle
the daily organization of life in the village, and to provide
support for the war. Council members were elected by the
peasants and replaced the traditional council of elders or chiefs.
However, given the traditions of the society, it seemed amazing
to me that both men and women had agreed to this radical
departure from past practices.
How PAIGC implemented this was one of the first questions I
 In the Liberated Zones 127

asked Teodora. It had not been easy, she agreed, to convince the
women or to persuade the men that women should be members
of the councils. “We solved the problem by a very practical
method,” she said. Each member of the council had a different
area of responsibility. The task assigned the women at first
related to the work they traditionally performed: women were
responsible for providing rice for the guerrillas. This went
beyond cooking, which had initially been done by women in the
villages, to collecting quotas of raw rice from all the families in
their respective villages, and which then had to be transported
to the camps and military bases. Women, responsible for the
harvest, were also responsible for the stores of rice in the village.
Hence, provision of rice for the army was an extension of the
work they performed daily in the village and, as such, was an
acceptable task for women to perform—in the eyes of both men
and women.
“It was not a simple matter for a man to cook for the fighters,”
added Teodora. “But for a woman it was easy, so she took up the
task with eagerness. She was basically doing the same work she
had always done.”
Nevertheless a qualitative change had taken place: the inte¬
gration of women into a decision-making body, once a male
preserve, brought with it recognition and increased status for
women’s work. For the first time, the “anonymous daily work of
women,” as PAIGC referred to it, was given a status more in
keeping with its real value in the society.
Teodora stressed that the task of cooking for the guerrillas was
especially important at the beginning of the war. In fact, it was
“the most important task that had to be done.” Initially, women
left their homes to cook for the fighters, who were based in
different regions, and this gave them more mobility than they
had had before. They would also participate in the constant
discussions that were going on about the war and about the work
of PAIGC. And not only among themselves. Because they were
carrying out such an essential task, they were able to have new
and more equal interactions with men. Food production was
consciously perceived as vital to the society. And as the war
itself stepped up, the provision of food for the PAIGC army
128 Fighting Two Colonialisms

necessarily became better organized. Hence, the task expanded

both in scope and in value even as women joined the councils to
carry it out.
Once on the councils, the women could take part in all dis¬
cussions and decision-making, giving them an opportunity to
develop self-confidence and leadership abilities. Meanwhile, a
new world was unfolding, not only for themselves, but for all the
women in the village. PAIGC represented an authority outside of
the traditional councils or chiefs, and because it had given its
approval and explicit encouragement to the idea of women
taking on an equal political role, men could begin to accept this
idea as legitimate. For women there was finally a structure
through which to begin to move toward liberation. As Francisca
Pereira had expressed it, they could now “count on political
institutions to safeguard their interests.”
N Before too long some councils had a woman president or
vice president. By the end of the war, there were many councils
with more than two women members. On one occasion I was
introduced to a council with four women members.
The tasks of the councillors also underwent changes, corre¬
sponding to the progress of social reconstruction in the liberated
zones. After a while, the provision of food became the responsi¬
bility of one member of the council, rather than two. Next, the
task of “social affairs” was added, in an attempt to overcome
the suspicion with which the peasants greeted the introduction
of the party’s new social services. And generally, though not
exclusively, this new council task went to a woman.
Responsibility for ensuring that PAIGC’s services were in fact
understood and used by the people for whom they had been
intended represented a qualitative difference in women’s roles.
Persuading a sick person to go to a hospital and reluctant parents
to send their daughters—not only their sons—to school, required
the exercise of authority, a function denied Guinean women
throughout their history.
Just how important this work can be is apparent from the
description of her work given by the woman responsible for
social affairs in Ca village in the south front. Explaining her
duties to a visitor, Tale Na Sum said:
 In the Liberated Zones 129

“I am responsible for the schools and the health care in the

village. The Portuguese never built any schools before. They have
started doing it now, when they are about to lose the struggle.
Therefore the parents are not used to sending their children to
school. We have to persuade them. This was not always easy to
begin with. But I explain to the parents that they have to send their
children to school, because it is important for our country. I also
see to it that the teachers get what they need, food and laundry and
other such things. . . .
“It is important that the school is not too far away from the
village, so the children will not have to walk too far. I discuss this
with the teachers. I also discuss with the parents. I ask them to
keep their children neatly dressed and clean, and to take care that
they get the help they need to do their schoolwork.
“I work with health care too. If anybody gets sick, I talk to the
president, so the sick person can be brought to the sanitary post.
When the health brigade comes to our village, I am always present
and watch that the people listen to the advice offered by the
brigade. I also see to it that the members of the brigade are received
as well as possible when they come to our village.”4

PAIGC’s requirement that at least two women be members of

the local decision-making bodies applied to sector and regional
councils when they were elected later in the war. Women also
became members of the People’s National Assembly though the
percentage was still very small. In addition, one out of three
elected members of the people’s courts was usually a woman.
However, Commissioner of Justice d’Almada denied that this
was conscious policy. “Election of a court is too sensitive a
matter to make stipulations such as these,” he said to me. “People
must elect judges whom they trust absolutely.” Another respon-
savel hotly contended that this was not so. “I was sitting right
next to [Amilcar] Cabral when the issue was being discussed at a
meeting of cadres, and he stated categorically that at least one
member must be a woman.”
I could only presume that d’Almada, supervising as he did
most of the elections personally, must have been reflecting cur¬
rent policy. In any event, my experience showed that women
were members in many cases, and I met a number of women
judges in both the south front and the Fula (Muslim) east.
130 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Policy or not, either villagers were being encouraged to elect

a woman to their courts, or by the time these courts were estab¬
lished toward the end of the war, the peasants were already so
accustomed to having women on their committees that they
readily elected a woman of their own accord.
Throughout the liberated zones women were emerging to
become militant, active members of the society and the revolu¬
tion. Bwetna N’Dubi was one such woman.
I first met Bwetna when I visited Cau Sambu’s base in the
south front. The base was about one-and-a-half-hour’s march
from Teodora’s, where I was staying at the time. Teodora and I
had spent the afternoon visiting a clinic and a people’s store, and
ended up at Cau’s base where Bwetna was waiting with two
other women from her village, both members of their village
council. Bwetna herself was a member of their regional council.
She was a tall, bony women, with a proud countenance and a
firm step. Her uneven smile seemed to be lurking around her
mouth even when she was serious and would illuminate her face
in a flash whenever she found something pleasing or amusing,
which was often. She knew little Creole and spoke in Balanta.
I watched with appreciation as she talked, giving vent to a
wide range of gestures and facial expressions. Her speech was
punctuated by the sharp “eh!” that so many Guineans use for
emphasizing a particular point, along with the “n’tchia”—the
Creole term to describe the peculiarly Guinean practice of
sucking one cheek in against the teeth, so that a high-pitched
sound resulted. Used in different ways it connCted anything
from anger and disgust to contemplation or approval. Of the
three women, Bwetna was the most outspoken. There was no
trace of diffidence or self-consciousness in her demeanor, and
she appeared to be enjoying my presence as thoroughly as I was
hers. I asked if I could interview her and she agreed to come to
Teodora’s base the following day.
Her arrival before seven o’clock in the morning meant she had
risen before five to begin the two-hour march from her village to
the base. She traveled alone. We sat for a number of hours under
the mosquito-netting tent, which had been erected over the large
table and two long benches serving as the eating area. While
 In the Liberated Zones 131

we talked, chickens ran about outside, squawking and busily

scratching in the dry, brown earth of the small clearing. Occa¬
sionally someone would enter or leave one of the five huts that
edged the open space. A slight, elderly woman sat on a small
carved stool outside one of the huts, looking after two preschool
children. Nearby a young woman washed clothes in a metal
basin. She had dug a shallow hole out of the ground and placed
her chubby, nine-month-old daughter in it. The child contentedly
watched her mother while she worked. Meanwhile, other sounds
of the base drifted through the mosquito netting. Pounding.
Radios tuned to music from Senegal or Guinea (Conakry). The
voices of people working, walking by, or relaxing in the shade, as
well as the occasional but inevitable drone of the Portuguese
bombers. Radios were turned off at once and silence reigned as
we cocked our ears toward the sound to check if they were
approaching in our direction.
Bwetna, who acted as liaison between the people in the villages
in her region and the regional representative to the People’s
National Assembly, spoke passionately—about the need for the
revolution, about the importance of the war in mobilizing people
for a new life, about the need to liberate women, about Cabral.*
Her husband had been chosen by her uncles, as her father was
no longer alive. Her mother had had no say in the decision.
Neither had Bwetna. “I did not understand anything; they give, I
take,” she said, adding that because of the changes since the
beginning of the war she could now leave her husband if she
wanted. “But it is not necessary as now he understands some¬
thing about the need for equality between women and men.”
Bwetna first heard about the need to fight for women’s rights at
the time of mobilization. It had meant a lot to her, as she under¬
stood from her own experience that equality was both necessary
and possible. ‘‘Today I work together with men, having more
responsibility than many men. This is not only true for me. I
understand that I have to fight together with other women against
the domination of women by men. But we have to fight twice—

‘Bwetna N'Dubi is the peasant woman whose moving tribute to Amilcar Cabral
is quoted in Chapter 3.
132 Fighting Two Colonialisms

once to convince women, and the second time to convince men

that women have to have the same rights as men.”
Many changes had occurred in her life since the beginning of
mobilization, Bwetna said. She felt much more confident now
and was able to speak at meetings, something she could not have
conceived of before. ‘‘Sometimes I have to leave my home for up
to three days on a party mission and my husband stays home and
takes care of everything. Two days ago, for example, I was told
that I should come and meet a visitor. Yesterday I was at the
commando and I met you, today I am here with you. Tomorrow
we have a meeting at the regional commando which I have to
attend and maybe I will return home only the day after tomorrow.
This is not the first time that I am doing this, nor is it only me that
does it.” (In fact, she stayed away from her village even longer.
Three days later we met by chance in the huge crowd that had
assembled to welcome the first five ambassadors to Guinea-Bissau
as they presented their credentials to President Luiz Cabral at a
military base inside the liberated zones.)
‘‘Before, life was very difficult for women,” she concluded.
‘‘The party has brought new ways and a new life for women. But
we must continue to defend our rights ourselves.”
Media Te, a Muslim who grew up in the north of the country,
spoke of similar changes. When she married she moved to the
south where her husband’s family lived. He joined PAIGC soon
after, at the time of mobilization, and was arrested by the Por¬
tuguese. She had not seen or heard from him since, and could
only assume that he was dead. In the short time I spoke with her
after a mass meeting, Media gave me the impression of being a
dynamic and confident woman. ‘‘I was very excited when the
mobilizers began talking about the need for women to be equal,”
she told me. ‘‘Yes, I welcomed this very much. Now both women
and men are considered people and can do the same work. We
must work together. My life is completely different now. I live
alone, but I am free.”
During our meetings, I invariably asked women what resis¬
tance their husbands or fathers had initially given to their joining
the struggle, or becoming members of the village councils. With¬
out exception they told me the men had been supportive. Such a
 In the Liberated Zones 133

stream of unthreatened men! This was contrary to what women

cadres told me or to the experience of mobilizers who often
found men very hostile to their wives becoming active in the
movement. I wondered if the advances made in the last ten to
twelve years had not blurred history a little. Bwetna responded
to my question with a chuckle. “If we tell the truth today about
what happened at the beginning of the struggle, we would have
to admit that many of the men were very unhappy about it. Life
was difficult for the men too, before, but now that so much has
changed in our lives, they refuse to remember their reluctance of
the past. In fact, they deny it!”
Some women would allude to other women’s husbands. Njai
Sambo, the village councillor in the south whom I interviewed
at the beginning of my visit, touched on these early attitudes
of men.
“In my case this was not a problem,” she began. “My father
accepted what the party said about women at the time of mobili¬
zation. So did my husband. But I have seen cases where husbands
refused to allow their wives to join the guerrillas or work for
them. They felt that if their wives went to the camps, other men
would take their women. This was a big problem. Women were
not free and they had to do what their husbands said.”
By the time I visited Guinea-Bissau it seemed to me that men
supported, even took for granted, that women be on the village
councils. There was also a consciousness among many men of
the need to fight discrimination against women. The mass
peasant meetings I attended were always addressed by both men
and women. The women who stood up to speak had crossed
many personal barriers since the first days of mobilization, when
women hesitated even to attend such meetings and would have
been put down by the men for such effronteries as speaking out.
Nonetheless, ideological development was not even. In my
interviews I found discrepancies among individuals, and among
different communities. Women would talk to me about their
work as providers of rice with immense pride, and I could see
that they felt their contribution to the war was extremely im¬
portant, even a revolutionary act. One peasant women, asserting
that women’s work was equal to fighting because the guerrillas
134 Fighting Two Colonialisms

could not continue without them, said: “The men fight with
guns, the women provide the food.” She correctly understood
the vital importance of her work. However, she, like a great
number of her sisters, saw this as an end in itself and not a
transitional step toward breaking down the division of labor
based on sex. Life had changed so radically for them that they
felt they were already free.
The gaps in the levels of individual consciousness were not
lost on PAIGC cadres. They would reply that it was not possible
to leap instantly from a society in which there was a strict
division of labor along sex lines, to one in which all work is
performed equally by both sexes; this was a goal that had to be
worked for over many years.
Disparate levels of consciousness on the village level became
apparent to me after I had attended two mass meetings in dif¬
ferent areas of the south. The first was held in Tombali, near a
semiboarding school, where we stayed for a few days. We set off
at about ten in the morning for the hour’s walk to the meeting
place. We followed a road originally built by forced labor, now
grown over by vegetation and in need of repair, and then turned
off onto a narrow forest path. Suddenly, without warning, we
were amid a crowd of about four hundred colorfully dressed
people who stood up and clapped their welcome as we entered.
The atmosphere was electric. People greeted us and shook our
hands as we made our way to the table and benches newly
constructed for the “guests of honor.” Teodora and the respon-
savels for justice, health, and education who were accompanying
us were surrounded and greeted with backslaps and warm hugs.
After a while the meeting was called to order and we sat down,
filling up the bench. Everyone else sat on the ground in front of
us, crushed close together, row after row. Women, men, children,
and infants, with no noticeable segregation between the sexes.
There were a number of speeches. The three responsavels
each talked about their areas of work. Then it was Teodora’s turn
and she spoke at length about the role of women and about the
coup which had recently taken place in Portugal. Her voice rang
out to the crowd, which listened attentively. The speeches were
being simultaneously translated from Balanta to Creole, or Creole
 In the Liberated Zones 135

to Balanta by an energetic militant who jabbed his hands in the

air for emphasis. The people from the audience got up to speak,
about six altogether, including two women. One was Sabado le,
a frail-looking elderly woman, who directed her words to me.
“We women gave the men food and the men fought against the
Portuguese colonialists. This is our fight, a fight of both women
and men, and the bombs cannot stop our struggle for liberation. I
am old, but this is not important because now I know what I
want. We will fight until our lives have ended. Every day children
are being born and will take our place and continue the struggle.
We women fight together with men to defend our country.”
When the meeting came to an end, Teodora led the vivas (long
live!) in her powerful voice. No meeting or gathering, however
small, failed to end with vivas, a unified expression of the
participants’ support for PAIGC. Viva Amilcar Cabral! Teodora’s
voice rang out. Viva Amilcar Cabral! responded the gathering,
as they thrust their right arms upward. Viva PAIGC! Viva PAIGC!
Then followed a veritable stream of these tributes in growing
crescendo, ending with a special Viva as mulheres da America!
Long live the women of America!
There had been a certain amount of moving around during the
meeting, as a few men and women walked about. The sexes
mingled with apparent ease. And when the meeting was over,
people dispersed slowly, and again both men and women came
up to talk with Teodora and the responsavels. It was men and
women together with no noticeable sense of inequality. As we
walked away, after the meeting finally ended, Teodora turned to
me and said that what I had witnessed was an important marker
in the progress of the revolution. Ten years before this scene
could not have taken place.
Several days later, I attended a much smaller meeting of about
one hundred fifty people at a village school in the sector of
Cubisseco. Because the single “classroom”—constructed from
wooden poles and thatch—was not large enough to hold every¬
body, rough-cut planks from benches and tables had been brought
out and people sat on them in rows in front of us. That is, the men
sat in rows. Most of the women sat in a circle on the ground at the
back, attending to children and talking among themselves. The
136 FightingTwo Colonialisms

spirit and involvement so evident at the Tombali meeting was

absent here. Part of this was due to the fact that the meeting was
called at short notice—hence the fewer people—and it was held
at a much hotter time of the day in a clearing that offered little
shade. The atmosphere was decidedly less festive. On the other
hand, despite the segregation of women, two of the four peasants
who gave short speeches were women, one being Media Te.
While the differences between the Tombali and Cubisseco
peoples had been marked (I never received explanations pre¬
cisely as to why), the gap between the Muslim peoples and the
rest of the Guineans presented no great mystery. Unlike the
confidence and eagerness to talk to me shown by the animist
women—although they were often shy and few were as forceful
and articulate as Bwetna—one Fula woman I spoke with seemed
to typify the general reticence of most of her Muslim counter¬
parts. She gave such tense, cryptic replies to my questions that
after a little while I decided to bring the interview to an end. We
were getting nowhere and she was so obviously uncomfortable.
Her ordeal over, the woman positively beamed with relief. For
the next half hour or so, she spiritedly launched into comments
and stories, joking with me and all those around her.
When I talked to women such as Teodora and Carmen Pereira
who could speak for the party with authority, they tended to
minimize the differences that still existed after eleven years
in the liberated areas. The impression I got from them was
that the differential, in terms of oppression, between Muslim
and animist women had narrowed to such a point that it was
virtually nonexistent.
“In the beginning of the struggle it was a problem because the
Muslim women wanted to stay at home,’’ Carmen told me. “But
now it is the Muslim woman who brings her children to the
party and asks that they go to school. We no longer have dif¬
ficulties in this regard. The party mobilized everyone, insisting
that we not be divided by ethnic group or by religion. We all
belong to Guinea-Bissau. The people understand this. Now there
are nurses who are Muslims and other Muslim women working
for the party. One of the regional responsovels for health in the
south is a Muslim woman.
 In the Liberated Zones 137

In the villages, you will meet Muslim women on the village

councils. She works and talks with confidence. The men will sit
and listen to her, just as if it was a man speaking. Before it was
not so, a situation worsened by colonialism. At that time when
two men sat down in a village, a woman could not go near them.
If she did there would be trouble. The woman had to stay at
home, shut up in the house. Today these things have been
changed by the party through struggle.”
An interview with another journalist gives additional insights
into the difficulties confronting Muslim women.
“Among the Muslin tribes the position of women was very
backward. To greet her husband, for example, a woman would
have to kneel and put her forehead on the floor. She went to work
and the husband stayed home. She worked till sundown, came
home, greeted her husband, prepared the meal, got some water
for him to wash with, brought him food and knelt before giving it
to him. The party has struggled against such negative traditions
and done away with most of that. Now men work with the
women in the fields.
‘‘In the past a Muslim man never wanted a woman to go to a
meeting. There were many meetings during the struggle and
women were very interested to hear what was going on. The men
would refuse to let them go for three or four times, but the
women would keep insisting. Finally, the men were obliged to
accept. Now, women are on the village committees and are
sometimes elected president. Men now accept women leading
meetings because it is a party directive and they see why it
is correct.”5
What Carmen was saying about the development of Muslim
women toward emancipation was true to the extent that Muslim
women have advanced considerably in relation to their point
of departure. There were, too, many women whose progress
matched that of their animist compatriots. However, I also saw
the still marked differences between Muslim and non-Muslim
women. Those Muslim women who were cadres of the party,
and the women confronting the restrictive customs in their
villages head on, had to fight harder than their animist sisters.
Male supremacist attitudes were more firmly entrenched in the
138 Fighting Two Colonialisms

customs of Muslim society. This did not mean that all women
were now at an equal stage in their struggle.
The work of women on the village councils also was different
in the south as opposed to the east. As the east was unsuitable for
growing rice, the Fula did not supply rice for the army in the way
that the people of the south had done throughout the war. It
appeared that the work of the women in the Fula areas was to
attend to visitors when they came to the village and to see that
they had a place to sleep and food to eat. The task of “social
affairs” had not yet been instituted there, judging from the
villages I visited.
The women council members in the east were referred to as
“president-for-women” and “vice-president-for-women,” which
seemed to indicate that they would be accepted on the council as
long as they were responsible for women’s affairs, but not as
equals with the men. This, and the fact that women were less
active on the councils as compared to men, had much to do with
the high level of stratification in Fula society in contrast with the
Balanta. The more rigid the stratification, the more rigid the
authority figure—an authority always vested in men in Fula
society as opposed to the Balanta.
Some of the younger women in the party were more open than
top leaders in discussing the differences between the two groups.
When N’Bemba spoke out so strongly about the subservient and
oppressed position of women in Muslim society, for instance,
she was not only referring to the past, before the beginning of
the war. Such oppression was still a part of life in Muslim vil¬
lages in the liberated zones. However, the south was liberated
considerably earlier than the east and this contributed substan¬
tially to these differences, they emphasized.
“Women in the south have more responsibility, it is true,”
said N’Bemba. “The constant contact with the army there leads
to this. In the east, women do not supply food for the guerrillas.
Progress is slower here, but it is still progress. You must under¬
stand that the south and the east are very different. The social
structure is different and this must be taken into account.”
Kumba Kolubali, Fula and Muslim, best summed up the
changes that had come about for women, Muslim women in
 In the Liberated Zones 139

particular, since the first mobilizers infiltrated the rural areas.

She talked to me about this the day I visited Senta Sare. In the
late afternoon the women had gathered in one place, while the
men sat a little way off, excluded from the gathering. Kumba
spoke at length, despite a severe toothache which had caused
one side of her mouth to swell up. She began even before I could
pose a single question.
“When the first comrade came here to mobilize us, we were
very afraid. We did not know him so we did not trust him. We
thought he was dangerous and that he would take our things and
not pay for them. But he talked about all the bad things that the
Portuguese were doing, which we understood very well. He said
that the party believes that everybody is equal and that we are all
one people.
“Later the party organized a committee in the village to take
care of matters that related to the party and to the village. It was
elected by the people in our village, and we elected two women
as well. Before it had not been possible to even imagine that
things like this could happen. But now life is very different.
Now I see more light and now I know that everybody is my
brother and my sister. Now we don’t talk about color or ethnic
group the way we did before. We know that everybody is from
Guinea-Bissau.
“We have forced the Portuguese out by the war, and we are
able to live much better than before. We used to go to Beli or
Madina Boe [the nearest small towns, but a long distance from
the village] if we needed things. Today we have shops that we
can go and buy from and we can afford the goods. We have so
many things since the party began to help us, things that I have
never seen before and could not have dreamed of. Schools and
hospitals, which are free. Before, we had no clothes and went
barefoot. But now everybody can get material and clothes and
we are well dressed. I am very happy for the things the party has
done for us. I can’t tell you enough how happy I am for my
people and how pleased I am that the party exists.’’
Kumba spoke animatedly and her words flowed without hesi¬
tation. After a few sentences she would pause and wait patiently
while the translation went from Fula to Creole to English,
140 Fighting Two Colonialisms

stoically ignoring the pain that her decayed tooth was causing
her. As she adjusted the large, bunched-up cloth against the
swollen side of her face, I remembered the tooth extraction a
medical officer had performed on an elderly peasant man during
my visit a few days before to a nearby clinic. The knowledge that
Kumba would be able to have the same attention at a free medi¬
cal service helped me appreciate the changes she was describing.
“The difference between my life as a woman before and my
life now is very, very big. How could I have ever thought that it
would be possible for me to be the vice president of a village
council one day. Before this was always man’s work. When
the elections were held, both women and men voted for me
and for the other woman on the council. I know they accepted us
as members of the council, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted
for us.
“Life is so much better for women now. You see, before you
were brought up to be a boy or to be a girl. Now things are
different. For the party says everybody is the same and we
understand this. A boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy. In
other words, each can do what the other can do.
“Oh yes, life is very different now. For example, I sit here at
this moment and men are nearby. They have listened to what I
have said and they have accepted it. They have made no objec¬
tions. Before it was not possible for me as a woman to sit here and
talk to you, a visitor. It would have had to be a man who talked
with you. It would not even have been possible for a woman to
sit and listen.
“Before, men and women could not work together doing
the same work. The men had this idea that the women must
work for the men. Not anymore. Now the men and the women
work together.’’
Chapter 6
“Sold for a pig or a cow”

While stressing the importance of revaluing the customs

of the people, PAIGC simultaneously began discour¬
aging the practice of customs that were oppressive.
Forced marriage, lack of divorce rights for women, and
polygyny were singled out as particularly detrimental
to women. Many young women joined PAIGC in order
to escape the restrictions of these customs. When elected
people’s courts were established, these women were
responsible for handling such cases.

141
142 Fighting Two Colonialisms

There was a rebellious streak in Fatima Buaro.* She did not want
to accept the husband—a much older man—her parents had
chosen for her and whom she, a Fula girl, was expected to marry
without question. The marriage had been arranged when she
was just a child, and although she had more than a decade to get
used to the idea, Fatima never overcame her dislike of the man.
At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she had met young men nearer
her age whom she preferred. There were two she liked in par¬
ticular and one she would have considered marrying had there
been a choice. But what could she do? She could flirt a little. Yes,
this was allowed. But girls her age, almost young women now,
knew their limits.
Fatima was nearing her next birthday. At eighteen she would
have to get married. Already the final preparations were being
made for the African-Muslim wedding: the long discussions
between the two families; the final exchange of gifts; the plans
for the ceremony. The young woman saw all this happening
around her and did not like it. No, there would be no wedding,
and she told her father so in no uncertain terms. But he was
adamant. Fatima became desperate. She cried and pleaded. Her
father remained unmoved. Didn’t she know that he was the best
judge of what was good for his daughter? After all, wasn’t this
man economically stable? That was very important. She would
get over her unhappiness in time and see what a good choice he
had made.
Anyway, he thought angrily, what could he do now, at this
stage? It was too late to go back. Hadn’t he arranged the marriage
ten years ago, knowing then that it was a good match? And
hadn’t he, since then, accepted the customary gifts from the
bridegroom’s family? The goats, the chickens, the rice, the few
escudos. (In the old days there would have been cattle. Not any
more, though. The Tug a had seen to that.) And wasn’t it hard
enough to just keep going? How difficult it was to produce even
enough rice to take to the trading store so he could pay his taxes.
And his family still had to eat. He worked hard. And so did his

*Fatima Etuaro told me this story of her life during the week I spent at Vendoleidi
base in the east front.
 In the Liberated Zones 143

one wife. For although Fatima’s mother had died and he had
married again, there had never been any question of a second
wife. He could not afford one.
Then his son had gone off to fight the Tuga. His only son. He
needed him to help with the work. Hadn’t he sacrificed much so
that his son could go to school? Was this to be his reward—his
son killed in battle? How could these guerrillas hope to defeat
the Tuga? The Tuga were far too strong. They had guns and
money. They had power. How could the poor people living in
the villages hope to fight them? And win? First, his only son had
got carried away with this nonsense. And now his only grown¬
up daughter was trying to go against his wishes. She knew he
would have to return all the bride-price if the marriage did not
take place. Poor as he was, how could he possibly do that?
As the preparations for the marriage progressed, Fatima be¬
came resolute. She decided to carry out the plan that had been
in the back of her mind for some time now. Taking with her
only the clothes she wore, she left her father’s village and
the Gabu area.
Somehow, she didn’t know how, she would make contact
with PAIGC. She would join her brother. Skirting the edge of the
forest, she walked on, hoping she would be lucky. Suddenly she
realized she was not alone. “Hey!” Hearing a man’s voice call
after her, she turned to see a man the age of her father coming up
quickly behind her. “Where are you going?” She did not answer.
“Young women don’t walk alone. You are not from this area.
Where are you going?” Still she did not answer.“Ahuh, I know.
You are going to the Republic of Guinea to join the bandidos.
Yes, I know. I am going to take you to the regulo.”*
The regulo, seventy-three years old, looked her up and down.
And then up and down again. He was pleased with what he saw.
His wives were also old, and he had been wanting a new young
wife for some time. He would marry Fatima, he decided.
Fatima knew there was no way out this time. She told him

*In the Fula hierarchy there were several levels of chiefs, at the top being the
reguios who wielded considerable power. They owned large tracts of land
worked by Fula peasants on a semifeudal basis, were generally very wealthy, and
collaborated with the Portuguese in order to safeguard their interests.
144 Fighting Two Colonialisms

where she came from, hoping without hope that her father
would intervene. The reguJo then contacted her father, a bride-
price was agreed upon, and the young woman returned to her
village to wait for the wedding.
There, her father was totally unresponsive to her predicament.
He brushed her anguish aside. “It serves you right. If you hadn’t
run away this wouldn’t have happened. Now you must live with
it.” Besides, what could he possibly do? Go against the regulo’s
wishes? Impossible.
If Fatima had cried before it was nothing compared with the
tears she shed now. She wasn’t just unhappy. She was terrified.
She hated this man and had heard that he was cruel. He was as
bad as the Tuga, forcing his people to pay him huge amounts in
livestock and rice. As if they didn’t have a hard enough time
paying their taxes. Once they had paid their taxes, and then the
reguJo, they were literally starving. And this was the man she
was being forced to marry and with whom she would have her
children. She did nothing but cry. Through her tears, though,
she knew that her father was in a difficult position. The regulo
had such power that her father, like the other villagers, was
afraid of him. Were her father to say anything on her behalf, the
regu lo would simply punish him, when his life was already hard
enough. And if she refused to marry the reguJo, he would make
life even harder for her father and she would have to marry him
anyhow. There was no way out.
The wedding festivities were very grand. It was the biggest
feast that had been held in Gabu for many years. People came
from all over and partook of the sumptuous spread of food the
reguJo provided. He had ordered many animals killed, not only
as a tribute to the bride but also because the occasion presented
an opportunity to display his wealth.
When the ceremony finally ended after a few days, Fatima
went to live with the regulo’s other wives. They were in a
separate compound and never came in contact with visitors. It
was almost like a harem. Although Muslims were only allowed
four wives, he had twelve . . . well, thirteen, including her.
Maybe he hadn’t married all of them. She didn’t know. Or maybe
when you were very rich and powerful and favored by the
Portuguese the way he was, you made your own rules.
 In the Liberated Zones 145

The other wives were very jealous of Fatima and ostracized

her. She spent most of her time alone, and bored. There were
many servants and, anyway, the regulo did not want her to work.
Occasionally, she cooked special dishes for him. Often when he
traveled to Bissau and other towns he took her along. This
simply increased the jealousy of the other wives and also their
hostility toward her.
Fatima became pregnant a few months after the wedding and
gave birth to a healthy boy. How pleased the reguio was. This
was indeed a perfect wife. Young. Beautiful. Fertile. And the
first-born was a son. For Fatima it meant that life was less lonely,
as her child kept her company and occupied her. But it did not
mean she was less unhappy.
One day the reguio told her that her brother was threatening to
come and take her away. He laughed: “He thinks he can do that,
but it is impossible.” The Tuga would stop him and smash that
puny PAIGC militia force he was commanding. Those bandidos
could attack the Portuguese gazernas [barracks] all they wanted.
No matter. The gazernas were impregnable, he thought smugly,
and had been established near the Fula villages precisely because
the Fula supported the Portuguese. (At least the regulos did, and
hence at this early stage of the war, so did many of the Fula
peasants.) Meanwhile, the young guerrilla anguished over the
forced marriage of Fatima and continued sending messages to
the reguio announcing that he would come and free his sister.
Forewarned, the reguio took precautionary measures. Whenever
he heard that PAIGC was in the vicinity he would remove Fatima
to another one of his villages in a different area. Her once high
hopes began to fade. Because she had been anticipating freedom,
she felt more trapped each time it failed to materialize. After the
fifth transfer she was desperate. No, this is enough, she told
herself. I have to do something about this situation myself. So for
the second time she ran away, taking her son, now a year old,
with her.
Walking through the forest she was suddenly surrounded by a
group of armed young Africans. Immediately they trained their
rifles on her, demanding to know why she was there. “I have
come to join the party,” she replied. They were suspicious,
however. She was a Fula, from a Fula village, and at that time
146 Fighting Two Colonialisms

most of the Fula were supporting the Tuga against the guerrillas.
They had no grounds to trust her. But when she told them who
her brother was and that she wanted to find him, their faces
brightened. Her brother had talked about her often. So they
helped her with her child and led her along the paths that
wound through the mazelike forest to a military camp, hidden
under the trees. After a joyous reunion with her brother she was
taken to Amilcar Cabral, who was visiting the camp at the time.
But Cabral too was suspicious because she had been married to a
regulo. “But it’s not my fault,” she pleaded. “I was taken by
force. What would you expect me to have done?” Convinced,
Cabral then spent a long time talking to her about PAIGC. He
went into detail about their work, about their achievements,
their goals, their difficulties. He took out a large packet of photo¬
graphs and went through them with her. They were of women
who were working in the party. He proudly and carefully ex¬
plained to her the need for the involvement of women and that in
the liberated zones women were treated as equals and expected
to play as full a part in the struggle as men. Fatima, whose own
experience had been so different, was exhilarated.
She had never heard anything like this before, and her heart
pounded faster and faster as Cabral unfolded his vision of free
men and women in an independent Guinea-Bissau. After they
had talked a long while, Cabral asked her what she would like to
do. Perhaps she’d like to train as a nurse, he suggested. Yes,
she’d like that a lot, she replied.
First Fatima went to the south where she was attached to a
health post and began to train as a nurse’s aide. After a few weeks
she went out of the country to train in Boke at the nursing school
attached to Solidarity Hospital. For the first time in her life, at
the age of twenty, she began to learn to read and write, at the
regular grade school for nurses in training.
Having completed her nursing studies after a year, she went to
work at Cameconde Hospital in the south front. When she got
there she learned it was one of the first hospitals established after
liberation began, and this under sparse conditions without any
fully trained doctors. But Fatima would work under the super¬
vision of a fully trained doctor and as one member of the hos-
 In the Liberated Zones 147

pital’s staff of twelve nurses, midwives, and nurse’s aides. There

were beds for over fifteen patients and a busy out-patient clinic,
but Fatima’s work was not confined to the hospital alone. She
joined the health brigade, consisting of four or five nurses,
which made weekly visits to the villages to attend to the health
needs of the population, visit pregnant women, and educate the
people about preventive medicine.
She began to enjoy her work at Cameconde, adapting easily to
the exacting life of the mato. She learned to distinguish the
sound of oncoming bombers and help the patients in and out of
the trenches when the raids came. With her son at the child-care
center in Conakry she was able to settle into her work quickly.
She felt she was contributing something very concrete to her
people. She grew close to the comrades she worked with. It was a
new kind of home for her, and she began to experience the
independence she had dreamed of when she first left her father’s
village to seek a new life.
This was not to last long. Shortly after her arrival at the
hospital her work there came to a dramatic end.
The morning began like many others at Cameconde. Fatima
and the other health brigaders had arrived at a village to begin
their work for the day. Suddenly they heard the whirring of
helicopters and looked up to see them disappearing behind
the trees into a clearing in the forest.* In a second everybody
scattered. Women picked up their babies and ran for shelter,
while the men and nurses made sure that everybody was leaving
the village. Then they followed amid the squawking of chickens
rushing round in circles, flapping their wings.
Fatima, being new to this area, did not know where to hide.
She ran into the forest and, after choosing a likely spot, watched
the Portuguese soldiers charge into the village and set the huts
on fire. But as they retreated, setting alight the bushes behind

*By 1970 it was obvious to Spinola that his “Better Guinea" program was doing
nothing to w'oo the people away from PAIGC. Beginning to get desperate as he
saw his dreams of reconquering “Portuguese” Guinea fade into oblivion, he
reinforced his program with military action by increasing the bombing raids and
the helicopter commando raids on liberated villages—parallel with the U.S.
army’s "search and destroy" operations in Vietnam. Unable to sustain these
raids, they were forced to abandon the tactic.
148 Fighting Two Colonialisms

them, they ran straight into her. She had chosen as her hiding
place the very path they were following to link up with the
helicopters. A few minutes later, when the helicopters lifted into
the air, squashed together with the soldiers was Fatima, a
prisoner. All the soldiers were African, including their officer,
who volunteered a comment: “When we take prisoners in the
forest and do not kill them on the spot, then we won’t allow them
to be handed over to PIDE [the secret police].” Fatima breathed
an inward sigh of relief. She had heard much about PIDE and its
methods—the brutal tortures, the murders, how they would
leave their victims to rot in jail.
On touching down in Bissau, the soldiers remained true to
their word. They handed their young prisoner over to the Por¬
tuguese army; Fatima underwent intensive questioning at mili¬
tary headquarters. But five military interrogators, a new one
every day, got five different stories from their captive. When
they realized what was going on they gave up and returned her
to the African soldiers. She heard afterward that the officer who
had effected her capture had called together a group of black
soldiers, handed them guns, grenades, and ammunition, and
threatened to wipe out PIDE in the event the young woman was
turned over to it. While it was unlikely they would have suc¬
ceeded, relationships between the African and the Portuguese
soldiers were tense enough. The Portuguese officers had wanted
to avoid a confrontation and so they released her into the custody
of their Guinean allies.
The African soldiers lived on the outskirts of Bissau, in housing
the Portuguese had provided for them. It was isolated and
difficult to reach without transport. They told her she could
work as a nurse at the hospital. Work for the Portuguese? No,
thanks, she said. Well, then she would have to work for them,
looking after their houses.
She thought this over. Tier one objective was to return to the
liberated zones as soon as she could. If she worked for them on
the outskirts of the town it would be well nigh impossible to
make contact with the PAIGC underground in Bissau. She would
seldom meet anyone but soldiers. No she could not risk that.
“Stabon, OK, I’ll work at the hospital,” she finally answered.
 In the Liberated Zones 149

The African soldiers were kind to her. They even told her in a
friendly way that she could choose any one of them for a hus¬
band. When she refused politely they were surprised. They
thought they were doing her a favor. She knew they were disap¬
pointed, but they left her alone.
The PAIGC underground was very active in Bissau. It did not
take long for them to hear that Fatima was there. PAIGC com¬
rades came to the hospital to make contact. She was thrilled and
relieved, and then disturbed. They were so evasive. Did they
want to help her? she wondered. Then she understood from
their questions that they were testing her. It was quite possible
that she might have found life so difficult in the liberated zones
that she had preferred to desert and work in the relative comfort
of the Bissau hospital. It wasn’t long, however, before they were
convinced of her sincerity. They planned her return in detail,
and ten months later she was back with PAIGC.
Up until the end of the war Fatima worked as a nurse in the
hospital at the Vendoleidi base in Boe Oriental, a Fula area in the
east front. She worked alongside an older nurse, then over sixty,
who came from Bissau to join PAIGC in the early years with his
wife and thirteen children, and who had, in fact, founded Came-
conde Hospital. Every day she attended to the patients at the
hospital. Twice a week she and other nurses in the health brigade
went into the Fula countryside to take health care to the peasants
in the villages. Being from a Fula village herself she communi¬
cated easily with her peers. In the afternoon, after the children of
the base had finished their lessons for the day, she would join
twenty or thirty other militants and continue her education in
the small reed classroom that stood between the small huts and
pup tents that the soldiers slept in.
The liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau had nurtured a new
Fatima Buaro. Her life was so completely different from what
she had grown up to expect that, at times, she was incredulous.
What meant the most to her was the equality she felt working
among men and women joined in common cause. When Fatima
first arrived in the liberated zones she had noticed immediately
the large number of women working for the revolution. She
came to learn that a woman could work like a man and have the
150 Fighting Two Colonialisms

same rights and the same respect. And that marriage could be an
institution based on free choice.
Soon after Fatima settled in Boe, she met and fell in love with a
political commissar who worked in a different area of the east
front. They decided to get married. The commissar’s mother was
Mandjak and his father Fula. But he, just as she, no longer
believed in religion. Nor did they believe any longer that there
were differences between ethnic groups. Fatima thought back to
the attitudes she had grown up with. The discrimination against
people who were not Fula. The way Muslims thought themselves
superior to animists because they did not pray in the same way.
The use of the derogatory word “Kaffr” (heathen) to refer to
animists. Now she sincerely believed that there was no difference
between people. They were all together in the same struggle
and, because of it, they had been revolutionized themselves.
And because of it, Fatima was able to marry because she chose
to marry. The wedding was held in Conakry in June 1974—a
simple ceremony led by the commissioner of justice and followed
by a small celebration. The couple returned soon afterward to
the east and to their separate places of work. Sometime in the
future they believed they would be able to live together—when
the war was over, and a new era begun.*
Fatima’s story highlights three oppressive customs practiced
widely in Guinea-Bissau: forced marriage, denial of women’s
right to divorce, and polygyny. While PAIGC was insistent on
the need to revalue the traditions of the people—3so disparaged
and attacked by colonialism—they were equally insistent that
all discriminatory practices, including those affecting women,
be discouraged and in time discontinued.
In stressing the vital role of culture in the liberation of a

*Just before we were to leave the base where 1 had stayed for a week, 1 asked
Fatima if I could take her photograph. We were in a hurry, but she disappeared
into her hut in another part of the camp. 1 thought, as we waited some time, that
she must have wanted to get "pretty” and would come back dressed up for the
photograph. She returned wearing a simple skirt, and a PAIGC T-shirt imprinted
with a picture of Cabral and the PAIGC motto Unidade e Luta—Unity in Struggle.
But there is a sad conclusion to this story. When I returned to independent
Guinea-Bissau, I was told that she had died a few months earlier in Gabu
Hospital, where she had been working since independence.
 In the Liberated Zones 151

people, a recurrent theme in all of his writings, Cabral has noted

contradictions in the Guinean experience:

The liberation movement must. . . base its action upon thorough

knowledge of the culture of the people and be able to appreciate at
their true value the elements of this culture, as well as the different
levels that it reaches in each social group. The movement must
also be able to discern in the entire set of cultural values of the
people the essential and the secondary, the positive and the nega¬
tive, the progressive and the reactionary, the strengths and the
weaknesses. All this is necessary as a function of the demands
of the struggle and in order to be able to concentrate action on
what is essential without forgetting what is secondary, to induce
development of positive and progressive elements, and to com¬
bat with flexibility but with rigor the negative and reactionary
elements: and finally, in order to utilize strengths efficiently and
to eliminate weaknesses or to transform them into strengths.1

Among the negative values is the belief in and reliance on

fetishes to protect an individual. This had dire repercussions
when the person placed faith above the necessary precautions.
While insisting that such anachronistic beliefs have a destructive
effect on the people practicing them, PAIGC went about its
program to combat such beliefs with patience and with respect.
Commenting on this in an interview, Cabral said:

[One] aspect which we consider very important is the religious

beliefs of our people. We avoid all hostility towards these religions,
towards the type of relationships our people still have with nature
because of their economic underdevelopment. But we have reso¬
lutely opposed anything going against human dignity. We are
proud of not having forbidden our people to use fetishes, amulets
and things of this sort, which we call mezinhas. It would have
been absurd, and completely wrong, to have forbidden these. We
let our people find out for themselves, through the struggle, that
their fetishes are of no use. Happily, we can say today that the
majority have come to realize this.
If in the beginning a combatant needed the assistance of a
mezinha, now he might have one near but he understands—and
tells the people—that the best mezinha is the trench. We can state
that on this level the struggle has contributed to the rapid evolu¬
tion of our people, and this is very important.2
 152 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Another patently negative aspect of the culture is gerontocracy.

