Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War

Abstract

The Portuguese Guinea Liberation War is is a major episode in twentieth-century decolonization, as Portugual’s defeat ultimately led to their abrupt withdrawal from their African colonies in 1974. Yet current accounts of the war, both popular and scholarly, tend to be distorted by gender bias: they usually focus on the charisma of male leaders and on male-dominated high politics and ideology, and they rarely ask how women contributed to independence. In They Did Not Share the Pie: War, Peace, and Womanhood in a Decolonizing Guinea Bissau, Aliou Ly offers a much needed corrective. He does so not only through deep archival research, but also by documenting an entirely new oral history drawn from extensive interviews with women who participated in the war as spies, guerrilla fighters, and weapons transporters. Ly shows that women played major roles in winning the war, this largely because their motives for participating were often uniquely concrete: unlike most male participants, for example, many women joined the struggle in order to help fight for their families’ food security. Ly also shows, however, that women faced discrimination both during the war and immediately afterwards. They had to fight internally to be able to engage in active combat, and they returned to home to find that they were expected to take a back seat in the post-independence era—as one woman puts it, “Instead of sharing the pie with us, they gave us a slice of the pie.” Ultimately, Ly shows, the legacy of this injustice feeds into distortions in contemporary narratives of the war. His accounts of the motives and experiences of female freedom fighters add new, urgent dimensions not only to these narratives, but also to received understandings of anticolonial struggle more broadly. For its major intervention into the gendered nature of current debates around a major episode in twentieth-century African independence struggles, this book is essential reading for students and researchers interested in modern African history, African feminisms, and African gender studies. It is also of keen interest to anyone interested in the relations between gender and anticolonialism.