The victorious struggle for national liberation of the peoples of the former Portuguese colonies

By Carlos Lopes Pereira
July 18, 2025

The author, a former member of the Secretariat of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), writes about African events for Avante!, the newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party. This article was published in July in O Militante. Translation: John Catalinotto.

July 7, 2025 — Almost half a century ago, four of the five African colonies under Portuguese rule — Mozambique, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola — proclaimed their independence in 1975. But the national liberation struggle of the Mozambican, Cabo Verdean, Santomean and Angolan peoples began earlier. And it is not over yet. …

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the independence proclaimed in 1975 by Mozambique (June 25), Cabo Verde (July 5), São Tomé and Príncipe (July 12) and Angola (Nov. 11). The other former African colony under Portuguese rule, Guinea, celebrated 50 years of independence earlier, as the Republic of Guinea-Bissau was born on Sept. 24, 1973, proclaimed unilaterally while still in the midst of an armed struggle for national liberation from Portuguese colonialism.

The emergence of these new African states has its roots in the centuries-old struggles for emancipation of their peoples, who were oppressed, exploited and humiliated but always resisted foreign domination. This resistance, since the days of slavery and the slave trade and later forced labor, took various forms, including armed struggle. In Guinea, Angola and Mozambique, the “wars of pacification” — in reality, the subjugation of African peoples to colonialist countries, which had been decided [by European imperialist states] at the Berlin Conference (1884-85) — only ended in the early 20th century.

In the following decades, multifaceted opposition to the occupiers intensified and “proto-nationalist” ideals spread and consolidated, either through revolts, demonstrations and strikes or around “nativist” groups (such as the African National League), cultural movements, magazines (such as A Mensagem [The Message] in Angola) and newspapers (such as A Voz de Cabo Verde [The Voice of Cabo Verde] in Praia, the capital, and Brado Africano [African Call] in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique) and even some attempts — generally brutally repressed — to form trade unions or simple recreational associations.

Starting from the end of World War II, with the emergence of an international situation that favored the struggle to liberate oppressed peoples, organized resistance against foreign domination intensified in countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The defeat of Nazi-fascism, the growing prestige of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its banners of liberation for oppressed peoples, the independence of Indonesia and India, the creation of the People’s Republic of China, then later the beginning of the armed insurrection in Algeria, the Bandung Conference [1956], the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese in Indochina, the victorious Cuban Revolution [1959] — all this favored emancipatory ideals in the then-Portuguese colonies in Africa.

Educated in Portugal

In the second half of the 1940s, young people from Cabo Verde, Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique came to Portugal to pursue higher education — at that time, there were no universities in the Portuguese colonies. Amílcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Agostinho Neto, Mário de Andrade and Lúcio Lara from Angola, Francisco Tenreiro and Alda Espírito Santo from São Tomé, Vasco Cabral from Guinea-Bissau, Marcelino dos Santos and [writer and poet] Noémia de Sousa from Mozambique were, among others, some of these students who became involved.

These future leaders distinguished themselves, while still in the colonial metropolis, in anti-fascist and anti-colonialist activities. Later, in their countries of origin, they continued in the national liberation struggles and, after independence, in the governance of the new states.

Between 1945 and 1960, while they lived in Portugal, these young people studied and fought side by side with other Portuguese and African comrades. They participated in student associations, such as the Casa dos Estudantes do Império [House of Students of the Empire] — a hotbed of nationalist leaders who were patriotic to their peoples in Africa. Some of them were in the clandestine structures of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), in the peace movement and in democratic organizations such as the Youth Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), which fought against the Portuguese fascist-colonialist dictatorship.

At the same time, they maintained links with patriots in the colonies. In 1954, they even founded an African Maritime Club in Lisbon, where students, sailors and other workers socialized and exchanged news and information.

For some young Africans living in the metropolis of the Portuguese colonial empire, those years were “times of learning” about the anti-fascist and anti-colonialist struggle, reading Marxist classics, studying the history and culture of their peoples (they created a Center for African Studies in 1951), the “re-Africanization of spirits” and a deeper understanding of the victorious emancipation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These were times when they also committed themselves to launching the organized struggle for national liberation in their homelands, then under Portuguese rule.

The liberation movements of the former Portuguese colonies

In 1956, Amílcar Cabral, who had completed his university studies in Lisbon and spent two years in Guinea-Bissau as an agricultural engineer, was working in Portugal and Angola and traveling extensively between Lisbon and Luanda, the two capitals. During a visit to Bissau in September, he secretly founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) with other Guinean and Cabo Verdean patriots.