Elected village councils have replaced the councils of elders that
exercised complete political control in village life. This change
did not come easily, as the elders were hardly eager to relinquish
control. As one political commissar told a visitor, “Young
people are often elected [to village councils]. The old people
haven’t always been happy to see their places in the village
leadership taken over by the young.”3 Nonetheless, village
councils existed throughout the liberated zones by the end of the
war, and were highly effective in their work. Plenty of political
education, talk, and meetings had helped this process along.
; Among the main targets of PAIGC’s cultural campaign are
forced marriage and prohibition of divorce for women, both
entrenched in the customary laws of all the ethnic groups in
Guinea-Bissau. The practices were interconnected, as the society’s
ability to enforce a marriage would dissolve if a woman were
^ able to divorce out of it once the ceremony had taken place.
According to custom, a girl’s father chose her husband. Her
age at the time of the arrangement varied among the ethnic
groups: she could be just a baby or young child (in the case of
many Muslim groups) or any age up to the time of puberty. Older
men were often preferred as they were more economically stable.
It was not uncommon for a fourteen-year-old to be married off to
a fifty-year-old man. A man might have decided that in ten years
time he would need an additional wife, as his present wife or
wives would then be old. The thought of a new young sexual
partner at that stage, as well as another worker in his household,
was attractive, and he would choose a young daughter from an
appropriate family. Once a father considered the man acceptable,
negotiations began for the bride-price, which was to be paid over
the years until the girl was ready for marriage, or in a few large
installments shortly before the marriage if negotiations had
begun only at puberty. The bride-price included items such as
cattle, pigs, chickens, rice, money, the amount depending on the
wealth of the husband-to-be.
“It’s just as if a woman is being sold to a man,” Teodora
commented. “It’s like selling babies or young children.” In a
similar vein, Francisca Pereira said, “A woman is sold for a pig
 In the Liberated Zones 153

or a cow. She then goes to the man’s house and has no active
voice whatsoever.”
If a marriage failed to take place for any reason, the girl’s
parents would be expected to return the bride-price or its equiva¬
lent value. Hence, for economic reasons, a girl could expect no
support from her parents if, at the last minute, she tried to refuse
the marriage. And for the same reason, they would side with the
man were she later to run back home.
Mothers had little say in the marriage arrangement and could
do nothing to prevent it, even if sympathetic to the daughter’s
predicament. The general expectation was that the daughter
would adjust to the marriage in time, particularly once children
were born, and cease to resist. Any unhappiness at first was
considered perfectly normal.
If a girl falls in love before she gets married,” Teodora said,
‘‘things get very complicated. Her parents do not take her feelings
into account and they blame the boy for interfering. In the
village nobody thought that the daughter had any right or desire
to think for herself.”
A husband could send his wife home in disgrace, repudiate
her, if he considered her to be unsatisfactory. A range of different
behavior could serve as cause for this: laziness, disobedience,
and, in the case of most groups, unfaithfulness. He could also
repudiate her should she prove to be barren. What sometimes
happened, though, was that a disgraced wife would be totally
ignored by her husband but kept in his household as a worker,
even as he took additional wives to replace her. Regardless of
how unhappy the woman was, or how badly she was treated, she
had little redress, other than possible community support to try
and change the husband’s ways. If a woman ran away persist¬
ently, he could demand the bride-price back, unless children
had resulted from the union. Children had such economic value
that they supplanted a refund of the bride-price as a means of
compensating the man. (The bride-price paid in the first instance
was a way of compensating the father for the loss of a worker.)
Nevertheless, in actual practice, a woman’s reproductive ability
did not diminish her entrapment in an unhappy marriage, since
a decision to leave her husband also meant almost certain loss of
154 Fighting Two Colonialisms

her children. If there were no children it would be difficult, if not

impossible, to raise the equivalent of the bride-price in a country
as poverty-stricken and underdeveloped as Guinea-Bissau. The
woman would have no access to an independent income as the
product of her labor would go toward the household as a whole.
The only latitude a wife had in marriage anywhere in the society
occurred among the Balanta, where lack of divorce rights for
women was mitigated by the practice of cundunka.*
PAIGC began its campaign against regressive customs with
political education. Speaking to a group of Mandinga peasants
in 1966, Cabral took up the question of forced marriage:

Why should a little girl go to school if afterwards she must be

married by force? I’m telling you that the Party is not going to
tolerate any more of these transactions and business deals in¬
volving daughters. . . . Some of the girls came to us at the bases,
as you well know, in order to avoid being married against their
will. A woman should marry the man she has chosen and not
one her parents have chosen for her.
The women here have been doing what they could in produc¬
tion and they deserve our respect for that. Meanwhile, a good
many of the men have been content to go on trafficking. They
buy and they sell, they sell and they buy, and finally they buy
themselves a woman in order to put her to work. Now all that has
got to stop.4

Since it was essential to go beyond political education PAIGC

recognized the need to provide alternative structures to support
the new attitudes and concepts. Thus, from the beginning of the
war, the party accepted into its ranks a large number of young
women who had left their villages and fled to the guerrilla bases
in order to avoid a forced marriage or to leave their husbands.
Anselmo, an education responsavel, interviewed in 1966,
described how young women were seeking PAIGC’s protection:

* An interesting exception to the practice that denies women the right to divorce
is prevalent among the people of the Bissagos Islands. Isolated from the main¬
land, they did not come under direct PAIGC influence during the war. They area
matrilocal people—the husband goes to live in his wife's village. If a woman
decided she no longer wanted him as a husband, she would place all his
belongings outside their hut when he was away from the village. When he
returned he would quickly sum up the situation, pick up his goods, and leave.
 In the Liberated Zones 155

With the girls, the custom of involuntary marriages creates a

special problem we have to handle with particular care, As a
result of the political lectures, the girls are no longer willing to be
married off to somebody they were promised to at birth. In this
very camp, for example, we have several little nurses who are no
longer willing to return to their native villages but insist on
staying here at the base and working for the Party. This is especially
true among those coming from Islamized background. They are
considered nubile at twelve or thirteen, whereas animist girls are
marriageable at eighteen or thereabouts. The Party upholds the
principle of freedom of choice.5

Sometimes, however, the problem of the bride-price that had

already been paid drew PAIGC into family quarrels. If the man’s
family demanded to be reimbursed, cadres would intervene by
discussing this with the two families, emphasizing, as Francisca
Pereira said, that “a woman is not an object that can be bought.”
They would encourage the man to forfeit repayment. And they
were usually successful, although sometimes only after lengthy
and persuasive discussion. A male responsavel commented,
however, that there had been occasions when both families
continued to insist a marriage be enforced for economic reasons,
and PAIGC would pay back the bride-price itself.
Political education was the first step. The next was to back it
up by law. At first it was the responsibility of the sector and
regional political commissars to mediate between parents and
children, or wife and husband. With the election of people’s
courts the responsibility for these judgments became part of
their work. Although forced marriages were illegal (decreed by
the two hundred articles of law issued to guide the actions of all
militants), PAIGC or the courts would not intervene if the girl
agreed to go along with her father’s wishes. The system was
established to support those who refused, by far the majority,
while political education continued to encourage the others to
make independent decisions.
In disputed cases, the three-member court listened to what all
the interested parties had to say before they made a decision. In
the case of forced marriage, they focused on the father to try to
make him change his mind. If he did not, the court decided in
favor of the daughter.
156 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Forced marriage had virtually disappeared in the liberated

zones by the end of the war. When I visited the Fula villages, F
asked the young women who had married in the last three or
four years whether they had chosen their own husbands. With¬
out exception, all had. “Perhaps if it was not for the war,’’ Justice
Commissioner Fidelis d’Almada postulated, “it would not have
happened so fast. With political preparation and long explana¬
tions about why marriages like this should not take place, they
are disappearing rapidly.”
Nonetheless, changes come slowly. While marriages against
the wishes of women appeared to occur only seldom, if ever, in
the liberated zones, by the end of the war arranged marriages,
with the consent of both parties, were still practiced to some
extent, even among party cadres. Canadian Chantel Sarrazin,
writing about her experiences in post-independence Guinea-
Bissau in 1975, recalls the situation of one of the FARP militants,
Dalme M’Bunde, who acted as her guard and translator during
her visit to the south of the country. For ten years he had been
part of the struggle, fighting in the mato. “Now that the war was
over, his family had found him a wife—a girl he vaguely remem¬
bered having played with at his home village many years ago. He
was proud to make the announcement; as a married man he
would get a separate hut and an extra monthly allowance from
the army.” Reflecting on this, Sarrazin observes, “Was this
marriage not a sign of political retrogression? I no longer think
the answer is so simple. The revolution cannot change all aspects
of negative traditions overnight.” She noted that Dalme and his
wife were both happy with the marriage. This “was neither
forced, nor polygamous; it was therefore consistent with PAIGC
principles. Still, that the relationship was not initiated by the
two young people themselves shows there is some distance
to go in transforming Guinea society.”6 Sarrazin, however, is
presuming that the young woman was in favor of the arrange¬
ment—having to go by Dalme’s account alone. One immediately
wonders what, if any, pressure may have been applied to his
future wife.
I myself was surprised to learn (during my second visit in
1976) from a top party cadre and one of the most effective
 In the Liberated Zones 157

mobilizers whom I had first met in the liberated zones, that

when his wife died shortly after independence, a man whom he
had mobilized and who had dedicated himself to the struggle
suggested that the militant marry his daughter. The couple
spent some time with each other before the final decision, but
they did not take long to commit themselves. She was a lot
younger than he, but it seemed to me—superficially at least—
after spending some time in the company of the couple, that both
were pleased with the arrangement. In telling me the story, the
cadre appeared quite moved by the gesture of his father-in-law
in “offering” his daughter, as he seemed to view it as an ex¬
pression of the man’s deep respect for the militant. I could not
help but wonder, however, how his new wife had viewed the
arrangement in the beginning and even later.
Like forced marriages, divorces in the villages were brought
before the people’s courts, who would request a six-month
period of reconciliation. If this failed to reunite the couple,
divorce would be granted.
During the war, divorces for party cadres were heard by the
military tribunal, which had usually married them in the first
place. A plea for divorce had to be submitted in writing. This
overcame the problem of convening the court when either the
litigants or cadres assigned to the tribunal might be anywhere
in the country and therefore unable to attend a proceeding
in a given locality. The six-month period of reconciliation was
applied in these cases as well.
Teodora stressed that the right to divorce and an end to forced
marriages was essential to help women in their fight for libera¬
tion. But passing decrees would not immediately bring an end to
these repressive practices; social factors still played a part in
maintaining them. It was still difficult, she said, for a woman
who wanted to divorce her husband but felt she could not
because, “due to prevailing attitudes, she would bring shame on
her family.” The general view of the community still maintained
in many instances that a woman who could not live well with
her husband was a disgrace. If she left her husband, her family
pressured her to return “because traditions expect her to be tied
to her husband.”
158 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Nonetheless, divorces were not infrequent, particularly among

younger women. Older women had adapted to their husband’s
village, had given birth to children, and developed friendships
with the other women of the community which bonded them to
the life they were living and gave it meaning. Unless they were
enormously unhappy with their husband or felt ostracized by
the community, they were unlikely to seek a divorce. Young
women, on the other hand, more mobile and restless, were quick
to snap up the opportunity to gain more control over their lives.
The war meant that young people were on the move. As members
of the army, or involved in other work for the revolution, they
traveled from one end of the country to the other, or were
permanently stationed in areas far away from their villages.
Thus, whether they traveled themselves or came in contact with
young men working in their home area, women had opportuni¬
ties to meet and fall in love with men from beyond their own
localities. This in turn led to requests that the people’s courts
dissolve arranged marriages.
“Who is granted custody of the children in a divorce?” I asked
Jeronimo Correia, a regional responsavel for justice, and other
comrades, as we sat around a table at the semiboarding school in
Tombali. We were having a lively discussion, after traveling
together for a few days.
“Oh, the father. Always,” he answered immediately.
“The father?” I queried.
“Yes, of course. The father.”
Yes, of course. The father. I turned the thought over in my
head, completely nonplused. Coming from a society in which
the mother automatically gets custody of the children, unless
the father can prove that the mother is “unfit,” I had blindly
assumed this to be universal. My almost casual question launched
a heated debate about the custody of children. The men vehe¬
mently supported the idea that it was the right of the father to
have custody over his children.
“How can you prove you are the father, if you don’t have
custody over the child?” one responsavel said with emphasis.
“What would happen if the mother married someone else? The
child would have the name of her husband, not the father.”
 In the Liberated Zones 159

“When I married my wife,” another responsavel told me

poignantly, “she already had a child by another man. I love that
child as if he was my own son, and he loves me as if I was his
father. But if his father came and said, ‘I want my child,’ I would
agree to his taking the child. It is his right.”
The spirited discussion continued for over half an hour. But
we went round in circles. It seemed clear to me that the auto¬
matic designation of custodian emanated from the economic
structure of the village, and paralleled the situation whereby
children could supersede the need to repay the bride-price if a
wife deserted her husband. What interested me though was the
way economic necessity had given rise to repressive social
values, the core of which was emotional and which could be so
hotly defended by men whose political perceptions were other¬
wise unclouded. Theirs was a very normal and human response,
which gave me added insight into the problems of bringing
about change.
Teodora, who had not been participating in the discussion,
came to join us after a while. She first explained to me that the
concept of custody in their society did not mean that the mother
loses her children. It was accepted that the children travel back
and forth between the parents regularly. A few months with one,
a few months with the other. The mother would continue to care
for the child until age five or six, at which time she or he would
go to the father. There was no question of having to establish
visiting rights or of the parents fighting over time to see their
children. The problem did not arise in the context of Guinean
society, she said.
Then Teodora added a view of her own, which she stressed
was not the position of PAIGC, but one she felt was valid: “It
would be a form of oppression to insist that women have custody.
This would result in the mother being bound by the children,
having to stay home and look after them. It would entrench her
lack of freedom, reinforcing her traditional role within the
household. In this sense having custody would defeat the pur¬
pose of divorce, rather than the reverse. Eventually this will not
happen, when mother and father are equal in the family. But
now in our villages this is a problem. And if the father gets
160 Fighting Two Colonialisms

custody, it does not mean that the mother loses the children. But
it does mean that the mother has more freedom.”
This question of custody was taken up later in a discussion I
had with the commissioner of justice. Traditional custom is the
decisive factor in determining who gets custody of the children,
d’Almada explained. All decisions of the people’s courts went
in accordance with the customs of the people living in the area,
unless these customs were contrary to the principles of PAIGC.
“The party does not interfere with the ruling of the court,” he
said. “The court can give custody to either. If the father is
considered incapable of adequately providing education for his
children, the court may give custody to the mother. The party
stipulates that everything must be decided in accordance with the
customs of the people. If these customs go against the principles
of the party, then PAIGC will intervene. But in this case, the
party has no reason to intervene and the court itself has the
power to decide. Hence the father usually gets the children.”
When I spoke with d’Almada, he commented further on a
social custom that is also a factor in granting custody to the
father. Even though forced marriage was on a speedy decline in
the liberated zones, it was still expected that a young man ask his
prospective wife’s father for permission to marry her. “Only the
father’s family has the authority to give consent to the marriage,”
he said. “This is still very important in peasant society. It
comes from the custom of giving the bride-price, and must be
respected.” D’Almada foresaw problems because the mother
cannot make such a decision, and if the mother were to have
custody of the daughter there would be no one to grant the
permission. Given PAIGC’s attitude that marriages be entered
into freely by the decision of the couple concerned and no one
else, the goal is eventually to eliminate the obligation to request
permission. In the meanwhile fathers are being given custody of
young children who may well not turn to them for “permission”
by the time they are ready to be married. Nonetheless, PAIGC has
to take into account what the customs are at the present time, as
the people in the village are not looking ahead in this way.
For party cadres, where traditional custom did not apply, the
military tribunal decided custody when granting a divorce, a
decision based solely on whom they felt to be most responsible.
 In the Liberated Zones 161

D’Almada gave two examples. The first concerned a man whose

wife left the country to live with another. Custody was granted to
the father. In the other instance, both husband and wife were
cadres of the party, but the court felt that the mother was more
stable than the father, and therefore granted the mother custody.
However, for party cadres, there was no concept of the children
“belonging” to one parent rather than the other, he explained.
As in the villages, there was a lot of flexibility in the time spent
with each parent. But with no economic gain attached to having
custody, unlike the case of peasant society, the tribunal could
decide that the child would live six months with one parent and
six months with the other.
What would happen, I asked, if both parents were considered
equally stable. Who would get custody then? “Generally the
father,” d’Almada replied with a smile. “It is not a right, but it is
a duty to educate your children. Women do not yet have the
same privileges in the society. The man leaves her more fre¬
quently and therefore it should be his duty to take on that
responsibility. We are fighting for total equality, but we cannot
pretend that we have achieved our goal. It is a long road.”
Forced marriage and lack of divorce were “negative aspects of
the beliefs and traditions” of the people which, in the short
space of twelve years, had been almost fully transformed in
the liberated zones. The elimination of polygyny is a much
slower process.
If Africa can be looked upon as the “region of female farming
par excellence/’ it can also be looked to as the continent—south
of the Sahara in particular—where polygyny is the most pre¬
eminent. While these two statements might appear to be uncon¬
nected, in fact they are decidedly related to each other. In order
to appreciate why this form of marriage is so widespread in
Africa, it is necessary to look toward the village economy that
nurtures it. A United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
report states it succinctly: “One of the strongest appeals of
polygyny to men in Africa is precisely its economic aspect, for a
man with several wives commands more land, can produce
more food for his household and can achieve a high status due to
the wealth which he can command.”7
In a large part of Africa it has been estimated that between
162 Fighting Two Colonialisms

one-third and one-fourth of marriages are polygynous. It is not,

as d’Almada emphasized to me, “simply the sexual pleasure of
having two or three wives. No, it is an economic necessity as
well. The wives provide most of the labor in the rice fields. Each
wife is necessary because she helps in production.”8
The laws of land tenure adhered to by many of Africa’s peoples
give a particular society rights to a prescribed territory, with the
land divided among the various clans and families. If land is not
scarce, a man will be allocated an additional plot of land for
cultivation with every new marriage. Accordingly, each addi¬
tional wife enables a family to expand its production.
This relationship between the number of wives, increased
production and, hence, wealth and status, can be seen among the
people of Guinea-Bissau. The extent of a man’s wealth, hence
status in the community, is dependent on the number of wives
and progeny he can acquire. The extent to which he can increase
his workers in this way has the added gain of allowing the hus¬
band more leisure time. It is altogether a highly advantageous
system for the man, and not one he is likely to relinquish easily.
For the wives, however, it is altogether another question. For
the first wife, polygyny can be beneficial. She is accorded higher
status in relation to other wives by virtue of being first and
oldest. Comments Boserup:
In a family system where wives are supposed both to provide
food for the family—or a large part of it, a wife will naturally
welcome one or more co-wives to share with them .the burden of
daily work. ... In many cases, the first wife takes the initiative in
suggesting that a second wife, who can take over the most tire¬
some jobs of the household, should be procured. A woman marry¬
ing a man who already has a number of wives often joins the
household more or less in the capacity of a servant for the first
wife, unless it happens to be a love match.9

There are societies where terminology refers to later wives as the

“wives” of the first wife. A more persistent first wife may herself
look for a woman she feels to be hard-working and trustworthy
and even begin negotiations for her, in order to ensure that her
husband does not marry someone unwilling to pull her weight
in the community.
 In the Liberated Zones 163

Being a second or third wife, then, can mean entering a life of

hardship. The desire for more wives on the part of the first wife is
dictated solely on grounds of economic necessity; it is this
context that renders comprehensible the statements of many
older African women that polygyny is preferable.
Another contributing factor to the hardships experienced by
younger wives (and sometimes the first wife) is the substantial
gap in age between the husband and his later wives. The choice
of younger women is the main way of circumventing the problem
of nonavailability of women in a society more or less evenly
divided by sex. Despite this, many men have to postpone mar¬
riage until there are girls available from younger generations.
While it is no doubt pleasurable for an older man to have a nubile
young woman as a new sexual partner, it is likely to provoke
the reverse reaction in the woman herself, particularly (as is
common) when the difference in age is thirty, forty, or even—as
in the case of Fatima—fifty years.
Hence, the tensions that permeate social life in the polygynous
household can often be severe. The age gap does not only apply
to the men and women, but between the wives themselves.
While the older women benefit from the work contribution of
new wives, this arrangement can also generate jealousy. These
tensions are manifested in different ways, leading women cadres
in Guinea-Bissau to observe that it is the exception to encounter
a polygynous marriage where wives live in harmony, particularly
among younger women. “In many cases of polygyny,’’ Francisca
Pereira told me, “there is rivalry between the wives due to
jealousy because the husband prefers one wife more than another.
There is also, many times, rivalry between the children. And if
one child is brighter than another, his mother might be accused
of witchcraft. Sometimes a woman will just leave the family and
try to look for a different way to support herself and care for the
children. But this is difficult to do.”
Aware of these sources of tension in the community, there is a
general attempt not to aggravate them by spending more time
with one wife than another. It is customary for the husband to
divide his time equally between his wives, eating and living
with each one in regular rotation. But it is a system that does not
 164 Fighting Two Colonialisms

always hold, particularly as the first and second wives grow

older, and the husband brings an attractive new wife into the
family. However, each wife has her own hut and does her own
cooking for her immediate family, and benefits from not having
t to cook each night for her husband.
Polygyny, because it is so tied in with other oppressive cus¬
toms, is opposed by PAIGC. Men with two or three wives cannot
provide adequately for the emotional needs of each of them, they
argue. The goal is for marriages based on love and mutual
respect, as well as free choice. However, because it is so basic to
the social and economic structure of the society, it is not some¬
thing that can be erased in a few years. Much more immediate
success has been accorded PAIGC’s efforts to terminate forced
marriage and the taboo on divorce for women. Hence, this means
that with the possibility of divorce, women who are unhappy in
such a marriage are now in a position to leave it. With this
freedom established, education will further reduce the practice
of polygyny. “Although the party is against polygyny,’’ explained
d’Almada, “we understand that we cannot change the customs
of the people suddenly, or they will turn against us. It is a custom
that has existed from generation to generation. We have to move,
but we have to move slowly.”
Despite the acknowledged time such changes take, polygyny
is noticeably on the decline. A limitation has been placed on the
custom by stipulating that a man cannot automatically replace a
wife he has lost through death or divorce, unless he has only one
wife in the first place. For party cadres polygyny is not permitted,
not even for practicing Muslims. “Polygyny is dying out,” Fran-
cisca told me. “People don’t want it any more. If they accept it,
they do so against their will.”
Young women in the Fula villages told me that they would
insist that their husbands not marry more than one wife. They
did not anticipate that this would ever become an issue for them.
I picked up this same attitude from other women I spoke to.
Re-evaluation of the marriage institution, so that it ceases to be
an instrument of women’s oppression, ranks high among the
changes that have taken place in the daily life of peasant women
throughout the liberated zones. “Before, life was very difficult
 In the Liberated Zones 165

for women,” said Bwetna. ‘‘The party has brought new ways and
a new life for women. But we must continue to defend ourselves.”
Although these views were echoed by many other peasant
women, who told me their ‘‘eyes have been opened to a new
world,” by and large peasant women still do “women’s work”
and men continue to carry out “men’s work.”
Women’s work. Visible everywhere. My clothes were whisked
from me and washed in the river, then neatly pressed with
irons heated over smouldering coals. In villages and at most
bases, women prepared our food. The rhythmic thud, thud
constantly in the background of village life was nearly always
the result of women rather than men pounding rice. Super¬
ficially, the villages I visited were typical of all African villages.
Women cooking around the fire, women pounding, women
calling after children, women collecting water. Some distance
away men sitting together, talking or silently watching the after¬
noons go by.
And yet, while the superficial impression is true as far as it
goes, a really sharp look brings other perceptions into bold
relief. One sees men helping women in their work in numerous
ways. Taking goods to the people’s stores on their heads. Helping
with children. Collecting water. Washing clothes. Sharing more
equally the work in the fields. Listen beyond the rhythmic
pounding and one hears the voices of Bwetna, of Kumba, of
numerous peasant women, speaking simply but expressing pro¬
foundly the changes that have taken place in their lives since the
beginning of the struggle. “Before women worked for men,” we
hear Kumba say. “Not anymore. Now men and women work
together.” Focus yet deeper and one sees women addressing
large meetings, mixing comfortably with men, talking as equals,
functioning on village councils, on people’s courts, on sector
committees, choosing their own husbands, resisting polygyny.
Hold this focus, and more subtle details come to the foreground—
hurdles, obstacles still to be surmounted. Those women still
diffident, still hesitant. Those peasant women who, because of
the immense changes in their lives, say proudly, “now we are
free,” who view providing rice for the guerrillas not only as a
revolutionary act, but also as an end in itself. Those men in the
166 Fighting Two Colonialisms

villages accepting women cadres, women leaders, but also

asserting authority and domination over Kumba.
We have been viewing a process that has only begun, and in
the nature of such processes, progress is uneven. The question is
how to keep the momentum going. The need for the reorganiza¬
tion of the economy can be seen with particular clarity when
considering the negative customs that perpetuate the dependent
and exploited position of women. To ensure that the gains
already achieved are not allowed to slip back before fully en¬
trenched, the system which is supported by such practices needs
to be eradicated. That system, of course, is the organization
of the village economy with its enormous dependence on the
intensive labor of women. However, the conditions of the mato
did not permit any real inroads to be made on the existing
economic structures.
Chapter 7
“Our education has to be conditioned
by our life and history”

Education is considered a fundamental necessity for

the emerging new society. Persuading parents to send
daughters to school proved to be an uphill battle. By
the end of the war the ratio of girls to boys in school
was one to three. From the beginning the new school
curriculum and work emphasized equality and political
education included a focus on the position of women
and the need for change.

167
168 Fighting Two Colonialisms

The sound of drums, an insistent rhythmic beat, filled the still,

twilight air and galvanized the young dancers as they stamped
and swirled in a wide circle in the clearing of the forest school.
As the beat quickened, the strands of their grass skirts fused into
a pale yellow haze. And when Mario, the director of their school,
rushed into the circle to exhort them to still greater efforts by his
own example, the dancers stamped even more vigorously. Then,
one of the students left the circle for the center and danced with a
machete held high above his head. Tied to each leg was a tin can
and an anklet of large dried pods which clinked and clattered in
time with his stamping.
The vitality of the dancers was infectious. We in the audience
watched appreciatively, clapping and calling out approval. The
students, between ten and fourteen years old, smiled with
obvious enjoyment and laughed back. But Mario, his large cow¬
boy-style hat gleaming in the dusky light, grinned broadest of
all. He was proud of his young charges. The scene we were
witnessing could not have occurred before the armed struggle.
Boys and girls together. Pepel, Mandinga, Balanta, Fula, all
expressing in dance their different national cultures. The per¬
formance had opened with a Balanta dance, continued with
songs about the revolution and satirical skits about Spinola and
Salazar, and ended with dances of other ethnic groups.
We had arrived at the school in Orango, Tombali region of the
south front, late the previous evening at the end of a long march.
Mario greeted us with friendly hospitality. Only a few of the
students were at the school, as the rest had not yet returned from
their villages where they spent weekends visiting their families
and helping with production. Mario had vacated his small hut
for Teodora and me, brought us water for a bath, and warm milk
to drink. He looked so young I initially took him for a student.
But at twenty, he was director of the semiboarding school, or
semi-internato as it was called. However, it was not just his
youth which had caused me to mistake him for a student. Like
most of the young directors of boarding schools, Mario did not
project a sense of authority or distance from his students; he was
one of the group of eighty young people at his school. And it
became evident, as I watched hnn and his three co-teachers both
 In the Liberated Zones 169

in class and out, that the entire staff treated their students quite
naturally-as comrades.
The vitality of spirit I found in the school could not have
developed by chance. No unusually felicitous combination of
staff, students, and curriculum could have produced such un¬
bounded enthusiasm among all concerned. Rather, that special
atmosphere flowed directly from the innovative approach to
learning which PAIGC had consciously formulated at the begin¬
ning of the struggle. And because it was not accidental, neither
was it exceptional: I found a similar quality to the atmosphere in
all the internatos* I visited. It was a mark of education through¬
out liberated Guinea-Bissau, and consisted in a shared joy in
learning and self-discovery, and a commitment on the part of
teachers and students alike to understand the society in evolu¬
tion around them; it expressed how it felt to be a revolutionary,
consciously involved in developing the new woman and the
new man that Amilcar Cabral and PAIGC had projected as the
ultimate goal of Guinean education.
A tough task confronted PAIGC when they first set out to
establish new schools. They had to begin from scratch, as
those facilities the Portuguese had provided were limited to a
few primary schools and one secondary school catering to the
children of the privileged few, the assimilados in the towns
who could afford the high fees. To realize that the illiteracy
rate was ninety-nine percent at the beginning of the war, and
that few of the remaining one percent had more than the most
elementary of reading and writing skills, is to appreciate the
extent to which Guineans were deprived of basic education. But
the threadbare system was enough for the Portuguese, who
needed only a small number of Guineans to administer the
colonial apparatus. The African graduates, meanwhile, were not
only few, they were alienated. Their education, steeped in Por¬
tuguese history and Portuguese culture, was synonymous with
de-Africanization. As assimilados they learned early to denigrate
their own culture, to accept that they had no history, and to deny

*Internato or semi-internato was never translated for me. As the term “boarding
school” tends to conjure up the idea of an authoritarian institution, isolated from
society, I have used internato as is.
170 Fighting Two Colonialisms

any links with or feeling for African identity. They spoke Portu¬
guese rather than Creole and prided themselves on their second-
class Portuguese status and on the way they had “come up’’ in
the world.
This miserable school education, however, was not the first
education that the people of Guinea-Bissau had known. Even if
there were no schools as we know them today, every child in an
African village.was educated. Girls and boys were educated by
their mothers and fathers, and by the other adults and elders
with whom they related on a daily basis. They were trained to
take their place in the society, a place defined by centuries of
tradition. History was passed from generation to generation in
the stories that elders told the young people. Social values and
customs were absorbed from experiencing life in the village and
from participating in the religious ceremonies, most particularly
in the initiation rites which symbolized the passage from child¬
hood to adulthood.
But colonial penetration had distorted this traditional process,
making one of PAIGC’s main goals the need to relearn and re¬
value Guinean history and culture, to inculcate in the people an
integrated national culture transcending the tenuous boundaries
between the different ethnic groups.
In this context, the process of revolution and the process of
education became interdependent. Just as education had been
the key to mobilization for the war, so the continuing revolution
reciprocally influenced the shape of education. And since school
could not be something separate, exempt from the revolutionary
dynamic, the PAIGC school became a microcosm of the trans¬
formation toward socialism that was going on in the society. In
other words, what happened to the students passing through the
school “system” was in step with what was happening to the
population as a whole, although, in the latter case, the pace of
development was generally slower.
As PAIGC viewed it, education was not a way of mechanically
providing students with the necessary skills to pass exams, to
find jobs in order to support themselves as adults, and to learn to
adjust to the system under which they lived. It did not prepare
them for a life as an elite. Guinean youth was being prepared for
 In the Liberated Zones 171

the life that the masses of people will lead in a new society. In the
revaluation of their own culture and their own history, they
learned too about the world as a whole and their place within
it, from the perspective of fighting imperialism and struggling
for justice.
The very process of education was itself helping to develop a
new society. The students were being prepared for a future that
did not yet exist, and in this way were themselves molding the
future. Their education was an insurance that the revolutionary
direction of the society into which they would pass would be
carried forward. “Our type of education,” said Cabral, “has to be
conditioned in each phase of the struggle by the life and the
history we experience at a given moment.”1
Thus, education went beyond the confines of the classroom.
No brick buildings, rooms with doors and windows, no walls.
None of the basic equipment that we take for granted, such as
desks, writing material, sports gear, scientific apparatus. Few
books. Instead, there was maybe one “classroom” built from the
vinelike branches of the forest, a frame holding up a roof of
branches or palm fronds. Often the school was simply a clearing
in the forest. The benches and desks were rough poles strapped
together by thin vines which worked well in place of rope. One
precious blackboard, worn with age, would be propped up in
front next to the teacher’s desk. Equally precious was the chalk.
Every pencil, every book, every writing tablet had to be brought
in from outside on the heads or backs of militants who marched
for days and miles into the interior. They were carried together
with medical supplies, ammunition, food, and other critical
necessities of life in the mato. Nothing was wasted, every scrap
of paper valued. For these meager supplies PAIGC relied on the
generosity of friendly countries and organizations. Every six
months the school would have to be rebuilt at another location
as a precaution against the bombing; schools, like villages and
hospitals, were considered legitimate military targets by Portu¬
guese bombardiers. A hundred yards or so from the classroom
were the deep trenches—as essential as the benches and the black¬
board. The first lesson to be taught at any school was survival.
There were three types of schools in the liberated zones:
172 Fighting Two Colonialisms

village, semi-internatos, and internatos. By the time of my visit

over sixty village schools dotted the mato. One, maybe two
teachers taught a class of fifty to sixty pupils from nearby vil¬
lages or groups of villages, spanning the first three grades and
aged between seven and sixteen. The school term was adjusted
to the agricultural season so that the children could help their
parents with production.
From the village schools the student could go on to the inter¬
natos. Students at the semi-internatos—one for each region—
attended school five days a week, returning home on the week¬
ends to work in the villages and to be with their parents. Their
parents provided rice for the school. Everything else was pro¬
vided by PAIGC. From the semi-internato, pupils could go on to
one of the four internatos in the countryside. Of these, one each
was in the north and south fronts and two were in the east.
(In addition, two secondary schools were situated outside the
country, in Conakry and Ziguinchor, Senegal.)
The internato, more than the other school in the liberated
zones, epitomized what PAIGC was trying to achieve in education.
PAIGC’s emphasis on the need for cooperation and collectivity
in work, as well as in day-to-day relationships, was incorporated
into its organization. The teachers had authority over the content
of lessons, but beyond that it was left to the students to administer
the school. No one was employed to work there, and all the tasks,
such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water from the well, were
divided among the students and performed on a rotating basis. A
committee elected at the beginning of the year was responsible
for leadership and for any disciplinary problems that might
occur. However, regular meetings of the assembly were held to
develop a consensus on these and other matters.
The school committee was composed of three boys and three
girls. Although the actual percentage at the schools varied
between twenty-five and thirty-three percent, equality was main¬
tained at the committee level to demonstrate that the goal
was to equalize the number of boys and girls in the general
student population.
At first parents hesitated for economic reasons to send even
their boys to school. And Cabral had to harangue a meeting
 In the Liberated Zones 173

of peasants a year after the first schools were established:

Parents may no longer refuse to send their children to school. The
children are caught up in the chores. . . . But children need to go to
school just as parents need the children’s help. ... I am an engineer.
Perhaps there are people present who are smarter than I. But there
are not engineers among them because there were no schools. The
Party wants to give all the children of our people a fair chance. Our
people’s main enemy is Portuguese colonialism. But any adult
preventing the education of our children is also our enemy.2

That was 1966. In 1971, with the problem still pressing, Cabral
was forced to take up the subject again. Addressing a meeting of
the Superior Council for the Fight, he pointed out that in many
countries the peasants had initially resisted education:

We must not be discouraged because there are people in our

country who do not like education. We must regret this, but we
must not be discouraged. In Portugal for instance . . . the people
rose and burnt schools when schools were built in the villages . . .
because the school took their children away from home, and this
harmed the work, for the children were taking care of the house,
the pigs, the sheep, the cattle, etc. This is normal, and we must
not be discouraged by it. We have to be able to understand it
as well as possible, and find an acceptable solution, without
aggravating the conflict between the schools (and thus the Party)
and the population.3

