Return to the Source

“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture”—and these were not just words. Guided by the concrete realities of his people, Cabral called for a process of “re-Africanization,” a Return to the Source, to African ways of thinking, being and acting. As a new imperialism has taken hold the world over, many have hearkened back to Return to the Source, but this time, our source of inspiration is Cabral himself. With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. Cabral and his fellow Pan-African movement leaders catalyzed and fortified a militant wave of liberation struggles beginning in Angola, moving through Cabral’s homelands of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and culminating in Mozambique and beyond. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three–quarters of the countryside of Guinea Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination.

In this new, expanded edition of Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral we have access to Cabral’s warm and humorous informal address to the Africa Information Service, and we revisit several of the principal speeches Cabral delivered during visits to the United States in the final years before his assassination in 1973, including his last written address to his people on New Year’s Eve. Return to the Source is essential reading for all who understand that the erasure of historical continuity between social movements has disrupted our ability to make the revolutionary transformation we all desperately require.

BIOS:

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) was a Pan-African freedom fighter and anti-imperialist theorist, best known for bringing the Portuguese empire to its knees. He was born in the Guinea Bissau town of Bafatá, to Cape Verdean parents of divergent classes, living under Portuguese colonial dominion. During a restive period in the development of African nationalist movements, he studied agronomy in Portugal alongside other African colonial subjects who joined together to form student movements dedicated to opposing the ruling dictatorship of Portugal and promoting the cause of independence for all Portuguese colonies in Africa. Upon his return to Africa in the 1950s, he managed, in under a decade, to steer Guinea Bissau towards near total independence. On January 20, 1973, Portuguese agents assassinated Cabral, but his murder did not deter his people from unilaterally declaring independence just eight months later. In life and death, he became an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national independence movements worldwide.

Tsenay Serequeberhan is a Professor of Philosophy at Morgan State University in Baltimore.  He is the author of the groundbreaking work The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse and the key text, African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, among other books.