Later that year, in December, Angolan patriots in Luanda unified several small organizations to form the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

From early on, Angolan, Guinean, Cabo Verdean, Mozambican and Santomean nationalist patriots advocated unity of action against Portuguese colonialism, their common enemy. In the 1950s in Lisbon, they had formed the Democratic Movement of Portuguese Colonies and, later, the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples of Portuguese Colonies. Both these organizations lasted only a short time.

In 1957, through the combined efforts of the MPLA, the PAIGC and nationalists from Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, the Anti-Colonialist Movement (MAC) was born following a “consultation and study meeting for the development of the struggle against Portuguese colonialism” held in Paris. The aim of the leaders was always to improve the coordination of the common struggle against Portuguese colonialism. To do this, they dissolved the MAC in January 1960 at the Second Conference of African Peoples in Tunis and replaced it with the African Revolutionary Front for National Independence (FRAIN).

In April 1961 in Casablanca, [Morocco], on the initiative of Amílcar Cabral, Mário de Andrade and Marcelino dos Santos, and with the support of Morocco, the CONCP (Conference of Nationalist Organizations of Portuguese Colonies) was created, replacing the FRAIN, still with the aim of coordinating and uniting forces against the common enemy, Portuguese colonialism.

The CLSTP (Committee for the Liberation of São Tomé e Príncipe), founded in 1960 in exile, also joined the CONCP. Later, in 1972, it changed its name to MLSTP (Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé e Príncipe). The CONCP remained active until the independence of Angola in 1975. It had fulfilled its mission.

Meanwhile, in the early days of 1960, Amílcar Cabral had left Portugal and, with other patriots, had set up the PAIGC’s general secretariat in Conakry [capital of Guinea, a French colony before 1958]. The MPLA leadership abroad also settled for a time in the capital of the newly independent Republic of Guinea, led by the Guinean Democratic Party (PDG) of President Ahmed Sékou Touré.

At that time, in Guinea and Senegal, within the Guinean and Cabo Verdean immigrant communities, other small nationalist groups emerged, which the PAIGC managed to integrate into its ranks, in a policy of encouraging unity. From the early 1960s onwards, Amílcar Cabral’s party thus became the only national liberation movement to lead and develop the political and, later, armed struggle of the Guinean and Cabo Verdean peoples.

Extensive struggle in Angola

In Angola, alongside the MPLA, the UPNA (Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola), later UPA (Union of the Peoples of Angola) — of a tribalist and racist nature — and then the FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola), led by Holden Roberto and supported by Zaire [since 1997 called the Democratic Republic of Congo] and U.S. imperialism; and, in 1966, UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), led by Jonas Savimbi and supported by the United States of America, were formed.

Until independence, and afterwards on the ground, the FNLA and UNITA fought mainly against the MPLA in collusion with the Portuguese colonial army. After April 1974, they allied themselves with apartheid South Africa against the People’s Republic of Angola.

With regard to Angola, it is important to note that Agostinho Neto, the great figure of Angolan nationalism, was persecuted with particular ferocity by Portuguese fascism. A medical student in Portugal, first in the [university] city of Coimbra and then in Lisbon, Neto became involved with other students and participated with progressive forces in the struggle against the fascist-colonialist dictatorship. He was arrested by the PIDE [secret political police under fascism] in 1952 and accused of links to the PCP.

Neto’s second arrest took place between 1955 and 1957, and he was held in the prisons of Caxias and Aljube before being transferred to the PIDE jail in Porto. He was tried, along with around 50 other Portuguese democrats, at the Plenary Criminal Court of Porto for “subversive activities of a communist nature.”

Already a doctor, Neto returned to Angola but was arrested in Luanda in 1960 and transferred with his family to Lisbon. Deported to Cabo Verde, it was there, on the island of Santo Antão, in 1961, that he learned of the uprising in Baixa de Cassanje in January and of Feb. 4 in Luanda, which marked the beginning of the armed struggle for national liberation in Angola. Returning to Lisbon, he was arrested again in Aljube and then placed under house arrest in Lisbon.

A few months later, in July 1962, in a daring secret operation organized by the Portuguese Communist Party in coordination with the MPLA, Agostinho Neto and his family, together with Vasco Cabral, a Guinean patriot also persecuted by the PIDE (which accused Cabral of being a member of the PCP), escaped from Portugal.

After successfully leaving Portugal — aboard a small boat on a risky journey between Lisbon and Tangier, [Morocco] — Neto returned to Africa and Angola and resumed his position at the head of the MPLA. On Nov. 11, 1975, in Luanda, he proclaimed the independence of the People’s Republic of Angola, becoming the first president of the young state.

