ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ideas and texts of two men from the small West African state of Guinea-Bissau: the well-known revolutionary theorist and activist Amilcar Cabral, leader of his people’s fi ght for independence from the Portuguese; and virtually the only fi lmmaker from that country (and certainly the only one with an international reputation), Flora Gomes. Although both men were, and in different ways still are, strongly rooted in Guinea-Bissau, at the same time they both display important elements of a circumatlantic disposition, thereby occupying both sides of Paul Gilroy’s “routes and roots” dyad. Both were educated abroad: Cabral studied in Portugal, becoming one of only three university graduates from Guinea-Bissau (after four centuries of Portuguese “civilization”), and his country’s fi rst agronomist, while Gomes studied at secondary school and the prestigious ICAIC fi lm school in Cuba. Cuba was also an important site for Cabral, as he attended the fi rst Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, delivering his seminal paper “The Weapon of Theory.” Traveling in order to speak became a central feature of Cabral’s “routes,” as his journeying took him to Europe and the U.S., both to encourage practical support for his people’s struggle, and to argue the justice of their case at the United Nations Assembly. In Flora Gomes’s fi lms, journeys-diasporic and other-are structurally and thematically important, with the conditions and consequences of return variously unpredictable, challenging, or problematic.
