From rupture to revolution: race, culture and the practice of anti-colonial thought

Abstract

This article considers the development of the political thought of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements, and their engagement with negritude. Some of the leading figures of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe were deeply engaged in poetry and literature, and during the 1950s and the 1960s some of them participated directly in some of the contexts of and debates over negritude. The article explores how the problems of race and culture in the struggles against colonialism came to be addressed and formulated in specific ways by and in the context of the lusophone African anti-colonial struggles which went beyond the limitations of negritude. It was the necessity of actual war and challenges of prolonged, popular armed struggle against the intransigent brutality of Portuguese colonial fascism which required a more revolutionary reformulation of the questions of race and culture in the struggle for independence.