In Mozambique, the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was created in 1962 as a result of the merger of three organizations, including UDENAMO, where Marcelino dos Santos, the main architect of this unity, was active. Eduardo Mondlane was the first president of FRELIMO, the only movement that fought Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique with arms. Mondlane was assassinated in 1969 by the PIDE. Later Samora Machel replaced Mondlane and led the armed struggle for independence. Starting from June 1975, Machel became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. He died in 1986 in a plane crash, most likely carried out by agents of the South African apartheid regime.

The struggles for independence and the inability of the fascist dictatorship to counter them

In late 1960, following the example of the MPLA, the PAIGC sent a memorandum to the fascist and colonialist government of Portugal proposing a peaceful, negotiated solution for the independence of the colonies under Portuguese rule.

Amílcar Cabral wrote in a Nov. 15, 1960, letter: “The path by which the total liquidation of Portuguese colonialism in Guinea and Cabo Verde will be achieved depends exclusively on the Portuguese government. However, our peoples and our Party, which are prepared and increasingly preparing themselves to face the worst, consider it their duty to remind the Portuguese government that it is not yet too late to proceed with the peaceful liquidation of Portuguese colonial rule in our lands. Unless the Portuguese government wants to drag the people of Portugal into the disaster of a colonial war in Guinea and Cabo Verde.” It was signed by Cabral and other PAIGC leaders.

Less than a year later, in October 1961, the nationalist patriots of Guinea and Cabo Verde sent another “open letter” from the PAIGC to the government in Lisbon, in a last attempt to achieve “the peaceful settlement of colonial rule in our African homelands.” In vain: [Portugal’s fascist Prime Minister António de Oliveira] Salazar failed to respond and chose instead to launch the Portuguese people and the peoples of the colonies into a war that would last 13 years, leaving thousands dead and wounded and causing enormous damage to all parties involved.

It is estimated that 800,000 young Portuguese men participated in the colonial war on three fronts. Around 10,000 Portuguese soldiers died, and around 100,000 were wounded. More than 200,000 young people refused to do compulsory military service, becoming deserters or draft resisters. [The total population of European Portuguese origin was less than 10 million at the time.]

The casualties among Angolan, Guinean and Mozambican guerrillas and civilians are difficult to calculate.

Faced with the intransigence of the dictatorship and with no alternative but to respond to oppressive colonialist violence with the liberating violence of the oppressed, the MPLA launched the armed struggle for national liberation on Feb. 4, 1961, in Angola; the PAIGC in 1963, in Guinea; and FRELIMO in 1964, in Mozambique.

The war of emancipation advanced on all three fronts and, although at the cost of enormous sacrifices by the African peoples, the situation evolved favorably for the liberation movements. In Cabo Verde, the PAIGC, and in São Tomé and Príncipe, the MLSTP, also developed the struggle on the political front, mobilizing the peoples of the islands for the goals of national independence.

Support of socialist countries

With the support of socialist countries — mainly the USSR, Cuba and China — and progressive African countries, after 13 years of war the PAIGC, the MPLA and FRELIMO were victorious. They had defeated the Portuguese colonial army, which was financed and armed by NATO countries (the U.S., Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, etc.) and by the racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.

And the liberation fighters won despite the crimes committed by the colonialists against the African peoples — crimes which included, among many others, the barbaric assassinations of Eduardo Mondlane in 1969 and Amílcar Cabral in 1973; the massacres of civilian populations such as that of Batepá, in São Tomé, in 1953; the massacre in Pidjiguiti, Guinea-Bissau, in 1959; the massacre in Mueda, Mozambique, in 1960; and the massacre in Baixa do Cassanje, Angola, in 1961; the aggression against neighboring countries of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique; the indiscriminate attacks on villages and their agricultural fields; the mass arrests and torture of African patriots (sent to Ilha das Galinhas, in Guinea-Bissau; to Tarrafal, in Cabo Verde; to Machava, in Mozambique; to São Nicolau, in Angola, among other prisons of colonialism).

The political and military victories of the Guinean, Cabo Verdean, Angolan and Mozambican guerrillas, especially the proclamation of independence of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau in the liberated areas of Boé in September 1973, while the armed struggle for national liberation was still in full swing, accelerated the end of the conflict.

The progressive sector of the Portuguese Armed Forces — realizing that the colonial war was lost from a military point of view — carried out the uprising of April 25, 1974. The uprising soon turned into a revolution through popular intervention and paved the way for Portugal’s recognition, in September 1974, of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau and in 1975, the independence of Mozambique, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola, although in this last case there was great and lengthy resistance from the conservative and neocolonialist forces in power. This happened 50 years ago.

The goals of the struggle still to be accomplished

Since the early 1960s, the national liberation movements of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa clearly defined the aims of their struggle for emancipation beyond the achievement of independence.