While economics lay at the heart of early peasant resistance in

Guinea-Bissau, its effects were not equal for both boys and girls.
Parents eventually found ways of sending their sons to school.
But daughters, no. It was not so much a matter of seeing the
education of girls as less important as it was an uncritical
response to the prevailing economic order. Girls were needed in
the village to assist their mothers, and women’s work, time
consuming and arduous as it was, was the linchpin of the village
economy. Besides, what possible use could education be to girls,
fathers reasoned, when they were to get married, and the younger
the better.
Political education around this issue was intensive, particu¬
larly in the Muslim villages where the women’s role had been
most rigidly defined. “Our party placed great emphasis on the
174 Fighting Two Colonialisms

children because they are the future of the country,” nineteen-

year-old Jacinta da Sousa, director of an internato in the east,
told me. “Political commissars go to the villages and explain
why education is so important, particularly for the girls. They
explain that we want to construct a new society, a society with¬
out sex discrimination.”
Still, after parents had finally agreed to educate their daughters,
another problem emerged: girls were starting their schooling at
a much older age than boys, usually once the younger girls in the
village became old enough to take on their work. I discovered
this for myself when I interviewed Njai Sambo, who was respon¬
sible for “social affairs” on her village council. Yes, she assured
me, all the children in her village attended school, boys and
girls. Education for all the children was very important. She
added: “I want all my children to go to school. If they go to
school, then they will know what they are able to do and what
they will want to do when they are adults. I put my younger
sister through school. I didn’t know what she could do, but now
she is a nurse in the east front.”
But when I asked her whether all her own children were
presently in school, I learned that her twelve-year-old daughter
was not. “She will be going next year,” Njai hastened to add.
And then she touched on the core of the matter: “But what can I
do? I have a baby and I need my daughter to help me look after
him. There is just too much work to do in the village.”
There were other hitches. A parent might turn up at a school
from one day to the next to retrieve his or her daughter for work
in the village, because something unexpected had come up. As a
result, the child’s education would be erratic and she would fall
behind. In an attempt to overcome this, some girls had been
placed in internatos far away from the villages and given special
attention so that they might catch up. Hence, although it was
usual for the lowest grade to be the third, at these internatos
there was a class of second-graders who were all girls.
The ratio of girls to boys at the three semi-internatos and the
two internatos I visited varied. At the internato at Boe in the east,
there were eighty-eight students, of which eleven were girls.
The percentage was higher at the internato in Candjafara, which
 In the Liberated Zones 175

had a second-grade class for girls only. Of the semi-internatos I

visited, one near Teodora’s base in the Balana-Quitafine region
had only two girls out of a total of fifty-one students. The other
two I visited were better, with about twenty-five percent girls. So
was the internato in the north, where two years earlier in 1972
there were forty-three boys and ten girls.
However, these figures may not be as disheartening as they
appear. A number of girls—probably as many as those in schools
in the interior—went to Boke to study nursing and continue
their regular education alongside the nurses’ training. (Although
boys studied nursing as well, this alternate schooling was con¬
sciously viewed as a way of ensuring further education for
young women.) An American journalist who visited Guinea-
Bissau in 1973 recalled that he attended a combined graduation
ceremony for a group of schools in the north and the percentage
of girls among the graduates was about one-third.4 Party statistics
for 1971-1972 indicate that one-third of the students in the north
were girls.5 Party statistics for the country as a whole, from 1965
to 1972, give the breakdown over those years.6

1965-66 1966-67 1967-68 1968-69 1969-70 1970-71 1971-72

Students 13,361 14,386 9,384 8,130 8,559 8,574 14,531
Male 9,821 10,865 6,737 5,907 6,232 6,419 10,898
Female 3,540 3,521 2,647 2,223 2,327 2,155 3,633
% Female 26 24 28 27 27 25 25

The percentage of girls in school remained fairly level despite

PAIGC consciousness of the problem and its attempts to change
the attitudes supporting it. But by 1974 direct improvement
could be seen, with the percentage of girls in school reaching
thirty-three percent.
The best performance in terms of enrolling girls was that of the
Pilot School in Conakry. Girls made up one-third of the one
hundred twenty students who attended this secondary school in
1974. And this despite the fact that the school was outside the
country—so far away from the villages as to discourage parents
of prospective students from sending even their sons. Mean¬
while, the relatively large overall percentage was even greater in
the two lower grades. Here a good number of students were
176 Fighting Two Colonialisms

children of cadres or war orphans and therefore the number of

girls was not affected by the attitudes of their tradition-bound
parents. The classes were divided equally between girls and
boys. The sixth and highest grade, however, had fourteen boys
and only three girls, possibly due again to girls having chosen or
having been encouraged to take up nursing. While day to day
peasant resistance to educating girls was not so much of a factor
at the Pilot School, it was still true that the majority came from
the interior. The process of selection must have been weighted
in favor of girls in order to set a national example and put into
practice its political principles.
Teodora insisted that the number of girls attending school had
increased over the years, despite the fact that official statistics
appeared to say otherwise. Without exception, the village coun¬
cillors I interviewed responded to my question about attendance
from their village with the answer that all girls and boys went to
school. I was puzzled by this contradiction. It seems, on looking
beyond the statistics a little, that there is a less obvious dimension
to the above table which helps clarify the relative number of girls
who had some schooling. If instead of looking only at the flat
yearly statistics of the percentage of girls versus boys in school
at one particular time, one looks at the percentage of girls
that attended school over a period of time in the school-going
population as a whole, the gap between the sexes narrows con¬
siderably. Two facts pertain: girls went to school later than boys;
boys and girls seldom continued their schooling beyond the age
of sixteen (as they could more valuably direct their energies
toward other aspects of the revolution once they reached that
age). Hence, there was a greater turnover of girls in school. To be
sure, quantitatively, schooling for girls was inferior in general,
because they spent less time in school. However, the actual
number of girls who passed through school compared with the
number of boys who passed through school is not as unequal as
the above table would suggest. Further, once girls left school,
and presuming they did not return to their villages to marry and
become reabsorbed into the traditional peasant life and economy,
they would be able to join adult education classes and continue
their studies, be it in Boke at the nursing school, working at a
 In the Liberated Zones 177

base, or at a hospital in the liberated zones. Thus their lesser

education had a chance of being remedied.
As to the education of Guinean children generally, one fact
stands out of the table of figures: the enrollment decreased rather
dramatically in the third year (1967-1968), and then in 1972
leapt equally dramatically back to the previous level, before
increasing steadily until the end of the war. Why? Some of the
reasons are obvious. The initial enthusiasm of many parents
waned with the inconvenience of having their children away
from the village for a good part of the day, or a good part of the
week and year in the case of semi- and full internatos. But most
interestingly, this decline was actually the result of a conscious
move on the part of PAIGC. When Cabral discussed the reduc¬
tion of school services in his address to the Superior Council for
the Fight (quoted earlier), he insisted on the need for realism.
“It is more important for us to have a few schools and many
young people without schools, than to have many schools
that we cannot support, with fourth-grade teachers who have
only finished second grade themselves, and similar things.”
PAIGC had been overoptimistic at first, established schools
“everywhere” without a clear line on the matter, and then had to
retrench. In addition, there was a need for teachers with a high
level of political consciousness. “This is more important than
increasing the number of schools,” Cabral explained. “If the few
teachers we have in the few schools we have perform their
education and political functions properly, our struggle will
advance much more than if we have 300, 500 schools, where the
teachers are a bunch of cheating liars, without any connection
with the political work of our Party.”7
Consequently, enrollment rebounded only when PAIGC was
in a position to provide more schools and teachers. In the mean¬
while, political education regarding the need for sending chil¬
dren to school had more of an impact even as the peasants,
encouraged by the military victories won by their guerrilla
army, had come to see the bombing less as a danger to their
children and more as an ineffectual response by the Portuguese
to a losing situation.
There is one other factor that contributed to the acceleration of
178 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the enrollment of both sexes. Soldiers in the army played an

important role in agricultural production, pulling their weight
in the village at critical times in the growing and harvesting
seasons. In so doing they helped alleviate the heavy burden of
production supported by the peasants, enabled those who re¬
mained in the villages to accept their youth going to school, and
affected attitudes to traditions such as forced marriage. By
providing an alternate source of labor, the soldiers were able to
undermine rigid adherence to repressive traditions.
No matter how many schools were in operation at any one time,
PAIGC ideology was put into practice through the subjects
taught. Standard subjects such as history, geography, mathe¬
matics, and language were part of the curriculum. But political
education and agricultural production also had their place in
the academic routine.
The teaching of history and geography was made political in
the sense that students were able for the first time to learn about
their country and the world from the perspective of their own
lives and culture—and not from the Portuguese point of view.
Rather than rely on unsatisfactory books from other countries or
adaptations of them, teachers used no books at first and developed
their own lessons. Mathematical problems, for example, related
to their environment. How much rice would be needed to feed a
village? How quickly do mosquitoes multiply in a swamp? How
many swamps near the village? In this way, too, the danger of
malaria would become part of the lesson with the children
encouraged to talk to the people in the villages about the need to
remove the swamps.
Readers in Portuguese, the first books to be written for each
grade,* were produced collectively by village schoolteachers,
based on their experiences. Colorfully and often humorously
illustrated by PAIGC artists, they depicted life in Guinea-Bissau:
the war, the village, the national reconstruction programs. The
books were straightforward and simply written, with limited

*Portuguese is the language medium for all schools. Creole is not yet a written
language and, besides, if Creole were to become the sole national language it
would isolate Guinea-Bissau from the rest of the world. Since independence,
plans are being developed to have Creole written and taught alongside Portuguese.
 In the Liberated Zones 179

political content. That PAIGC refrained from using this oppor¬

tunity to indoctrinate its youth was reflective of the confidence
the party had both in the people and its own ideology.
The political was dealt with more specifically in weekly
political education classes. These classes were considered vital
to the process of education, and featured lively discussion
and debate. Courses emphasized developing an understanding
of PAIGC, its program and its work, and an international per¬
spective, including African history (independence and trade
union struggles in particular), the history of revolutions in
other parts of the world, colonialism, and the role of culture in
national development.
Another aspect of political education promoted in the schools
was that of learning through doing. Learning from books solely
within the confines of a classroom was considered inadequate to
equip the student for life in the new society. For example,
students grew their own food and cultivated land adjacent
to the schools, as an object lesson in self-sufficiency which,
by extension, demonstrated the importance of agricultural pro¬
duction to their society. At the same time, through sharing
the work of administering the schools, they learned principles
of collectivity and that the blind authority and bureaucracy of
the colonial system had no place in the organization of their
future state.
A question of relating future goals to a current reality was
particularly evident in the approach to the issue of exploitation
of women. Because many discussions focused around the need
to eradicate all forms of exploitation, students came more easily
to understand the nature of the oppression of women and to
broach different ways in which to work toward a society based
on true equality.
Jacinta da Sousa, the Boe intemato director, explained how
these issues are taken up in the political education classes. “We
direct the discussion around the rights of women at the boys in
particular,” she said, “so they can begin to understand that what
they learn at home in regard to women is not true. You know, the
boys come to school with the opinion that ‘I am a man, she is
a woman, and therefore I am superior.’ We try very hard to
180 Fighting Two Colonialisms

eradicate these ideas from the boys’ heads. We talk about women
in the militia and now in our army also. We give examples of
women such as Carmen [Pereira] and Titina [Sila] to show the
girls that women can have the same responsibility as men and
can become leaders in our country.”
These discussions were reinforced by daily experience in the
schools where equal participation by all students was consciously
encouraged. No part of the curriculum was set aside for one sex
or the other. Every aspect of school life—all classes, including
sewing and gymnasitcs, all work in maintenance and adminis¬
tration of the school—was shared equally. And in an attempt
specifically to counteract the sexual division of labor found in
the villages, agricultural work was done by both boys and girls.
The contrast between school life and much of village life was
marked. In the schools I saw boys fetching water from the well
and carrying buckets on their heads, just like the girls. I saw boys
cooking and both girls and boys taking part in the early morning
gymnastics and quasimilitary training. (In fact the gymnastics
teacher at the Pilot School was a young woman.) I saw boys
looking after the young children of women working at schools,
children of a nurse on one occasion, the administrator of a
semi-internato on another. I saw girls and boys rebuilding two
large huts that had burnt down at the internato in Candjafara,
both carrying the long, heavy wooden poles used in such con¬
struction and defying the long tradition that marked building
huts as ‘‘men’s work.” This was the school at which Espirito
Santo taught. He was very proud of the way his students shared
work, regardless of the traditional sex-based work roles. “At my
school everything is equal,” he would declare.
It was something of a challenge for the students to appeciate
sympathetically the contradiction between the future-oriented
nature of daily experience in school and the reality of village
life. Village life could not be changed because one wished it, any
more than it could be changed by force. Such a result could only
come about “step by step’’ through the peasants’ own strivings.
Meanwhile, the school readers appeared to reflect a point of view
intermediate between the past derogation of women and their
future equality. In the process, women’s work was reevaluated
 In the Liberated Zones 181

and women themselves accorded higher status, in keeping with

the conscious effort of PAIGC to emphasize everywhere that
the economy was based primarily on their labors. And so we
read in the second-grade reader, under the section entitled
“Mother’s Work”:
“In our section of the village who is it that always goes from
one side to the other, working without stop? It is our mother. She
is the first to awaken and to go at once to the kitchen to prepare
some rice with milk. Then the whole family eats. The men leave
for the fields and the children for school. Our mother goes to
clean the house and to make lunch. Such a delicious meal
mother makes.
“Moreover, after working in the house, mother still goes to till
the fields. Now many mothers are members of the party. They
work in the house, in the fields, and struggle as well. Our
mothers know that it is necessary to work harder in order to help
build a better life for their children. We must respect the work of
our mothers.”
What is most significant about this passage is that children
were being encouraged actively to comprehend the value of the
work their mothers did, probably for the first time. “The anony¬
mous daily work of women,” as PAIGC called it, would no
longer be permitted to remain so in the minds of the new genera¬
tion. Consciousness was the first step toward change.
In another section, entitled “The Day of Women” and com¬
memorating the March 8th International Women’s Day, respect
was expressed again for women along with suggestions that
alternative roles were possible. “The women clean the house,
plow, cook, and do the laundry, even for our soldiers. But the
women also perform other work. Many of them are soldiers,
nurses, teachers, and others are officials in the party. Isn’t it true
the women of our land work hard? . . . Also, do not forget to
help the women in their work. And now let us applaud all the
courageous women.” To underscore that different roles were
possible, the drawing accompanying this story was of a woman
in army uniform, carrying a rifle on her back and a baby in her
arms. Another way the reader hinted at new roles was through
the use of the word “companion.” Women were portrayed as
182 Fighting Two Colonialisms

companions of, i.e., equals to men. This was an important

element in the new relationships between men and women
which the text posed as possible in a transformed society.
What these texts portrayed, then, was the reality of the daily
life of peasant women. To suggest that the division of labor no
longer existed or to depict a society that was already equal
would not make sense to the children leaving their peasant
village to attend school. The readers reflect where the society is,
not where one would ideally like it to be. Nonetheless, elements
of contradiction are evident in the discussion of international
women’s day—the contradiction of celebrating a still unequal
role. As such the spirit of “women’s day” seems to have been
confused with that of “mothers’ day.” The passage reads: “The
8th of March is women’s day. In all the countries, the children
give presents to mothers; brothers to sisters; grooms to brides;
boyfriends to girlfriends. The woman is honored on that day as
the companion of man, as the mother of all men. It is a great
celebration, and in some countries women do not work the
whole day, because men do the work for them. Women are very
happy with such proof of affection and gain courage to proceed
with the great tasks they perform every day. Also in our land in
the new life we will build after the Portuguese colonialists leave,
we will celebrate the women’s day with great happiness.”
In contrast with the schools in the mato, discussion around
the emancipation of women was apparently downplayed at the
Pilot School, possibly because it was more removed from the
contradictions of the interior. Lilica Boal, the director of the
school, told me, “This problem is not discussed in the Pilot
School because it is a problem of the past. The boys treat the girls
completely as equals. Now the young people have received a
completely different education. They belong to the new genera¬
tion and they accept this equality.”
This may be overhopeful; certainly it has not always been the
case. Fina Crato, who studied there for four years after being
evacuated from Como Island at the height of the 1964 siege by the
Portuguese army, recalled both the discussion of the oppressed
role of women and the equality she experienced in the school.
“Here for the first time in my life I discovered that boys and
 In the Liberated Zones 183

girls can be equal. We lived it in our lives each day. We did

everything together—studying, playing, working. All the pupils
shared in the work of the school equally, which included cooking,
cleaning, laundry. And besides our regular lessons we did
sports and learned to sew together. For a while Carmen Pereira
was our sewing teacher for both boys and girls.”
It was the practical situation which had made the deepest
impact on Fina, enabling her to understand both the need for
and the potential of emancipation. From Lilica Boal’s statement,
however, it seems that practice was emphasized while theoreti¬
cal discussion on women’s liberation was not. (Lilica became
director after Fina was a student.) Although I could accept that
the problem of sexism was minimal in the day-to-day life of the
school, I did feel—looking about me at the society I was in—that
this ideal situation existed in a very small section. The students,
the party’s future cadres, needed to understand the realities
of the world outside their protected enclave, and to combine
that understanding with a broad political perspective. It seemed
to me that these needs meant that there was still an important
place for continual political education around the issue of
women’s oppression.
In the interior education responsavels grappled head-on with
the myriad contradictions of peasant society. “We have to utilize
all methods of education that will be of use for the development
of our society,” said Teodora, voicing a basic principle of PAIGC
and pointing out that education in the schools, along with
lectures in the villages by cadres, had gone a long way toward
overcoming the anachronistic aspects of their culture. In fact,
polygyny, forced marriage, and denial of divorce rights for
women were no longer considered acceptable options among
youth with even a few years’ education.
One striking example of how school education can influence
such change is evident in the effect it has had on the practice of
circumcision, and most particularly female circumcision or
clitoridectomy. The practice of clitoridectomy is not confined to
Africa, although outside the continent it is prevalent mainly
among Muslims. This is not the case in Africa, where it can be
found in at least twenty-eight countries.
184 Fighting Two Colonialisms

One study defines clitoridectomy as follows:

The terms “female circumcision” or “excision” cover a variety of

practices involving the mutilation of the female genitals. Basically,
three different operations may be distinguished: clitoridectomy,
the removal of whole or part of the clitoris; labiadectomy, the
excision of all or part of the labia minora, occasionally including
the labia majora; and infibulation, in which the labia are sewn
together, or a girl’s legs are tied together for several days in order
that the amputated edge of the labia may join through healing. . . .
The risk of haemorrhage and infection is always present, as
the indigenous instruments of iron, stone, wood or glass, are
never sterile.8

The most commonly practiced of the three operations is clitori¬

dectomy. Such mutilation of the genitalia—apart from the pain
and possible infection—has a horrific effect on women. While
anthropologists tend to view male and female circumcision as
equatable aspects of initiation rites in a given society, this is not
so. As the study cited above indicates: “Whatever the parallels
might be in the ritual and surgical operations, the physiological
effect of male and female circumcision is fundamentally dif¬
ferent. For boys, the operation has little lasting effect; but for
girls, the removal of their clitoris may drastically damage the
capacity for sexual enjoyment.”9 For boys it can be argued that
there is a valid hygienic reason for the practice. For girls it
is a conscious or unconscious method of maintaining the sub¬
ordination of their gender.
The time in the life cycle of women at which the operation is
performed varies among the different ethnic groups of Africa,
and might differ within a region. In Nigeria, for instance, it can
be done at birth, at puberty, as part of the bridal preparations,
prior to childbirth, and after several years of marriage. However,
the time that is the most prevalent throughout the continent is
during the initiation ceremonies of girls into womanhood. It is
tragically ironic, therefore, to find young girls eagerly looking
forward to the event as the mark of the transition from girlhood
to adulthood. Only then is she considered mature and mar¬
riageable: a woman.
Not all societies appear to understand the correlation between
 In the Liberated Zones 185

the clitoris and sexual pleasure, although it is impossible to

know at this stage why the practice was initially instituted. The
passing of time clouds and modifies the ostensible reasons: that
it makes the girl strong, ensures her fertility, prevents a difficult
childbirth or the future sickness of the baby are among the
rationales. These reasons have undergone changes, in some
instances, corresponding to changes in the society itself. For
example, among the Yoruba of Nigeria, when infant mortality
was higher than it is at present, the operation was considered
necessary to safeguard the life of the baby, for it was believed
that if the head of a baby touched its mother’s clitoris during
birth it would die. This belief has since died out, and been
replaced by one which directly addresses the connection between
the clitoris and sexual pleasure, namely that the operation will
prevent young girls from becoming prostitutes and bringing
disgrace on themselves and their families.10* But the most usual
explanation for the practice was tied to tradition, a continuation
of a practice “always performed.”
This latter reason was prevalent in Guinea-Bissau, where
clitoridectomy is to be found only among the Muslim groups,
representing thirty percent of the population. As far as I could
ascertain, total excision is not performed; rather, the tip of the
clitoris is removed. Male circumcision is not confined to Muslim
peoples, but is practiced by all ethnic groups, and, being integral
to the initiation rites into manhood is, like female circumcision,
performed at puberty. The girls undergo the procedure just prior
to puberty, and, like their sisters elsewhere in Africa, view it as a
symbol of passing from a girl to a woman.
Given the sensitive nature of the subject, I was not able to gain
conclusive insights into the reasons behind the practice in the
short time I was in the country, and the problem was further
compounded by language barriers. The older women I spoke to
in the Muslim community seemed very much in favor of clitori¬
dectomy. My questions as to why it was practiced invariably
produced the answer “it has always been done,” or “she cannot

*The practice of clitoridectomy is not confined to third world countries. There

were numerous cases of the operation being performed as a “cure” for masturba¬
tion and nymphomania in nineteenth-century England.
186 Fighting Two Colonialisms

be a woman if it isn’t done.” I asked N’Bemba, who was trusted

by the women in the Fula villages we visited, to try and elicit a
more concrete rationale. She was given the same answer. And I
came to see that the direct connection between circumcision and
womanhood provided one of the clues to the unquestioning
continuation of the practice. From early childhood, girls learned
that in order to become a woman they must go through the
initiation rites. Each year they saw the rites carried out for older
girls in the village and eagerly anticipated their turn. They
understood that only then could they be considered a woman.
The initiation rites, therefore, played an important role in the
conscious process of growing up.
The effectiveness of this connection makes PAIGC’s efforts to
change the practice difficult. Yet, as with all such customs, they
do not deny the interrelationship between the custom and the
social structure of the society; instead they emphasize it. Were
they to ban the practice the result probably would be its con¬
tinuation in secret, causing more harm to women, at the same
time generating hostility and mistrust toward the party. Neither
have they followed the path chosen by leaders in other newly
independent African nations, however: the blind return to tradi¬
tional customs, however detrimental, which had been outlawed
or disdained by the oppressive colonial regimes. As an expression
of victory over the colonialists, for example, clitoridectomy was
reinstituted and encouraged in Kenya. And in Sierra Leone
young women proudly adhere to the practice in an effort to
distinguish themselves from westernized urban women.
As we saw in the previous chapter, PAIGC draws a bold line
between those customs that enhance the culture of the people
and those that provide only negative influence. Yet unlike the
customs discussed in that chapter—polygyny, forced marriage,
and denial of divorce rights for women—clitoridectomy was not
singled out as a target for PAIGC’s opposition and was not made
illegal in the liberated zones. This, according to party leaders,
was because women themselves did not consider the procedure
oppressive. Realizing that a call for an end to the practice would
not have won much support, PAIGC decided other tactics needed
to be used.
 In the Liberated Zones 187

They designed an information campaign directed at the younger

generation: girls were told circumcision was unnecessary while
boys were warned of infections resulting from traditional methods.
And both sexes were told that the procedure was no precondition
of true adulthood. However, the older generation basically was
left alone. Teodora, expressing PAIGC’s characteristic patience
in such matters, explained: “It is not possible to stop overnight a
custom that has arisen out of centuries of tradition. In particular
it is very difficult to prevent any practice that relates to sexuality
and which emanates from very old and deep-rooted ideas. Hence,
the party has not taken any concrete measures, directed at the
older people, to try and stop this practice. But those who have
been educated—the youth—understand that it is not necessary.”
It had been PAIGC’s experience that when young students
went to study in the internatos, in the secondary schools in
Conakry and Senegal or abroad, they found themselves in a
social environment completely different from that in which they
grew up. Here they saw that clitoridectomy was not practiced by
others, and that it was even considered harmful. After these
impressions had sunk in, they quickly reached the conclusion
that it is irrelevent to attaining womanhood, and, on returning to
their villages, insisted that their younger sisters not be circum¬
cised. The teachers in the village schools and semi-internatos
also took up the issue, but because of the counterpressure
that parents could apply directly on their daughters, they were
not as successful as their counterparts in the internatos and
secondary schools.
Teodora pinpointed another aspect that PAIGC took into
account: “Someone who has grown up knowing that at a certain
age, he or she must go and be circumcised, might suffer psycho¬
logical problems if they do not have it done.” An individual
would have to live with these doubts for the rest of his or her life
unless the process of political education was done so sensitively
that it gained the full support of the individual child. “Teachers
do not say that those who have been circumcised are better or
worse than those who have not,” Teodora added. “Rather they
stress that there are other ways of living and the practice itself is
unnecessary and not beneficial.
188 Fighting Two Colonialisms

If parents still insisted, then PAIGC encouraged them to send

their children to a clinic or hospital to have the operation done
more hygienically. But it appeared, at least in the case of girls,
that in the villages the ritual was considered as important as the
actual operation. Girls were, once more, the last to be released
from tradition. So while the party had some success in steering
boys to clinics, girls by and large were circumcised in the ways
demanded by tradition.
PAIGC’s experiences in the circumcision campaign were
not without their lighter moments. I listened on one occasion
as a group of cadres jokingly but sympathetically recalled the
predicament of a young teacher. A group of fathers had come to
his school to retrieve their sons for an initiation ceremony and
took them back to the village. The teacher followed in hot pur¬
suit, arriving just as the ceremony was about to take place, and
rushed in to demand that they stop. Only he had forgotten
something: according to tradition, if an uncircumcised man
witnesses these sacred rites, he too must undergo the procedure.
As the teacher was uncircumcised he found himself running
again—this time in the other direction.

The effectiveness of PAIGC’s school education program in the

ten years of its existence can be measured by reference to the
new generation of Guineans that grew up in it.
At one of the internatos I visited, I talked with the two
“political commissars”—a boy and a girl—of the elected student
committee. The boy explained the workings of his school with a
clarity and political insight which quite belied his youth. While
he spoke, the girl, also fourteen, sat quietly next to him, looking
down, her hands resting in her lap, interjecting no comments
into his authoritative presentation. Adama Sambu seemed a
perfect image of her mother and grandmother. But when I asked
her questions after her comrade had finished, referring particu¬
larly to the role of women, her seemingly subservient demeanor
disappeared without a trace. Showing an equal political grasp of
the revolution, she confidently described her perceptions:
“In our school the girls live and work on a completely equal
basis with our male comrades. So here it [sexism] is not a problem.
 In the Liberated Zones 189

Nonetheless, we talk frequently about the role of women in our

country and the problems confronting women because of their
inferior status. On March 8th, the day of women, for instance, we
hold special meetings, and a teacher, who is a member of the
party, visits each class to talk about the rights of women, the
work we must do in our country in order to free women, and the
necessity for women to have equal rights with men.
Outside the school, I see immediately the difference between
the role of women there and the special situation of equality in
our school. There, a woman does all the work around the home.
She works continuously and very hard. Men do not help with
this work at all, although they could very easily. Men are, of
course, engaged in other work, work which women may not do
although they are perfectly capable. This is because they are
treated unequally in the society and are expected to serve
the men.
“In order to develop our country, in order to make the women
of our country advance toward complete equality, women and
men must have the same rights. We women must do the same
work as the men, which they believe we cannot do, and men too
must free women from the enormous amount of work they have
to do in the home. In this way our country will advance so that
men and women will have the same responsibilities and the
same rights.”
Top: Fina Crato (center) with (acinta da Souza, school director (second from left), and Con-
ceicao Goia, teacher (right) at east front internato. Bottom, left: Carmen Pereira, PAIGC
leader. Right: Manama Camara interviewed at her house in Cacine. To the right is her co¬
wife.
Top, left: Ana Maria Gomes, PAIGC responsaveJ. Right: Juliana Gomes, hospital director, ex¬
amining malaria victim in the liberated zones. Bottom: Ule Bioja (left), health responsaveJ,
with nurses at Cameconde Hospital. Nurses often worked with babies on their backs.
Top, left: Cau Sambu, one of the first and most effective mobilizers. flight: Satu Djassi, a
leader of the Organization of Women, addressing a peasant meeting. Bottom: Teodora
Gomes, regional political commissar, at work at her base in the south front of the liberated
zones.
Chapter 8
“At the same time fighting
for personal independence”

As the war progressed, increasing numbers of women

were found entering such diverse areas of work as dif¬
ferent facets of political mobilization, health, education,
and information, and women worked their way up
through different levels of leadership. Markedly lacking,
however, were women soldiers. I found PAIGC’s reasons
for this were more connected to social and economic
factors than to attitudes that discriminated against
women.

193
194 Fighting Two Colonialisms

It was the last week in January 1973. From north, south, and east,
from every region and sector, responsavels, party militants,
soldiers, representatives from villages, young people and old,
emerged from villages, bases, schools, camps, and hospitals and
set out on foot for the border with neighboring Guinea. They
were on their way to pay their last respects to their leader and
hero, Amilcar Cabral, whose funeral was to be held in Conakry.
They marched in sorrow and anger, but also with determination.
For however deeply they mourned his death, they knew that
their struggle was not embodied solely in Cabral; his assassina¬
tion would not mark the end of the revolution, but a strengthening
of their will to press on more resolutely to victory.
The journey meant days of marching, especially from the north
front. For seven or eight days, nonstop, the people marched,
following the paths that wound through the forest, sprinting
across the open bolanhas under cover of darkness. At the edge of
the rivers they waited in mangroves for a peasant to take them
across in a dugout canoe. Although the peasants were notified
ahead of the travelers’ arrivals, invariably there was a wait,
as precise timing under such conditions was impossible. The
crossing time varied: a few of the rivers were miles across,
while others were much narrower. No journey could be made
without such crossings, however, as rivers carved their way in
all directions through the Guinean landscape. Six or eight people
balanced on their haunches on the floor of the dugouts as the
expert paddlers negotiated across to safety.
The Portuguese colonialists, meanwhile, realizing that many
militants would be traveling to mourn the murder of their prime
target, intensified their attacks, hoping to hit less illustrious
ones. One such was Titina Sila, one of the most loved leaders of
the revolution. Crossing the broad Farim River on February 1, as
part of an advance guard to make preparations for the funeral,
she and her comrades fell into a Portuguese ambush. This was
not the first—more likely the seventh or eighth—but this time
her presence of mind and bravery could not help her as before.
When the comrades were in the middle of the river, the Portu¬
guese army boat appeared and shot at their rubber dinghy,
hitting Titina. A Cuban doctor in the dinghy tried to grab her,
 In the Liberated Zones 195

but he missed, and she fell into the water. The others managed to
get away, but Titina, unable to swim, did not, and the revolution
lost its political commissar for the whole north front.
Ernestina (“Titina”) Sila was born in Cadique Betna, Tombali
region, in April 1943. By the time mobilization began she had
moved with her mother to Cacine; it was there, in 1961, that she
was first contacted by two mobilizers, Nino Vieira and Umaro
Djallo. From the first time they approached her, she threw all her
energies into the struggle. Her initial task was to distribute
clandestine literature, which she hid in a can in her backyard.
Later she acted as a liaison between the mobilizers living in the
forest and the peasants. Ever active, she went between forest and
village, working nonstop, talking incessantly about the struggle.
It was not long before she had convinced all the people she
knew, all those she contacted, both young and old, to support
the PAIGC and fight for the liberation of their country.
But her mother, meanwhile, looked with distrust on the young
mobilizers who visited Titina. What were they encouraging her
young daughter to do? She worried herself sick and tried to
persuade Titina to stop. Titina would not listen. Already she was
dedicated and accepted without question the need for national
liberation. So her mother decided to send her to Bissau to live
with an aunt and continue her studies. The entreaties of Nino
and Umaro proved unavailing. But Titina had also made up her
mind. Though she loved her mother, she had to follow her
conscience. She ran away and took refuge in the base at Gala, in
the sector of Cubucare. There she trained as a guerrilla, and was
soon taking part in combat missions.
The following year Cabral began a program for the mobiliza¬
tion of girls and young women and chose Titina to study in the
USSR, under the auspices of the Soviet youth organization.
Affected by the extreme cold, she returned in 1964 before she
had completed her course, but her revolutionary fervor was not
dampened, and she continued her political work among the
people as a responsavel. When Titina attended the first party
congress in Cassaca in 1964, she was lauded for her work in the
south front. She had shown such exceptional leadership qualities
that Cabral took a special interest in her, treating her like a
196 Fighting Two Colonialisms

daughter. A year later she returned to the Soviet Union, this time
to Kiev, as co-leader with Carmen Pereira of a group of women—
between fourteen and thirty years old—who had won scholar¬
ships to study nursing.
Back in Guinea, she went to the north front, where she set up a
militia training camp, as assistant to the front commander. Later
she was assigned to one of the most responsible positions in the
liberated zones.—political commissar for the whole north front.
Since the north was the most strongly contested of the three war
fronts it was the most challenging, and Titina seldom left, except
to represent PAIGC at a conference, accompany Cabral or another
leader on a foreign visit, or attend a meeting of the seventy-five-
member Superior Council for the Fight, of which she was a
member. Her militancy extended to the liberation of women, a
question she made a central issue in all facets of her work.
In the meanwhile, Tia (aunt), as her mother Eva was affec¬
tionately called, had herself joined the struggle; the words of her
daughter had not fallen on totally deaf ears. Throughout the war
she helped in whatever way she could. Later, because of a heart
condition, she left the liberated zones and went to Boke, where
she continued to work for PAIGC.
Titina married a PAIGC militant and had two children, the
eldest of whom died in the mato when a few years old. Distraught
at the thought that the same fate might befall Eva, her youngest,
she placed her in the care of Tia in Boke, where she would be
beyond the reach of the war. The decision meant she seldom saw
her daughter, so as she journeyed toward the border for Cabral’s
funeral, the pain of her mission was slightly alleviated by the
rare opportunity to visit.
Francisca Pereira, who had been a close friend and comrade,
recalled Titina with emotion, her voice breaking as she talked.
“Titina symbolized the kind of woman that PAIGC is trying to
produce. Strong enough to withstand even the kind of test that
the north front presented, she was always able to find a solution
to the most difficult problem. She had natural leadership quali¬
ties and the people responded to her because she was neither
selfishly demanding nor authoritarian. Everybody loved her.
Everybody. That is why we were all crying when we heard that
 In the Liberated Zones 197

she had been killed. She was always willing to sacrifice herself
for the struggle and that is how she died. She was someone
formed by the revolution and who had attained the ideal of what
the Guinea-Bissau woman should be.”
Many women in Guinea-Bissau have been formed by the revo¬
lution, including Francisca herself. She had been a political
commissar in the north before acting as the PAIGC representative
to the Pan African Women’s Organization in Algeria, where she
was when the war ended. There was also Carmen Pereira,* one
of the top leaders of the party and the political commissar
for the south front, and Teodora Gomes, regional political com¬
missar in the south. These women had joined PAIGC as young
adults: Francisca and Teodora were sixteen or seventeen, Carmen
slightly older. They were joined by women like Ule Bioja, Ana
Maria Gomes, and Fina Crato, only ten or eleven when they
joined the struggle. They came straight out of their villages, with
no formal schooling, and grew up in the revolution, later holding
positions of responsibility and leadership. Ana Maria was a
political commissar for a sector of the north, Ule Bioja a regional
health responsavel in the south, and Fina Crato a film maker
working in the Department of Information.
On an absolute scale, the number of women cadres was
abysmally small. However, in light of the fact that no women
had previously worked on an equal footing with Guinean men,
the number was not unimpressive. And PAIGC was constantly
looking to improve its performance in this regard. Responding
to a question about the role of women at an informal meeting in
New York shortly before his death, Cabral said,

Yes, we have made great achievements, but not enough. We are

very far from what we want to do, but this is not a problem that can
be solved by Cabral signing a decree. It is all part of the process
of transformation, of change in the material conditions of the

*Francisca and Carmen Pereira are not relatives. Names such as Pereira, Cabral,
and Gomes are very common in Guinea-Bissau. Many Guineans, particularly
those from the towns, have Portuguese surnames. This is mainly due to an early
custom whereby Africans were given the names of their Portuguese masters. It
does not necessarily indicate mulatto background, although this was a factor in
the towns.
198 Fighting Two Colonialisms

existence of our people, but also in the minds of the women,

because sometimes the greatest difficulty is not only in the men
but in the women too. We have a big problem with our nurses,
because we trained about 300 [women] nurses—but [some of
them] married, they [had] children and for them it’s finished.1

“Women cadres work harder than men cadres,” another PAIGC

leader said to me with a troubled air. “They have to do the work
they are responsible for, like the men. But they also have to work
with women, to encourage them to join the struggle and to make
them understand that they can have equal rights. The shortage of
women cadres is a big problem.”
The lack of women cadres was starkly brought home to me at a
ceremony at a military base in the south in May 1974, when the
first five ambassadors to the country presented their credentials
to President Luiz Cabral. I felt totally surrounded by men—
soldiers, responsavels, members of the government. The only
women present among the thirty to thirty-five male cadres were
Carmen Pereira, Teodora Gomes, and Lucette Andrade, the
director of the Department of Information.
While the event provided confirmation of the length of time it
takes to involve women on an equal basis with men, reminders
were everywhere of the seriousness and commitment with which
PAIGC confronted this problem. Women were being encouraged
to take on a more active and positive role in the revolution and
had responded by demanding that they be allowed to take their
rightful place in the political life of the country.
At the time of my visit a few women had risen to high-ranking
posts. Two of the seventy-five members of the Superior Coun¬
cil for the Fight were women—Carmen Pereira and Francisca
Pereira; a third had been Titina Sila. One of the twenty-five
members of the Executive Council was a woman: Carmen. Two
of the fifteen-member State Council were women: Carmen and
Chica Vaz. Carmen was also elected vice president of the recently
constituted National Assembly. But none of the newly appointed
commissioners were women.
I asked Teodora why there were not more women on these
bodies. “It would be tokenism if there were more members,” she
replied without hesitation. “We have to face the reality of our
 In the Liberated Zones 199

society, and in light of the reality this number is not small and it
is certainly not tokenism. If we wanted to, we could put more
women on this council or that, but it would be pretending that
we have come further than we have. It is a slow process, this
emancipation of women. And members of the Superior Council
for the Fight, for example, have to work hard and have to attend
meetings regularly. This means a lot of traveling. We do not
have enough women cadres who can spare the time. We need
them to work inside the country. We need them to help develop
new cadres.”
Carmen, Teodora, and Francisca represented a vanguard for
the younger generation which was growing up in the revolution
and taking on positions of responsibility at an ever-increasing
rate. ‘‘The older women have shown us the way,” Fina said to
me. “We have great respect for what they have done.” They had,
through their work, been able to demonstrate that women could
enter fields of work traditionally reserved for men and also the
new areas which might automatically have become ‘‘men’s
work had women been content to follow uncritically patterns
of history in Guinea and elsewhere in Africa.
The crucial role played by women in the fight was apparent
even to the strategists of the colonial army. The very presence of
Carmen Pereira in the liberated zone provoked the Portuguese to
design a special strategy for her elimination. They spent six
weeks bombing the area around Donka, her base, and when she
moved to another area, they shifted their bombing targets. During
those six weeks in the late 1960s, she seemed to spend more time
in trenches than anywhere else, unless it was en marche to yet
another adjacent area in the hope of throwing the bombers off
her trail. But she never fled her region or took refuge in Conakry.
Such was the courage of this militant. And it paid off in the end,
when the bombing halted as suddenly as it began, and she
returned to her work, undefeated.
To look at Carmen and watch her among comrades, it was hard
to believe she was such a dangerous militant. But as time passed
I came to observe a few of the different sides of Carmen: the
leader, sitting in front of her hut, quietly and patiently explaining
a course of action to three young militants; the speechmaker,
200 Fighting Two Colonialisms

addressing a crowd of one thousand people in fiery tones; the

comrade, joking and teasing with the cadres over whom she
ostensibly had authority, the teasing as much at her own expense
as at theirs. Her hair was braided into a number of points that
stopped just short of her shoulders, but which invariably stuck
out below one of those patterned woolen hats that had become
the mark of PAIGC militants.* In fact, she had become so identi¬
fied with the head covering that when I wanted to take her
photograph she laughed, touching her bare head, and, with a
look of mock embarrassment, joked: “Oh, but I am not wearing
my cap! How can I possibly be photographed?” The photograph
did not show her hat, but it did capture the hint of a smile and
gentle expression which often played about her face.
What impressed the visitor too about Carmen was the ease
with which she worked in the liberated zone and accepted the
rigorous life it offered. Perhaps because she was a woman, she
had won the special respect of the peasants for the way she
traveled constantly around the region, investigating problem
areas, exhorting people to further efforts for the revolution,
organizing the myriad aspects of the social reconstruction pro¬
gram; and no less for the way she was in and out of the trenches
with them, risking the bombs without ever flinching or changing
expression. Donka had been her home for eight years, a “home”
that moved at least twice a year to lessen the chance of detection
by the Portuguese army. Her reed-matting hut contained only a
few personal items. And in a small clearing next to the hut was
what she laughingly called her “office.” Its furnishings consisted
of a table of rough-cut poles and four canvas chairs, all of which
were built so low that the heads of those sitting round seemed to
peer just above the table top.
There were years when she hardly left the liberated zones
at all, others when she went on numerous missions abroad,
accompanying Cabral or attending conferences, and always
returning as quickly as possible to continue her work as political

