Amílcar Cabral’s life as a Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial revolutionary still inspires

Kim Yi Dionne over at the WaPo’s The Monkey Cage:

[Peter] Mendy wrote “Amílcar Cabral” [Amílcar Cabral: Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary] because he was inspired by him. Reading, I was also inspired, in many different ways. Most inspiring, of course, was Cabral’s commitment to and solidarity with “every just cause” in the world. Cabral connected the anti-colonial struggle in Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau not just to other independence movements in Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique but also to the Vietnam War and Palestinian statehood.

How Cabral pursued his everyday life and career was also inspiring. As an academic, I am impressed by the sheer volume of his published research as an agronomist. As Mendy writes, “within a decade of his first publication on rainfall in Cabo Verde in 1949, his published writings on agronomy and agriculture totaled about sixty works.” Keep in mind that Cabral researched, wrote and published his scholarly work as he was starting a family and sowing the seeds of his revolution for independence across what was then Portuguese Africa.

More here.