In 1965, at the Second CONCP meeting in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania, Amílcar Cabral, speaking on behalf of the PAIGC, MPLA and FRELIMO, referred to the objectives of the struggle, reaffirming: “(…) We are not simply fighting to put a flag on our country and to have an anthem. We, the CONCP, want our countries, which have been martyred for centuries, humiliated and insulted, to never again be ruled by insult, and we never want our peoples to be exploited, not only by imperialists, not only by Europeans, not only by white people, because we do not confuse exploitation or the factors of exploitation with the color of people’s skin; we no longer want exploitation in our country, even if it is carried out by black people.”

And, speaking of the future, he insisted that they were fighting to build, in their countries — in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe — “a life of happiness, a life where every person will respect all people, where discipline will not be imposed, where there will be work for everyone, where wages will be fair, where everyone will have the right to everything that workers have built and created for the happiness of humanity. That is what we are fighting for.” He warned that “if we do not succeed, we will have failed in our duties and will not have achieved the goal of our struggle.”

The assessment of 50 years of independence in Mozambique, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola, as well as in Guinea-Bissau, will naturally be made in a sovereign manner by the people of each of these African countries and their respective political, economic and social organizations. But it is clear that, despite the immense problems left behind by colonialism — illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, difficulties in health and education, in water and electricity supply, in decent housing, in transportation — despite the wars, the stranglehold of debt, corruption, despite all this, and contrary to what those nostalgic for fascism and colonialism would have us believe, independence was an irreversible historical advance, an accelerator of development that benefited millions of people.

It should also be emphasized that, while it is true that in this half-century (1975-2025) the greater goal of building societies without exploitation has not been achieved in the new African states, the former Portuguese colonies, it is no less true that the independence of Mozambique and Angola was fundamental to the historic transformations that took place in southern Africa during that period.

With the solidarity of the Mozambican and Angolan peoples — and with the internationalist aid of Cuba — Zimbabwe, in 1980, and Namibia, in 1990, became independent. Meanwhile, in 1988, the historic military victory of Angolan and Cuban forces over South African and UNITA forces in Cuito Cuanavale, [Angola], paved the way for the liberation of Nelson Mandela (1990) and the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, culminating in the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994.

Even today, in much of southern Africa, the parties of independence and victory over racist regimes remain in power — in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Tanzania — despite the efforts of imperialism to undermine and weaken this progressive front.

★★★

“Sweep All Manifestations of Imperialism from the Face of Africa”
1965 Speech of Amilcar Cabral follows:

(…) We want to tell you that, with regard to Africa, we at CONCP are confident in Africa’s destiny. We have examples to follow in Africa itself, and we also have examples in Africa that we must not follow. Africa is therefore rich in examples today, and if tomorrow we betray the interests of our peoples, it will not be because we did not know better; it will be because we wanted to betray them, and we will then have no excuse.

In Africa, we are for the total liberation of the African continent from the colonial yoke, because we know that colonialism is an instrument of imperialism. We therefore want to see all manifestations of imperialism completely swept from the soil of Africa. We in the CONCP are uncompromisingly opposed to neocolonialism in whatever form it takes. Our struggle is not only against Portuguese colonialism; we want, as part of our struggle, to contribute in the most effective way possible to expelling foreign domination from our continent forever.

In Africa, we are fighting for African unity, but for African unity in favor of the African peoples. We consider unity to be a means and not an end. Unity can strengthen and accelerate the achievement of ends, but we must not betray the goal in sight. That is why we are not in a hurry to demand African unity. We know that it will emerge step by step, as a result of the fruitful efforts of the African peoples. It will emerge in the service of Africa, in the service of humanity.

We are convinced, absolutely convinced, in the CONCP, that the joint development of our continent’s wealth and human, moral and cultural capacities will contribute to creating a rich, considerably rich human space, which in turn will contribute to further enriching humanity. But we do not want the dream of this goal to betray the interests of each African people in its realization.

We, for example, in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, declare openly in our party program that we are ready to unite with any African country, and we set only one condition for this: that the achievements and gains of our people in the national liberation struggle — the economic, social and justice gains that we seek and are already achieving, little by little — that all this is not compromised by unity with other peoples. This is our only condition for unity.

We in Africa are in favor of an African policy that seeks first and foremost to defend the interests of the African peoples, of each African country, but also in favor of a policy that never forgets the interests of the world, of all humanity. We are in favor of a policy of peace in Africa and fraternal collaboration with all the peoples of the world. …

[Excerpt from the speech given by Amílcar Cabral on October 5, 1965, at the plenary session of the Second Conference of Nationalist Organizations of Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) in Dar es Salaam, Senegal.]