*Many militants, following the example of Amilcar Cabral, had adopted the
habit of wearing the blue, green, or brown woolen caps from a number of ethnic
groups in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, who traditionally wore them regardless of
heat or rain.
 In the Liberated Zones 201

commissar of the south front and member of the movement’s

most important decision-making bodies. Nonetheless, these
episodic sojourns in the big cities—with such comforts as run¬
ning water, hot showers, sanitation, abundance and variety
of food, the possibility of shedding guerrilla uniforms and
donning attractive West African or European dress, the pleasure
of traveling by car—must have been unsettling. Yet Carmen
slipped so easily back into the spare life of the mato that one
would have thought she had been born to it, or at least had
grown up in a peasant village. But her mulatto complexion and
fluency in Portuguese and French hinted at her background:
Carmen had grown up in Bissau, the daughter of one of the few
indigenous Guinean lawyers. As her family had acquired a fair
amount of status in the small town, a status her father took
seriously, she and her three sisters were sent to school up to the
fourth grade. Then their schooling stopped. Carmen’s father did
not want them to attend the secondary school in Bissau where
students were equipped only to join the civil service. Such an
occupation did not befit his daughters, he thought, preferring
instead that they spend the next few years engaged in such
ladylike activities as embroidery and sewing, and waiting for
suitable husbands. He got his wish. Carmen married a man who
appeared to be satisfactory and, in the following few years, gave
birth to two sons and a daughter.
While she was pregnant with her third child, the “suitable”
son-in-law joined PAIGC. It was 1961.
“One day I noticed my husband and two of his friends up to
something unusual,” Carmen recalled. “They had papers and
these they hid in the house. But I thought I had a right to know
what my husband was doing, so I found the hiding place and
looked at the papers. They were documents about the PAIGC, a
photo of Cabral, and a drawing of the flag.”2
She was reproached by her husband for going into his be¬
longings. But Carmen was not one to play the submissive wife.
She retorted that he should have told her about the party in the
first place and not left her out.
The next few months saw a lull in Portuguese repression. Then
the secret police, responding to an escalation of the guerrilla war
202 Fighting Two Colonialisms

and a corresponding increase of underground activity in Bissau,

conducted massive raids and dawn swoops throughout the area.
Although hundreds of people were arrested, Carmen’s husband
left the country just in time, and she followed his example in
short order. Gathering her three children, the youngest just a few
months old, she set off for Senegal. The move was the beginning
of her total commitment to the liberation struggle. “Although
my life was not unpleasant, I could see the sufferings of my
compatriots around me,” Carmen said.3 “I saw what the Por¬
tuguese did in my country: wealth for a few, with extreme
poverty for the great majority. I saw them putting my Guinean
brothers and sisters in prison for the smallest protest, and I
realized that this life was not a good one.”4 She could not accept
this with complacency. “Eventually I was drawn into the revolu¬
tion. I had felt myself gravitating toward revolt, but the question
for me had been how to contribute to the fight like a man.”5
Any doubts she might have carried with her as she traveled
toward Senegal soon dissolved. “On the way we passed by a
concentration camp in Tite and saw prisoners being treated very
badly by the Portuguese. Some had been so badly tortured they
were bloody and lying on the ground, unable to get up. This
confirmed my decision to go and join the Party.”6
In Senegal she met Amilcar Cabral, who encouraged her to
work full time for the party. She went to Ziguinchor, a town near
the country’s northern border, where the party had established a
rather tenuous base. The president of Senegal initially looked
upon the movement with a great deal of ambivalence, making
life awkward for PAIGC militants in his country and arresting
some of them, as well as preventing even medical supplies from
crossing the border. Carmen, twenty-one at the time, threw all
her energy into her work in Ziguinchor. She ran the small party
house, always overcrowded with people moving to and fro across
the border. “The movement was so poor then, and we all offered
whatever help we could. I prepared meals for them, took in
sewing, and treated our wounded brought in from the Guinea
war zones across the frontier. We had no money for hospital bills
in those days.”7 At the same time she looked after her own
children who lived with her in the house.
 In the Liberated Zones 203

In 1963 Carmen was offered a scholarship to the Soviet Union

to study nursing for ten months. Leaving her children in the care
of people at the house, she departed for Moscow and her first
chance to further her education and acquire a skill that would be
of more substantial use to the armed struggle. Two years later
she went again to the Soviet Union with Titina Sila. On her
return, the party posted her to the interior, where she was to
remain—except for her brief diplomatic visits abroad—until the
war ended in 1974. The first few months of the transition were
not easy. Growing up in the relative comfort of Bissau had not
equipped her for the rigorous life of the forest. “I had my own
problems in the beginning,” Carmen remembered. ‘‘I couldn’t
march for more than a few hours and I didn’t know the village
people. I needed about three months to orientate myself, to
adjust to the life here.”8
For the first year she worked as a health responsavel in the
south, where she opened the first hospital in the liberated zones.
In 1967 she was appointed political commissar for the south front,
one of the most taxing positions in the revolution. “At that time
many people thought a woman couldn’t carry out a responsibility
like that. My work required a lot of travelling, and walking was
the only way. Many ambushes were set up by the colonialists. I
was responsible for the political mobilization of all people—
men and women—in that region.”9 With her children in PAIGC
boarding schools, she could devote all her time to her work.
Within the first few months of her new task, she had covered the
whole of the front on foot. “My only companions were men
because we had so few women [cadres] at that time,” she said,
adding that the men treated her with respect. “I think their
attitude under these circumstances would always have depended
upon my own behavior. I gave and took respect.”10
Her work in the revolution contributed to a profound personal
development. “Before I joined the struggle I was very timid and
didn’t speak much. I couldn’t be among people too long because
I was shy. And I was very afraid when seeing people with guns.
Now I don’t hesitate to talk and have learned to use a gun
myself.” Noting that this change was due to the great influence
Amilcar Cabral had had on her life, his books, lectures, and
204 Fighting Two Colonialisms

conversations, she concluded: “I have learned that the first thing

one must have is political determination. To win the people’s
respect and confidence it is necessary to be disciplined and serious
about one’s responsibilities. It is especially important to follow
every directive and line of the Party. With the people’s respect
and confidence one can work without too many difficulties.”11
Although she was trained to handle weapons, Carmen, unlike
other cadres, men and women, chose not to carry them herself.
Never far from her was a member of the army, rifle slung over his
back, and when she was on a march, a group of armed militants
would always escort her.
Not so Teodora Gomes. She seemed proud to be armed; her
revolver and holster were always strapped to her waist. ‘‘I was
the best shot in my class,” she once proclaimed with a self-
satisfied grin. Teodora’s manner then, as always, was totally in
keeping with her forceful verve for life that allowed nothing in
half measure. Her generosity, her anger, her laughter, her defense
of those women in a less fortunate situation than herself, her
demand that she be taken seriously by those around her, all this
she projected strongly. Many were the times I saw her burst into
infuriated shouts at someone who was behaving in a less than
correct manner. I remember on one occasion, when a male cadre
criticized me for being withdrawn, she flew to my defense and
attacked him for his inhospitable comments—only after she told
me that I needed to rest. From my hut I heard her bellowing at him;
he hardly ventured a response. The next day, though, she looked
on like a proud older sister, all smiles, when the militant and I
hugged each other good-by, the rift healed. On another occasion,
a militant, seeing me for the first time, asked her in sexist tones,
‘‘And who is that?” “That,” she immediately responded, bringing
herself up to her ample full stature, ‘‘is my friend!” He made no
further comment. In fact, most men spoke to her and of her with
respect and affection: ‘‘Ah, Teodora, she has such a big heart.”
Or, referring to her hard work and sound political sense, they
would say: ‘‘Ah, Teodora—it is easy to see that her work is
political.” Other men, though, who were more easily threatened
by strong women, were more cautious in their comments.
During the three weeks I was with her, Teodora learned more
 In the Liberated Zones 205

English than I did Creole (although I heard it constantly all

around me). She was always asking the English for this word or
that, wrestling with the difference in pronunciation between
such fundamental verbs as “work” and “walk,” puzzling over
the similarity in sound of “two” and “shoe.” Her eagerness to
learn as much English as possible in the short time available was
one indication of the gusto with which she approached all
challenges. In this case, her smattering of English represented
the beginning of her tenth language. She was fluent in most of
the other nine—four European, Creole, and four indigenous
African languages.
Unlike Carmen, who grew up in the rather rarefied atmos¬
phere of the Bissau elite, divorced from the rural areas and the
culture of the people, Teodora grew up in small towns that
dotted the south, towns scarcely larger than the villages which
surrounded them, where her father, an assimilado, ran his small
business concerns. The ethnic make-up of her family traversed
five animist groups. Unlike many assimilados, Teodora’s father
was not mulatto and her mother’s parents were peasants.
Teodora had observed the life of the women around her and
resolved somehow to escape from the mold.
“I knew that women were dominated,” she told me. “But the
way to free ourselves from that domination? This I did not know
and couldn’t conceive. I saw how women lived in misery,
struggling to survive. They had to contend with a lot of problems
from their husbands. But what could we do at the time? What the
men wanted was for the women to stay at home. They had
control over all the money. If they chose to give some to their
wives, they gave it. If not, they didn’t. We could do nothing,
because we were oppressed.”
While Teodora was taking all this in, her parents were telling
her a woman’s main goal in life should be to get married. But the
thought of marriage was not a happy one: “To me it meant that I
would enter a life of hardship, but one that could not be avoided.
There was no alternative.” Except through education: “In this
way I could defend myself. I realized that the more ignorant a
woman was, the more she was dominated. The domination of
women is the result of economic domination.”
206 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Her quest for education began at an early age. While it was

taken for granted that the boys in her family went to school, the
presumption did not extend to girls. So she began to pester her
father. “Why do you want to learn to write?” he would chastise
her. “You just want to write love letters.” But he finally suc¬
cumbed to his daughter’s persistence, and when she was eight
employed a tutor to come to his home and teach Teodora and her
younger sister, Juliana. Six years later, they had only passed
through second grade; the teacher was incompetent. When
Teodora complained each year, her father ignored her. She’d
got what she wanted, what more did she expect? Eventually
he gave in and sent her to a missionary school, where she
completed two more grades in as many years. No sooner had
she got this far than her teacher was arrested for cooperating
with PAIGC, and her schooling came to an abrupt end. But
the year was 1962, and events were occurring which began to
take precedence in her life.
First, her father was mobilized by PAIGC, the culmination of a
process that had begun years before. When he returned from
Lisbon without having completed his studies in construction
engineering, and with only a small sum as seed money, he
developed a number of moneymaking enterprises: building
houses on speculation and then selling them at a large profit;
buying large tracts of land and growing rice for export; buying
boats to transport the rice; growing sugar cane and exporting
that. At the height of his success, he had purchased his own pier
to handle his boats and employed a large number of workers. But
several features of the colonial situation combined to undermine
his endeavors. The first—widespread poverty—fed right into an
African custom which required wealthier members of a family to
support less fortunate relatives. “And did we have a big family!”
Teodora laughed.
Then, despite his diminishing wealth, her father felt committed
to provide benefits which Lisbon never saw fit to extend to
workers in its “overseas provinces,” and few other employers
even contemplated. The Portuguese did not and there were few
Guineans in his position. “My father was a generous man,”
Teodora reminisced. “He helped his workers pay their taxes. He
 In the Liberated Zones 207

supplied them with food, medical services, and he established a

school for his workers’ children.”
Finally, there were the heavy Portuguese taxes: all facets of his
business and property were taxed by the administration. There
were the arbitrary expenses too—such as the 5,000 escudos
(about $175) he had to pay to replace his lost identity card—so
that by the time he was mobilized at the beginning of the war he
was virtually bankrupt.
Her father never said a word to his daughters about the
war or his membership in PAIGC, but it did not take long for the
curious sixteen-year-old to see that something out of the ordinary
was happening.
“I remember the night I first noticed that something unusual
was going on. I was at home and a large group of people gathered
outside. In the morning they were gone. I asked who they were,
but no one would talk about it and this only increased my
interest. More and more incidents occurred which puzzled me; I
went inside a few days later to listen to the news as always,
and the radio was gone. Then a number of Portuguese soldiers
arrived in our town, looking for guerrillas in the forest, and
demanded to know where they were. Nobody told them anything.
The people I saw that first night returned to our house soon
afterward and my father gave them food and clothing. I asked
where the food was going, and again nobody would tell me, but
by then I knew it was for the guerrillas.
‘‘Knowing that my father would refuse to answer my questions,
I began to plague one of his workers. Eventually he agreed to talk
about it and take me to visit a camp. I was very excited. Portu¬
guese propaganda had been maintaining that the guerrillas were
just like monkeys, covered with hair! I was curious to see them!”
One night, when her father was asleep, they went to the
guerrilla camp. The insurgents welcomed her as a friend, and
talked about the struggle and the mobilization for two hours.
She listened avidly, taking in all that was said, and stared about
her, wide-eyed. ‘‘Yes, they were a bit hairy because they had
beards, but that was all!”
It was a turning point in her life. A few months later, in 1963,
the war began in earnest. (The comrade who had taken her to the
208 Fighting Two Colonialisms

camp joined the guerrilla army and was later killed in combat.)
But Teodora was still answerable to her father and could not
actually get involved until a brutal incident jolted the entire
household. The Portuguese soldiers rounded up ten well-known
people in her town, all supporters of PAIGC, and shot them to
death in full view of the townspeople. This attempt to terrorize
the population, and nip the insurrection in the bud, had precisely
the opposite effect. “That day my whole family decided to join
the guerrillas and we went to live in the forest,’’ Teodora said.
Later that same year, she was chosen to study youth organiza¬
tion in the Soviet Union. When she returned twelve months
later, she worked in the PAIGC hospital in Boke where there was
a dire shortage of nurses. Then it was back to the Soviet Union a
year later, this time for four years, to study child psychology.
When Teodora came home for good, she was assigned to work as
a regional political commissar in the Balana-Quitafine region of
the south, and, like Carmen, rarely left her post until the end of
the war.
But her sense of self and what she would do in the future had
been irrevocably changed. At the time Teodora joined PAIGC
she thought her life was heading inevitably toward marriage. In
the crucible of the revolution, however, she became a person in
her own right. When she spoke of women joining PAIGC because
they had found a way they could fight for their own liberation,
she was talking as much for herself as for a peasant woman.
“We did not know how to fight together to change our lives as
women. This we have now learned through PAIGC.” In fact,
Teodora had never married.
The supportive climate offered by the party was perhaps the
determining factor in the recruitment of Francisca Pereira,
a self-reliant fighter since childhood. She made the defense
of women a principal component of all her work for the revolu¬
tion. Always on guard against male supremacist attitudes, she
presented a prickly exterior to male comrades whose sensitivity
to the issue left much to be desired. And this was hardly mitigated
by her expressed conviction that those Guinean women who had
taken up the issue for their liberation were in fact more politically
advanced than many of their male counterparts.
 In the Liberated Zones 209

When Francisca defended women, she was likely to show

anger, her forehead creasing into a slight frown and her face
shining as she talked. But the anger was cool, and so contained
that she became extremely articulate. It was a demeanor with
which not a few male cadres became familiar; from the time she
joined PAIGC Francisca fought her way to equality with the
comrades working with her. As one of the top leaders in the
party, she directed those energies on behalf of younger women
who, sometimes tentatively, were beginning to take their place
in the revolution. A case came to her attention of a young woman
who had been studying in a socialist country in Europe when
she became pregnant as a result of a relationship with a male
student. The first response from PAIGC headquarters had been
to recall her, despite the fact that it would have meant the
end of her studies and possibly the loss of a cadre. Francisca
took up the issue immediately, criticizing this attitude and the
double standard implicit in it. “If she comes home, then he
comes home! ” she protested, in order to underscore the inherent
unfairness. She won. The young woman remained to complete
her studies.
Francisca’s staunch belief in the need for all women to be
independent from men can be traced back to the view of the
world she acquired as a child. “I watched my mother. I watched
her struggle through great difficulties just because she was a
woman. I decided from a very early age that I would always be
responsible for myself, and not have to rely on a man for any¬
thing.” So she set about ensuring that she would be economically
independent and, from the age of thirteen, was already making a
bit of money for herself by sewing. Later, she was able to inte¬
grate these perceptions into her political views. “Nothing is
better than if women can become economically independent.
We can talk about discrimination against women and about
domination by men because the woman does not have economic
independence, because she depends on her husband. 12
It was not only economic self-sufficiency she resolved to
maintain in her personal life. She was by nature independent,
and not about to let others control her life, even when according to
custom she should have been obedient. Consequently, numerous
210 Fighting Two Colonialisms

acts of defiance dotted her formative years: by age sixteen she

had left her uncle’s house and the secondary school in Bissau
because she did not like her aunt; she walked out of another
uncle’s home in Conakry when he refused to allow her to marry
the man of her choice; she packed her bags and left her husband
when the marriage did not work out.
Although her family was assimilado, she grew up in Bolama
in relative poverty. Her father had died a few years after her birth
and the small family income vanished with him. The situation
began to ease only when her mother remarried some years later.
In the interim, the money problems represented a barrier to the
child’s schooling, a stumbling block all the more frustrating
because the family, unlike most others, held that both girls and
boys should be educated. Fortunately for her, an uncle agreed to
pay for her education and she began her schooling in a small
town to which they had moved after her father’s death. She
remembers the next years as happy ones. She worked hard and
was liked by the teachers. All this changed abruptly, however,
when her family returned to Bolama as she was about to enter
third grade. Her mother took her to the Portuguese school to
enroll her, only to discover that they would not admit the child
without a birth certificate. Francisca’s was nowhere to be found.
“My mother didn’t know anything about my father’s affairs,
where he kept his papers, where he kept his money. Typical of
Africa, where the woman is the last person to know anything
about her husband.” All efforts to find the precious document
were in vain. In the end she was enrolled at a missionary school,
but only after she had agreed to become a Catholic. She did not
like this at all. “My mother was a Christian, which is why I am
called Francisca. But I didn’t believe. I now had to take com¬
munion and go to church every single day! I hated it.” But what
she hated even more was the racism at the school. Incidents
happened regularly which caused her great distress. For instance,
she remembered that “One day a white pupil began fighting
with an African pupil. The priest came and separated them and
then gave the African child such a vicious beating. It wasn’t even
his fault. He ran home crying. Of course his parents could do
nothing as there was no justice in cases like this. It was this kind
 In the Liberated Zones 211

of discrimination that created a lot of antagonism against both

religion and whites.”
When Francisca had completed fourth grade, she went to
Bissau to continue her studies at the secondary school. As was
the custom, relatives provided her with board and lodging in
return for domestic work, virtually the only way that children
from outside Bissau could attend secondary school. But often
they were treated like servants, as Francisca herself was to
discover: ‘‘My aunt treated me so badly that I ran away and
returned to my mother. My schooling stopped there. Mine was
not an unusual case.”
Not long afterward, a different uncle, who had recently married
in Conakry, invited her to live in his household. Francisca’s
acceptance of the offer proved to be a critical decision in her life.
Arriving in Conakry in 1957, one year before independence, she
witnessed a period of political ferment as Sekou Toure, the
president-to-be, maneuvered to thwart France’s desire for a neo¬
colony. The energetic debates of the time struck a responsive
chord in the young visitor. Supporting the independence stand,
Francisca began gravitating toward politics herself—and to the
house where PAIGC had established its headquarters and school
in 1959. There, Amilcar Cabral was quick to spot her talent. He
saw in her the makings of a strong leader and, with few women
in the party at that stage, personally encouraged her to take an
active role.
In the meanwhile her life in Conakry had been unhappy. Her
aunt resented her presence and treated her unkindly. The climax
came when she wanted to marry: ‘‘My uncle opposed it, so I just
said ‘ciao’ and left them.” Her happiness in her married cir¬
cumstances was short-lived, however; when her husband began
to maltreat her she took her infant daughter and left him too.
Francisca was as decisive in getting into situations as she was
in getting out of them. When the chance of working for the
liberation of her country presented itself, she jumped at it. By
the age of seventeen, she was living in the PAIGC house and
working full time for the party. She was also growing into an
extremely attractive young woman. Carrying herself with an
ease and confidence which belied her teenage years, she had a
212 Fighting Two Colonialisms

ready, winning smile which spread wide across her face and
showed a large gap between her teeth. Her face glowed when¬
ever she expressed feelings of particular friendship. But being
the only woman living in the PAIGC house at the time proved
problematic. In fact, it was a battle which she fought without
ever compromising, to make the young militants around her
treat her with respect and not as a young woman there for their
pleasure. “In the beginning they treated me as inferior,” Francisca
recalled. “Even those with whom I had equal responsibility
would keep thinking that whatever a woman does cannot be as
good as they do. ‘Huh! she’s just a woman,’ they would think. It
is a continual fight even now. However, things have changed
enormously since those early days. But this does not mean that
the problem has disappeared. Men need to be polished! I am still
having to fight with my comrades about these attitudes. Toward
me, yes, but more so in their treatment of younger women.
Cabral helped women a lot over these issues. Now our women
have become even more aware than the men, and women are
carrying on their own struggle for liberation.”
In 1965 Francisca joined the group of young women led by
Titina Sila and Carmen Pereira and went to study nursing in the
Soviet Union for one year. During the course she and Titina
became very close friends, sharing similar attitudes toward life
and a special aversion to the Moscow winter. When they returned,
they were both assigned work in the north front as health
responsavels. Much later Francisca represented PAIGC at the
Pan African Women’s Congress and was based in Algeria until
the end of the war, returning regularly with Carmen and Titina,
to carry out her responsibilities as one of the three women
members of the Superior Council for the Fight. Her quick rise to
leadership in the party, rather than setting her apart, served to
intensify the common cause she felt with women comrades.
Francisca regarded leadership not as an end in itself, but as a
facet of the general independence that all women must fight for:
“It is not enough to fight for political independence, if we are not
at the same time fighting for personal independence.”
Carmen, Teodora, and Francisca are examples of the transfor¬
mation taking place in Guinea-Bissau. They are not tokens; each
 In the Liberated Zones 213

has fought her own way to a position of equality with men.

While their assimilado background had given them a relatively
privileged position, as compared with peasant women, they still
had to overcome severe disavantages vis-a-vis men in terms of
education. And while they were not as bound by the kind of
culture which so severely circumscribed their peasant sisters,
they still had to reverse tradition in order to exercise authority.
But the revolution was a great equalizer in many other respects,
not the least being the way in which it gave peasant women
some upward mobility even as women from assimilado back¬
grounds were finding their roots again. Women participated in
all facets of work for the revolution, including education, infor¬
mation, and, of course, politics. They played a particularly
strong role in health. Although PAIGC began the war with no
more than three male nurses, by its end there were over ten
qualified Guinean doctors (one woman) and an equal number of
medical assistants, some of whom were women. (These were
supplemented by doctors from friendly countries, Cuba in par¬
ticular.) Of the five hundred nurses who were working by the
end of the war, more than half were women. And while not
all of these had gone through the full nurses’ training course,
all did have sufficient preparation to work effectively in the
health service, whether at a health post, on a health brigade,
or in a hospital.
One of the medical assistants was Teodora’s sister, Juliana
Gomes, head of Guerra Mendes Hospital in Tombali, in the
south’s Catio region. My itinerary in the south included a visit
to the hospital, where I stayed overnight. Juliana was two years
younger than Teodora and very different in temperament, her
expansive patience a contrast to Teodora’s energetic and dy¬
namic nature. The personalities seemed to match their choice
of work.
Juliana was born in Fulacunda, a small town in the south
where her father was working at the time. Her overriding passion
as a child and young teenager had been that someday she would
work in the health field, nursing being the highest position she
could imagine. It took a revolution, however, for such a dream to
enter the realm of the possible in Guinea-Bissau. After Juliana
214 Fighting Two Colonialisms

had joined the liberation movement she was given a scholarship

to study in the Soviet Union. She left Guinea equipped with a
fourth-grade education and returned four years later, trained as a
medical assistant, possessing more skills than the nurses who
had inhabited her early dreams.
In fact, she had many of the skills of a doctor, the difference
lying primarily in her less extensive diagnostic and surgical
training. This more limited training was due in part to starting
with a fourth-grade education, in part to expediency on the part
of the party: cadres could not go away for training for indefinite
periods when people with a certain modicum of skill were
required on the scene of the revolution. Besides, the party knew
the gap in her expertise would not be of immediate consequence,
since most of the cases she would encounter would likely be
diseases endemic to the country, arising from social conditions
and not requiring surgery. Most importantly, her training gave
her sufficient expertise to run a hospital such as Guerra Mendes,
and provided a highly trained cadre to the revolution.
When she returned from her studies in 1969, Juliana first
worked at Solidarity Hospital in Boke for one year and then
went into the interior, to a hospital in Cubucare. She had not
been there long when the Portuguese selected the area as a
prime bombing target and it became essential to have a fully
trained doctor on hand. So Juliana exchanged posts with the
head of Guerra Mendes. “I never believed as a child that my
dreams could possibly come true,” she told me. “Maybe when
the war is over, I’ll be able to continue my studies and become
a full doctor.”
Guerra Mendes Hospital was a typical mato hospital. Camou¬
flaged in the forest, the “wards” were built from thatch and palm
fronds. There were about four beds to each hut, covered in pale
green sheets. In the late afternoon, a four-year-old girl with a
high fever was brought to the hospital by her parents. They had
walked a number of miles to get there and now stood next to
Juliana as she examined their daughter and quickly diagnosed
malaria—a chronic complaint. After giving the child an injec¬
tion of quinine, Juliana handed the parents a box of phials of
more quinine, explaining that they should take these to a health
 In the Liberated Zones 215

post near their village so that the child could be treated each day
without having to walk for miles.
A few days later I spent two nights at Cameconde Hospital in
the region of Cubisseco. The main purpose for this visit was to
meet Ule Bioja, the regional health responsavel. Although based
at the hospital, she was regularly away in the villages. The work
of a health responsavel was essentially political and educational.
It involved educating the population about hygiene and preven¬
tive medicine and encouraging them to use health services which
at first they had viewed with suspicion. The political significance
of all this was simply a variation of PAIGC’s mobilizing theme—
that national independence demanded people let go of destruc¬
tive customs, including the dependence on traditional medicine.
For the responsavel it meant traveling constantly between vil¬
lages, from one sector to another, often for days at a time, covering
the whole region to coordinate the work of the health brigades
and check on the problems of each area.
One morning at Cameconde we sat on a makeshift bench
outside one of the carefully constructed huts that served as a
ward, and Ule talked about her life. She was reserved and quiet
spoken, but also relaxed. As she spoke, I recognized that quality
of self-possession I had grown accustomed to finding in the
women cadres I met.
A Balanta, Ule was eleven when mobilizers first came to the
village on Como Island where she was born. She was not aware
of anything unusual. “In the beginning only a few adults were
mobilized. The children were only told what was going on once
the whole village was supporting PAIGC. I suspected nothing.”
She was thirteen when the Portuguese launched their massive—
and ultimately unsuccessful—attack against the islanders. “Many
people went into the forest, under the protection of PAIGC, and
helped to fight off the Tuga,” Ule recalled. As the siege wore on,
she joined the work in support of the guerrillas. “I helped the
women cook for the guerrillas. At the same time we did some
gymnastics training, not full military training. There was a
serious lack of guns and ammunition and these tended to be
used by the men. I was young, but I remember at least one
woman who had a gun and fought with the men.
216 Fighting Two Colonialisms

During this period, Ule lived in the forest. Then she was
evacuated from the island with a group of young people and
taken to the mainland. But she never had a chance to settle
down. The party soon sent her to Ghana for three months to
begin training as a nurse. A few months later, at the age of fifteen,
she joined Carmen and Titina’s group to study nursing in the
Soviet Union. The course there had been specially designed to
accommodate people who had had no formal schooling. In fact,
Ule began to learn to read and write only when she returned to
Guinea-Bissau; the hospital where she first worked, like all
PAIGC hospitals, was attached to a school for the workers. She
had completed fourth grade by the time I met her.
While Ule was growing up she was conscious of how women
were oppressed. “My mother was a classic example. She could
not sit with the men or speak with other men in front of my
father. All she could do was pound rice, cook, wash all my
father’s and her children’s clothes. She had to attend to all his
needs. She had no choice. But I have seen a great change in her.
She responded very strongly to what the mobilizers were saying
about the need for women to be equal. Now she attends meetings
and does things independently. It was she who encouraged me
to join the party and to study. She is very supportive of my work.
“Before mobilization I thought my life would be just like my
mother’s and my grandmother’s. I could not visualize anything
else. I was very hopeful when I heard what the party was saying
about the need for women to take part equally in thfe struggle. I
understand now clearly that women must be equal with men,
but we have to fight for that equality. The conditions for women
have been very bad, so it’s going to take a long time. PAIGC
stresses that women must be as free as men and I believe that in
the future this will happen. There is such a difference between
living under Portuguese colonialism and with the party’s view
of society. Now women can have the same responsibility as men.
Now men must hear the women’s voice.”
Ule had two children. At the time of my visit, the older one
was one and a half years old, the younger seventeen days. Since
her husband was away, studying in the German Democratic
Republic, I asked her how she managed to look after her new
 In the Liberated Zones 217

baby and work at the same time. She responded by telling me

that PAIGC suggests pregnant women work only up to their
seventh month, and take off a few months after the birth to care
for their child. Those who wished to work longer before the birth
or begin again sooner could do so. As for herself, she said, “I did
not stop working until the day my child was born. Even in the
last month I was attending meetings away from the hospital. I
am back at work already.”
And did having a child make it more difficult to travel long
distances now? “When I have to do that, I carry my child with
me,” she responded with a shrug of her shoulders. She did not
consider this a “problem” that needed solving. Her older child
was with her husband’s parents and, although they lived in the
same region, it was still some distance away. “I have to cross two
broad rivers to get there,” Ule continued. “If I have work to do in
the area, I can go and visit him, but this does not happen too
often. I cannot let my child interfere with my work. The struggle
must come first now. He is being well looked after, so I don’t
have to worry.”
Encouraging women to train as nurses was not only a health
expedient; for young peasant women it represented a basis
for acceptance as equals. For some women nursing became
a stepping stone to greater responsibility and leadership in
the movement.
Ana Maria Gomes was another example of a woman who took
this route out of obscurity and ignorance. Like all the women in
her poor Mandjak village, she received a traditional education
which prepared her for an adulthood of arduous work in produc¬
tion and in the home. By the age of six she had already learned
the time-consuming and backbreaking task of pounding rice.
She helped to look after the younger children, wash clothes in
the river, collect water from the well; she learned to work the
land, and was soon balancing large bundles on her head as she
walked the long distances from one place to another.
Still, she was a sickly child, prone to regular bouts of fever,
cold shivers, and attacks of vomiting. The nearest health station
in her area of the south was a six-hour march away, and the
Portuguese fees for treatment were beyond what her parents
218 Fighting Two Colonialisms

could pay. So for Ana Maria and the people of her village, the
health post was as good as nonexistent. There was no question of
her attending school either. It was too expensive and far away for
even the boys of her village.
A predictable life pattern was established from a young age:
soon after puberty she would have to marry a man chosen by her
father, then move to her husband’s village and, if she survived
childbirth, bear many of his children, some of which, with the
high mortality rate, could be expected to die young. Such was
her mother’s life and Ana Maria could imagine no other.
Ana Maria was ten years old when she noticed that unac¬
countable things were happening in her village. For instance,
there was her mother, cooking mounds of rice and palm oil—far
too much for their family, large though it was. When she asked,
her mother would brush her aside: “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing.
Don’t worry about it.” She was even more puzzled by the
strangers visiting their village, once unusual now almost a regu¬
lar practice. Eventually, even though the adults tended to stop in
midsentence when the children joined them, Ana Maria began
to pick up a word here, another there. She learned that men were
living in the forest, that they were talking about something
called the “party,” and that they were planning to make life
better for the peasants.
The people of her village responded quickly to what the
mobilizers were saying, at last seeing a way out of their oppressed
existence. By the beginning of the war in 1963 mahy had joined
PAIGC, some to fight in the guerrilla war, others to take on
whatever tasks were needed to support it, such as transporting
ammunition and other goods, acting as guides, cooking for the
fighters. “We organized it,” she told me, “so that different people
took turns with the cooking and washing. This way everybody
did a little extra and no one had the full burden.”
At first Ana Maria did not understand much about what was
being said regarding the need for women to participate equally
with men. However, she did see how women were speaking out
more and more at these meetings, standing up and expressing
what was on their minds. Later, sitting with the women around
the fire, she would listen to their talk about all the changes that
 In the Liberated Zones 219

were taking place. The excitement was infectious. In terms of

her own life, she understood that she would be able to choose
her own husband and saw how young women had joined PAIGC
in the camps in order to escape forced marriages or to divorce
men they had not wanted to marry in the first place.
Ana Maria was far from docile, even as a child. Bright and
talkative, she was full of questions and eager to try the new
things that brought excitement into her life. She was one of the
first chosen to join a PAIGC camp established in 1964 specifically
for girls.
“The camp was created so that girls could begin to participate
in the struggle,’’ she explained. “When boys wanted to join—
and there were many—they just did it. One day they would be
off, just like that. They were boys, it was easy. But for the girls?
Oh, no. This was out of the question. Many parents were more
comfortable about allowing their daughters to participate in the
revolution if they knew they were being well cared for. But not
all the parents. Some thought their daughters would be taken by
force and so they quickly arranged a marriage for them, even if
they were very young. Others thought: ‘If the party takes my
children, who will help me at home?’ There were those who
were afraid of the bombing and so would not let them go.’’
In cases where there was reluctance, PAIGC militants would
talk patiently with the parents and encourage them to send their
daughters, Ana Maria said, adding, “If a mother had only one
daughter, though, they would not try to mobilize her, unless her
mother wanted her to go.”
When Ana Maria arrived at the camp, scarcely more than skin
and bones, she had her first medical examination ever and
discovered that she was a chronic malaria sufferer. After treat¬
ment she began to blossom into a healthy and very attractive
teenager. With the other girls, about sixty of them, she started
learning to read and write and to do semimilitary training. All
the while, they had to be on constant alert for Portuguese bombers
which were trying to rout the camp. No sooner had they estab¬
lished themselves in one area, when they had to move again to
the next. Eventually, it became too dangerous to remain, and
PAIGC decided to escort the girls out of the country for further
220 Fighting Two Colonialisms

training. It was a difficult journey from the north to the south and
across the border to Guinea (Conakry). Only one-third of the
country had been liberated at the time and they had to march
through hostile territory, hiding both from the Tuga and the
other so-called liberation movement, FLING.* On occasion they
went without food for days. Never before had Ana Maria marched
like this. But although she was exhausted, her still spindly legs
hardly managing to carry her, she made it. It was her first of
many lessons of endurance.
Subsequently, she joined twenty other young women, including
Ule, who went to Ghana to begin training as nurses. The program
was so badly organized by the Ghanaians, however, that after a
few months they all returned to Conakry. She then went to the
Soviet Union for the year’s nursing training course.
When she returned to Guinea-Bissau she was stationed as a
health responsavel in Mores sector. It was the first time she had
been to the north, which, as the most contested area, was most
steadily bombarded. Although Ana Maria was just sixteen then
and her responsibilities extremely taxing, she worked as hard as
any adult, displaying courage and determination. These qualities
distinguished her as a promising leader and in 1970 she was
chosen to participate in a seminar for cadres held by Amilcar
Cabral in Conakry. There he told her that she was to be given a
greater responsibility, that of political commissar for the sector
of Sara, also in the north.
“Oh no,” she replied, maybe only half in jest, “the work is too
hard for me. I will collapse under the strain!”
“Oh, if you fall down,” replied Cabral with mock nonchalance,
“we’ll just pick you up again so that you can go on.”
Round this time she married a young military commander,
and a year later became pregnant. From the beginning it was
clear that it was going to be a difficult birth. The doctors felt she
could not get special care in the mato, and so, with her child
heavy inside her, she marched over the hilly terrain to the border
with Senegal, and gave birth in Dakar.

*FLING, the Front for the Liberation of Guinea, was an organization based in
Senegal whose aims were independence in the form of neocolonialism. They
were never a serious threat to PAIGC, but at the beginning exerted their energies
toward harrassing PAIGC rather than the Portuguese.
 In the Liberated Zones 221

“I knew it was going to be difficult, but I did not anticipate that

it would be as bad as it was,” she recalled. “It was awful! I was ill
for a month afterward.” She also knew that had her life continued
as she once imagined it she would have been one more young
peasant woman who died in childbirth.
Eager to return to Guinea-Bissau, however, she left Dakar
earlier than was wise, still weak, and carrying the added weight
of her one-month-old daughter, tied to her back. Crossing the
Farim River—the same river that claimed Titina—the guerrilla
party heard the sound of a Portuguese patrol boat approaching.
The women with children were told to get out of the pirog first
and to start marching fast. Ana Maria stumbled along with the few
other women, none of whom knew the way, and almost got lost.
Back in Sara she returned to her work immediately, her
baby on her back. An important aspect of this work was the
political education of women. “We can see what the party has
done for our women,” she said to me, “because now there are
women responsavels in both the party and the government.
This was never seen before. Women are everywhere in the life
of our country.
“The women are very glad that their lives are changing. Now
we understand that when the party talks about independence,
there is another independence—not only national independence,
but personal independence. This has opened a new road for us.
A road to equality. We know it will take a long time, but we are
working steadily so that things can change little by little. The
women are very grateful for what the party has done for them.
Thanks to it, we women know there is a way to free ourselves. I
feel this particularly. I never, never knew anything about life
beyond my village. My life has changed.”
By the end of the war, with six years’ experience behind her,
Ana Maria had become a forceful, articulate, and vibrant woman.
She was twenty-two years old, an impressive young leader in
the party, and a long way from malaria and bare survival in a
peasant village.
Although not in such numbers as in nursing, women could be
found in all fields in the liberated zones in 1974. They were
being trained as agronomists, working as teachers, and working
with the party in such areas as information. About half of the
222 Fighting Two Colonialisms

schools I visited had women teachers on the staff, and two of

those—-one boarding school and the Pilot School—had women
directors. As the comparative lack of education for girls was
overcome, this would in turn lead to more women teachers in
the future. In 1974 over one-third of the students going outside
of Guinea-Bissau for further study—to socialist Europe, Cuba,
and Africa—were women.
One of these students was Fina Crato, who began to work
in the Department of Information upon her return from Cuba
and Senegal.
I first met Fina in Conakry, when she came to my hotel with a
young militant from PAIGC headquarters. She was to be my
companion on my second trip to the interior, this time to the
east. Fina was small and fairly thin, her youth accentuated by
her short red cotton dress. Her thick hair was hidden under a
floral scarf, loosely tied around her head, and looking as if it
might fall off any minute. On her feet was a pair of the molded
plastic sandals that many of the militants wore, a gift in bulk
from one of the socialist countries, probably Cuba. What struck
me most was her shyness. She sat next to me, not uttering a
word, looking nervously down into her hands. She hardly ever
raised her head and never once allowed her eyes to look directly
at my face. She answered a stifled “yes” or “no” to my questions,
and after she left I wondered how we were going to get along
together. I was pleased to have the opportunity to travel with
someone young, so that I could get a sense of that generation, but
alas, it looked as if our communication would be limited.
When I arrived at the headquarters the following afternoon,
ready for our drive down to Boke, I was startled to find a totally
different Fina. Dressed in guerrilla uniform, she was with a
group of young people, telling jokes and roaring with laughter.
She waved in a friendly, self-confident way, smiling directly at
me. The Fina of the day before had totally vanished, never to
return for all the time I was with her, not even in the presence of
top party leaders. Anxious about our initial lack of interpreter,
she rushed over to Aristides Pereira, secretary-general of PAIGC
and Cabral’s successor, who was walking toward his office. “I’m
in a fix! she exclaimed, her jocular tone masking her anxiety.
 In the Liberated Zones 223

“How can I travel with the journalist if I can’t speak English?’’

