A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through
self-liberation
"For us,"
said Amilcar Cabral, "freedom is an act of culture"--and
these were not just words. Guided by the concrete realities of his
people, Cabral called for a process of "re-Africanization,"
a return to the source.
As a new imperialism has taken hold the world over, many have
hearkened back to Return to the Source, but this time, our
source of inspiration is Cabral himself. With a system of thought
rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking
revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a
dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world's most
profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of
anti-imperialist struggle. Cabral and his fellow Pan-African movement
leaders catalyzed and fortified a militant wave of liberation
struggles beginning in Angola, moving through Cabral's homelands of
Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and culminating in Mozambique and
beyond. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in
under just ten years steered the liberation of three-quarters of the
countryside of Guinea Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination.
In this new,
expanded edition of Return to the Source: Selected Texts of
Amilcar Cabral we have access to Cabral's warm and humorous informal
address to the Africa Information Service, and we revisit several of
the principal speeches Cabral delivered during visits to the United
States in the final years before his assassination in 1973, including
his last written address to his people on New Year's Eve. Return
to the Source is essential reading for all who understand that
the erasure of historical continuity between social movements has
disrupted our ability to make the revolutionary transformation we all
desperately require.