Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau, a small country on the West Coast of Africa, had been a colony of Portugal for 500 years, and with the 1926 rise of a Portuguese fascist dictatorship, colonization of the country became both brutal and complete. In 1956, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded by Amilcar Cabral and a few country people. At first, PAIGC’s goal was to organize workers in the towns, hoping that through demonstrations and strikes they would convince the Portuguese to negotiate for independence. It soon became clear that this approach to independence would not work. Each demonstration was met with violence, until the 1959 massacre of fifty dockworkers holding a peaceful demonstration at Pidgiguiti. This was a turning point for PAIGC: they realized that independence could not be won without an armed struggle, one that had to be based on the mass participation of the people. This book focuses on the way in which PAIGC ideology integrated the emancipation of women into the total revolution: how it emphasized the need for women to play an equal political, economic, and social role in both the armed struggle and the construction of a new society.

Stephanie J. Urdang was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the author of two books on Africa, including And Still They Dance: Women, War, and the Struggle for Change in Mozambique. She has worked as an anti-apartheid activist, journalist, academic writer, university lecturer, and freelance consultant, as well as gender specialist and senior advisor on HIV/AIDS for the United Nations. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey and returns regularly to South Africa.