“What, Fina,’’ he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “you mean to
say you can’t use a dictionary?” She jumped at any chance to
retell the story with gusto, laughing heartily each time. In fact,
my more vivid memories of Guinea-Bissau include Fina, her
hearty, chuckling laughter, and the fact that during the two
weeks I spent with her, in Boke and in the east front, she seldom
seemed to stop talking, the words coming out fast and staccato,
like a machine gun. Always ready with an opinion, a comment, a
joke, she was pleasure to be with, and through her I began to
understand what it meant to grow up in the revolution, a genera¬
tion behind Francisca, Teodora, and Carmen.
Fina’s political awakening had been sudden. She was born in
Catchanga in the south, where her father worked long hours in a
Portuguese store, at abysmal wages. The family had a hard time
making ends meet. They moved first to Catio, where Fina’s
father died: “We now lost the family income, which had not
been very big in the first place. My mother worked to try and
support the children by doing housework and washing clothes.”
And then they moved once or twice more before they decided to
settle in Catum. Fina was eleven.
One morning she was sitting outside the house in the sun
when she heard a drone in the distance getting louder and
louder. She ran inside to her mother, shouting excitedly, “Mama!
Mama! Planes are coming.” “Oh, stop your nonsense,” her
mother shouted back, not breaking from her work, “You’re always
making up things.” But a few minutes later, the planes could be
seen approaching in the distance and the noise was unmistakable.
All the villagers ran out of their houses into the open, filled with
curiosity at this unexpected event. They had never seen planes
so close before and stared up at the sky, smiling at each other and
exclaiming, some even waving at the metal birds. Then the
planes proceeded to disgorge their bombs on the upturned faces.
One after another. They bombed nonstop for a few days.
It was the beginning of daily raids that were to last over a
period of four or five months. Many people were killed at first,
but the casualties diminished as the villagers began to adjust
their lives around the raids. By five o’clock in the morning they
224 Fighting Two Colonialisms

were up, preparing food. By seven o’clock they were ready to

leave the village, which was out in the open and highly visibly,
to hide in the mangrove swamps, where they would remain the
whole day, in water up their waists. The Portuguese then began
to bomb before seven, this time using napalm.
Ten years later, Fina was able to recall the resourcefulness of
the people with a chuckle. “The villagers were very inventive.
They would take the empty napalm cannisters and make spoons
and combs and such things!”
But her mother had had enough, and she decided to move to
Como Island, an area already liberated by PAIGC, in 1964.* As
luck would have it, the Portuguese began their historic siege just
a few days after the Crato family had unpacked their small
bundles. Fina was at a New Year’s Eve party at one of the PAIGC
bases when they heard a shot ring out. Some of the militants
went to investigate and saw Portuguese soldiers landing at the
port. They quickly relayed the news and the people were escorted
back to the village. A few days later, the villagers all moved to
the center of the island, as the Portuguese were landing their
helicopters on the rice fields which ran around the edge of the
island. For seventy-five days and nights the attack continued
nonstop—from the air, from boats, and on the ground. Fina
remembered, “When the bombs were dropped, my mother would
lie on top of me to protect me, or she would hide me in the
hollow of a pilom tree.”
When PAIGC wanted to evacuate children, women, and old
people, the women refused to go along, saying they would rather
die than forsake their island. They played a key role in the

*The battle on Como Island was a decisive point in the escalation of the war and
the refining of PAIGC'S military techniques. Cabral spoke of the battle as follows:
Being the first part of our national territory to be liberated by our forces,
Como’s reconquest became for the Portuguese at the beginning of 1964, a
matter of basic and even vital necessity to their military and political
strategy. . . .
The battle of Como was a test for the Portuguese, but even more for
ourselves. Indeed, it has helped us to make a better judgement of our own
forces. We have learned about the capacity of our fighters and our people
when confronted with the most difficult situations: about the political
consciousness and fierce determination of the civilian population (men,
women and children) in the liberated zones—now definitely liberated—
not to fall again under Portuguese rule.13
 In the Liberated Zones 225

counteroffensive. Some took up arms, others kept the provisions

moving from the mainland to the island, including ammunition
and food for the guerrillas. All continued production as best
they could so that the population could be fed.
Fina worked alongside her mother during this period. “We
worked hard during the attack, cooking and carrying ammuni¬
tion for the fighters. We had to find ways to cook so that there
would be no smoke. And when we pounded, we buried the pilla
in a large hole to deaden the noise. But still the Portuguese
managed to locate some of the villages and bomb them. There
was one large Nalu village which they bombed heavily, killing
the whole population. But we finally won and drove the Portu¬
guese off the island for good.”
Since Fina’s birth, her mother resolved that her daughter
would have a better chance in life than she had had. From her
meager income she had scraped enough money together to send
her to school. And so, despite all their moving, Fina had managed
to complete a few grades before the war began and Como Island
became a combat zone. Later, when PAIGC gave many of the
young people on the island the opportunity to leave it for training,
Fina was among those chosen to go. For the next three years she
studied at the Pilot School. After that she went with three male
comrades to study film making in Cuba for four years. Then it
was on to Senegal. After spending a year in further training with
the Senegalese Film Institute, Fina returned to Guinea-Bissau.
She was waiting for a camera in order to begin filming in the
liberated zones when the war ended.
Had Fina been able to get her hands on a camera prior to the
ceasefire, her footage would have shown relatively few women
carrying arms.
Women in all fields of work? No, not quite. Few women fought
in combat. And I seldom saw women armed.
A consistent reply to my questions was that arming women
was “not necessary.” This view was in line with comments
made by Cabral to a mass meeting early in the war. Although the
speech might have been tempered in order to lessen the reaction
of the peasants, Cabral said: “[We want our women] to administer
our schools and clinics, to take an equal share in production and
226 FightingTwo Colonialisms

to go into combat against the Portuguese when necessary. . . .

[They] will work in the villages ... in the village militia. We
want the women of our country to have guns in their hands.”14
When necessary. If the goal of PAIGC is an equal society in
every respect, I asked, how could something be considered
necessary for men but not for women? The regular response was
that Guinea-Bissau is a small country with a small population.
They could rely on a proportionately smaller army than Mozam¬
bique, for instance, where vast territory had to be defended.
Therefore Guinea-Bissau was in a situation unique for a guerrilla
war, having more than enough men to fill the ranks of the
national army, FARP. While this was less true for the local
armed forces (FAL) or the village militia, it was FARP that
engaged in the major combat. “In our country,” Teodora said to
me, “we do not have women who fight in combat, although there
are women members of the army in the field of telecommunica¬
tions and as nurses. We have enough men and therefore we do
not need women.”
This had another aspect as well. Luisa and her husband,
Battista, both of whom were in the diplomatic field, saw the
central issue as the necessity to increase the population. When
Cabral had been asked this question, Luisa said, he would stress
that they have an extremely small population: “We cannot put
women in our army and risk their death, because we want to
increase the population when the war ends. We cannot work
without people. To develop our country we need as large a
population as possible.”
This is not an insignificant point. The devastation wrought by
decades of colonialism and eleven years of guerrilla war, meant
that the population had decreased drastically. PAIGC saw as
legitimate the need to halt this trend, to make special efforts
to preserve the female population so as to guarantee a rising
birth rate.
Further, I was told by one of the leaders of PAIGC that
many younger peasant women hesitated to join the army due
to the deep-set custom of having children at a very early age—
beginning at sixteen or seventeen, sometimes younger. In fact,
this was more than custom; it was an economic imperative
 In the Liberated Zones 227

dictated by the seemingly unalterable social factors—the require¬

ment for child labor of the village economy, a high infant mor¬
tality rate, and low life expectancy generally. “It is a problem
and we need to overcome it,” the cadre said. “But still at present
it is a factor which cannot be ignored.”
Teodora also mentioned the problem of tradition. “You see, in
order to put women into the front line in combat, we have to fight
very hard against our traditions which maintain that women are
not suitable for this work. The people who feel this way are very
much against having women fighting in the army. Our priority is
to expel the Portuguese from our country and we cannot slow
down the war, change these traditions, and then continue. It
would set us back and we can’t afford to lose time. If we did not
have sufficient men, we would have had to set this as a priority.”
The reasoning behind this argument did not surprise me, for I
had heard it before in discussions of the party’s practice as
regards clitoridectomy and placing women on the village coun¬
cils. In general, it was consistent with PAIGC’s overall strategy,
in not moving too fast in sensitive areas or in ways that would
alienate the people. All of these arguments, however, did not
impinge on the central one: that had there been too few men,
women would have been encouraged to join up.
At the time of mobilization, when volunteers were first being
recruited for the guerrilla force, many women came forward
to fight. Then it was necessary and women were actively en¬
couraged. A regional FAL responsavel reminisced about how
recruiters would often go to a village with a group of armed
women. “Then all the men would join up so as not to be shown
up by the women!”
Titina Sila, for instance, was always armed either with a rifle
or a revolver, and worked as assistant commander of the military
training camp she helped to set up early in the war. When Cabral
introduced her to a peasant meeting attended by Chaliand, he
said proudly, “Comrade Titina Sila, who is in overall charge of
our public health program in the North. She saw combat in the
South, gun in hand.”15
However, when FARP, a well-organized national army, as
opposed to a guerrilla militia, was formed in 1967, women were
228 Fighting Two Colonialisms

no longer encouraged to take part in combat, although those

who insisted were not prevented. Meanwhile, the army did
require such support personnel as radio operators and nurses,
and women joined in large numbers to work in these capacities.
Others continued to be members of the village militias and, to a
lesser extent, FAL. The village militia had a purely defensive
role, and were not active in combat because the Portuguese
attacked villages from the air, not the ground.
Fatmata Silibi, a twenty-one-year-old Fula woman, had been
in combat at the age of sixteen. She told me when I met her at
Senta Sare that she had been the only woman member of a unit of
thirty youths, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. During
the period of training, both she and her instructor had felt she
was equal to her comrades. But this was not the case in actual
combat. She recalled one particular mission that had been very
strenuous from the beginning and on which her group was later
ambushed. Fortunately, they managed to escape. “I think we
wounded some Tuga soldiers, but we didn’t wait to find out!”
Then on the retreat to the base, she experienced such difficulty
in keeping up with the speed of the march, that her comrades
had to help her carry her equipment. This she ascribed to being a
woman: ‘‘I am just not as strong as a man.” And she never went
into combat again.
This personal account seemed to corroborate what I was told
on various occasions, that PAIGC experience had led them to
conclude that women could not fare as well in-combat as the
men. I wondered while listening to Fatmata, however, how
much her performance could have been affected by attitudes,
rather than her inherent capability. Did the men project onto her
any feelings that she would not be able to keep up because she
was a woman? If there had been a number of women with her,
would she have derived support from them to keep up, which
she may not have received from the men? There was probably an
additional psychological element, having to do with the fact that
she is Fula and as such had been brought up to denigrate herself
as a woman. This could have contributed to the fact that she gave
in easily, in a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to interview
 In the Liberated Zones 229

women who had fought in combat in the south, the area that had
the highest number of guerrillas, or interview women members
of FAL. Fina commented a number of times: “Ah, but in the
south there are many, many women who fought in combat
alongside the men.” She did not feel that they were less capable
than their male comrades.
Moreover, it was a generally accepted fact, based on the history
of guerrilla war elsewhere, that while men may have had a better
capacity for short expenditures of brute force, women are better
able to handle tasks requiring physical endurance, certainly
over the long haul. Women fighters in Mozambique or Vietnam,
for instance, always stressed that women fared equally with
men.* Why then, should the Guinean experience have been all
that different? As far as I was able to ascertain, the young women
I spoke to did not harbor hidden frustrations or resentment
because they were not playing a combat role in the army. I asked
Fatmata if she regretted not going into combat again. “No,” she
replied, “I had a baby. I had to look after it. That is the way things
go. I had a choice. I am doing other work for the struggle now.
All work is important.”
Even though few women went into combat, all cadres, whether
male or female, attended the political and military training
school at Madina Boe in the east front for two months, before
taking up their first assignment inside the country. “All women
who are participating in the struggle know how to shoot and
handle weapons,” said Teodora. This was imperative for self
defense. Their work took them to all parts of their respective
*For instance, Pauline Mateos, a seventeen-year-old commander of the women's
detachment in Mozambique told Barbara Cornwall:
We undergo the same program as the men because we will be doing men's
work. We stay in the same camps often and we regard them as our
brothers. We suffer hunger and thirst and heat as they do, and we learn to
handle all kinds of arms. When we first begin our training we think that
we will die of hunger and fatigue. With the men we are marched past
water holes and rivers and not permitted by our trainer to drink although
we might be near collapse with thirst. This is done to toughen us for the
times when we might want to drink water from sources suspected of being
poisoned bv the enemy.
Finally, when we are strong enough to have overcome all of these trials,
we find that we can suffer as much and march as long as any of the
men, even with our packs and rifles. Sometimes we overpass men who
have collapsed.16
230 Fighting Two Colonialisms

fronts and the danger of ambushes and attacks was ever present.
Yet by the end of the war, PAIGC had apparently reversed its
policy in principle. Combat roles for women became a national
goal, and women were being given the same military training as
men in a special camp in Madina Boe. Because the war ended
shortly after, these women never entered combat, but the fact
that the party changed its practice reflected an ongoing debate
within the leadership. This concerned expedience more than
principle; Cabral always recognized the symbolic importance of
arming women, the trade-off was between advancement of the
women’s struggle and the arguments presented above.
A hint of the debate’s evolution was provided by Information
Director Lucette Andrade during an informal speech she made
at the World Youth Festival in 1973: “We have great respect for
the women of Vietnam. We have not yet been able to achieve the
level that they have. We do not have a commander of a battalion
who is a woman.”17
Comparisons with the wars in Vietnam and Mozambique were
also evoked whenever the subject of women in the military came
up during my travels in the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau.
“We do not yet have the situation that exists in Mozambique,”
Fina said to me, referring to the large number of women that
fought in FRELIMO’s army, “but we are trying to change this.”
Nevertheless, had all things been equal, it is not clear whether
the Vietnamese and Mozambican liberation movements would
have supported an ideology which maintains that Women should
be soldiers as readily as men. In fact, a closer look at these two
countries seems to give weight to PAIGC’s argument about
necessity. Mozambique, for example, has a land mass twenty
times that of Guinea-Bissau but only eight times as many people.
And although Mozambican women were armed far more exten¬
sively than women in Guinea-Bissau, and a women’s detachment
was created by FRELIMO in order to increase the mobilization of
women, the fact remains that relative to men, they did not play
as decisive a role.
Josina Machel, one of the leading women in FRELIMO until
her unfortunate death at the age of twenty-five, said, in discussing
the role of the women’s detachment:
 In the Liberated Zones 231

As in the case of military units composed of men, one of the

principal functions of the Women’s Detachment is naturally, par¬
ticipation in combat. In Mozambique, the military activities of
women are generally concentrated, together with the militia, in
the defense of the liberated zones. In this way, the men are partly
freed from the task of defense and can concentrate on the offensive
in the advance zones. Nevertheless there are women who prefer to
participate in more active combat and fight side by side with men
in ambushes, mining operations etc. They proved to be as capable
and courageous as their male comrades.18

In North Vietnam, too, although women played a major role in

the war, they were not, on the whole, sent to the front. An
American journalist who visited North Vietnam shortly after the
end of the war observed:

Few women are members of the regular Viet Nam People’s Army
(VPA)—the mobile, full-time soldiers who usually travel far from
home. It was not general policy to send women to the front. But
few North Vietnamese would suggest that women are incapable of
becoming full-time members of the VPA. I asked a Vietnamese
friend if the VPA discriminated against women and if women had
a lower status than men in society because they rarely went to the
front. Her answer was proud:
“Every country must limit its full-time army because the army
cannot be economically self-sufficient. Some people must stay
home to take care of production and the children. Besides, the
militia is very important. We could not win the war without village
defense. The entire country recognized the contribution of women
in fulfilling the ‘Three Responsibilities’—production, defense,
and the family—not just defense. In any case, we do whatever the
revolution requires without calculating personal gain.19

In the final analysis, then, the contribution of women in the

Mozambican and to a lesser extent the Vietnam wars was sup¬
portive, secondary to that of men, and reflective of the historical
division of labor.
In Guinea-Bissau, no special heroism was attached to being an
armed soldier; in fact, any tendency to value this role above any
other was consciously discouraged. The guerrilla was considered
the liberator of the country no more than any other worker for the
232 Fighting Two Colonialisms

revolution. “We are armed militants, not militarists,” Cabral

would insist. No sense of the macho was attached to the image of
the guerrilla. In fact, none of the movements in the Portuguese
colonies tolerated the development of such macho qualities and
one sees photographs of Cabral, and of other leaders, holding a
child or baby more often than brandishing a gun.
This gentleness in the way they projected themselves, reflected
party ideology: revolution meant total transformation of the
society so that any person engaged in any aspect of social
transformation was considered a revolutionary. Cabral told a
group of peasants:

This work cannot be done by one person alone. It must be done by

everybody, and most especially by those who understand the
meaning of their action. The people must work. . . . The armed
struggle is very important, but the most important thing of all is
the understanding of our people’s situation. Our people support
the armed struggle. We must assure them that those who bear
arms are the sons of the people and that arms are no better than the
tools of labor. Between one man carrying a gun and another
carrying a tool, the more important of the two is the man with
the tool. We’ve taken up arms to defeat the Portuguese, but the
whole point of driving out the Portuguese is to defend the man
with the tool.*20

Women whom I interviewed were united in their opinion that

armed struggle was not the highest form of revolutionary activity.
They would say in essence what Fina said: “But'we do not see
some work as being more important than other. The important
thing is to work for the revolution. And there are many different
and equally essential ways of doing that.”
Pointing to the temporary nature of the war, they would also
assert that national reconstruction will continue long into the
future, as will the fight to change attitudes. As such, there was
no direct connection between military activism and the fight

*Cabral fluctuated in his use of the word "man.'' In other addresses, he specifically
said, “When I say 'man,' I mean both man and woman.” Other occasions he
would say “man and woman" or “brothers and sisters" without qualification.
This speech was recorded in 1966, before the question of sexist language had
been raised as an issue in the United States.
 In the Liberated Zones 233

for their own liberation in particular. Women would win their

emancipation in the long run, the very long run, and maybe the
fact that they did not fight in combat would have no measurable
effect on the outcome.
But this “maybe” lingers in my mind. Despite the under¬
standing I took away from Guinea-Bissau, the lack of armed
women soldiers seems to present an objective problem. I saw
guns everywhere—in villages, in the bases, at meetings, propped
up against trees while people were eating or relaxing. Wherever
there were people, there were guns, men carrying guns.
Guns and power are often equated, and I wondered what
psychological effect this could have on the girls and boys
growing up in Guinea-Bissau. “We are fighting to change atti¬
tudes,’ they told me over and over again; liberation has value
only when minds are liberated in the process. But would minds
not change a little faster if women too, like men, had been
carrying guns?
Top, left: students from a Bissau secondary school and a rural internato work on production.
Right; a father takes care of infant during a meeting. Bottom, left: a school in a liberated
zone; girls were often older than the boys. Right: a man pounding is still uncommon.
Top: a Cacine town meeting after independence is divided by sex—men on one side, women
on the other, the men benefiting from the only shade. Bottom: a member of a Fula village
court (center) with other peasant women.
Top: rest stop during a long march. Bottom, left: a radio operator, member of the national
army, flight: Titina Sila, political commissar for the north front, with her child. Later killed
in ambush while crossing the Farim River, she is now a national hero.
Chapter 9
“The woman of today is a new woman
from the woman of yesterday”

A slow but perceptible change in sexist attitudes could

be traced between the period of mobilization and the
end of the war. Those women who joined PAIGC at the
beginning of the war were denigrated at that time by
many of the men they worked with, most particularly
when in positions of authority. Toward the war’s end
the younger women who had grown up under PAIGC
were experiencing greater equality. Other problems
were beginning to be confronted, such as the need for
child care and sharing domestic work with the men.

237
238 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Heading back across the dry, open plain to Vendoleidi base in

the east front in early June we did not march in an ordered
column. Neither did we keep an ear on constant alert for the
drone of approaching bombers. We were spread out rather hap¬
hazardly, chatting easily among ourselves. We knew the planes
were not going to come. The coup in Portugal had taken place a
few weeks earlier and a ceasefire was in effect.
As we neared the base, returning from my first outing to a
nearby Fula village, Mario pointed to the two hills that rose up
from the edge of the plain and the clump of trees at the foot of the
nearest hill. “Look,” he said. “Those trees are a perfect camou¬
flage for the base. The Portuguese pilots have to fly high to avoid
the hills. And so, bom, they can’t pick out the camp from among
the trees.”
So effective was the camouflage that the camp had never been
moved during the war, other responsavels told me as we walked.
Looking for myself, I could appreciate what they were saying.
Long before we could discern human life among the trees, the
noises of the camp reached us across the stillness of the plain:
the crowing of cocks, barking of dogs, the thump, thud of women
pounding, music and voices from the radios.
Vendoleidi was a large base, housing over one hundred fifty
soldiers, who slept in small huts or pup tents crowded under the
trees. The space also harbored a hospital, a school, and the
political commissars of the region. The small, typically con¬
structed school was shared between the childremof the base in
the morning, and the adults—nurses, soldiers, responsavels—in
the afternoon. At any time of the day I would see groups of two or
three women or men sitting under a tree or on a protruding rock
and, laboriously pouring over one of the PAIGC readers, teaching
each other to read.
As we entered the base along the narrow path that cut through
the clearing, 1 stopped to watch two young militants in green
guerrilla uniforms, cleaning their automatic rifles. As they rubbed
each one meticulously with oil, I wondered if it would be for the
last time. 1 thought back to a recent afternoon in Conakry, when
the head of Solidarity Hospital drove me to my hotel from PAIGC
headquarters in his Volkswagen. He told me then that the hospi-
 In the Liberated Zones 239

tal in Boke, which I had visited not too long before, had been
partly destroyed in the first torrential rains of the season. The
filler between the prefabricated walls of the wards had been
devoured over time by termites and part of the building had
washed away. And now, the director told me, some of his com¬
rades were arguing for the hospital not to be rebuilt. Indepen¬
dence was so near, they had said, that the whole hospital would
be transferred to the interior any day. “This is incorrect thinking,’’
he said to me, shaking his head. “We must not allow ourselves to
give in to the idea that independence is just around the corner.
We cannot trust the Portuguese. Who knows, we might still have
to pick up arms again. No, we must continue the struggle until
we are absolutely sure. The hospital must be rebuilt in Boke.
Coming as it did in the midst of a fluid diplomatic situation in
Lisbon, the ceasefire caught us all off balance. People were
divided over how to proceed. Some of the leaders, evincing
extremes of optimism, sported broad grins and teased: “You’ll
see, you will leave from Bissau!”
Others, like the hospital director and the militants at the
Vendoleidi base, carried on as if the war were still in progress.
But as the days went by, a new atmosphere began to pervade the
mato. Discipline was relaxed unmistakably and replaced by a
tentative but growing elation on the part of the guerrillas.
In the end, I did not leave from Bissau. But it took only
four months for the new Portuguese government to grudgingly
recognize the de facto independence of Guinea-Bissau. As for
the Solidarity Hospital, it never did get rebuilt in Boke, and those
rifles I had watched being oiled were never again used in combat.

During those last, more relaxed days of my visit—and as it

turned out, of the war—I had time to reflect on my experiences of
the past weeks, and on the perceptions I had gained of the
women in Guinea-Bissau. I thought particularly about the “new
woman” that was emerging and the differences I perceived
between the generation of Teodora and Francisca and that of
Fina and Ana Maria.
Young women usually had more easy-going and naturally
equal interactions with men of the same age. The older genera-
240 Fighting Two Colonialisms

tion of women had had to struggle against the conditioning of a

lifetime, both their own and men’s, in order to break ground
which their younger sisters could follow. In the process, they
gave vent to an anger and resentment that before had burned
below the surface.
I witnessed a number of encounters involving women cadres
and their male comrades who had not totally rid themselves of
chauvinist ideas. The women’s response was often angry, but it
always included a firm declaration of their rights and a demand
for equal respect.
One such incident happened on my first night inside the
liberated zones, a night which I spent with Teodora at the military
base in Candjafara. It was after supper and we were sitting round
a table with Joaquim Baro, a member of the PAIGC executive,
who was also a commander of the south front. Baro’s English
was good and, mellowed by strong, sweet Cuban coffee and the
gentle, flickering light of a kerosene lamp, we began to talk about
general matters. Then, on learning the purpose of my visit,
his face lit up and he exclaimed, “Ah, the women have achieved
so much. It is such an important aspect of our struggle.” So
enthusiastic was he that I began to ask him questions about the
role of women. He answered without referring to Teodora, except
to translate the interchange. Teodora listened for a few minutes.
Then, while Baro was in midsentence, she drew herself up, her
elbows planted firmly on the table, and spoke to him sharply in
Creole. He turned to me with a sheepish but good-humored grin
and translated: “Teodora says she is better qualified to answer
your questions than I am.” From then onward, until late into the
night, he was interpreter only.
Male supremacist ideas were manifested in myriad ways, both
overt and subtle, but the most common expressions of sexism
saw men refusing to take women’s work or leadership seriously,
presuming that women could be treated as sexual partners only,
feeling that men are more capable than women in carrying out
political tasks. And when I first broached the subject with Teo¬
dora, asking whether she found this a problem, I had hardly got
all the words out of my mouth before she burst forth emphatically:
“Sim, sim, sim/” (Yes, yes, yes.)
 In the Liberated Zones 241

“It is a very important question you have asked,” she went on,
“because this is one of the aspects of our society that has been
present, still is present, and will continue to be present for a long
time. In our society, men have very particular ideas about women.
At the beginning of the struggle when women and men first
began working together, the men brought these conceptions
with them from their previous experience. They found it difficult
to conceive of a woman as a comrade, a companion, or to treat
her with the respect due to her, as someone who is equal in the
struggle and working for the same goal. It was common to find
comrades having relationships with more than one woman, and
saying blithely that he loved them all!”
Amilcar Cabral gave these attitudes special attention when he
spoke with young men individually or at meetings. “Women are
not like shirts,” he would tell them, “so that you put on one
today, another tomorrow. If I find any of you treating women in
this way, you’ll marry the woman!”
Teodora chuckled at the memory and quipped: “There were
lots of marriages in the early days of the struggle!” Then,
returning to Cabral, she recalled how he insisted from the first
that woman is an equal companion of man and that the basis for
choosing a spouse must be mutual respect and a desire to live
together. Actions that were not in keeping with this, he had
made clear, were in violation of the principles of PAIGC, and he
never let up in his insistence that the young men act accordingly.
“The belief that all women are good for is to do the domestic
work and to be a sexual partner and bear children still mani¬
fests itself in our society,” Teodora acknowledged. “We con¬
tinue to battle with these ideas and I can say that there has
been a very perceptible change over the years. Nonetheless, we
cannot deny that in reality and despite our efforts, they still
exist. But it is not just the men. As Cabral used to point out,
women themselves must have a clear understanding of how
these attitudes affect them. No one can fight for their rights
except women themselves.”
Both women and men have to learn to take responsibility for
their actions, she said. This was often easier for them to do if they
had had some education and exposure to the party’s position on
242 Fighting Two Colonialisms

harmful social customs. Only recently, for example, did it

become possible for a woman to choose her own boyfri-end and
decide if she wants to marry him or not. By taking responsibility
for their actions, they were becoming stronger women and
hence respected in their own right.
“We feel sure that if our people are able to have mutually
respectful and trusting relationships, it will be advantageous to
their own children who will grow up in a new kind of environ¬
ment. These children will learn early and consciously about the
respect that men must have toward women and women toward
men. This is our great task in the revolution.”
Although Teodora began her work inside the country and
Francisca in Conakry, their experiences had been similar in
regard to the attitudes of the men they worked alongside. Both of
them joined PAIGC as young adults, around the age of seventeen,
and won respect after proving themselves over the years. “Now,
though,” Francisca told me, “these difficulties seldom occur
between comrades working together. For women like Carmen,
Teodora, and myself, these problems do not arise. Women in our
position in the party have their opinions and decisions taken
seriously and with respect.” Nevertheless, she lamented that
older men with more than residual sexist attitudes were con¬
tinuing to mistreat younger women, those just beginning to
work with the party. In many of these cases the men were not
according them the respect they deserved and the young cadres
were hampered in carrying out their work.
“The party gives her a particular mission and often she can do
the work better than a man,” Francisca explained, “but when
she gives an order, he feels that he doesn’t have to obey it, simply
because he is a man. This problem exists in the family as well.
The husband will go ahead and act without consulting his wife,
even if his actions affect her. And then there is a huge uproar if
she acts without consulting him—perhaps by taking contracep¬
tives or having an abortion. This is the sort of thing we are
fighting against.”
It was not only the women who spoke of the continuing need
to change such attitudes. At an informal meeting in New York in
1972, Amilcar Cabral, responding in English to a question about
 In the Liberated Zones 243

the role of women, referred both to the achievements and to the

difficulties. ‘‘But we have big problems to solve and we have a
great problem with some of the leaders of the party. We have,
even myself, to combat ourselves on this problem, because we
have to be able to cut this cultural element, with its great roots,
until the day we put down this bad thing—the exploitation of
women. But we have made great progress in this field in these
ten years.”1
Progress has indeed been made, but for many men it appeared
that notions of equality had not penetrated into the homes. This
reality was underscored for me during a conversation I had with
a male cadre. He commented that some party cadres, even leaders,
accept that their wives should work in responsible positions in
the party. They accepted in principle that the liberation of women
is very important. ‘‘But in my home? Never!”
Meanwhile, women turned to each other for support, the older
cadres feeling a special responsibility to look out for the young
women. I saw this in Teodora on a number of occasions. One
evening, she, Espirito Santo, and Starr, another regional political
commissar who shared her base, got into a heated debate. One of
the men had brought up the case of two teenagers from Bissau,
who were in love with each other and had decided to join PAIGC
in the liberated areas. The young man had gone first, and a few
months later the woman followed. They were assigned work in
different areas, but before they could be reunited, the young
woman fell in love with a responsavel, who was older than her
boyfriend from Bissau and higher up in the party. Compounding
the problem, she had not written to tell her boyfriend and he still
harbored the thought that she was waiting for him. The argument
about who was in the right went on for a long time, Teodora’s
voice getting louder and more emphatic with each point she
made. Espirito Santo became so involved that it was barely
possible to get a translation, as he would dive back into the argu¬
ment himself, leaving me dangling on the end of incompleted
sentences. Both Espirito and Starr were denouncing the young
woman with vehemence, contending that she was interested
only in glamor, while Teodora stood stoutly in her defense. She
was wrong not to write, Teodora acknowledged, but how could
244 Fighting Two Colonialisms

they presume that her feelings for the second man were not
genuine. In any case, the role of the men was not to condemn but
to try and understand the woman’s position and educate her.
Given the society in which she grew up, she might well have
acted “fickle.” But they had to remember that men, simply by
virtue of the fact that they were men, had both education and
privileges that were denied women and that pressures existed
for women to live vicariously through men. While Teodora
maintained that men were failing as revolutionaries if they did
not understand the context of this behavior, Espirito and Starr
did not agree, and the argument continued for a long time.
However, not only did Teodora show solidarity with the woman,
she also used the debate as an opportunity for political educa¬
tion, directed particularly, I suspect, toward Espirito, who had
recently joined the party.
Throughout my trip I found myself in the company of both
men and women cadres and the main impression I gained,
particularly from the younger cadres, was that the men and
women felt equally at ease with each other. I never felt that
men were just giving the appearance of combating sexism or that
they were self-conscious about women being in positions of
higher authority.
For example, during my stay at the internato at Boe in the east
front, a mixed group of adults sat around the table after supper.
There were four young women—Fina, the director, a teacher,
and the school nurse—as well as about five men, all teachers.
Everyone participated in the discussion, the women taking as
active a part as the men. In fact, they soon were outdoing the
men; when the talk turned to the role of women in Fula society
Fina and one other woman passionately aired their feelings on
the subject. While this was going on, Mario turned to me, a look
of wonderment on his face, and observed: “It was absolutely
impossible to see men and women sitting around a table talking
like this at the beginning of the struggle, or even six years ago.
[He had been out of his country for the past six years, and had
returned shortly before my visit.] Maybe the women would have
eaten together with the men. But afterward they would have
excused themselves and left. This difference is truly remarkable.”
 In the Liberated Zones 245

The following morning I interviewed Jacinta da Sousa, the

school’s nineteen-year-old director, while an open-air class was
in progress nearby. At one point Jacinta stopped talking, her
attention caught by something the teacher was doing. Walking
over, she called the teacher aside and, after they had talked
briefly, the lesson continued in an apparently different vein. It
seemed the teacher, who was male and a few years older than
she, had been able amicably and without defensiveness to accept
Jacinta’s comment that he had been using an outdated lesson.
It was through the young women, those who were nineteen or
in their early twenties, that I was able to glimpse the future
women of Guinea-Bissau. Most had grown up in the revolution
and had been educated by PAIGC. Some, like Fina, had attended
the Pilot School and then gone abroad for further study. Others,
like Ana Maria and Ule, had trained as nurses abroad and learned
to read and write only on their return to the mato. And then there
were women like Jacinta, who had grown up in Bissau and
chosen to leave the city to join PAIGC in the liberated zones,
where they quickly assimilated the ideology of the movement.
In the case of Jacinta, a child when the war began, she had
heard so much about the liberation movement before she left
Bissau that the transition was not difficult. Her parents supported
the PAIGC, so eight-year-old Jacinta supported it too. Every day
they tuned in the radio for news and talked about the bad
conditions under colonialism and what was happening to change
all that. Jacinta shared the excitement about PAIGC victories and
by the time she was thirteen had resolved to share them.
The daughter of a privileged Bissau family, she attended a
school in Bissau catering only to girls and geared toward pro¬
viding “good wives” for the elite. Although it was part of
Spinola’s “Better Guinea” program, it was also one of the only
ways that girls could be educated past elementary school. The
best thing about it was that she received some training as a
teacher. Meanwhile, Jacinta and Conceigao Goia, a classmate
just a year younger, had become inseparable friends. Together
they dreamed and schemed of ways to get to the liberated
zones—in secret. “We couldn’t talk about it to anybody else,”
Jacinta told me, “because of the informers. Everyone in Bissau
246 Fighting Two Colonialisms

was afraid of informers. You didn’t even talk about such things
with your best friends.”
When Jacinta was seventeen and Conceigao sixteen they put
their plans into action. First they made contact very discreetly
with the PAIGC underground and convinced them that they
were serious about leaving. Their route was planned and a
young militant assigned to travel with them to Co, where they
would contact another underground member who would escort
them into the liberated zones. They were told that another young
woman from Bissau would be traveling with them.
The next obstacle was to obtain permits to leave Bissau.
Presenting themselves to the Portuguese authorities with their
hearts pounding, they lied about their names, ages, and destina¬
tion, saying they were going to visit relatives in Teixeira Pinto.
After additional formalities they left the building, clutching the
precious document and grinning at each other in victory. But
before they could leave their contact was arrested, so they decided
to go alone to find the man who was to escort them. When they
got to Co, along the route to Teixeira Pinto, they were greeted
with sour suspicion by the inhabitants, most of whom had found
it safer to support the Portuguese. People came up to the young
strangers and began to question them: Why did their permit say
Teixeira Pinto and they were staying over in Co? Oh, they
replied, affecting nonchalance, we have come this way first to
visit relatives. But Jacinta panicked. She split from the others
and made a hasty retreat back to Bissau, only to hear later that the
others had made it across into PAIGC territory. Then she got
angry with herself, immediately began work on another plan,
and in May 1973, a few months after her friends, she was escorted
by a PAIGC militant into the liberated zones.
Jacinta was quickly put to good use, first as a teacher at a school
in the north and after she had proved her capabilities as director of
the internato at Boe. There she was reunited with Conceigao, who
had been assigned to the school as a teacher. Their friendship was
still strong, and had expanded to include the nurse at the school,
Babtida Nambuna. The three women spent much of their spare
time together. Relaxed, at ease, supportive, they talked easily
with one another and treated each other as equals.
Jacinta got much satisfaction from teaching in her new sur-
 In the Liberated Zones 247

roundings. She was able to work in an education system she

could get excited about and, at the same time, feel she was
making a contribution to the building of a new society. PAIGC’s
emphasis on equality between the sexes particularly impressed
her, she told me.
While she was growing up she was conscious of women’s
inequality and she saw how her father treated her mother. “My
father had three other women, though it was my mother he was
married to. Had she not been his favorite, it might have been a
problem between them. My mother never said anything about
this, but it made me angry as a child. I could see she found it very
hard to accept. But what could she do? It is our custom. I will
never accept this custom.”
Jacinta also spoke of change. “We have been colonized twice,
but it is not the woman’s fault. But although we are aware of it
now, it is not something that can be resolved quickly. It must be
part of building a new society and this takes time. What I find so
remarkable is that only a few years ago it was impossible to
conceive of what has already transpired.”
While Jacinta’s commitment to PAIGC was obvious, she showed
signs of someone new to the movement—a slight hesitancy in
explaining theoretical points and a tendency to resort to the pat
phrase. N’Bemba Camara, the head nurse at Vendoleidi hospital,
was the complete opposite. At the age of nine, when Jacinta was
first hearing about PAIGC, N’Bemba had already joined.* Her

“During the war of liberation PAIGC resembled a mass movement, the criteria for
membership being a) support for the party’s principles and b) anticolonialism
vested in unwavering support of the armed struggle to oust the Portuguese. No
system of membership cards or files of registered members was developed. So
children working for the struggle alongside adults saw themselves and could be
considered members of the party.
Assessing the nature of the party after being present at the third party congress
in 1977, Lars Rudebeck noted that “the backbone of the organization, i.e., all
members with special responsibilities and tasks from the local committees up,
were, however, often referred to as ‘the party within the party.' This open
political movement, with its core of committed and trained cadres, provided the
administrative and judicial structure of the new society emerging in the liberated
areas. It was, in other words, both a party and a state at the same time. This
changed, as he points out, at independence, with the need to separate the two.
After debating whether the new party should be an open mass organization or a
vanguard party of the most dedicated and politically conscious, the 1977 con¬
gress decided on the latter.2
248 Fighting Two Colonialisms

whole way of thinking, her basic approach to life, reflected the

ideology of PAIGC—but in a completely unself-conscious way.
She was what the revolution is all about.
I first met N’Bemba at Vendoleidi base. Her people, the Beafada,
are one of the smallest ethnic groups in Guinea-Bissau, and she
had grown up in a Muslim village in the south where her father
was chief. When PAIGC mobilizers first arrived, N’Bemba’s
father was quick to join and soon had the whole village sup¬
porting the liberation struggle. But he had to walk a tightrope to
carry it off. At night he would allow the mobilizers into the
village and during the day the Portuguese would come to ask
him to tell them what was going on. Although he pretended
ignorance, the Portuguese were suspicious. One day troops took
his wife to Fulacunda, a nearby town, and threatened to kill her
unless he talked. Although he knew they were serious, N’Bemba’s
father refused to give them information, and eventually the
Portuguese released her.
Unlike many peasant parents, N’Bemba’s father talked to his
daughter from the first and at length about PAIGC and what they
were going to do. In fact, he encouraged all his children to begin
working for the party. So did his wife. “She was just as tired of
the oppression by the Tuga,” the young nurse told me. With this
kind of encouragement N'Bemba developed a consciousness of
women’s condition and how it was changing. When she was
thirteen, a time when she could expect her family to marry her
off to some older man, she found she could continueto assert her
wish to become an independent person. “What PAIGC was
saying about women made great sense to me. I had seen how
women in the villages were oppressed, how they had to do all
the work in the village all day. This angered me. Then I saw how
women members of the party were taking on equal responsibili¬
ties with the men.”
N Bemba was quiet spoken and seemed to consider seriously
all that was happening around her. She did not make quips or
tease and she gave the impression of being mature beyond her
years. Completely unflustered, she never hesitated and carried
out her work with responsibility and thoroughness. She showed
her respect for the people she worked with in the villages, and
 In the Liberated Zones 249

was respected in return. All this is not to say that N’Bemba did
not laugh or joke. She did so often, and her oval face and even
features would light up instantly.
In talking about the changes that had come about since the
beginning of the war, N’Bemba contrasted the young women who
had joined PAIGC and gone to live in the mato as she had done
with those who remained in the villages; the difference in out¬
look and in lifestyle was enormous. “But there have been vast
changes in the villages as well,’’ she added. “Life for women in
the villages is very hard, but they are much freer now. I see how
women have taken on more responsibility and are accepting the
new way of life.”
In the generation growing up behind her she saw the changes
most clearly: “I feel that the woman of tomorrow will not be like
the woman of today. And the woman of today is a new woman
from the woman of yesterday. The situation has changed not
only for us, but for the men as well. But the struggle for emanci¬
pation will be a long one. There is still potential for much more
change. We are building a new society and therefore more things
are possible.”
I detected a noticeable difference in the way that Fina and her
generation approached men, compared to Teodora’s attitude.
The younger women all stressed how men treated them as equal
comrades in working relationships; they did not see these as a
battle. The key to the difference probably lies in the fact that
Fina’s generation reached adulthood some eight or ten years
after the beginning of the armed struggle, eight or ten years of
pressure on men to change their attitudes. Fina studied in Cuba
with three young men who had been classmates at the Pilot
School and had shared the same political education. “At no
point did I feel that I was not being taken seriously or being
considered inferior,” she told me. I asked the women at the Boe
internato whether they felt that men treated women as sex objects,
despite the fact that in work they were treated as equals.
“Sometimes it is a problem,” Jacinta answered, “because
some men feel that they have to make advances to women,
because if they do not, they are not men. It is true that men have
these ideas. For example, a comrade came here a little while ago.
250 Fighting Two Colonialisms

