ABSTRACT

Scientific historical analysis must neither idealize nor malign social reality, but rather explain it. Political sociology must set itself the same objective. It must interpret and explain history. Guinea-Bissau devoured and demobilized, extraverted and polluted, not the land's waters and riches, but people's minds. Colonization, the symbolic and imposing myth of Western societies, worked on many of those who hold power in Guinean society. Class struggle, interacting with the most diverse social phenomena—ethnicity, culture, privilege, authority, symbolism, religion—was charged with contradictions, sometimes explosive, but largely silent. If the petty bourgeoisie controls the state apparatus, it imposes a class relationship favourable to itself. This is the principal explanation of the political change. The achievement of a nationalist strategy aimed at building socialism demands an economic base and power that are devoted to social and political change. Relations between social strata cannot remain static but are dynamic whenever mechanisms of a new type are activated.