Guinea-Bissauan War of Independence

At issue: Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence from Portugal

Date: January 23, 1963-September 10, 1974

Location: Guinea-Bissau (West Africa)

Combatants: Guinea-Bissauan nationalists vs. Portuguese

Principal commanders:Guinea-Bissauan, Amilcar Cabral (1921–1973), Luis Cabral (1931- ), Aristides Pereira (1923- ), Domingos Ramos, Osvaldo Vieira, Bernardo Vieira (1939- ); Portuguese, General Arnold Schultz, General Antonio de Spinola

Result: Guinea-Bissauan nationalists’ victory; independence of Guinea-Bissau

Background

The inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, swampy archipelago and an inland country in West Africa, include the Balanta, the backbone of the nationalist struggle (32 percent of the population), the Fulani (22 percent), the Manjaco (14.5 percent), the Mandinka (13 percent), and the Papel (7 percent). As early as the 1440’s, Guinea-Bissau was one of the first Portuguese trade centers along Africa’s west coast and was for a long time lumped together with the Cape Verde Islands. Until the nineteenth century, the Portuguese limited their activities to a few enclaves, such as Cacheu and Bissau. They exploited Guinea-Bissau’s human resources through the introduction of slavery and cheap forced labor and did very little to develop the infrastructure. The colony was separated from Cape Verde in 1879, but its boundaries were set only in the 1890’s through international conventions involving the Portuguese, the French, and the British. In 1951, Guinea-Bissau was declared a province of Portugal. This gave the population the right to assimilation once they fulfilled the required criteria—namely, ability to speak Portuguese, reading and writing skills, and employment. However, by 1970 only 0.3 percent of Guineans were able to assimilate, while the rest of the population was subjected to forced labor, taxation, land expropriation, and political oppression.

The Portuguese found it difficult to pacify their colony, and as late as the 1930’s, there remained pockets of resistance against colonial rule in Guinea-Bissau. Therefore, not surprisingly, the sense of nationalism and desire for self-government—and the ensuing mobilization—occurred early in the history of the colony. Returning from his Lisbon studies as an agronomist at the age of thirty-two, Cape Verde-born Amilcar Cabral initiated the struggle for independence. Along with five other educated Cape Verdeans and Guineans, he created on September 19, 1956, what later became known as the Partido Africano pela Independencia da Guine-Bissau e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), or the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

The party’s objective was to develop a two-pronged strategy whereby it would create urban unrest and mobilize the peasants in the countryside, especially among the receptive Balanta. With bases in Conakry, and Guinea, and inside Guinea-Bissau itself, the PAIGC began training revolutionary cadres and incited labor strikes, such as one that occurred in July, 1959, when workers, including seamen, refused to work. The Portuguese retaliated by killing at least fifty people. This response caused the PAIGC leaders to begin to wage guerrilla warfare against the colonial state.

Action

In 1962, the PAIGC initiated guerrilla activities against the Portuguese, leading the government to arrest two thousand rebel sympathizers in the colony and to kill many of the leaders and followers in the countryside. On January 23, 1963, the bloodiest and heaviest guerrilla warfare in the Portuguese colonies broke out in Guinea-Bissau (and peripherally in Cape Verde), when the nationalists attacked the Portuguese barracks at Tite in the south. Portuguese troops deployed against the insurgents then numbered five thousand. By July, 1963, the PAIGC guerrillas, not the Portuguese, had become the overlords in the southern seaboard. Other insignificant nationalist fronts, such as the Frente da Luta Pela Independencia Nacional da Guine-Bissau (FLING), emerged, but were soon overshadowed by the strength and efficacy of Amilcar Cabral’s PAIGC.

In fact, the PAIGC was so strong as early as 1964 that it held its first congress, on February 13, inside Guinean territory, having at that time close to 4,000 activists on its side and more than 200,000 Balanta as its supporters. PAIGC strategy was refined as the war progressed, with the creation of specialized units under interregional commands. All the units were headed by a war council. PAIGC forces, known as the Forcas Armadas Revolucionarias Populares (FARP), or the People’s Armed Revolutionary Forces, spread throughout the south. They marched eastward under Domingos Ramos and Osvaldo Vieira, and northward under the command of Luis Cabral, Aristides Pereira, and Bernardo Vieira, attacking both the fortified Portuguese government posts and commercial establishments while cutting access to roads to prevent relocation of businesses.