He had never been here before and did not know the women.
After a few hours he began making propositions. Not directly—
you know how men are. However, if a woman likes a man, if she
has no commitment to another, she can accept if she wishes.
Why not? We don’t think that by accepting, it is a commitment
for life. For if a man has a desire, a woman has a desire as well.
That is natural and it is the same for both.”
I was informed that contraceptives, mainly pills, were available
at the hospitals in the interior and in Boke and Conakry. An
older male nurse at the Vendoleidi base, the one who had joined
PAIGC at the beginning of the war, tried to tell me that pills
were available only for married women. But Fina and N’Bemba
denied this vigorously. “We know!” they laughed, leaving the
old nurse completely nonplused, fumbling to readjust his atti¬
tudes about sexual relationships.
The women also said it was possible to get an abortion, although
it is not encouraged officially and was seen as a last resort.
Emphasis was placed on the development of attitudes which
would make young people feel responsible for their actions and
decide in advance whether or not they wanted children. If they
did not, then they could take preventive measures. “We are
trying to educate our young women about birth control,” Teodora
said, “in order to avoid the situation that has been so common
where a very young woman would get pregnant against her
wishes and hardly know how it happened. Sometimes girls
who are studying become pregnant. And suddenly'we have lost
a cadre. We want to prevent unwanted pregnancies from hap¬
pening. We try to discourage our young women from feeling
ashamed or shy about discussing these problems. We encourage
them to take measures in order to ensure a healthy sex life. And
we are being successful.”
Nonetheless, there were still many problems in this area.
While I was in the south I was told that a sixteen-year-old pupil
at one of the internatos had become pregnant and that the father
was a teacher at the school. This had upset Espirito Santo very
much, as he felt the teachers, as party cadres, should be particu¬
larly correct in their relationships with pupils. And, worse,
he assumed the girl would now have to stop or suspend her
 In the Liberated Zones 251

studies. Nevertheless, if Francisca continues to have her way,

this will cease to be automatic and cadres will not be lost. As
she insisted in the case involving two students: “After all,
nobody expects the young man to stop studying as well. That is
completely unfair.”
Peasant women married by age eighteen at the latest, and in
the case of Muslim women such as the Fula, years earlier. But
many of the younger cadres I met were not married, although
they were in their early twenties. For most, the desire for children
would be the deciding factor about whether or not to get married.
Teodora talked about this one afternoon as we rested on a mat
outside our hut at the semi-internato we were visiting. She was
twenty-nine, she told me, and loved children. Sometimes when
she saw friends of hers with their own children she felt sad
because she had none. But the struggle had to come first, and
consumed her life totally. Once the war was over? Well, then
things would change. But as long as the war continued, she had
no choice.
N’Bemba saw the situation differently. Her two-year-old son
lived with her at the base, superenergetic and brazen. He was
loved by all and could always find a playmate in one of the older
children or one or more of the militants. N’Bemba told me
frankly that she was not married, a situation I thought was not
something taken lightly. “I did not love the father,” she said, “so
why should I marry him?” When I asked if anyone had shown
antagonism toward her she shrugged and looked at me in her
direct way. “No,” she said, “even my parents have accepted the
situation. A war is going on. They have got used to living a new
life in so many ways.”
N’Bemba told me that there were many women who had left
the villages and who were deciding not to marry if they got
pregnant. If they wanted a child there would be no problem in
caring for it, and should they wish to marry later, children from a
previous relationship did not present an obstacle. A child was
not the sole responsibility of the mother, she said, adding that
PAIGC would also look after it and provide medical care and
education. “There is no problem. My child is the child of
the revolution.”
252 Fighting Two Colonialisms

The problem of child care in Guinea-Bissau has its own par¬

ticular nature, which makes the whole question more complex.
It needs to be considered in the light of the African situation, of
the fact that caring for children during a war creates unusual
problems, and of the fact that new patterns are emerging and
being tested as the society changes.
Throughout Africa the extended family, not the nuclear family,
provides the context of the child’s care and upbringing. Children
do not relate only to their mother and father in their day-to-day
activities, but also to their mother’s co-wives, aunts, uncles,
cousins. This means that, although the mother is mainly respon¬
sible for caring for her children, she can rely on other women for
assistance if she needs to leave the village to work in the fields, to
collect water from the well, or in case of illness or any circum¬
stance that makes the care of her children impossible. The
helping hands of other women are taken for granted as the care
of children is viewed as a collective responsibility among the
women. Additionally, when the child is still small the mother
will tie her or him onto her back before starting work or leaving
the village. Even once the boys have begun to learn “men’s
work,” with their fathers and older brothers, the mothers feed
all the children and look after their welfare—again much of
this collectively.
For peasant women the provision of child care by the state has
not arisen as an issue, given the organization of social and
economic life at a village level. As reorganization'of the village
economy begins to take place and collective villages are estab¬
lished, this is likely to change. The benefit of having child-care
facilities in the village which would help free up the enormous
amount of time women invest in reproduction might then be
appreciated. But the advantages of conceptualizing such a need
at this early stage were not seen as a necessary part of the
political education process. A prior step is the need for educa¬
tion and for the development of women cadres. The lack of
child-care facilities was not a hindrance here, as there were
other women in the village who would step into the breach
when necessary. Hence the communal tradition of child care to
some extent facilitated the release of women for work in the
 In the Liberated Zones 253

revolution. I asked N’Bemba, for example, what happened to her

son when she had to leave the base for short visits to nearby
villages (a major part of her work) or when she spent entire
days with me visiting the Fula villages, and on one occasion
sleeping over.
“For the first six months,” she replied, “while I was breast¬
feeding him, he was with me all the time. And it did not interfere
with my work. But afterward, no problem. There is always
someone at the base to look after him. I have never seen a child
being a problem to a woman. Whatever her work, there is always
someone to look after her child.”
That Teodora viewed this differently resulted from the fact that
she was involved in intensive political work, demanding con¬
stant travel and undivided attention. But for nurses or teachers
it was easier. Ule, for instance, accustomed to carrying her
seventeen-day-old baby with her when she had to visit areas
away from the hospital, did not anticipate that the infant would
ever be a hinderance. While she was taking me on a “tour” of her
hospital we passed an elderly man, a patient, sitting upright on
his bed, very still, and holding Ule’s baby in front of his chest. He
had a gentle smile on his face and had been sitting like that for
some time. As we got near, the baby began to yell with hunger.
Ule took her from him, and breastfed her as we continued the
tour. When the child was satisfied, Ule handed her back to the
patient and we proceeded. There was barely a change of pace.
All in a morning’s work. I saw variations of this behavior when¬
ever I met women with young babies.
Moreover, it seemed to me that children in Guinea-Bissau
seldom cried, and it was very rare to see a child give way to a
tantrum. They had free run of the base, the school, or other living
area, and whoever was nearby would keep a watchful eye for
trucks driving in and out or bombers overhead. When I inter¬
viewed N’Bemba in her hut after nine o’clock one night, her son
sat on the bed they both shared and played with a small car.
Sometimes he would run the car up one of my arms, across my
back, and down the other. He entertained himself like this for
over an hour and a half. Later, when I was transcribing the tape
of my interview with his mother, I could hear his little voice in
254 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the background, occasionally asking N’Bemba a question, but

most of the time going “brrr, . . . brrr, . . . brrr,” as he drove his
car around the bed.
During my travels in the liberated zones, it was common to see
women working with babies tied to their backs—at hospitals,
schools, bases. At the schools the women could count on help
from the students, so the children seemed to spend more of the
day with students than with their mother. I watched a young
male student patiently wheel a two-year-old around a clearing
on a bicycle, back and forth, back and forth. But it was always the
girl students who looked after the very young babies, even
though these students were fewer.
Nonetheless, the men I met were in general very gentle with
children. I noticed it everywhere. One of the militants who
accompanied us on a march was rather macho in the way he
related to women, always ready for a flirtation. But as soon as
we arrived at our destination, he immediately sought out the
children and played with them for long stretches of time. At one
school we visited, the two-year-old son of the administrator was
not feeling well and was crying constantly, and yet this militant
was the only person, other than his mother, that the child allowed
near him.
I asked Teodora whether the men had always related to
children that way or if it was a by-product of the revolution. She
said that men had always shown attention to children, but on a
limited scale. Men that were not really interested'remained so,
but more and more men were feeling freer to express their
affection for children and helping with child care in ways that
had not been customary in the villages in the past.
The women cadres, meanwhile, insisted that their husbands
share equally all tasks associated with domestic life. Fina ex¬
plained: “The child would not only be mine. It would be the
father’s as well. We must share all the domestic work and child
care. I just don’t accept that it is only women’s work. Both hus¬
band and wife are working and both must have the same rights.
However, I am proud. I would not ask a man to do things like
change diapers. If he is prepared to do it, fine. But I would not
demand it. Everything else, yes, I would demand. There are many
 In the Liberated Zones 255

things around the house to do—cleaning, cooking, washing,

taking care of the children. This work must be shared.”
‘‘It is an absolute necessity,” said Francisca with similar
emphasis, “that men help equally with child care and house¬
work. But to reach this goal we have to educate the men and
there are still many women who do not understand this. In many
cases, if a man helps with the housework or with the children,
changing diapers, for instance, or cleaning the house, his friends
laugh at him. This has got to stop.”
However, women’s insistence that men must take on half the
responsibility for child care spoke more to the ideal situation
than to the real one. Because families were fragmented as a
result of the war, the husband working in one region, the wife
in another, it was invariably the mother who had the young
children with her. Sometimes, as in the case of Ule or Titina, a
grandmother would take on a lot of the child care, but it was
always a woman.
This is the point N’Bemba overlooked when she commented
that there is always someone to look after a child: that “someone”
was usually a woman not working actively outside of the home.
It was still the women, not the men, who carried babies on their
backs, and it was the women, either sisters or mothers or friends,
who were responsible for the children. Men helped. A good sign
for the future, but the reality was that children in Guinea-Bissau
received adequate care largely because many women had a
unidimensional conception of their social role.
PAIGC cadres told me that many women still opted for full¬
time child care once they had a baby, giving up their work in the
revolution. Cabral regarded the conflict with particular concern.
Raising the issue at the 1971 meeting of the Superior Council, he
referred to the phenomenon of nurses leaving their work as soon
as their first child was born: “This cannot be. Either we find a
way of obliging our nurses to continue working after having
children, or otherwise we will have to stop recruiting female
nurses for our struggle.” This problem was not peculiar to
Guinea-Bissau, he admitted, but that did not mean that PAIGC
must not seek ways to solve it. “We have to be capable of
understanding this reality, but also capable of struggling in
256 Fighting Two Colonialisms

order to improve it. And the best way of improving the work of
our women is to demand of them that they hold themselves in
due consideration.”3
In other words, that they be liberated. If its success in other
areas is a guide, PAIGC ultimately will succeed in raising
women’s consciousness to a point where nonagricultural work
and child care are no longer mutually exclusive. Such an even¬
tuality, however, brings with it two related problems. First,
contradicting the views of Ule and N’Bemba, one of the leaders
said PAIGC’s experience had been that women cadres returning
to work after childbirth were often hampered by the presence of
a child and did not perform as efficiently as before. Teodora said
this depended a lot on the type of work they were engaged in and
the number of children they had. A school administrator would
be able to manage with little real difficulty, particularly with the
help of students, and if there was only one child. But women like
herself, a political commissar, would never be able to work with
children alongside them, as their work demanded all their atten¬
tion and constant travel, from region to region, and in and out of
the country.
And then again, Teodora, noted, the masses of Guineans tended
to have large families. ‘‘How can it be possible,” she asked, ‘‘to
even consider a woman free if she has seven or eight children
dependent solely upon her? How can she be free if she is unable
to send her children to kindergarten, and to school?”
Thus as more women participate in the revolution and cease
to see their work centered around home and children, there is
the problem that existing child-care resources are certain to be
strained, even if men are doing more than just helping.
Everyone concerned agreed about the need to provide child¬
care centers throughout the country. During the war it was
impossible to establish these in the liberated zones. With the
Portuguese bombing constantly, people had to be ready to rush
for the trenches at any moment of the day or night, so in a center
with many young children virtually one adult per child would
have been necessary to make sure they all made it to the trenches
in time. Besides, it was too dangerous to keep large groups of
children together in one place. Infantarios were established
 In the Liberated Zones 257

during the war in Mozambique because they could be adequately

hidden from the Portuguese in the large liberated territories.
However, as Guinea-Bissau is so small, every acre was vulnerable
to bombing and the risk too high. As a result, the one child-care
center PAIGC had was located in Conakry. It housed sixty
children, all of whom had one or both parents fighting or con¬
stantly on the move (Fatima’s son by the regulo lived at this
center). But the war was over, and party leaders were only too
aware that a much larger beginning had to be made to make
an impact on the population in general and the role of women
in particular.
As we have seen, changing the role of women was expressed by
the Guineans as having to engage in a battle on two fronts. I asked
Guinean women what exactly they meant by “two colonialisms,”
the phrase I heard so often throughout the liberated zones. In
reply, they emphasized that the men were no more the enemy of
women than the Portuguese people were the enemy of the
Guinean people;* the real contradiction was the system under
which they all labored. This system gave rise to so-called male
colonialism and has to be eradicated; it is a system of values
stemming from a subsistence economy and further distorted by
the influence of colonialism. The women see it as a question of
changing both attitudes and the economy, not of fighting men.
Teodora talked at length when I asked her how she perceived
the need for the liberation of women and what it means to her.
“In our country women are considered the instruments of pro¬
duction,” she began. “For instance, in marriage and particularly

*That the Portuguese people did not represent the enemy in the eyes of the
people of Guinea-Bissau was demonstrated for me shortly after the coup was
announced. Up until May 1974 a great deal of skepticism existed among the
people in the liberated areas about the nature of the coup and whether Portugal's
new leaders were serious about independence for their African colonies. On May
Day, however, demonstrators poured out in their thousands into the streets of
Lisbon, waving PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO flags and carrying banners pro¬
claiming support for the liberation movements and demanding an immediate
end to the war. As this news came over the radio the comrades with me were very
moved. It was seen as the first real sign that the coup could bring an end to the
war. One militant said to me later, his voice filled with emotion, "Cabral always
used to say that we are not fighting the Portuguese people, but the Portuguese
system. Now I really understand what he meant.”
258 Fighting Two Colonialisms

in polygynous marriage, she is considered the property of men,

just like cattle.” What is seen as important, Teodora continued,
is the number of children a woman can produce for her husband
and the size of the harvest she can reap from the fields. This is
her role in life, a role devoid of any rights or any freedom, and it
is from this that a woman must be liberated.
‘‘By a liberated woman I mean a woman who has a clear
consciousness about her responsibility in the society and who is
economically independent. By a liberated woman I mean one
who is able to do all the jobs in the society without being
discriminated against, a woman who can go to school to learn,
who can become a leader.
‘‘The liberation of women is one aspect of our revolution. It is
one element of our struggle. Because without equality of all
people, without equal opportunity to go to school, to get medical
care, without equality in work, it is not possible for a woman to
be free. Without a revolution in the system of education, so that
both girls and boys are educated to have the same responsibilities,
there will be no liberated women in our society.”
Teodora spoke of the need for women to be free to make their
own decisions about their lives, not only to combat such practices
as forced marriage but also to bring change in the relationship
between men and women in family life, where men had too
much control over decision-making in the lives and actions of
women. She stressed, however, that personal freedom could not
be individual: “The old men—and young men as well—must
understand that freedom cannot be individual. You cannot be
free if your neighbors are not free.
“While women are fighting for their freedom at present, a new
system is evolving which is preparing the young people of the
next generation. And this new system is trying to change their
idea of liberty, their idea of freedom, and their idea of sexual
equality between the members of the family and within the
society in general.
“The struggle for the liberation of women has to be done in
different ways. First of all, women must fight together with men
against colonialism and all systems of exploitation. Secondly,
and this is one of the most fundamental points, every woman
 In the Liberated Zones 259

must convince herself that she can be free and that she has to be
free. And that she is able to do all things that men do in social
and political life. And thirdly, women must fight in order to
convince men that she has naturally the same rights as he has.
But she must understand that the fundamental problem is not
the contradiction between women and men, but it is the system
in which we are all living.
“If we build a society without exploitation of one human
being by another, then of course women will have to be free in
that society. Our struggle for national liberation is one way of
assuring the liberation of women because, by doing the same
work as men, or by doing work that ensures the liberation of our
country, women convince themselves that they are able to do the
same work as men. In the process women will learn that they are
able to do many things that they could not have conceived of
before. They will learn that in our party tiere are women in the
highest level of leadership and that women are working in all
different sectors of our lives. It is important because it convinces
women that they have potential and it also shows men what that
potential is.
“You cannot isolate the liberation of women in circumstances
such as ours because there is one goal for our society—which is
to transform it step by step.’’
As Teodora finished speaking I thought of Ana Maria Gomes,
not a relation but a sister in revolution. Had liberation of women
in Guinea-Bissau remained a distant goal, unconnected to a
process of change, Ana Maria probably would have died in
childbirth. Or had she somehow survived that first difficult
delivery, she would be illiterate still and surrounded by four or
five children, rather than the two she deliberately chose to have,
still pounding rice in a village together with her husbands’
co-wives, worn out by the incessant toil and weakened by malaria.
National independence resulting in a change in the color of
the dominating minority would not have improved the life of
Ana Maria and her sisters. A neocolonial elite would continue to
exploit the peasant masses, especially the women, in order to
build skyscrapers in Bissau and keep the country open to Portu¬
guese and other Western capitalist profits. Instead, independence
260 Fighting Two Colonialisms

brings with it both hope for the future and questions about
women’s emancipation. The armed struggle represented several
things at one and the same time: a force for rapid change, a
unifying focus for contradictory social tendencies, and a limita¬
tion on the initiatives of a progressive movement. In peacetime,
however, unencumbered by the restrictions of the guerrilla war,
PAIGC confronts problems of rising expectations, especially
from women, even as they search for ways to maintain the pace
of forward motion in the absence of the galvanizing effect of
armed struggle.
Part II
After Independence

Chapter 10
“We are not fighting for a piece of the pie. .

After independence in 1974 the awesome tasks of

developing the nation brought the need to confront
numerous issues. Among the measures taken to assist
the continuing struggle for equality between the sexes
during the first year of independence were the establish¬
ment of the Organization of Women, the passing of
laws to protect the rights of women, and the continued
political mobilization of women, particularly those
who had lived in the Portuguese-controlled areas.

261
262 Fighting Two Colonialisms

I swung my camera bag over my shoulder and behind me so that

my back could take its weight, and with my free hand grasped
the door frame of the old ex-Portuguese troop-carrying plane
which now bore the gold, green, and red flag of the new African
republic. Below me a rickety metal ladder extended four feet to
the rough tarmac of Bissau Airport. Weighted down by cameras,
tape recorder, lenses, tapes, film, notebooks, I descended rung
by rung until my feet were on terra firma, on the soil of indepen¬
dent Guinea-Bissau. I exulted inwardly as I followed the other
passengers across the runway toward the small, shabby building
which served as the air terminal. African and East European
diplomats, two Danish film makers, PAIGC militants, an old
peasant woman, and a North African agronomist had all shared
the bumpy flight from Dakar to Bissau that Saturday morning in
April 1976. As we walked, the heat pressed down from above
and rose up from the dark, tarred surface to envelop us. I knew I
was back.
But this time I was in Bissau, once the very core of colonialism
in “Portuguese Guinea.” A small town, with barely eighty
thousand inhabitants, it had been for many years the generally
unwilling host to thousands of Portuguese army members:
soldiers, officers, generals, and the numerous and various func¬
tionaries ill the Portuguese administration, who grumbled at the
boredom of it all and sweated from the humidity and oppressive
tropical heat. They filled the small sidewalk cafes, sitting on the
rusty chairs and balancing their imported drinks on wobbly
metal tables with faded white or pink enamel paint. Rocking
back in their chairs, they would eye the women who passed by,
discuss their attributes among each other, shout out comments,
and occasionally call them over for a drink. And when they
tired of entertaining the young assimilado women who eagerly
responded to their interest and their money, the soldiers could
turn their attention to the prostitutes. There was a shortage
of neither.
Another feature of colonial life was the small stores. Set back a
little under the two- or three-story buildings with their neat
balconies and shutters, they were fairly bursting with luxury
goods imported from Europe to add variety to the lives of the
 After Independence 263

military men, as well as the roughly two thousand white settlers

and the assimilado elite. Occasionally, no doubt, the soldiers
would consider the idiocy of being there in the first place, and
certainly an active group among them was plotting to ensure
that it would not be for too much longer.* In the evenings the
military men would stroll along the pleasant, though short,
boulevard that ran parallel to the broad Jeba River and past
Pidgiguiti dock. After dark, when the moon filtered through the
rows of tall palm trees along the waterfront, the scene was
positively romantic, especially since the African dockworkers,
in their torn shirts and faded pants, had long since gone to
their homes.
Home for the Portuguese was in the town proper, scarcely a
half-hour’s walk from one side to the other, and an ordered
concentration of neat streets. Then the city, “their city,” gave
way to miles of ugly African slum, without running water or
electricity, where families had to survive for a month on what
one officer casually fished out of his pocket to pay for one night’s
consumption of alcohol.
When the Portuguese army grudgingly left Guinea-Bissau at
independence, this life vanished entirely. The rows of houses on
the tree-lined streets were evacuated by the military families and
panicked settlers and reoccupied by PAIGC militants and officials
of the new government. In the shops the remaining luxury items
were gathering dust, looking oddly incongruous alongside the
new stock—including brightly colored cloth or T-shirts with the
imprint of Cabral’s portrait—that could be afforded more easily
by people who were not elite or settlers. But many shops, stripped
bare, stood dark behind padlocked metal gates, a stark reminder
of the large numbers of Portuguese who preferred to desert the
new nation rather than give up their exclusive priveleges.
And now, a little way from the center of Bissau, near a wide
street lined with small, tidy houses, I sat drinking Guinean beer
on the newly completed patio of the Hotel 24 de Setembro,
which had been converted from army officers’ quarters. Next to

*It was in Guinea-Bissau that officers in the Portuguese army first began to plot to
topple the Portuguese fascist regime, eventually culminating in the April 1974
coup led by the Armed Forces Movement.
264 Fighting Two Colonialisms

me sat Teodora Gomes. Instead of her green uniform and revolver,

she wore a patterned African cloth wound around her waist,
topped by a green blouse. Her hair, cropped fairly short and
combed flat, was no longer covered by the familiar turban.
But it was the same Teodora. Vital, spontaneous, generous.
She worked in the Department of Veterans, in charge of the
program for disabled veterans of the war, and her office, like
most of the offices, was in a small and run-down building. But it
was a brick office and not a reed hut. And seeing her sitting
behind her desk the following day, 1 flashed back to a scene
which had become so familiar during my travels in the liberated
zones of the south: Teodora, in the middle of an open clearing at
her base, sitting on a chair in front of a makeshift table and
typing on a portable Adler typewriter, while, in the background,
automatic rifles hung by their straps from the low branches of
the trees.
Yes, it was a far cry from life in the mato. And yet no large,
modern concrete and glass buildings “graced” Bissau as they do
Luanda and Maputo. Only the simplest of structures, and these
had gone to seed, evidencing Portugal’s historical ambivalence
toward this colony and the sense of hopelessness the colonial
military felt at ever being able to contain the insurgents. And
now, with the drastic economic situation in which the new
government found itself, it would be quite a while before the
impact of renovation and construction would be felt here.
During the war the freeing of Bissau had come, for many
militants, to symbolize total liberation. Two-thirds of the national
territory had been safely under the control of PAIGC. But not
Bissau, nor for that matter any of the towns such as Bafata, Gabu,
Farim, Catio, Bambadinca. The symbolic importance of Bissau
existed regardless of the relationship to the city. Militants such
as Carmen Pereira, who had been born and raised there and who
subsequently made the adjustment to the spartan and dangerous,
though rewarding, life in the mato, never knew when or if
they would see their city again. Others had only visited Bissau.
Teodora, for instance, joined PAIGC after having paid only a
brief visit there. Still others—such as Fina Crato and Ana Maria
Gomes—had never seen Bissau in their entire lives. But they all
 After Independence 265

knew that the day they set foot in the capital would be the day on
which they would experience the true and complete liberation
of their country.
After September 1974 this fantasy became reality. Militants
who had lived in the mato for over a decade began to come to
Bissau, either to visit or to work. Fina, now working in the
Commission of Information as a film maker and film editor, first
arrived in Bissau in December 1975. “I had always heard so
much about Bissau that I was very curious to see it. When I got
here the first thing that struck me was the way that the colonialists
had destroyed the people of Bissau. They had been terribly
corrupted by the Portuguese. Everywhere people were drinking,
drinking, drinking. They were only concerned with enjoying
their life, taking no responsibility—just drinking and fooling
around. This is one instance where there is no discrimination
between men and women! Both drink too much! We have a lot of
work to do here.”
Apart from the spiritual devastation, colonialism had left other
legacies. I was spared nothing when I was taken through the
bairros of the city by the deputy mayor who along with the
mayor had been an active cadre of PAIGC in the mato for many
years. Rather than avoid the worst eyesores, he seemed eager to
show me the vestiges of colonialism so that I could appreciate
the problems that lay ahead. We drove over “roads” that were
gouged deep with ruts and barely passable. In a month or so,
when the rainy season began, they would disintegrate into
muddy rivers. And then there were the slum dwellings. An
occasional small tiled-roof house that seemed reasonably livable
stood out among badly weathered mud huts and brick hovels
patched together with flattened metal oil drums or crates which
had originally contained Portuguese war material. We also
passed small oblong houses, each of which was divided by three
sets of stable doors, with narrow cement verandas running
around the four sides. Each door was the entrance to a family’s
home—behind which parents, children, grandparents, and other
close relatives crowded into two small rooms—while the few
windows were too small to provide adequate ventilation. As
with all the houses in the bairros, here there was no running
266 Fighting Two Colonialisms

water, no sanitation, no electricity. The “kitchen” was not in the

house, but behind it, in an open place where fires could be made
for cooking. The corrugated iron roofs kept out the rain but
absorbed the sun and heat, so that by afternoon, the temperature
inside must have seemed akin to that of a furnace. Roofs that
were patched together with cardboard or wood or bits of metal or
anything that could be salvaged were not as hot. But they were
no effective barrier to the heavy rains either. More effective were
the thatch roofs which, nonetheless, needed replacement or
patching each year. During the rainy season empty oil drums
were used to collect the rain and reduce the number of trips
people made to the communal water pump. At any time of the
day a large group of women and children could be seen standing
around the pumps waiting to collect water for cooking, drinking,
and washing.
The squalor of the various slums was uniformly grim, although,
in one of the bairros we drove through, it unexpectedly gave way
to rows of neat houses connected tb electricity and running
water and topped by corrugated iron roofs which, although
impractical, were considered a status symbol. Built during the
Spinola administration for African supporters of the Portuguese
regime, the houses were, the deputy mayor told me, the product
of forced labor by political prisoners who had worked from early
morning to dusk without stop and without shade from the
blinding sun. Lunch had invariably consisted of a handful of
cold rice which the prisoners grabbed in one motion as they
marched single file, and at quick time, past a huge metal con¬
tainer. Many horror stories could be readily recalled. One stands
out: a sick baby, tied to the back of its mother as she worked,
succumbed to heat stroke. Forced with the other prisoners to
continue without stop to the end of the day, she could only then
remove the stiff body of her dead infant from her back.

The imprint and cruelty of the colonial administration that

had pervaded the fabric of life for all but the privileged in Bissau
gradually gave way to the realization that, yes, the war had
ended in victory. The euphoria of being back in the capital soon
began to fade, superseded by the stern realities of the enormity of
 After Independence 267

the task ahead. Independence was not the end of an era. It was a
new beginning. A new nation had to be forged from the rubble of
colonialism, a period of history that had so gravely wounded all
facets of the social, political, and economic life of the people of
Guinea-Bissau. And so, with strengthened resolve, PAIGC mili¬
tants began once more the immediate task at hand: political
mobilization. Among the critical items on the vast agenda for the
rebuilding of the nation, through the efforts and participation of
the people themselves, was the question of emancipating women.
In order to facilitate this, the Organization of Women was
established three months after independence, its leadership
invested in a ten-member Commission of Women. Each of the
members, with the exception of Carmen Pereira who was co¬
ordinator, was responsible for a different region of the country.
Because of its size, Bissau, had two representatives while the
other seven regions of the country had one each.
All ten women had been active militants in the armed struggle.
They included Teoclora, Francisca, Carmen, Ana Maria, and
Lilica Boal, as well as women whom I had not met on my first
visit, or had met only briefly. Some were from peasant back¬
grounds, others not. The youngest was twenty-one-year-old
Satu Djassi, who lived in Catio and worked as a nurse in addition
to being the commission’s representative for her region. Another
member was Lucette Andrade Cabral, then wife of President
Luiz Cabral and a leader in her own right, who had headed the
Department of Information and who never accepted the designa¬
tion or role of full-time “president’s wife.” Carmen, meanwhile,
headed the PAIGC Secretariat as well as taking on other major
responsibilities (such as National Assembly vice president). Al¬
though she was coordinator of the Commission of Women, she
carefully pointed out that she was not its president. The leader¬
ship was collective.
This was not the first time that PAIGC had formed a women’s
organization. In 1961, before the beginning of the armed struggle
and shortly after the beginning of mobilization, the Democratic
Union of Women (UDEMU) was founded in Conakry. “In those
early days,” Francisca told me, “there were few women working
for the party. The women who were involved in the organization
268 Fighting Two Colonialisms

in Conakry were mostly daughters of exiles who were living

there. Many had never been in Guinea-Bissau themselves and
their commitment was weak.”
By 1965, UDEMU had been disbanded. “As the struggle began
to intensify and develop,” Francisca explained, “these women
[the daughters of exiles] did not want to participate fully in the
struggle. They felt outsiders. Hence, the UDEMU began to slowly
die. In 1966 PAIGC decided that the organization had ceased to
be effective and that the women should actively join the struggle
in the interior and work toward the liberation of women inside
the country.”
The early experience of the women’s organization showed
that despite well-intentioned and revolutionary goals, success is
not automatic if the practice does not live up to the theory.
UDEMU failed to fulfill its role because it lagged behind the pace
of the overall struggle, due to the influence of a petty-bourgeois
elite group who did not want to foresake their positions and go
into the mato. They had preferred to support the revolution from
the safety and relative comfort of Conakry. Thus, it is to PAIGC’s
credit that they allowed the organization to die rather than
pretend that their goals were being implemented through it.
They could have hidden behind rhetoric, but chose not to.
Eight years later, when the country was fully independent, the
creation of a new women’s organization became one of the
immediate tasks of the new government. However, its goals and
practice now rest on a firm foundation of years of experience
gained during the armed struggle.
The members of the Commission of Women traveled regularly
to the areas they represented and, continuing the political edu¬
cation program, talked about the necessity to continue the
struggle for women’s rights, why women should take part in all
activities, why they should help in national reconstruction. There
were committees of five members of the women’s organization
on a bairro or sector and regional level; a political organizer,
who was the president of the committee for each region, worked
closely with the appropriate commissioner based in Bissau. At
the time of my visit, these committees were newly established
and their effectiveness varied from region to region depending
on the objective conditions and the capabilities of the local
 After Independence 269

president and those working with her. Teodora was the commis¬
sion’s representative for the Gabu region, and working with her
as political organizer was N’Bemba Camara whom I first met at
Vendoleidi in the liberated east front. The town of Gabu had been
in a Portuguese stronghold and the population was one of the
most resistant to the new government. Other areas which were
in ex-liberated zones proved easier to organize. The region of
Bafata, however, also one of the ex-Portuguese areas, responded
well after the war. A contributing factor was the leadership of
Satu Camara, who was president of the local women’s organiza¬
tion. She had grown up in a Beafada village, began working for
PAIGC when she was thirteen, did military training, and then
trained as a nurse. She had spent most of the war years as a
health responsavel in the north front, with particular responsi¬
bility for educating mothers about health care for their children.
Since independence she had worked in Bafata Hospital. Satu
was one of the many women cadres I met on my second visit who
had been active throughout the armed struggle, and who evinced
strength of purpose and political sense, combined with commit¬
ment to their work and to the continuing revolution. Indeed,
it seemed to me that most of these women were even more
serious about their political work than were their male counter¬
parts. I attributed this to the extra burden—fighting a second
“colonialism”—which gave them added direction as political
beings. And I began to understand more concretely why Fran-
cisca could contend that once they were mobilized women
develop politically even faster than men.
However, the paucity of women cadres* adversely affected
the work of the women’s organization. There were simply not

*By 1977 the number of women in top leadership positions was still abysmally
low. There was no lack of strong and extremely competent women, even if they
were less educated and less technically qualified. A breakdown of women in
some of the leadership positions is as follows: State: Peoples National Assembly:
19 women among 150 delegates, including Carmen Pereira as vice president;
State Council: 2 women of 14 members, namely, Ana Maria Cabral and Francisca
Pereira; regional presidents (governors): 1 woman of 8, namely, Francisca
Pereira. Party: Permanent Commission of PAIGC: 8 members, no women; Execu¬
tive Committee of the Struggle: 1 woman of 26 members, namely, Carmen
Pereira; Superior Council of the Struggle: 2 women of 90 members, namely,
Francisca Pereira and Carmen Pereira. The figures are not enhanced by the fact
that there is an overlap in the women, reducing the absolute total.
270 Fighting Two Colonialisms

enough cadres who could give the organization their full-time

attention. For instance, the very fact that the members of the
Commission of Women had been chosen from among the most
experienced and committed PAIGC militants also meant that
they held other responsible positions in the party and/or govern¬
ment. Work with the commission took up their “spare” time. It
was something of a vicious circle: cadres’ inability to devote
more time to the Organization of Women in turn affected the rate
at which new women cadres were trained.
The staggering array of responsibilities handed Francisca
Pereira illustrates this problem quite graphically. Francisca was
appointed president (governor) of the geographically isolated
region of Bolama when the country was redivided into eight
regions after independence. Before that, and during much of the
colonial period, the area had been sorely neglected and its
people subjected to greater suffering than most. As a result, the
new government felt a special need to integrate the region into
the country as a whole and had chosen it as the focal point for a
number of development projects.
Thus, by the time I visited Bolama the projects had just been
launched, and Francisca was presiding over a center of growing
activity. In addition, the town of Bolama itself was the new site
of the Pilot School—which had moved there directly from
Conakry—as well as a nursing school and a training center for
primary school teachers. But on top of her political responsibility
for all this, she had her duties as representative for Bolama
region on the Commission of Women as well as her role as active
fighter for women’s rights.
Bolama was the place of Francisca’s birth and had once been
the capital of Guinea-Bissau. But it was rather inaccessible,
situated on a coastal island far to the south of the country, so the
Portuguese transferred the capital to Bissau rather than invest in
building roads and bridges. In its heyday Bolama had been a
haven for settlers, who attended lavish parties at the sprawling
Governor’s Palace or at the hotel, a large, magnificently designed
building up the street from the palace. The rooftop of the paldcio
served as an open-air ballroom, and on hot tropical nights it
would fill with elegantly dressed Portuguese men and women
 After Independence 271

who lived the life of the aristocracy—simply transplanted to

African soil—and spent their time bemoaning the “laziness” of
the natives. Meanwhile, below in the kitchen and hallways of
the palace itself, these same “natives” were serving, attending,
cleaning, and scrubbing so that the building shone and sparkled.
After the settlers deserted the capital, it rapidly went to seed.
Rooms of the palace were closed up, the hotel had trouble
surviving. Then came the mobilization. Bolama was one of the
first areas to respond, and so did the Portuguese, who bombed
the town, isolating it even further, and arrested hundreds of
people. The supporters of PAIGC fled to the mato and Bolama
became a ghost town. “I am crying for Bolama,” begins a Guinean
song that came out of the war.
When Francisca returned to Bolama after independence, she
found the town of her youth falling apart. The palace had served
as a barracks for the Portuguese army; ignoring the worn paint
and the cracked walls, she moved in with her husband and two
young daughters.
When I visited her there I saw that Francisca had blossomed
into an even more self-possessed woman than I remembered.
Dressed in elegant cotton dresses or long West African robes, her
hair cut in a short Afro, I observed the ease and tact with which
she interacted with her co-workers and with the people of
Bolama. She was pregnant with her fourth child at the time, and
her daughter from her first marriage, now fifteen, was with her
on a brief vacation from studies in Moscow.
Francisca’s days were full. She had just returned from a trip
with Luiz Cabral to Scandinavia and Yugoslavia and would
soon resume a routine which also took her away from Bolama
and which saw her attending conferences in Bissau or traveling
through her region. “Whenever I return to Bolama,” she lamented
to me, “even if I have been away only a short time, I spend the
return journey worrying myself sick about all the problems that
will greet me as soon as the plane lands. If I can spend an hour a
day with my two daughters and my husband, I consider myself
fortunate.” Her husband directed the teacher training college in
Bolama. He appeared to have taken on a responsibility for his
children which was far from common in Guinean households.
272 Fighting Two Colonialisms

When his youngest child began to yell in the courtyard while we

were eating supper one evening, it was he who jumped up
spontaneously and rushed out to see what the matter was. Fran-
cisca remained in her seat without reacting at all. The pattern of
behavior that I would have anticipated in other households
when such incidents arose would have been for the husband to
respond by telling the wife to go and see what the matter was.
My visit coincided with the last of many trials of collaborators
with the Portuguese that had been held throughout the country
during the previous six months. As president of the region,
Francisca was a member of the tribunal and participated actively
in the proceedings. After one of the accused had been handed a
two-year sentence for stealing cattle and selling it to the Por¬
tuguese, she delivered an impassioned speech, directed as much
at the general audience as at the culprit. It was an exercise in
political education, and Francisca carefully explained how dif¬
ficult conditions had been for the guerrillas and the people
living in the forests. But they had done it for the freedom of their
country and for people such as him. And while they had been
starving in the mato, the accused was selling cattle to the
Portuguese army so that they could remain fit and continue
perpetrating their atrocities on the people of Guinea-Bissau,
his people.
While Francisca’s daily calendar was crowded with appoint¬
ments, somehow she found time to be an active host—which
meant showing me Bolama, driving out to a state cooperative
run by FARP soldiers, and taking me on tours of the schools and
child-care center in the town of Bolama. Besides the meetings
that had been planned, there were also the spontaneous ones,
when people arrived at the palacio with their problems. Francisca
was available for everybody. She had regular meetings with
cadres working as area responsavels for health, education,
people’s stores, agriculture, justice, and so forth. There were
also weekly meetings with members of the regional council and
regular meetings relating to the establishment of the regional
structure of the Organization of Women.
But Francisca was not the only woman cadre bogged down
with work. One morning I spent a few hours with Carmen
 After Independence 273

