ABSTRACT
The man who would lead the independence movement until his death in 1973, Amilcar Cabral, was born in Portuguese Guinea in 1924, the son of a schoolteacher and the operator of a small hotel. After completing his primary and secondary education in the Portuguese colony of Cape Verde Islands, Cabral won a scholarship to study agronomy at an institute in Lisbon, graduating near the top of his class in 1952. Like other Lusophone African intellectuals studying in Portugal, Cabral gravitated toward the anti-imperialist Portuguese Communist Party, which was banned and had to function underground during the rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. But the future revolutionary did not like the party’s doctrine that revolution should come in capitalist countries before their colonies were given independence. Though adhering to the economic agenda of socialism, Cabral increasingly became panAfricanist in his political outlook.