From 1966 to 1968, however, the PAIGC suffered a series of setbacks that almost paralyzed its activities temporarily. The Portuguese had brought to the colony General Arnold Schultz, a counterinsurgency general who had fought in the Angolan War of Independence. Schultz’s strategy involved the creation of more than two hundred garrisons, extensive use of the air force to bomb FARP bases, and the burning of food supplies. Meanwhile, he increased his overall fighting force from 20,000 to 25,000 troops and inflicted severe casualties on the PAIGC, including 19,280 people who were severely wounded and 60,000 people who were forced to flee into Senegal. What saved the PAIGC, according to researcher Mustapha Dhada, was the reorganization of its forces into smaller units, smaller bases, and smaller arms depots and training camps to elude the enemy. Above all, however, was PAIGC’s acquisition of antiaircraft missiles provided by the Soviet Union and China, as well as some Cuban war ammunition. This demoralized Schultz’s forces and compelled them to spend $350,000 a day in their bombing and scorched-earth campaign.

As a result of his failure, Schultz was recalled to Portugal and replaced in March of 1968 by Angolan War of Independence veteran General Antonio de Spinola, the PAIGC’s most deadly enemy. Spinola abandoned the garrison strategy of his predecessor and implemented a set of five strategies. First, he created dissent within the PAIGC by luring away the Cape Verdean elite leadership, thus splitting Guinea-Bissau from Cape Verde. Second, he attacked and destroyed the infrastructure created by the PAIGC (schools, hospitals, infirmaries, agricultural programs, and civil defense posts). Third, he recruited to the Portuguese army Fulani and anti-PAIGC elements and released political prisoners as long as they promised to work with the Portuguese. Fourth, he made inroads into Guinean territory with dissidents attempting to overthrow Sekou Toure’s government and attacked the insurrectionists’ bases and homes, even if that involved killing the leaders. Fifth, he gathered an elite, brutal force of 800 commandos called cacadores (hunters) to fly helicopter missions and destroy every enemy in sight.

Thus the operation began in earnest, and in 1970, the Portuguese army and Guinean dissidents invaded former French Guinea. Although Sekou Toure was not assassinated, the Portuguese commandos succeeded in freeing some Portuguese prisoners held by the PAIGC. Again, it looked as if the PAIGC would disband. However, the tenacity of Cabral and the securing of more ground-to-air antiaircraft missiles devastated Spinola’s strategy, which, in four months, is said to have lost eighteen pilots. By 1972, Portugal had suffered 8,000 casualties.

That year, the United Nations sent a fact-finding mission to Guinea, to which the Portuguese responded with more bombing, using the highly sophisticated arsenal of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In a brilliant diplomatic move, however, the PAIGC held a secret ballot for a national assembly in the interior of Guinea-Bissau. The assembly declared the colony independent in September and thereafter gained observer status at the United Nations. However, Amilcar Cabral had been assassinated by Portuguese agents in Conakry on January 20, 1973, and replaced by his half brother, Luis Cabral. Still, by the end of September, some seventy-five countries had recognized the independence of Guinea-Bissau, forcing Lisbon to recall Spinola that same month. Spinola was nevertheless received as a hero in Portugal and decorated with the highest military honor, the Torre e Espada (Tower and Sword). Following the April 25, 1974, bloodless overthrow of Premier Marcello Caetano’s government in Lisbon engineered by young officers of the armed forces, Spinola was installed as president of Portugal. Somewhat reluctantly, Spinola went on to dismantle the colonial empire by announcing a cease-fire in May, 1974. The cease-fire was followed by the withdrawal of the Portuguese troops and Portugal’s recognition of Guinea-Bissau’s independence on September 10, 1974. In October, the PAIGC occupied the city of Bissau, with Luis Cabral as the president of the new republic. Thus ended a true “people’s war,” as the Guinea-Bissau struggle for independence has been called.

Aftermath

Guinea-Bissau became a single-party state immediately, and Cape Verde achieved its own independence on July 5, 1975. As a result of the resentful backlash caused by the preeminence of Cape Verdean leadership in the country, Joao “Nino” Vieira overthrew Luis Cabral in November, 1980. In 1981, Cape Verde withdrew from the PAIGC altogether. An attempt by the army led by Ansumane Mane to oust Vieira in June, 1998, and the subsequent involvement of some 1,300 Senegalese and 400 Guinean troops in support of the government, threw Guinea-Bissau into chaos. Consequently, even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, peace had not returned to the former Portuguese colony.

Bibliography

Chabal, P. Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War. African Studies Series 37. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Dhada, Mustapha. Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Set Free. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991.

Forrest, Joshua B. Guinea-Bissau: Power, Conflict, and Renewal in a West African Nation. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992.

Lopes, Carlos. Guinea-Bissau: From Liberation Struggle to Independent Statehood. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987.

Mendy, Lobban, Jr. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.