Pereira in her office. It had not been easy to set up time for
our meeting as she was continually traveling to the interior
of the country as well as outside. I finally managed to catch a few
days with her before I left Guinea-Bissau and after her return
from a visit to other African countries. Carmen, in addition to
coordinating the Commission of Women, was responsible for
the organization of the party at a national level and worked with
the eight regional party secretaries. She also had recently been
reelected vice president of the National Assembly.
Despite the lack of cadres and the lack of finances, Carmen
told me, the Organization of Women was beginning to tackle the
various problems affecting women. Illiteracy was one of these,
and Lilica Boal, who now coordinated all the PAIGC boarding
schools out of the Friendship Institute in Bissau, had been dele¬
gated to supervise a nationwide literacy campaign that would
place special emphasis on women. “It is possible to travel to
different regions,” Carmen commented, “and not find one woman
who knows how to read and write. The situation is scarcely
better in the towns.” Another problem was unemployment, and
special programs were being organized to begin to overcome
this. One example involved a sewing center where women could
either work full time or take material home and do it there.
But it was not only the lack of jobs that concerned the new
government. There was widespread lack of understanding among
women about the value of work outside the home. “In the cities
and towns there are some women who worked before indepen¬
dence,” Carmen said. “But we know that these women worked
during the colonial period because of the poverty they were
experiencing. It was necessary for a young woman to work in
order to help support her family. Every member of the family
that could bring in a salary worked. Now we want these women
to understand that the goal of working is not only for a salary.
There are more important and far-reaching reasons. They must
contribute to the reconstruction of our country. They must
understand that they are every bit as important as the men, and
that they have to make an extra effort to gain more experience
and knowledge.”
In order for them to do this, the provision of child-care centers
274 Fighting Two Colonialisms

across the whole country had become one of the priority tasks.
And a major program, involving the establishment of a few pilot
centers, was due to begin in a few months with help from the
Soviet Union.* These were already long overdue and would
come as a welcome addition to the child-care center in Bolama,
which served much the same purpose as it had in Conakry
during the war—housing children of cadres and youngsters who
had lost their parents in the armed struggle.
Meanwhile, true to form, PAIGC had not taken long to size up
the situation of women in the towns and to use the people’s
structures to further tasks of mass mobilization. Once again,
they respected the institutions already in existence and instead
of supplanting them began to develop them so they could better
serve the women of Guinea-Bissau.
The government’s growing relationship with traditional
women’s societies was a case in point. A feature of life through¬
out the countries of West Africa, these societies were to be found
in even the smallest of towns (but not the villages) in Guinea-
Bissau. Known in Creole as manjuandades, the societies were
ethnically integrated, a facet of organization which distinguished
them right away from typical village structures. Members of a
particular manjuandade, having all joined at about the same
time, were also about the same age and remained in the same
group throughout their lives. This informal grouping, I was told,
represented a relatively recent departure from tradition, whereby
women usually joined a society some time in their teens and
then moved through a succession of other groups which cor¬
responded to different age brackets.
The societies function essentially as support groups. Members
will make financial contributions to one of their group who is
experiencing hard times economically, and they also organize
wedding and birth celebrations, among other festivities.
“These are not political groups,” Carmen told me when I
spoke with her, “but they are well organized and the women

*By mid-1978 these had not yet been established, the funding still a problem.
Plans for their development were continuing. An additional center, organized
on the lines of the one at Bolama, had been established.
 After Independence 275

provide strong support for each other. They are traditional

organizations which have existed for a long, long time and we
found them still to be an important aspect of town life when we
arrived in Bissau.”
One afternoon I accompanied Isabel Bushkardin, one of the
two representatives of the Commission of Women in Bissau, to a
schoolroom in a bairro, where a meeting had been set up with
members of manjuandades from the area. About thirty women
of all ages, representing six different societies, sat in rows at the
desks which had been hurriedly vacated a few minutes earlier by
the students. (The grave shortage of places to meet meant that
whatever was available had to be shared.)
Among them were representatives of the oldest manjuandade
in Bissau, the members of which were as old as eighty. There
was friendly competition among all the groups. The younger
women said that times were changing and that they think of
themselves more as “clubs” rather than traditional societies.
They wanted to learn new dances and “modern” ways, while the
older women continued to pride themselves on being reposi¬
tories of the traditions of their culture. The women spoke out
easily and seemed to treat the meeting as something of a festive
occasion. They were dressed in their best clothes, with bright-
colored turbans piled high on their heads.
Each of the groups selected one spokeswoman who explained
their basic structures, which appeared to differ little among
them. The societies had up to eighty members who elected a
“queen” and an “assistant queen.” In all other respects the
groups were highly egalitarian. For example, at all festivities,
the women wore dresses made of identical cloth, chosen before¬
hand, so that one woman did not look better off than another.
Each group also elected a man, only one, to handle affairs with
the administration or government when necessary. While an
obvious anomaly, this appeared to reflect the reality that women
encountered in such matters, given their low political status
within the community. However, I was unable to confirm this
with the women themselves. “That is the custom,” was the
fullest reply I could elicit. The male representative was usually
the husband of one of the members or a man respected in the
276 FightingTwo Colonialisms

community. In this way, I was told, he would not generate

jealousy or competition among the women.
Each manjuandade had its own name. Pe di mesa—legs
of table—was the name of one, but the women shook their
heads when I asked if they knew its significance. It had been
chosen because the grandmother of one of the founders had
belonged to a manjuandade of that name. Another was called
Confortavel, comfortable. “We are called this, ” their spokes¬
woman explained, “because we do not want too much. On the
other hand, we do not want too little either. We just want to
be comfortable.”
The Organization of Women wanted to benefit from the exis¬
tence of such societies, Carmen Pereira told me. “They will form
the basis for organizing women in the towns. We have begun
working with them in order to organize them politically and
mobilize them for the continuing work of national reconstruction.
They are giving strong support to the Organization of Women
and are beginning to participate in our work.”
While PAIGC was politicizing the women’s societies slowly,
it had lost no time at all in enacting a number of new laws
concerning women. Three of the first six laws passed by the
National Assembly covered provisions for divorce, abolition of
the concept of “illegitimate” children, and the legalization of
common law marriages.
The fact that they moved so quickly is not insignificant, given
the amount of work and shortage of cadres trained in judicial
affairs. The entire legal system needed to be reorganized. One
of PAIGC’s first tasks had been to review the cases of every
person jailed by the Portuguese to see who were the political
prisoners and who were the common criminals. Generally,
the task had been to evaluate the colonial laws to ascertain
which were acceptable, which could be lived with until new
ones could be passed, and which had to be discarded. It readily
became apparent that there were no laws protecting the rights
of women.
Under Portuguese law and the influence of Catholicism, divorce
was prohibited in colonial times, as it had been for women under
 After Independence 277

customary law. Now, however, divorce is a fairly straightforward

procedure for the whole population, as it was in the liberated
zones, with a recommended period of attempted reconciliation.
The law states that if a marriage does not “fulfill the social task
that is expected of it, then it can be dissolved.” In order to ensure
that a man’s wife and children were not abandoned, the law
established that a certain percentage of his income would go for
the upkeep of his children. In addition, the wife kept the house
they lived in, with the husband paying the rent. This latter
arrangement only ceased if the woman lived with or married
another man.
The second law, which relates to women indirectly, calls for
all children to be regarded as “legitimate,” whether they are
born in or out of marriage. This means that a man can no longer
disclaim responsibility for children he has fathered, whether or
not the relationship with the mother is ongoing or legally regis¬
tered. Under Portuguese law all such children would not have
been recognized as the man’s and their support left to the
woman and her family. “A child does not choose his parents,”
one woman militant commented to me. “Men must be respon¬
sible. A child cannot be made guilty for the circumstances in
which he or she was created.”
The legislation legalizing common law, or “informal” mar¬
riages as they were referred to, is the most far-reaching. These
marriages had been widely practiced in the towns of Guinea-
Bissau for as far back as people could remember. The couple
established a domestic arrangement and the community treated
them as married and the children as “legitimate.” However,
colonial law did not. This led to complications for both parties.
For instance, women who had lived with their men for many
years sometimes discovered, at the man’s death, that all his
assets—a result of both their work—were inherited by a woman
the man had formally married years before and with whom he
had lost contact. And the children of the common law relation¬
ship were denied rights of inheritance.
Another problem highlighting the need for such a law grew
out of the war and involved militants who had lived with
278 Fighting Two Colonialisms

peasant women in the mato. After independence many of these

young men went to work in Bissau or other towns and some
decided to marry young women they met there. Meanwhile,
their previous common law marriages were thrust into the realm
of past history, much as the war itself.
In order to try to protect women caught in this situation,
the new law invests common law marriages with the same
status as those legally established through a marriage ceremony.
It allows for a simple registration of the common law marriage,
if it has been in existence for three years or more. Registra¬
tion can be done together, or separately by either spouse, with
or without the consent of the other, and makes the union a
legal marriage that can be dissolved only by divorce. A man
can no longer simply “forget” his former spouse. By going
through a divorce procedure if he wants to leave her, and
having to bear a continued responsibility for financial support,
he acknowledges the commitment he made to her. At the time
of its enactment, the law was widely publicized through news¬
papers, over the radio, at political meetings, and by reports
the deputies to the People’s National Assembly took back to
their constituencies.
“Thorough propaganda was made about this law; it was dis¬
cussed everywhere,” Commissioner of Justice Fidelis d’Almada
told me. “If a man wants to marry another woman in Bissau,
then his common law wife can come here and we will explain
the law to her. ‘OK, how many years were you living with
him?’ we’ll ask. If she replied more than three years, we’ll say,
‘OK, you must ask for the recognition of your marriage and we
will prevent this second marriage.’ Of course, you cannot force
a man and woman to live together, but now he will have to go
through with a divorce and take responsibility for his children
and ex-wife.”
In fact, all three laws were seen as a mechanism for developing
greater respect for women. PAIGC anticipated that when a
man is faced with the prospect of taking equal responsibility
for all the children he brings into the world, or when he knows
his wife can Walk out on him, or that he cannot simply deny
a common law wife in favor of a more attractive situation, he
 After Independence 279

is likely in the future to weigh his actions vis-a-vis women much

more carefully.
The most striking examples of PAIGC’s attempt to bring about
a change of attitudes as quickly as possible, as well as provide
protection for women, involved a “regulation” concerning bat¬
tered wives. Because laws take time from formulation to enact¬
ment, and the National Assembly meets just once a year, a
regulation ratified only by the party was promulgated to put
violent husbands on notice. A wife beaten up by her husband
can report the case to the Commission of Justice and if she can
show marks on her body the man will be jailed immediately for a
minimum of twenty-four hours. In addition, he has to pay a fine
which goes in part to his wife. Wife-beating was basically a
regional phenomenon and confined to the towns. The practice
had ceased entirely in the former liberated zones and occurred
only rarely in the rural areas, but it continued in Bissau on such a
scale that the government was forced to move decisively and
without delay.
“We have to show men who beat up their wives that we are
serious about changing these attitudes,” d’Almada emphasized.
“Men must learn to respect women, and if they do not, we
have to take actions to combat this. The situation was scan¬
dalous. Every single day wives would be beaten so badly that
some even died. Men who were oppressed by the colonialists,
and unable to retaliate against their oppressor, took their frus¬
trations out on their wives, and even their children. It was an
urgent situation.”
Meanwhile, the women’s organization faced obstacles of time,
finances, human resources, and political underdevelopment
standing in the way of its attempts to achieve concrete goals. On
speaking with young people in Bissau, I had the sense that there
was some impatience about the organization’s lack of speed in
setting up programs.
Frustration was articulated to me by Maria Santos,* a young
woman who had studied in Portugal and returned to Guinea-

*This is the only instance where I have substituted a fictitious name. It was the
specific request of the woman in question.
 280 Fighting Two Colonialisms

Bissau after independence to take up a responsible position

on one of the commissions. She felt generally that at the time
of my visit too much emphasis was being placed on political
education—such as mass meetings and rallies on International
Women’s Day, which she nonetheless threw her energies into to
help organize—and not enough on the development of services
for women. Despite her criticisms, however, she was a strong
supporter of the women’s organization and an outspoken cam¬
paigner for women’s rights at her place of work.
Maria, a lively young woman under thirty, projected a nervous
energy which did not detract from her appealing personality.
When I arrived at her office with a tape recorder, she became
very agitated and said with a laugh she was shy about being
interviewed. I told her I was not conducting an examination and
she laughed again before confessing she had been so afraid of
going blank that she had prepared something in writing the
night before. Should she read it? Maria asked, fingering the
pages laid before her on a desk. When I agreed, she began to read
immediately, stopping every now and then, her face slightly
flushed, to add a spontaneous comment. Eventually, though, she
had relaxed completely and she just kept going in her energetic
and passionate way, hardly giving herself time to catch her
breath as she jumped from one thing to another.
% “The fundamental problem,’’ she said, “is to change the
values of the society which characterize women as inferior. But
it is very difficult to change the conditions of life for women
when they continue to live according to these old conditions.’’
She was critical of the government for being too slow in preparing
for and providing essential social services. “It is not enough to
just do political work. We must also provide services to free
women, such as day-care centers, improved working conditions,
and so forth, that take the problems of women into account. I
think the state is not attacking these problems quickly enough or
seriously enough.”
As evidence of how hard it is to change attitudes, she referred
to her own circumstances. Both she and her husband worked in
government jobs; they had two young children and paid someone
 After Independence 281

to come in and take care of them during the day. But they could
not afford to pay someone to babysit at night. It was expected,
then, that Maria stay home to look after the children, whereas
her husband, without once thinking it might be unfair, was free
to go and visit friends, take in a movie, or go out for a beer. If she
needed to go out at night and it was in connection with her work,
that was fine too. Her husband willingly stayed home with the
children. But only if it was “official.” He would never consider
staying home so she could visit friends or go to the cinema.
Maria laughed, but the laugh did not mask some bitterness: “I
resent this very much. But at least I know I am economically
independent and can leave my husband if I choose. Not that I
want to, as it is a very good marriage otherwise.”
Compared to the other women, particularly those women in
Bissau—by far the majority—who were not educated, she felt
she was fortunate. They grew up ignorant of the liberating
potential of education and with just one thought in mind:
they had to marry and their husbands would support them.
But what alternative was there really? The society did not pro¬
vide jobs enough for the men. And in the rare cases where a
young woman held a job, tradition demanded that she stop
working as soon as she married. Thus, the marriage institution,
since it required the woman to be in the home and only the
home, served to reinforce her dependency, a dependency which
multiplied each time another child was born. Husbands, on
the other hand, knowing their wives could never leave them,
often took advantage of the situation to act as they pleased.
And if the woman didn’t like it, she just had to bottle it up
inside her and say nothing.
Maria insisted that education and employment opportunities
were fundamental. These would enable women to be economi¬
cally independent, and then emotionally independent. This in
turn would bring respect from men.
“Also,” Maria continued, “if a woman is economically in¬
dependent, then she does not need to get married. Why shoud
she have to get married. The traditional attitude, which is still
strong, is that a woman is only a complete woman if she has a
 282 Fighting Two Colonialisms

husband and a house and some children. Single women are

looked down upon. This is wrong. And then if a single woman
gets ill, people say, ‘Oh, she needs a man to look after her so she
,r won’t get ill.’
“But every day we are trying to educate both women and men,
and so these attitudes are changing. Now women are more easily
able to live alone and have normal sexual relationships, which
both men and women need.”
She stopped and thought a minute so that her next point
would be clear. “But some confusion has come with this freedom
in regard to sexual relationships. These young women in Bissau
confuse sexual liberation with the emancipation of women.
Young women just sleep with anyone they wish and think this is
fine. They do not understand the value of relationships with
men. And they say, ‘Oh, the Organization of Women says we
must be free. We are free because we are sexually liberated.’
They think this is freedom. It is not.”
She shook her head. “We do not want women to behave
like men, like animals. No, it is for women and men to change
their attitudes. We are not becoming emancipated in order to
act like men, to behave according to their values; we are being
emancipated to create a new and responsible man and woman,
to create a new society. When both men and women under¬
stand this, then we will have passed the halfway mark to
true liberation.”
While Maria was talking in Portuguese and I was waiting for
the translation, I thought back to a conversation I had a few days
earlier with a young militant of the youth organization. He had
said essentially the same thing about some of the young women
in Bissau, the women who came from privileged, elite families.
“All they are interested in,” he told me, “is getting married. And
to go out with members of the government. They sit in groups at
the cafes and all they talk about is who they have gone out with,
whether he is good-looking, whether he has a car.” I asked if
party militants took it upon themselves to try and educate these
women instead of going out with them to have a good time. Yes,
he replied, this did happen on occasion. “But that can become a
problem in itself. Maybe he will give her some books to read
 After Independence 283

about revolution. Then she will carry these books under her arm
wherever she goes to show that she is ‘revolutionary’ and that
this man has given her some gifts!”
I remembered, too, how a party militant who now holds a
highly responsible position in the government, had teased Ana
Maria Gomes one afternoon when we were all together. “Ah,
Ana Maria, you are so ugly, ug-Jy!” he joked at this very beautiful
woman. “I remember when you came into the camp, all legs and
ugly. You are very lucky, very fortunate that Lucio married you
when you were still in the mato. Because if he had not, you
would not have had a chance. No, not a chance! Why, when I first
came to Bissau, I was driving a battered old Jeep. But still the
girls came running, and look at how awful-looking I am! And
now I have a Volvo!”
And yet, even though these two militants had spoken from
principle, and their criticisms of the young women had merit,
they had addressed only one side of the equation. What of the
men, even party members, who were involved in this continuing
transaction? The women would not be persisting in their be¬
havior if it were not met with a positive response from a lot of
men. And it was these same men, the men who were encouraging
the women to be sexually “liberated,” who complained all over
town, “there are no girls in Bissau that are good enough to marry
any longer.” A familiar hypocrisy. The age-old double standard
survived, unadulterated, in the Guinean capital.
I brought my attention back to Maria. “It is totally wrong,” she
was continuing, “for virginity to be equated with a ‘good woman.’
The problem is to explain to both men and women that virginity
is not important, but neither is sexual freedom of this kind the
answer. What must be valued is the new and meaningful rela¬
tionships that can develop between the new woman and the new
man in our revolutionary society.”
Maria stopped again, this time to think of a way to sum up. Her
face serious, she searched for a metaphor to convey the essence
of her meaning.
“We are not fighting for a piece of the pie,” she said. “The men
control the pie and we don’t want men to give us a piece of their
pie. For if we accept something that is given to us, even if it is
284 Fighting Two Colonialisms

half, we will never have the same power as those who gave it.
They will still control it. What we want to do is to destroy this
pie so that men and women, together, can build a new pie where
women will be totally equal with men.”
Chapter 11
“For our country to develop,
it must benefit from both men and women”

Priority for development has been given to the rural

areas because of the importance of agriculture to the
economy and because it was the people in the rural
areas that suffered most during the war. PAIGC cadres
from the liberated zones can be found in leadership
positions within the state, focusing now on the contin¬
uing struggle. The system of education is based on that
established during the war, with a reemphasis on agri¬
cultural production as part of the school curriculm, as
well as on the liberation of women.

285
286 Fighting Two Colonialisms

The six-seater airplane flew low. Below us huts, rivers, forest,

palm trees, marshes, villages, spread out like a tapestry map
come alive. Tones of browns and greens, rich textures of earth,
foliage, human life.
A similar scene must have greeted Portuguese pilots as they
reconnoitered for targets, instantly transforming the tranquil
landscape into a nightmare as their bombs scorched the green
vegetation, gouged holes out of the fertile earth, and reduced the
huts to smoldering cinders. Two years before I had listened
keenly for the sound of those bombers. Now it was I who was
surveying the scene from above. I could almost feel the tranquility
of the countryside rising up to engulf me. But something was
different below, something insubstantial which the Portuguese
pilots could not have experienced no matter how many missions
they flew. And that was the difference between tranquility
and peace. For without freedom, it is not possible for the latter
to exist.
I was jerked out of my reveries as the plane bumped down at
Catio “airport”—a dirt clearing in the midst of rice fields, palm
trees, and huts. The veneer of calm created by the altitude
dissolved in an instant. Children, their thin brown legs moving
fast, came running from the huts to greet the plane, their small
bodies exuding the excitement they felt at this arrival from
above. And so began my return journey to the rural areas of
Guinea-Bissau and an attempt to find out what freedom means.
Traveling through the region of Catio for ten days—on the first
of a number of visits I made to the countryside—I saw for the first
time how different rural life could be outside a war zone. Now
planes could be treated as a novelty, and the children, instead of
diving for the nearest trenches, ran to greet them.
It was a Land-Rover that provided the means of transport for
the rest of my journey, this time out in the open roads and not
confined to some circuitous route under the cover of dense
foliage. The vehicle passed quickly over ground that had once
taken days to cover by foot, the shrinking of distance suddenly
making sense of the fact that Guinea-Bissau is a very small
country. The villages, meanwhile, were built in the open, next to
trees, not camouflaged beneath them, and the vigorous pounding
 After Independence 287

by the women was not curtailed by the fear that it would alert the
enemy. The women had also begun again the cultivation of
vegetable gardens, marked out behind the huts, which they had
had to abandon during the war. The villages themselves had
many new huts, the thatch still golden and the branches freshly
cut. There was more livestock and even cattle; the people could
now begin to breed their animals for the communal benefit and
not for taxation or for destruction by bombing and fire. The many
people’s stores that were already built in the villages were solid
cement structures—-simple, functional, and easily accessible to
the people living in the area.
I made the journey from the town of Catio, and from one
village to the next, squeezed between two PAIGC cadres in the
front seat of our Land-Rover. Pressed up against the right-hand
window was the youngest member of the Commission of Women,
Satu Djassi. Her one-year-old daughter Branca sat on her lap
throughout the trip, occasionally sleeping but mostly giving
vent to her active self, obviously resentful at being cooped up for
hours in a car. Satu worked as a nurse at a hospital just outside
the town, living in converted army barracks, which now served
as the site for an internato. Her husband, a top commander in the
army, was stationed in Bissau.
Sitting on my left, exercising his new driving skills as he
directed the vehicle around deep corrugations and through
wide puddles, was Cau Sambu. Every now and then he would
turn to me, particularly after negotiating a tricky maneuver
through slippery mud, and give me a few staccato nudges
and grin his wide grin. His pipe, as always, was clenched
between his teeth, and he carefully rationed out his supply
of Dutch tobacco to avoid having to smoke the pungent-smelling
local leaf. Slightly broader now, Cau was the same energetic
man, working as party secretary for the region of Catio. He
lived in a small house in the town of Catio with the young
woman he had recently married. His first wife had been killed
in a tragic accident a few weeks after independence, when a
land mine, a legacy of Portuguese colonialism, exploded under
their passing car. The war had managed to reach out its tentacles
beyond independence, claiming a few more lives before finally
288 Fighting Two Colonialisms

subsiding. Cau, sitting in the back seat, had sustained only

minor injuries.
One of the first villages on my itinerary was Cassaca, which
being the venue of the first party congress was something of an
historic site and had become absorbed into the folklore and oral
history of the revolution. The full support given PAIGC by the
people of Cassaca had been met with reprisals from the Portu¬
guese army, which destroyed the village totally soon after the
congress. Some of the inhabitants took refuge in neighboring
Guinea, but the rest transferred their village to the mato and
continued to work for liberation. When the war ended, the
people returned to the original site of their village, by then
completely overgrown and unrecognizable, and together they
cleared the land, rebuilt their houses, and began to work the
fields. Later I would spend a day in the newly constructed
village which was still to be surrounded by fresh tree stumps
sticking out of the ground.
A meeting of the people of the surrounding villages was due to
start in Cassaca at nine o’clock the morning of our visit. But at
ten-thirty we were still making our way toward the village. We
were not the only ones late. As we got nearer we passed groups
of people heading in the same direction, the women balancing
on their heads stools carved from tree trunks, shiny and smooth
with years of use. The villagers had prepared for our arrival. In a
clearing to the side of the road was a table and a few chairs for the
visitors and speakers. A number of makeshift benches provided
some seating, others were brought by the audience. Already a few
had taken their places, but it was at least another hour before we
began. By then about one hundred and fifty people had arrived,
some forty of them women. When the party responsavel for the
area made the introductions he apologized for the generally
small audience. It had rained heavily the day before, one of the
first days of the rainy season, and the opportunity to begin to
prepare the land for planting could not be allowed to pass by. As a
result, individuals were chosen from each household to attend the
meeting. This may have explained in part the smaller proportion
of women, since it was they, more than the men, who were needed
to work in the fields; but it was doubtless not the sole reason.
 After Independence 289

Cau spoke first, and I found his energy had not diminished
with independence. He kept his audience transfixed as he
graphically illustrated, through mime and metaphor, the need
for the revolution to continue and for the people themselves to
carry on the struggle. He spoke for over an hour and a half,
describing the conditions of the country, reporting on decisions
made at the recent meeting of the National Assembly, and
emphasizing both the need for vigilance against counterrevo¬
lutionaries and to protect what had been gained during the
armed struggle. Repeating once again his extended metaphor of
“sweeping away the stones,” Cau spiced his speech richly with
other examples from the daily lives of the people. If a fisherman
has a canoe full of fish, he hypothesized, and one fish goes bad,
then it is necessary to throw away the fish immediately or it will
turn the whole lot. Or take the man stung by a bee. Why was he
stung? He was wearing a sweet-smelling perfume, that’s why. It
was his fault he got stung as the bee was only acting according to
its nature. Those who are responsible for the security of the
villages are like the bees, Cau opined,
While he spoke, he radiated energy and vigor. He would
thrust his arms into the air and then point his fingers to the
ground. He bent over double, he jumped from one side to the
other, his voice now raised and shouting, now soft. And some¬
times he would stop in midsentence, then beam his brilliant
smile and launch right back into his story. As always, by the end
of his “performance,” he was breathless and dripping with
perspiration. But he kept the undivided and appreciative atten¬
tion of his audience from beginning to end. Even after he stopped
they continued to exclaim, “aiyee, Cau!”
They were still reacting to him when Satu got up to speak.
Satu did not look a day older than her twenty-three years, and
her slight build emphasized her youth, particularly when she
stood next to Cau. She wore a scarf tied neatly around her head, a
blouse, and a long cloth wound African-style around her waist.
Her slightly protruding teeth seemed to accentuate her serious
expression. How could she hope to capture the audience s atten¬
tion after Cau’s virtuoso display, I found myself thinking reluc¬
tantly. But I need not have worried. Her initial nervousness soon
290 Fighting Two Colonialisms

vanished, and in her quiet way Satu proved herself as capable a

speaker as Cau.
She began, in her soft, melodious voice, to speak about the
family. It is important for men and women to live together in
harmony, she said, and for men and women to work together.
Production was the priority task for all Guineans and they should
be prepared to do without consumer goods for a good while.
“We went through the war with nothing,” Satu told her audi¬
ence. “We do not need as our example a woman with lots of
dresses and flashy things, but who does not work. All women of
the party should continue to wear the clothes that we had in the
war time. Our priority now is to help our men rebuild the
villages. If you desire only expensive cloth—so, you can fill your
suitcase full of pretty cloth. And then what? Where will you go
with it? Into an ugly house. But if you build a nice-looking
house, people will pass and see the work you have done and will
learn from your example. When our villages are rebuilt and
when we have the basic necessities of life and the standard of
living has improved for everyone, then it will be time enough to
think of acquiring beautiful things. Life is not expensive here
and we have plenty of time.”
While Satu was exhorting women to help build their houses, I
recalled that in peasant society this work is usually done by
men, and it began to dawn on me that she was beginning to
touch on aspects of women’s liberation in the Guinean context.
“If both husband and wife build their houses,” §he was saying,
“then they will have to have equal rights in that house. He
cannot say, ‘This house is mine, not yours.’ And from now on, he
cannot do what many men do. He cannot send you away because
both of you have shared in building the house. The house belongs
to the wife as much as the husband. One does not have more
rights than the other. Your husband cannot send you away.”
Smiles spread across the faces of the women and their ap¬
plause was loud. “Maybe some of the men think they are stronger
than women and that they can still send their wives away,” Satu
continued. “But no man is stronger than the state, and the
people’s courts can intervene. Men must respect us and treat us
as equals.”
 After Independence 291

She then pointed out that there are two sides to the problem.
“If a woman thinks, ‘no, I am inferior,’ then there is little we can
do to change the situation. This is not right. We women are not
inferior. We can do what the men do. Some women work much
harder than men. Women must be able to travel around the
country if they wish, and we must be able to do what work we
choose. There is no work that is just for men or just for women.
Women must help to rebuild the country.
“Historically, the women of Guinea-Bissau and of Cape Verde
participated in the struggle. Through this participation we
learned that we are not inferior. Women, I am asking you to hold
on to what you gained during the war and to continue the
struggle for equality. Do not allow the rebuilding of our country
to go ahead and to leave you behind.
“Maybe, because I am not from Cassaca, you are thinking, ‘Ah,
but Satu has no business to talk to us like this.’ This is not so. All
the women of Guinea-Bissau are one.”
Satu had captured the attention of the women. Their eyes
were fixed on her and the expressions of their faces would
change from serious concentration to smiles and then dissolve
into laughter. Satu was enjoying herself and she laughed with
the women.
“The colonialists were against us. They oppressed us. Both
men and women. Then, on top of that, we were oppressed by our
men. This is why I say that we women had two colonialisms on
our hands: we had the Tuga in our country and our husbands in
our house.
“The problem of the colonialism in our own home is a more
difficult one. We are part of the same family. Our husband lives
in our house and he is the father of our children. But it is the
woman who cares for the children. The father does not even buy
his children a shirt. He has other things to think about, he says.
But then the children grow up. Oh yes, suddenly the father is
interested. ‘This is my daughter,’ he says with pride. From that
time on he begins to pay much attention to her. ‘Oh, my daughter,
come here to your father,’ he will say whenever he sees her. But
we know about the marriages our daughter is expected to make.
The father is doing this because her marriage will profit him. If
292 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the mother or daughter is unhappy about the husband he has

chosen, what can they do? Nothing. Why can’t the mother also
make decisions about her daughter?”
Satu began to direct her words to the men.
‘‘This cannot be, comrades. We must all decide together what
the daughter is going to do. You must ask your wife’s opinion.
You must consider your daughter’s wishes. When you decide to
give your daughter to someone without her consent, it is as bad
as living in the time of the Tuga. This practice must stop once
and for all. If you talk about freedom, then it must exist in your
own home, not just outside. As Comarada Amilcar Cabral said,
we must leave these bad traditions behind us. Your daughter
and your wife know that you are the head of the house and they
respect you. You must respect them the same way and not
practice your colonial ideas on your family.”
Satu addressed the question of a family environment that
would be conducive to nurturing respect for all members, saying
that men must respect their wives, must not beat or shout at
them. She added that they shared responsibility to educate their
wives, but that it was important to go slowly. “You cannot
expect your wife to grow by beating her. Talk to her. Talk to her
with respect and she will change. You cannot change her by
force. Your wife is your comrade. She must be equal in your
house. The future of your children depends on the quality of life
within the family.”
When Satu was nearing the end of her speech, the meeting
was well into its third hour. Everything she and the other speakers
said had to be translated from Creole to Susu, one of the local
languages spoken by a number of ethnic groups, and this drew
things out considerably. And yet the people were still with her,
even though the sun was at its peak and the shade of the leafy
mango and towering pilom trees hardly lessened the heat.
“Comaradas, men and women,” she went on, “it is my respon¬
sibility, as representative of the Commission of Women for this
region, to talk to you about these things and to help the women
understand why they are being oppressed so that they can begin
to change their lives. Women, we must tell the men to let us be
free. Free to rebuild our country, our village, our house, with our
own hands.
 After Independence 293

“Unfortunately, however, there are some women who are

confused about the meaning of the liberation of women. These
women think freedom means doing what they want without
responsibility. Maybe after I leave tomorrow some women will
begin to do as they please, not taking others into consideration.
They will say: ‘Ah, but Satu says I must be free. The party says I
can do what I like.’ I am not talking about this so-called freedom.
I am talking about respect between men and women. I am talking
about building a new life together.
“We all know that times are hard now. It is often difficult to
find a husband because so many men died in the war. But this
does not mean that, because there is a shortage of men, men can
do simply what they like and treat their wives as they wish. Not
at all. We would rather live without men than accept this kind of
oppression from men any longer.’’
Throughout the meeting a soldier, his rifle propped up against
a large tree behind him, sat patiently with his six-month-old baby
on his lap. A white cloth was neatly spread out over his knees and
under the child, while she moved around, put her hands to her
father’s face, pressed his nose, grabbed his ear. The father was all
gentleness. Sitting next to him was his three-year-old daughter,
who played with her sister or quietly watched what was going
on. The man’s wife was president of the sector committee of the
women’s organization, and she was sitting with the speakers up
front. The scene accentuated the changing times.
When Satu came to the end of her speech, the women’s ap¬
plause filled the muggy quiet of the afternoon. Their faces were
bright with smiles as they nodded at each other and exclaimed
their approval. The clapping of the men was polite. Elsewhere in
the region, and on several occasions, I saw other signs of a less
than supportive response from men. On one occasion, Satu’s
interpreter was a local resident, active in PAIGC. He had a rather
aggressive and lively personality which added flavor to the
translations. But when he translated Satu’s words, he would add
his own version of what she was saying, softening her points,
even twisting them, to try and lessen their impact. His efforts
did not pay off, however. Most of the women understood both
languages and laughed at him when he made his own interpreta¬
tions. At one point, when the women responded with particular
294 Fighting Two Colonialisms

delight and chuckles to something Satu had said, he got angry

and shouted: “What are you applauding for? You have no
business to applaud!” But they ignored him, and treated it as
a joke.
At this same meeting, Cau himself expressed some impatience
with the women. The meeting had been a particularly long one
and the election for the first village council—the main reason
for his visit to the town—had still to be organized. After Satu
finished speaking, she asked whether any women wanted to
respond to what she had said. She was greeted by silence. A few
women looked at each other, some were given encouraging
nudges by their friends, but no one came forward. We waited.
There was a feeling of mounting tension as the women remained
reticent. I thought back to meetings in the liberated zones where
women had been ready and eager to speak, and many more than
one. The interpreter began to get agitated and press for the
business to continue. Cau matched his impatience and said with
some irritation, “No pintcha! No pintcha!” meaning in this case,
come on, come on, let’s get on with the proceedings. But Satu
was not about to be stampeded. She turned to Cau, her face
shining with anger. “This is not right,” she said sharply. “We
must not hurry the women. They are not used to speaking.
It is important to encourage them and to go slowly.” Cau said
nothing more.
At last an older woman stood up to speak. She had caught
my attention a number of times because of her demeanor. She
had been especially engrossed listening to Satu, and her face
glowed when the representative made a point which particularly
appealed to her. Then, when the speech was over, she had been
one of the first to applaud. During all of this, she would light up a
small pipe from time to time and puff away at it. Her own speech
was short, although she did not appear particularly shy.
“I had not intended to speak, but after hearing Satu I felt it is
very important that a woman speak. I know that all the women
here agree with me when I say that she spoke the truth to us
today. At home we women discuss these problems. I heard very
well what Comarada Satu said. We want to ask her please to
continue to help us to rebuild our country.”
 After Independence 295

Later, when I asked if I could interview her at her home, she

agreed. Manama Camara was the first woman I interviewed who
had not lived in the liberated zones during the war and hence
had not benefited from PAIGC’s mobilization of women. Her
home was right in the town of Cacine, where the meeting had
taken place. Throughout the war, Cacine had been a Portuguese
aldeamento, that is, a fortified village or strategic hamlet, an
enclave carved out of a vast liberated zone.* Although the
true population barely exceeded eight hundred inhabitants, its
strategic importance had earned it the title of “town” and a
particular designation on the Portuguese-drawn maps. However,
to the visitor, Cacine differed from a village not in terms of
its size—there were villages with larger populations—but be¬
cause it boasted permanent structures: a cement administrative
building, a sizable brick house, and two brick shops. The con¬
struction materials of the other houses ranged from mud, to a
combination of mud and brick, to all cement. The center of the
town was not more than half a mile long, spread out between two
parallel roads. The main road, a wide earth track, ran the length
of the center, passed through a dense avenue of mango trees,
heavy with the bright orange fruit, and then went down to the
Cacine River and onto a dilapidated pier.
Halfway between the pier and the entrance to the town stood
Mariama Camara’s small house, built by her husband years
before the war. Its age was revealed by the numerous cracks
which traced their way across the cement walls. Typically, it
had an iron roof and no electricity or running water. When Satu
and I arrived there late in the afternoon, we were greeted by
members of her family, who immediately brought out carved
stools for us. Mariama then perched herself on the edge on the
concrete veranda that ran around her house, letting her legs
dangle over the edge. A few feet away sat Fatmata, her co-wife,
balanced on a small stool.
*Cacine's vital importance during the war derived from its position on the
Cacine River. The Portuguese built one of their largest marine bases there,
strengthened with a considerable garrison. The town itself was fortified bv
uprooting some sixteen hundred people from the surrounding areas and concen¬
trating them into a "strategic hamlet,” providing a human hedge between the
base and the vast liberated territory.
296 Fighting Two Colonialisms

“The Portuguese colonialists oppressed us,” Mariama began,

without prompting. “They smashed us—both the men and the
women. But for women it was particularly bad. The men were
oppressed by the Portuguese and then they turned around and
oppressed us. So we were oppressed twice.
“Now at meetings women want to stand up and speak their
minds freely. Many women want to express their own indepen¬
dent personalities, but they are afraid of the men. And the men
think we do not speak because we do not understand what is
going on. This is not so. We understood only too well the
situation. We are not stupid. We are not inferior. The men think
this is why we do not stand up and speak. But we do not speak
out because they have oppressed us.
“In order for our country to advance, these attitudes must end.
For the country to develop, it must benefit from both men and
women. Otherwise we will all suffer by losing the contribution
that women can make. If this changes, we will advance more
quickly than we are doing now. But it is not easy. Even though
our country has been liberated, it does not mean that these
attitudes, this mentality, can change suddenly. Oh no. It will take
a long time to free both women and men from these attitudes.”
Mariama’s words were always accompanied by graphic facial
expressions and other body gestures. She would jab her fists into
the air, shake her head, sigh, put her hands on her hips and
thrust her chin forward or exclaim a high-pitched “he!” at the end
of sentences. Although she spoke in Susu, her mannerisms were
so expressive that I had a sense of what she was feeling, even
before the translations were relayed to me.
“Many women could have spoken at the meeting,” she con¬
tinued. “They understood what Satu said, but we have been so
oppressed, it’s terrible. This isn’t the first time I spoke at a
meeting, but often I do not. But after Satu spoke I felt I had
to say something to express our support for what she had said to
us women.”
Mariama had moved to Cacine when she got married, about
twenty-five years ago. Or was it twenty-two? No, maybe as much
as twenty-seven. She could not be exact as she did not know her
age. In any case, she had been there long enough to give birth to
 After Independence 297

and rear three children, one boy and two girls. Long enough to
see them marry and be delighted by her numerous grandchildren.
She had remained in Cacine all this time and had never traveled.
After the war began there was no chance of leaving anyway. The
town was one of those circles on a colonial map that had lines
surrounding it. The lines showed the large liberated areas, the
circles the fortified camps of the Portuguese. To have left would
have meant the suspicion, or rather the presumption, by the
Tuga that you were collaborating with the terrorists. When you
returned you would be arrested, yet if you stayed away, your
family would be the target of reprisals. If she had known more
about PAIGC at the beginning of the war, she said, then maybe
she would have left Cacine to live in the mato. But they (her
family) did not, so they missed the chance. Later it was too
dangerous. “He”—she shook her head—you just tried to live
through those days as best you could. What else could you do?
Once Mariama had a close escape. Her brother had come to
visit her while ill with a fever, so she took her basket and set out
for the forest on the edge of the town to gather medicinal herbs.
So engrossed was she in looking for the right plants that she did
not hear the soldiers arrive. And when she looked up, she gasped
at finding five rifles pointed at her.
“You’re a ban dido!” they accused her.
“No, I’m from Cacine,” she protested. “I’m looking for medi¬
cines for my brother.”
“Bah! You liar! What can you find among these dry bushes?”
They grabbed her by the arm, forced her into the back of the
truck, and squashed an empty oil drum over her head so that no
one would see her as they drove through the town. She could
barely breathe. “We’re going to kill you,” they yelled at her.
“When we get to the camp we will shoot you.”
When they had reached their destination, Mariama was taken
down from the truck and tied up. But a young African soldier
walking past stopped and looked at her.
“What are you doing?” he asked the other soldiers, puzzled.
“Why have you arrested the mother of Fatima?”
“Oh no, she is a bandido. We found her in the forest. We are
going to kill her.”
298 Fighting Two Colonialisms

