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The peoples of the land now known as Guinea-Bissau first experienced European (Portuguese) contact in the late 15th century, but it took four centuries until Portugal could establish exclusive colonial control, in the late 19th century. Over that period, Guinea-Bissau had become one of the first regions infiltrated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where thousands of African people were stolen by capitalist enterprises from Portugal, France, and Britain to work and grow their plantation economies.

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The PAIGC (the Portuguese acronym for the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) began as a small group of five or six comrades, and ultimately grew to lead the revolutionary force that would overthrow Portuguese rule. It was founded by Rafael Barbosa and Amílcar Cabral, who is now memorialized as one of the most brilliant revolutionary-scholars in the Marxist tradition. In his words: “It is our opinion that if we get rid of colonialism in Guinea the main contradiction remaining, the one which will then become the principal contradiction, is that between the ruling classes, the semi-feudal groups, and the members of the groups without any defined form of organisation.”

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3 | Praxis in Operation: Revolutionaries Learn from Their Mistakes

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3 | Praxis in Operation: Revolutionaries Learn from Their Mistakes

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The PAIGC organized a massive dockworkers strike in 1959; Portuguese colonial forces responded with a massacre of around 50 workers. Recognizing the futility of this strategy, the PAIGC shifted focus to organizing the rural peasantry, preparing in the countryside for armed guerrilla struggle. They first engaged in sabotage operations that destroyed bridges and telegraph lines, and soon open hostilities between the PAIGC and the Portuguese broke out in 1963.

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4 | Guerrilla Warfare & International Support

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4 | Guerrilla Warfare & International Support

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The war would last a decade. Though the PAIGC only numbered around 7,000 guerrillas (fighting against a Portuguese force of nearly 32,000), the liberation forces had the support of the Guinea-Bissau and the majority of the Guinean population. This revolutionary force would receive material support from Libya, Algeria, China, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Cuba. The Portuguese forces under António de Spinola would employ a process of “Africanization” by which they recruited and integrated African soldiers into their fighting forces, including Guineans, especially those from the Fulbe population, whose chiefs had beneficial relationships with the Portuguese. After years of guerrilla warfare and the inability of Portugal to quell the revolution, the PAIGC accelerated political activity, including diplomacy abroad, as it saw independence as a real possibility. After Cabral’s assassination in 1973, the PAIGC launched a series of offensives that crippled Portugal’s air force and relegated their presence to major cities and a set of fortified encampments.

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5 | Independence for Guinea-Bissau; Fascism Falls in Portugal

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5 | Independence for Guinea-Bissau; Fascism Falls in Portugal

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In September 1973, Guinea-Bissau unilaterally declared its independence and by November of that year, the UN General Assembly voted to welcome this declaration and condemned Portugal’s colonial presence. By 1974, the Portuguese government that had overseen the war was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution left-wing military coup (to which the war in Guinea-Bissau had been a contributing factor) and an accord was signed that year in which Portugal would agree to recognize Guinea-Bissau’s independence and initiate the withdrawal of its occupying force.