ABSTRACT

People's war would succeed, where constitutional decolonisation had failed, in bringing revolution to Africa and thus in laying the foundations for a non neo-colonial path to development a transition to socialism. The ultimate significance of people's wars, however, does not lie in the nationalists' ability to mobilise villagers into bands of guerillas. The PAIGC was the most adept in its prosecution of a people's war. The political component of an African revolution would imply, mini-mally, the acquisition and establishment of political power in a post-colonial state whose structure, personnel, and policies would derive not from its colonial predecessor but from the legitimacy of a vanguard mass party rooted in the countryside. In Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the process of political mobilisation did indeed lead to the development of parties which differed greatly from earlier African nationalist parties. In Angola, as in Mozambique, the Portuguese had set up strategic hamlets, thereby restricting the impact of the party's attempts at reconstruction.