“Don’t be ridiculous. She lives in Cacine. I have been to her

house.”
The soldiers reluctantly let her go.
Her husband had not been so fortunate, however. It was soon
after the beginning of the war that the soldiers came to get him.
One morning he got up and went about depressed and pre¬
occupied. Both Mariama and Fatmata noticed and asked him
what was wrong. “Nothing,” he said, and they watched him go
out and sit under the kola nut tree. That tree just to the side of the
house. But he did not eat the breakfast they brought him. Then
the Tuga drove up in an army car and took him away. Just like
that. They never saw him again.
Mariama stared past me out to the kola nut tree and began to
cry silently. She took the corner of her skirt and dried her eyes
before continuing.
They had no idea why he was arrested. All the Tuga would say
was that he had been working for PAIGC. Mariama said this was
not true. Of course, he supported the movement, but that was all.
She remembered hearing him talk to a young man once, telling
him to go and join PAIGC. “I am too old,” he said. “I have my two
wives to take care of. But you are young. It is best that you go and
join the struggle.”
At independence, when the prisoners were released, his
wives waited eagerly for his return. But he never came.
“He never returned to us,” Mariama said. Tears ran down her
cheeks again. “Only then did we hear that they had killed him
soon after his arrest.”
Mariama and Fatmata looked toward each other consolingly.
The relationship between them was relaxed and supportive.
They were like two close sisters. (Satu commented later on how
unusual this was in polygynous marriages. The young women
in particular were always quarreling.)
After their husband had been arrested, the two women lived
together in the house they had all built, and brought up their
children. Life became very hard. Now they had to do all the work
because there were no men to help them. Only men could clear
the land for growing rice and dig up the trenches for planting, so
they grew peanuts instead. But this did not provide sufficiently,
 After Independence 299

and when they had some money, which wasn’t often, they would
buy rice. Other times they exchanged peanuts for rice at the
Portuguese store. They were constantly short of food.
Aiye, Manama exclaimed, “but the difficulties, the troubles
we have seen in this village! I can’t begin to tell you. I’d prefer to
forget it all, it was so bad.” Then, as she added another “he” to
underscore her anger, her hands sprang to her hips as she jutted
her chin and right shoulder forward in a defiant manner.
“The Tuga did bad things to us, really bad things. But those
who committed the worst acts were the sons who turned against
us. Yes, the very sons and grandsons of Cacine hurt us the most.
They were armed and paid by the Tuga and told to fight against
PAIGC in our town. But they took the war out of the hands of the
Tuga and waged it against their own people. Because we all
lived in the same town they knew everything, everything about
us, and they used this knowledge to commit atrocities against
us. They would accuse people of working with PAIGC, even
when they were not, and have them arrested. They would kill
people for no reason. Once these boys fired a bazooka at our
house. Luckily it missed and went over the roof. They threatened
to kill us and called us ban didos and said we were collaborating
with PAIGC. In the end they left our family alone. He, it was
hard. And they were the sons of our town!”
Then Mariama’s face broke into a vivid smile. “But now our
country is independent. This makes us so happy. Life is much
better. Before I was just like a stick. I have put on weight and we
are all healthier. Oh, you should have seen us the day we heard
we were free! The excitement in this town! You can’t imagine it.
And the festivities! I have never seen anything like it. It was
wonderful.”
And now? What of the future, I asked.
“Everything in life comes to an end,” she replied. “The war
has ended and now there is only one thing to do. Just one thing to
do. We must all join our hands together and with our power to
work, we will build up our country. The past and the suffering is
behind us. This is what we must do now.”
When she had finished talking, Mariama fished around in the
folds of her skirt, took out her small pipe, filled it carefully with
300 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the coarse, sharp-smelling local tobacco, and lit it. She puffed at
it pensively, all the while clenching the pipe between her teeth,
and every now and then opening her lips just enough to blow out
smoke in gentle bursts. We sat in silence, thinking over what she
had told us. Finally, Mariama called her grandson over and
spoke to him in Susu, pointing at their orange tree. Quickly he
climbed the tree, and began shaking its branches until all the
ripe fruit fell to the ground. His grandmother then got up, care¬
fully picked up each orange, placed them one by one in a cloth
normally used as a turban, and handed it to me as a gift. I was
very touched.
But the most enduring impression I took away with me from
Cacine had to do with the level of political consciousness, which
matched that of many women mobilized by PAIGC at the begin¬
ning of the war. My first reaction was to consider this extra¬
ordinary in light of the fact that these women had been sup¬
pressed throughout the war by a Portuguese garrison, and
therefore denied any real involvement in PAIGC’s political
education process.
On the other hand, their experience of oppression had been
acutely personal, more drawn out than that of Guineans in the
liberated zones, and marked by brutality due to the continued
Portuguese presence in the town. It was not difficult for them to
understand what PAIGC was talking about when they spoke of
the need for change. As a result, after the war had ended, PAIGC’s
continuing politicization campaign was readily received, since
what they were saying about women related so closely to the
facts of their own lives.
In fact, this ability of PAIGC to articulate the people’s experi¬
ence in language they could understand was an important
reason why so many women had been quick to throw their
support behind the party fifteen years earlier, and why, after
independence, most of the peasants living in the region of Catio,
male and female, responded favorably to the new phase of
mobilization. Nevertheless, PAIGC’s success in postwar recon¬
struction depended on other factors also, and these explained
the fact that development was anything but uniform across the
country. Peasants who had lived in the heart of Portuguese-
 After Independence 301

controlled areas—as opposed to towns like Cacine which had

been colonial pockets within vast liberated territories—regarded
the new regime with suspicion and put up some resistance to the
political mobilization. For too long they had been recipients of
the colonial pacification programs. To win either the allegiance
or political neutrality of these people, the colonial administrators
had waged an unrelenting campaign of psychological subver¬
sion. They left in place and manipulated to their own advantage
repressive local customs, spread propaganda depicting the guer¬
rillas as terrorists bent on destroying the traditional way of life,
and offered consumer staples at prices set artificially low, to be
competitive with the people’s stores.
Such tactics would not have worked in the garrison towns,
the military enclaves surrounded by liberated territory, and the
colonialists knew it. Some children of Cacine, for example, may
have hired themselves out to the Portuguese army, but many
more, including Titina Sila, had joined the guerrillas in the
nearby mato. Consequently, those they left behind had intimate
and ongoing connections with the liberation movement, connec¬
tions which proved impermeable to all attempts at subversion.
Moreover, the Portuguese occupation force had its hands full
in keeping the guerrillas at bay, and no time to administer a
network of alternative social structures based on bribery of the
local population. They had difficulty enough assuring their own
supply lines.
After the war, the amount of resistance emanating from former
Portuguese areas thus varied from place to place, and a lot
depended on the abilities of the PAIGC responsavels and the
amount of time and energy they were prepared to put into their
work. And with the shortage of cadres more severe than at any
time in PAIGC’s history, the problem was compounded con¬
siderably, as for example, in the Calequisse area, which I visited
on a later occasion.
As we drove from Bissau toward Cantshungu (formerly Teixeira
Pinto), the central town of the region, I looked out of the window
of the car onto an already familiar scene. Few cars passed us in
either direction. But we were still sharing the road with the local
population, who were walking the long distances from their
302 Fighting Two Colonialisms

village to one or another destination. Meanwhile, others waited

patiently, often next to a pile of luggage, under large mango trees
which cast their shade over the road. They would rise as a car
approached, hoping for a ride. I watched the women as they
walked, their backs perfectly straight, with the ease and rhythm
of people used to walking long distances. Heavy bundles or
baskets balanced on their heads, and not a few had the additional
weight on their backs of a baby, tied with a long piece of cotton
cloth. Their clothes were not more than a piece of cloth wound
around the waist, and invariably grayed from countless washings,
which could no longer remove the stain of earth or retrieve the
color. I tried to look beyond the silhouettes along the side of the
road and to conjure up the reality of their daily lives. The distances
they walked, the clothes they wore, the conditions of the houses
and the huts we passed, all pointed to the harshness of the life
these women shared. But I was not able to fully appreciate this
until I had spent a day and night in the Calequisse village.
I stayed in the compound of the president of the village
council, which, like the other compounds comprising the large
sprawling village, included a main house of mud bricks and
thatched roof and a number of smaller huts surrounded by neat
thatch fences, compressed and tied by thin branches. From early
morning to late into the evening the women never stopped
working: sweeping the ground to clear the leaves, pounding for
hours, preparing palm kernels for palm oil by boiling them and
then pounding and sifting, roasting large mounds of cashew
nuts which they had spent hours collecting, and then, after
removing them from the heat, sitting in front of the mound to
shuck the tough bitter shells. The daily routine also involved
tending the fire and cooking, caring for the children, fetching
water from the well where they also washed the clothes—a good
hour’s walk from the village—and cleaning and tidying their
houses. Moreover, the rainy season was approaching and they
had aleady begun to work in the fields and to prepare food to take
to their men who were breaking up the ground. In the evening
each woman placed her husband’s food—a good portion of
chicken, meat, or fish and rice—in his hut, where he ate alone or
was joined by male relatives. On the night we were there, my
 After Independence 303

interpreter and I were invited to eat with the village councillor

and his brother. While the women did not appear to act in a
particularly subservient way toward the men (this was not a
Muslim village) they did stay at a distance, so that the separation
of the sexes was immediately obvious. The men were our hosts
and the women were supposed to have nothing to do with our
presence. They never came to talk to us and seemed puzzled that
I would want to speak with them.
The following morning, when I spent some time with the
women, they were shy and seemed unused to visitors. They
asked if I had come to take photographs for postcards—the only
reason for them that would explain the presence of myself and
my camera. The concept of the liberation of women was totally
alien to all the villagers. So, apparently, was the concept of
liberation itself. Our host reminisced about the “good times” of
the Portuguese rule. “They just left us alone,” he told me, “and
we could live our lives every day without interference.” PAIGC
forced them to pay taxes and tried to control their lives. However,
there was something suspect in the man’s criticism of PAIGC,
his use of the words “us” and “we” and in the defensive way he
spoke. I inferred that in some way his relationship with the
Portuguese had been beneficial to him and his family. Now he
had no such privileges and therefore no real incentive to accept
PAIGC’s egalitarian program. As a result, political mobilization
in the area had been a slow process, and I found nothing here to
match the spirit of the Catio region and its support for the new
government. (I was told later in Bissau that this situation had
been aggravated by the ineffectiveness of the politcal commissar
for the sector, and that he was replaced shortly after my visit.)
Meanwhile, the process of council elections was under way
here and in other former Portuguese-controlled villages, and
also in villages which had seen a large part of their populations
flee from the war and then return after independence. The delay
of one and a half years had been deliberate. It gave PAIGC time to
encourage mass participation in the process, and also served to
prevent the automatic elections of those who had held positions
of authority under colonial rule—the chiefs, the collaborators
with the Portuguese, the wealthier men. What PAIGC had learned
304 Fighting Two Colonialisms

from earlier mobilization was being applied again: that a prior

period of political education is essential before institution of any
large-scale reform. The first elections in the liberated zones had
taken place only after the mobilization had moved into the phase
of armed struggle, and in the wake of victory, when the peasants
could see that what the mobilizers predicted was beginning
to materialize. They were indeed able to liberate their land,
govern themselves representatively, and extend this democracy
to include women.
But the situation was very different ten years later in areas
which had no experience of revolutionary life. A mass peasant
meeting at which the new councils of five villages were presented
demonstrated for me that this second phase of the revolution
was going to move slowly in relation to the pace of events in the
old liberated zones. Without exception, any woman elected was
made responsible for relatively low-status activities, like keeping
the treasury and cultural affairs. Provision of rice for the guer¬
rillas could no longer be used as a politicizing tactic, and, while
the stipulation of at least two women per council had been
adhered to, none of the councils exceeded the minimum, as they
often did in the PAIGC-influenced villages. However, cadres
regarded these developments as a good beginning. An element
of national uniformity was now in place, and the presence of
women on the new councils meant that they had opportunities
to assert themselves politically where once there had been none.
In Cacine, for instance, Mariama Camara was elected to her
council and I doubted that her contribution and participation
would be token.
Elsewhere, the political mobilization of the people was being
conducted at still higher levels. The eight regions of the country
and the sectors into which they were subdivided each had their
elected councils, all with a minimum of two women. Discussions
with the regional presidents I met reinforced for me the leader¬
ship’s contention that Bissau would not become the focus of
national life. These governors knew their regions from one end
to the other, were familiar with local problems in every way, and
generally impressed visitors in terms of their own commitment
and the high caliber of many of the responsavels who worked
 After Independence 305

with them. The government leaders, for their part, regularly

traveled through the countryside and the smaller towns, ad¬
dressing meetings and speaking to the people. They had not
insulated themselves in the capital.
Nevertheless, regional disparities were such that PAIGC leaders
told me they were expecting some setbacks in an upcoming vote
to replace the National Assembly that had been elected in the
liberated zones four years earlier. (The first national elections
were duly held in December 1976, at the same time as those for
regional councils. Basil Davidson, who was in Bissau at the
time, reported that the party did not simply compile a list of
candidates and ask the people to vote for them. Desiring elections
in which voters should actively participate in the whole process
of selection and choice of candidates, as well as discussion of
problems, they spent some months reviewing possible candi¬
dates with an electoral commission for each region, until the
people were satisfied with those chosen. Since “a large fraction
of the electorate was voting for the first time in their lives, and
without the slightest experience even of the superficial forms of
electoral democracy,” there were some disappointments. ‘‘In
the two main regions of the north where hereditary chiefs in
Portuguese pay (mainly Fula) had always opposed the movement
of national liberation . . . the PAIGC list could manage to secure
only 50.4 per cent of the votes (Bafata) and 56 per cent (Gabu).”
The picture had been very different in most of the other areas,
with PAIGC gaining over ninety percent of the votes. Even the
city of Bissau responded with eighty-four percent, ‘‘a striking
tribute to the effective work of party militants there.”1)
So while all was not rosy in the early days of independence,
Guinea-Bissau militants tended to view with patience their com¬
patriots who maintained backward views on women’s liberation,
and PAIGC’s policies of social reconstruction. It was not, they
felt, that such people were actively, or even essentially, opposed
to the party or its policies. The problem was one involving
underdevelopment. They saw this as a direct result of the
ideological damage suffered by the population who lived with
colonial propaganda for so many years.
An anecdote related to me by Francisca Pereira captured
306 Fighting Two Colonialisms

the disparities between the people’s consciousness and demon¬

strated the difference in political development between those
who had remained active participants in the struggle and those
who had not. An elderly Muslim chief who had joined PAIGC
right at the beginning of mobilization risked much in his work
for the party and the revolution. For his efforts he was arrested
by the Portuguese before the beginning of the war and spent
the duration of the armed struggle isolated behind the bars
and walls of his tiny prison cell. At independence, however,
when all political prisoners were released, the chief returned in
triumph to Bolama, his hometown. Still a respected and loyal
member of the party, he was elected onto the regional council.
But all regional councils function under the leadership of a
regional president, with whom the members work closely. The
president in this case was Francisca, not only a woman, but
virtually young enough to be the chiefs granddaughter. For the
twelve years this elderly Muslim headman had languished in
the prisons of the Tuga, he had remained a supporter of PAIGC.
But he had not experienced daily life in the liberated zones,
where old attitudes and practices had been drastically altered in
the context of armed struggle and national reconstruction. In
short, the chief was not prepared to deal with women on equal
terms and was finding it extremely difficult to adjust to the new
world into which he had been released. Francisca spoke about
him with understanding, saying she appreciated what he must
have been going through. However, while she was trying to
handle the situation tactfully, she would not compromise her
leadership. “He must learn to let go of his backward ideas about
women,” she told me. “Not since the beginning of the armed
struggle have I been confronted with this kind of problem. If
he had not been isolated during the war, his attitudes would
have changed gradually as did those of the other militants, old
and young.”
In sum, if we take a bird’s-eye view of the society that is
emerging since independence, our attention necessarily focuses
on an apparently motley array of inharmonious situations. In
Bissau, our eye is caught by a group of young women flirting, a
seemingly major preoccupation in their lives, with members of
 After Independence 307

the government; in Catio region we find a nurse trained in the

liberated zones, newly wed and not working outside the home,
while the hospital in the same town is short of nurses. But then
our eye fixes on a meeting of peasants, mainly women, in Mansoa,
not far from Bissau. The women’s clothes strike a blaze of rich
colors against the green trees and brown earth as they listen to a
speech by Ana Maria Gomes. The interpreter, however, a party
responsavel in the sector, is stung by her words and takes it upon
himself to defend “men’s rights” and to remind the women how
much they must respect men. Ana Maria then jumps up and
launches into a lively defense of women’s liberation and a deft
put-down of his male chauvinism. Throughout, the women clap
energetically in support of her words. An overview also has to
include Mariama Camara listening with rapt attention to the
speech of a young woman, younger than her youngest daughters,
drinking in the words and trying to translate them into action in
her everyday life. And yet, at the same time we cannot help
noticing that the physical separation between the men and
women is as if a rope had been dividing them.
These apparent contradictions are not antagonistic, however.
They permit eventual reconciliation even as they now give life
and movement to a new society that is breaking out—painfully
here, spontaneously there. And most important, they do not
detract from the dominant trend that emerges from the bird’s-
eye view, the view of Guinean society taken as a whole. And this
is that women in the towns and the villages are taking up the
idea of their own liberation; that women cadres, government
representatives such as Teodora, Satu, Francisca, Ana Maria,
and Fina are working as hard as anyone to ensure that this move¬
ment remains an integral part of the continuing revolution,
and that the state, which sees women’s emancipation as indis¬
pensable to the fight against underdevelopment, is planning
programs and services directed especially toward women.
But political education and exhortations are not enough. Laws
are not enough. The work of the Organization of Women, its
establishment of services for women, even these are not enough.
Critically important, yes. But not enough. True women’s eman¬
cipation will not come in Guinea-Bissau if the revolution does
308 Fighting Two Colonialisms

not get past the superstructure. A vital next step is the need to
change the organization of agricultural production, a step that,
as we have seen, PAIGC still relegates to the future. Fundamental
changes in the social life of the peasants cannot happen without
it. For instance, how can repressive customs such as polygyny
cease unless men—and women—experience the reality that in¬
novations such as cooperatives, technological improvements,
retraining of both women and men, will in the long run produce
more at the least physical cost? Marrying that extra wife will not,
under these circumstances, have any impact on the amount of
work a family puts out to feed itself or to increase the wealth of a
particular individual. Only when time spent in agricultural
work is more equitably divided between women and men can a
community afford, on a lasting basis, to release all its daughters
from the heavy workload imposed upon them from an early age
and allow them to benefit from a full schooling.
While the pace of rural transformation remained slow in the
first years succeeding independence, the work remained strenu¬
ous. As I drove through the rural areas, I saw peasants everywhere
working a long day in the fields. My visit coincided with the
coming of the rains and the planting of rice, peanuts, manioc
and other produce—but mainly rice. And the Guineans accom¬
panying me would point to all the land under cultivation for the
first time. PAIGC was emphasizing the need to work, for both
ideological and pragmatic reasons, and the people seemed to be
responding with great optimism about prospects for the future.
N’Fansu Thiam, an elderly peasant and PAIGC militant who
lived in Cassaca for many years and who walks with a limp as a
result of his participation in one of the first guerrilla actions
against the Portuguese, said to me:
“This is our land, our country now. Only work can take us
forward. Our country has such potential, such possibilities for
the future. Our land is very good for agriculture, our soil is very
rich. Already we are seeing the results, and we are benefiting
from them, not the Portuguese. Fruit that was grown here before
the war—bananas, apples, oranges—were all taken from us by
the Tuga. Rice too. Then the war destroyed everything. Now that
the war is over, we must work hard so that we can have all this
 After Independence 309

again. It will all return. I am old. Many of us in this village are

old. But our hearts are young. We can all work to rebuild the
society. But we must do it together. Step by step. Yes, it’s
like that.”
Thus, the emphasis was not only on the need for hard work,
but on the need to work together. Bwetna N’Dubi expressed it
best when I met her again in Catio. She now lives in a village
twenty kilometers away from the town and is a member of the
party’s regional council.
‘‘Rebuilding Guinea-Bissau is like work in the rice fields.
Some of the rivers are salty, so everybody must build a wall
around his portion of the rice field to keep the salt water out. If
just one person does not build his wall, or builds it badly, it will
let the water in to all the fields and destroy everyone’s rice.”

“The children are the flowers of our revolution and the prin¬
cipal reason for our fight” goes the oft-quoted saying of Cabral.
Thus it is only in the coming generations that the ambitions of
the present-day revolutionaries can be realized. In this context,
the PAIGC educational system becomes a crucial element in any
assessment of what the future holds for the people generally,
and women particularly. For as much as new laws and economic
development strengthen the process of revolutionary social
change, education helps people to understand the need for that
change, thus empowering them to become in their own name,
the major protagonists of the revolution.
Of all the programs of social reconstruction under way, prob¬
ably the most alive and innovative was education. In fact,
although there were new and more difficult obstacles along the
path, the party has actually redoubled the commitment it made
to all its children some fifteen years earlier.
The Kwame Nkrumah Secondary School—new name, old fa¬
cility-stands adjacent to the Commission of Education and in
front of the small Titina Sila Square, where a plaque has been
mounted as a memorial for one of ten national heroes of the
country. The building is large by Bissau standards, and rises two
stories. I was struck by the lively atmosphere in which students
mingled easily with the teachers, many of whom were hardly
310 Fighting Two Colonialisms

older than the pupils. Along the corridors were taped wall
newspapers, written and illustrated by the students. One com¬
memorated the first years of Mozambique’s independence, while
another denounced apartheid and the Soweto massacres and
expressed solidarity with the people of South Africa. Still others
depicted the role of women in the Guinean armed struggle or
explained aspects of preventive medicine. Although the school
buildings were old, rambling, and in poor repair, the freshness
of the atmosphere bespoke the excitement permeating all other
aspects of education in independent Guinea-Bissau. Because
here too the government was challenging the old colonial struc¬
tures and continuing the process by which the society would be
transformed into one based on freedom.
During the colonial period, this had been the only secondary
school in the country, and catered exclusively to the sons and
daughters of the assimilados and the small settler community.
With wives of army officers for teachers, the students were
trained to perpetuate the civil service while they wrestled with
the dates and events of Portuguese fascist history. As a result,
they learned nothing of their own. And they absorbed values
entrenching their feelings of superiority over and alienation
from the masses of their countrymen and women. They were
told, and generally believed, that PAIGC was not a liberation
movement trying to free their people, but a band of terrorists—
ban didos—who, in their efforts to bring dreaded communism to
Guinea-Bissau would cause great suffering for the people in
general and for the assimilados in particular.
When the new government took over its first inclination was
to replace such schools with those developed in the liberated
zones, but a shortage of teachers, for one thing, made this not
feasible. So for the first year of independence a dual system of
education was in operation: the system inherited from the Por¬
tuguese administration, of which the Kwame Nkrumah School
was part, existed side by side with the PAIGC internatos, now
numbering ten.
The adoption of the old Portuguese system in the towns was a
pragmatic decision, not an ideological one. PAIGC first set about
making certain changes that could not wait, and then designed a
 After Independence 311

program to transform the system year by year, over six years,

when it would fully reflect their ideology and effectively com¬
plement the internato network in the rural areas.
At the time of my visit, they were confronted with many
difficulties. There was a great shortage of teachers and, except
for the eighty Portuguese nationals on contract from Lisbon, few
of the teachers had any formal training. In fact, the primary
schools in Bissau, which were staffed mostly by instructors who
were themselves pupils in the secondary schools, would not
have teachers with formal training until the return of large
numbers of student-teachers who had been sent outside the
country for study. These would be supplemented by graduates
from the school for primary school teachers in Bolama, still
small, which had been taken over from the Portuguese and
completely restructured. Meanwhile the texts that had been
used by the colonialists had to be discarded. The teachers at the
Kwame Nkrumah School, for instance, were writing their own
lessons and discussing them collectively, so that they might
form the basis for the new textbooks still to be written. Often I
walked into the teachers’ room to find one or another pounding
away on an old manual typewriter, preparing stencils for mimeo¬
graphing his or her lessons. Regularly, however, the school
would run out of paper and they would then have to dictate the
text to the class before they could begin the lesson.
One of the English teachers, Lucette Tavares, a Guinean and a
young PAIGC militant, was my interpreter for part of my visit to
Bissau. During the many hours that I spent with her, we talked at
length about the school and the problems educators were facing.
Most of her students, thoroughly imbued with the colonial men¬
tality, were uncritical and resistant to a political way of thinking,
she said. Rather than aggravate this by the use of overtly political
English texts, she selected works of African writers and of pro¬
gressive writers from other continents and used the subject matter
as a basis for discussion, which she insisted be done in English.
“What I do is take a sentence from the text and begin a discus¬
sion around that,” Lucette told me. “For instance, one African
story referred to the woman standing outside the door. ‘Why did
the woman stand outside the door, away from the company of
312 Fighting Two Colonialisms

men?’ I asked my class, and we got into a discussion of the

oppression of women. On another occasion we were discussing
the well. I showed a picture of women collecting water from
a well.‘Why are only women collecting water from the well?’
I asked, and again we began to talk about the role of women in
our society.”
Sometimes these discussions can get very heated, she told me,
but the most heated one was when they were reading a text about
native Americans. ‘‘A boy in the class made the comment: ‘But
they are lazy.’ I said, ‘OK, class, close your books. We’ll stop
right there.’ I then took up the point he had made and for over an
hour we had an intense debate about these attitudes. I began by
pointing out that this was exactly what the Portuguese said
about us. By the end of the discussion all the pupils agreed and
the boy tried to make out that this was not what he had meant!”
At the end of the term, however, during the criticism-self¬
criticism session in which pupils evaluate their teachers, she
had been criticized for being “too political,” although she herself
felt her pace had been slow and deliberate. “Some of my students
told me that they had come to class to learn English, not for
political education!” Lucette recalled with a laugh. Nonethe¬
less, not all the students had been resistant to the ideas of
PAIGC—although most, for lack of contact, had little knowledge
of the party—and the overall level of political consciousness
continued to rise with each succeeding year. This process,
Lucette added, had been given a boost by another factor. As time
went by, the composition of the school had changed substan¬
tially, with students from nonelite backgrounds entering for the
first time. And, as none of these could ever have hoped to go to
secondary school in colonial times, they brought progovernment
ideas into the classroom which affected the changing attitudes
of the other students in a positive way.
The ten internatos were a different story. In keeping with
the dual principle of giving developmental priority to the towns
and not alienating the students from peasant culture, none of
the internatos—except the Pilot School and kindergarten in
Bolama—were situated in the towns. The exception was made
for the express purpose of rebuilding Bolama after its destruc¬
tion. Given its isolation and size, the environment was not all
 After Independence 313

that different from the rural areas and certainly anything but
“urban.” One of the few useful inheritances from the colonialists
was the proliferation of brick army barracks throughout the
countryside, which PAIGC put to good use as school buildings.
With a coat of paint and the planting of flowers, they had been
made to look quite attractive. One aspect had not changed,
however: the one-to-three ratio of girls to boys in these schools
had not improved since the war. The problems that had con¬
fronted PAIGC in this area during the war had not diminished
after independence.
Of the several internatos that I visited throughout the country,
one stands out most particularly. The internato at Mores is in the
heart of the old liberated zones. I traveled there by bus one
Sunday with a large group of students from the Kwame Nkrumah
School who were to spend the day helping with production.
This was not a token effort. For hours the students and teachers
of both schools worked side by side in hand-plowing the land
and planting corn. But even if I had not known already which
students were from which school, it would have been easy to
spot. Those from the internato expertly wielded their imple¬
ments, while the “city” students, because production had only
recently been added to their curriculum and because of growing
up in an urban area, were awkward still.
As I watched the young people, both boys and girls, waging
their sweaty battle to unlock the abundance of the earth, it
occurred to me that no young person was destined anymore to a
strictly anonymous life devoted exclusively to productive toil.
Some were even going to be future leaders of Guinea-Bissau,
leaders who had actual experience of the backbone activity of
the country and, therefore, responsavels who had come from the
people and whose consciousness had been formed in the revolu¬
tionary educational system.
Take Helder Proenga for example. At nineteen he was the
responsavel for education for the Bolama region and a veteran of
PAIGC. A few years earlier, during the war, he had left off his
own schooling in order to teach at a village school in the liberated
zones, and now combined his duties as responsavel with further
study at the Pilot School.
I got to know him on my visit to Bolama and was able to
314 Fighting Two Colonialisms

observe him one evening interacting with his young comrades at

the school, where we had gathered for a rally in solidarity with
the student uprising in South Africa, to be followed by a poetry
reading intended especially for the visitors. The room was filled
with students of all ages who had much to say and many ques¬
tions to ask. Although they were to rise at six o’clock the
following morning, it was midnight before the front desks were
removed to make room for the small school band which would
provide background music for Helder’s poetry.
During the rally my eyes kept returning to Helder. Possessed
of one of the most pleasant and easy smiles I have seen, he
projected almost constantly a quiet enthusiasm about his work
and the revolution. And although his personality was not force¬
ful (if anything, he was a little shy) his presence was always felt.
Even his vivas, which he shouted in unison with the other
students at the end of the meeting, had a naturalness to them
which seemed the integrated expression of the unforced way in
which he held his beliefs.
Helder was also a very fine poet. As I listened to him read in
his sonorous voice I remembered how so many people in Guinea-
Bissau had insisted to me that in order for women to be liberated,
men’s attitudes—perhaps more than women’s—must be changed;
and that for a sign of real change we have to look to the next
generations, not only in young women but in young men. And
Helder’s poetry did conjure up rich images of the revolution, of
solidarity with oppressed people, of Comarada Amilcar Cabral.
But when he announced his last poem would be a love poem, I
had an involuntary reaction of disappointment and braced
myself to hear something saccharine and naively romantic.
Then he read his poem about love. It was addressed to a young
woman he had met in the mato. The verses spoke of how they had
fought together for the revolution, which had formed their love, a
new kind of love, based on mutual respect and real equality.
They had found new smiles, he read. And these new smiles
would be multiplied on the faces of their children and on those of
all the children that would be born into the coming generations.
Notes

Introduction

1. Amilcar Cabral, Our People Are Our Mountains, text of a speech given in
London, 1971 (London: Committee for the Freedom of Mozambique, Angola,
and Guine, 1972).
2. See Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1970), pp. 53ff, 119ff, and United Nations, Report of the
Secretary-General, Development and International Economic Co-operation:
Effective Mobilization of Women in Development, A/33/238, October 26,
1978.
3. Memorandum of 1965, quoted in Basil Davidson, Liberation of Guine
(London: Penguin, 1969), p. 122.
4. Ibid., p. 137.
5. Basil Davidson, “No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky,” The Socialist
Register (London: Merlin Press, 1973).
6. See Denis Goulet, Looking at Guinea-Bissau: A New Nation’s Development
Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1978), p. 20.
7. Quoted in Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization
(Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), p. 177.
8. Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: Difficulties and Possibilities of Socialist
Orientation (Uppsala: AKUT, 1978), p. 23.
9. Peter Aaby, The State of Guinea-Bissau: African Socialism or Socialism in
Africa? (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1978), p. 26.

315
316 Notes

10. Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: Difficulties and Possibilities, p. 24.

11. Ibid., p. 25.
12. Goulet, Looking at Guinea-Bissau, p. 40.
13. Ibid., p. 40.
14. See Aaby, The State of Guinea-Bissau, p. 32.

Chapter 1. “No Pintcha!”

1. Barbara Cornwall, The Bush Rebels (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1972), p. 166.

Chapter 2. “What can we consider better than freedom?’’

1. Texeira da Mota's observations are quoted in Amilcar Cabral, Report to the

United Nations, 1961, cited in Basil Davidson, Liberation of Guind: Aspects
of an African Revolution (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), p. 27.
2. Basil Davidson, Joe Slovo, and Anthony R. Wilkinson, Southern Africa: The
New Politics of Revolution (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 25. Davidson's
extensive writings on Guinea-Bissau have been invaluable to me in the
preparation of this chapter.
3. Lars Rudebeck, “Development and Class Struggle in Guinea-Bissau,” Month¬
ly Review 30, no. 8 (January, 1979): 18-19.
4. Amilcar Cabral, Our People Are Our Mountains, text of a speech given in
London, 1971 (London: Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola,
and Guine, 1972), p. 21.
5. Rudebeck, “Development and Class Struggle," pp. 15-16.
6. Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory," in Revolution in Guinea (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), p. 92.
7. Amilcar Cabral, "Brief Analysis of the Social Structure of Guinea,” in ibid.,
pp. 56ff.
8. Ibid., p. 61.
9. See, for example, Peter Aaby, The State of Guinea-Bissau: African Socialism
or Socialism in Africa? (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies,
1978), p. 11.
10. Cabral, “Brief Analysis,” p. 61.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 63.
13. Cabral, "Towards Final Victory," in Revolution in Guinea, p. 159.
14. Ibid., p. 110.
15. Ibid., pp. 104-8.
16. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source:
Selected Speeches, ed. Africa Information Service (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 79. Cabral was speaking English to a group
of black Americans. While he spoke many languages, English was not his
most fluent.
17. As quoted in Davidson et al., Southern Africa, p. 51.
18. Ibid., p. 52.
 Notes 317

Chapter3. “A great deal of patience”

1. A/rique-Asie 24 (February 19-March 4,1973), translated in Southern Africa

6, no. 4 (April 1973). Shortly after the assassination journalist Aquino de
Braganga went to Conakry. This section is based on his report, parts of which
have been used verbatim.
2. Confidential party record, quoted in Basil Davidson, Liberation of Guind:
Aspects of an African Revolution (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), p. 32.
3. Amilcar Cabral, Our People Are Our Mountains, text of a speech given in
London, 1971 (London: Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola,
and Guine, 1972), p. 3.
4. Speech delivered by Amilcar Cabral at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania,
1972, mimeo.
5. Amilcar Cabral, “Towards Final Victory,” in Revolution in Guinea (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), pp. 158-60.
6. Davidson, Liberation of Guine, p. 54.
7. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Portu¬
guese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 47.

Chapter 4. ‘‘First it is the women who pound . . .”

1. Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1970), p. 16. On the role of women in rural societies Ester
Boserup concluded:
The joint result of women's high rate of participation in agricultural
work and their generally long working hours was that women, in
nearly all the cases recorded, were found to do more than half of the
agricultural work; in some cases they were found to do around 70 per
cent and in one case nearly 80 per cent of the total. Thus, the available
quantitative information about work input by sex seems to indicate
that even today village production in Africa south of the Sahara
continues to be predominantly female farming. (Ibid., p. 22)

2. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in "Portu¬

guese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 67.
3. PAIGC, “Report on the Politico-Socio-Economic Role of Women in Guinea
and the Cape Verde Islands,” published in English in Women in the Struggle
for Liberation (New York: World Student Christian Federation, 1973), p. 52.
Emphasis mine.
4. Amilcar Cabral, “Brief Analysis of the Social Structure in Guinea," in
Revolution in Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
p. 57.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Chapter 5. “We are part of the same fight”

1. “There was not room for sex discrimination during the struggle," Interview
with Francisca Pereira, Ceres 8, no. 2 (March-April 1975): 40. Emphasis
mine.
318 Notes

2. Ibid., pp. 40^11.

3. Gerard Chaliand, Aimed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in ‘‘Portu¬
guese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 93.
4. Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization (Uppsala:
Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), pp. 130,186—87.
5. Chantal Sarrazin and Ole Gjerstad, Sowing the First Harvest: National
Reconstruction in Guinea-Bissau (Oakland: LSM Information Center, 1978),
p. 63.

Chapter 6. “A woman is sold for a pig or a cow”

1. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source:

Selected Speeches, ed. Africa Information Service (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 52.
2. Ibid., p. 160.
3. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in "Por¬
tuguese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
p. 45.
4. Ibid., p. 67.
5. Ibid., 63-64.
6. Chantal Sarrazin and Ole Gjerstad, Sowing the First Harvest: National
Reconstruction in Guinea-Bissau (Oakland: LSM Information Center, 1978),
pp. 43-A4.
7. Quoted in Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), p. 38.
8. Boserup states it thus:
In regions . . . where women do all or most of the work of growing
food crops, the task of felling the trees in preparation of new plots
is usually done by older boys and very young men. . . . An elderly
cultivator with several wives is likely to have a number of such
boys who can be used for this purpose. By combined efforts of
young sons and young wives he may gradually expand his cultiva¬
tion and become more and more prosperous, while-a man with a
single wife has less help in cultivation and is likely to have little
or no help for felling. Hence there is a direct relationship between
the size of the area cultivated by a family and the number of wives
in a family.

9. Boserup, Women’s Role, p. 43.

Chapter 7. “Our education has to be conditioned by our life and history"

1. Quoted in Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization

(Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), p. 220.
2. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Por¬
tuguese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press 19711
p. 93.
 Notes 319

3. Quoted in Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau, p. 207.

4. Conversation with American journalist and anthropologist, Richard Lobban,
1974.
5. Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau, p. 205.
6. Ibid., p. 206.
7. Ibid.
8. Hermione Harris, “The Practice of Clitoridectomy in Africa,” preliminary
report for the Anti-Slavery Society, London, 1975, p. 2.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.

Chapter 8. “At the same time fighting for personal independence”

1. Amilcar Cabral, “Connecting the Struggles," in Return to the Source:

Selected Speeches, ed. Africa Information Service (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 85.
2. Basil Davidson, “No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky,” The Socialist
Register (London: Merlin Press, 1973), p. 278. This story of Carmen Pereira’s
life is based on my own interviews with her, but supplemented, with my
appreciation, from Davidson as well as Barbara Cornwall, The Bush Rebels
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972) and Chantal Sarrazin, “Car¬
men Pereira: Woman Revolutionary,” in Chantal Sarrazin and Ole Gjerstad,
Sowing the First Harvest: National Reconstruction in Guinea-Bissau (Oak¬
land: LSM Information Center, 1978).
3. Cornwall, Bush Rebels, p. 192.
4. Sarrazin, "Carmen Pereira,” p. 61.
5. Cornwall, Bush Rebels, p. 192.
6. Sarrazin, “Carmen Pereira,” p. 61.
7. Cornwall, Bush Rebels, p. 192.
8. Ibid., p. 193.
9. Sarrazin, “Carmen Pereira,” p. 62.
10. Cornwall, Bush Rebels, p. 193.
11. Sarrazin, “Carmen Pereira," p. 63.
12. “There was not room for sex discrimination during the struggle,” Interview
with Francisca Pereira, Ceres 8, no. 2 (March-April 1975): 41.
13. Quoted in Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guine: Aspects of an African
Revolution (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), pp. 100-1.
14. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Portu¬
guese” Guinea (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 93.
Emphasis mine.
15. Ibid., p. 59. Chaliand mentioned that she was wearing a FARP uniform and
carrying a rifle.
16. Cornwall, Bush Rebels, p. 51.
17. Sun of Our Freedom: The Independence of Guinea-Bissau (Chicago: Chi¬
cago Committee for the Liberation of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea,
1974), p. 28.
18. Josina Machel, “O Papel da Mulher na Revolupao,” Dia da Mulher Mocam-
bipana (Maputo: FRELIMO, 1975), p. 9 (author's translation).
320 Notes

19. Arlene Fisen Bergman, Women in Vietnam (San Francisco: Peoples Press,
1975), pp. 171 ff.
20. Chaliand, Armed Struggle, p. 35.

Chapter 9. “The woman of today is a new woman from the

woman of yesterday”

1. Amilcar Cabral, “Connecting the Struggles,” in Return to the Source:

Selected Speeches, ed. Africa Information Service (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 86.
2. A “new and stricter party organization" has been developed:
In order to become a full member of PAIGC, it will be necessary,
from now on, to spend at least one year as a candidate in a local
committee of the party and then to be recommended by two members
of at least three years’ standing. Only those dedicating themselves
wholeheartedly to party work can expect to become and remain
members, according to the new statutes. Thus it is hoped that the
party will be able to function with free and open internal discussion,
but also with efficient and disciplined action after decisions have
been made. Two-way contact between the party and the people will
be maintained through the local committees of villages and urban
neighborhood [bairros] as well as through the union and women's
and youth organizations which are to remain open mass organizations.

Lars Rudebeck, “Development and Class Struggle in Guinea-Bissau," Month¬

ly Review 30, no. 8 (January 1979): 21.
3. Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization (Uppsala:
Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), pp. 191-92.

Chapter 11. “For our country to develop, it must benefit from

both men and women"
0

1. Basil Davidson, "People's Elections," People’s Power in Mozambique,

Angola and Guinea-Bissau 6 (January-February 1977): 28, 29, and 31.