Return to the Source

A short collection of speeches by the agronomist and leader of the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, published in 1973, the year he was assassinated. Its central text, “National Liberation and Culture”, a 1970 lecture, argues that culture is the seed of resistance: colonial rule tries to suppress a people's culture because culture keeps their history alive, and so national liberation is necessarily an act of culture. Cabral explains the phrase return to the source. Educated Africans cut off from their people by colonial schooling may try to recover their roots, but this return matters only if it leads them to join the struggle of the masses. In “Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle” he treats identity as something formed in history, not fixed by race. The book also contains his 1972 address to a United Nations committee and an informal talk with Black Americans in New York.

It gives a brief and lucid theory of culture as a force in liberation, and remains influential in debates on decolonisation, identity and the role of intellectuals.