[News] How Africa’s National Liberation Struggles Brought Democracy to Europe

Thu Apr 25 10:30:39 EDT 2024

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*How Africa’s National Liberation Struggles Brought Democracy to Europe: 
The Seventeenth Newsletter (2024)*

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), /A Poesia Está Na Rua I 
/[Poetry Is out on the Street I], 1974.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the 
streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the 
fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally 
established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira 
Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the 
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 
1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 
1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The 
United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano 
governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities.

Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and 
Freedom 
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which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. 
During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student 
activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be 
tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The 
ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories 
preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took 
the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the 
secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos 
Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro 
Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her 
husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior 
Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship 
responded 
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‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant 
communist’.

John Green (England), /Peasants in Beja Demanding Agrarian Reform/, 1974.

It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the 
revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave 
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of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in 
Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and 
Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass 
workers’ strike in Marinha Grande.

Around this time, the dictator Caetano read /Portugal and the Future/ 
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written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of 
the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a 
military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor 
in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its 
colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on 
Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote 
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that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, 
which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’.

What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers 
(who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in 
April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which 
– despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell 
the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, 
Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African 
Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC 
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Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement 
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s 
army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. 
Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East 
Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that 
they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues 
at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented 
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Mário Macilau (Mozambique), /Bending Reality: Untitled (2)/, from The 
Profit Corner series, 2016.

On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in 
Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA 
approved its programme /Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation/, 
drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution 
erupted in April, Antunes explained 
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‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass 
movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When 
I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact 
that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the 
Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the 
soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than 
captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come.

In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 
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the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism 
in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the 
Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired 
on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing 
over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), 
the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of 
national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district 
administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many 
people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do 
Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere 
between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the 
Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement 
for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle 
on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up 
guns.

Nefwani Junior (Angola), /É Urgente (Voltar) /[It’s Urgent (to 
Return)], 2021.

Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, 
and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called 
‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against 
Portuguese colonialism:

    It was then that in eyes on fire
    now with blood, now with life, now with death,
    we buried our dead victoriously
    and on the graves recognised
    the reason for these men’s sacrifice
    for love,
    and for harmony,
    and for our freedom
    even while facing death, through the force of time
    in blood-stained waters
    even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory

    Within us
    the green land of São Tomé
    will also be the island of love.

That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia 
to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a 
forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called 
Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it 
was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out 
red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the 
revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the 
carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. 
Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. 
On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she 
put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and 
the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red 
carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 
revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers 
against guns.

Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of 
people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It 
inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks 
of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola 
(April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 
1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not 
men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were 
eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo 
colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa.

Bertina Lopes (Mozambique), /Omenagem a Amílcar Cabral /[Tribute to 
Amílcar Cabral], 1973.

Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this 
September and who did more than many to build the African formations 
against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of 
Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in 
Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old 
regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself 
would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, 
Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The 
main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said 
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is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against 
ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a 
battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the 
poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our 
complex cultural formations.

Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won 
independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo 
colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the 
end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger 
today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to 
his speeches, /a luta continua/. The struggle continues.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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