Amílcar Lopes Cabral (Portuguese pronunciation: [ɐˈmilkaɾ ˈlɔpɨʃ kɐˈbɾal]; 12 September 1924(1924-09-12) – 20 January 1973) was an Guinea-Bissaunian agronomic engineer, writer, Marxist and nationalist guerrilla and politician. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led African nationalist movements in Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands and led Guinea-Bissau's independence movement. He was assassinated in 1973 by Guinea-native agents of the Portuguese colonial authorities, just months before Guinea-Bissau declared unilateral independence.

Early years

He was born on September 12, 1924 in Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea, son of a Cape Verdean father and Guinean mother. Cabral was educated at a licéu in Cape Verde and later in Lisbon (the capital of Portugal which was the colonial power that ruled over Portuguese Guinea) at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia. While an agronomy student in Lisbon he founded student movements dedicated to African liberation.

He returned to Africa in the 1950s, and was instrumental in forming a number of independence movements on the continent. He was founder (in 1956) of the PAIGC or Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (Portuguese for African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) as well as the Movimento Popular Libertação de Angola (MPLA) (later in the same year), the later with Agostinho Neto whom he met in Portugal.

War for independence

Beginning in 1963, Cabral led the PAIGC in a guerrilla movement which evolved into a military conflict against the Portuguese ruling authorities of Portuguese Guinea. The goal of the conflict was to attain independence for both Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. Over the course of the conflict, as the group captured territory from the Portuguese, Cabral was made the de facto leader of a large portion of Guinea-Bissau.

Even before the war for liberation began, Cabral set up training camps in neighboring Ghana with the permission of Kwame Nkrumah. Cabral trained his lieutenants through rigorous mock conversations to talk with their tribal chiefs and convince them to support the PAIGC and the independence movement before he trained them in military tactics. Later in the war, Cabral found that members of the PAIGC who successfully converted their own tribe to the cause of the PAIGC would not leave to help convince and gather the support of other tribes, he instituted a rotation program where his trainees would no longer be sent to their home tribe.

As an agronomist, he realized that his troops needed to be fed and live off the land alongside the larger populace. He taught his troops to teach local crop growers better farming techniques, thus raising the productivity of the farms to feed their own family and tribe, as well as the soldiers in the military wing of the PAIGC. During down time, PAIGC soldiers would till and plow the fields alongside the local population.

Cabral and the PAIGC also set up a trade-and-barter bazaar system that moved around the country and made staple goods available to the countryside at prices lower than that of colonial store owners. During the war, Cabral also set up a roving hospital and triage station to give medical care to wounded PAIGC's soldiers and quality-of-life care to the larger populace, relying on medical supplies garnered from the USSR and Sweden. The bazaars and triage stations were at first stationary until they came under frequent attack from Portuguese forces.

In 1972, Cabral began to form a People's Assembly in preparation for an independent African nation, but disgruntled former rival Inocêncio Kani shot and killed him with the help of Portuguese agents operating within the PAIGC. The Portuguese enjoined the help of this former rival to bring Amílcar Cabral to meet Portuguese authorities to sign a document stating the independence of Guinea-Bissau. The assassination took place on 20 January 1973 in Conakry, Guinea. His half-brother, Luís Cabral, became the leader of the Guinea-Bissau branch of the party and would eventually become President of Guinea-Bissau.