TAKING AMILCAR TO THE WORKPLACE

The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Milan Kundera, Czech writer

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) was a Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary and independence hero who founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1956, which spearheaded the anti-colonial rebellion in Portuguese Guinea (today Guinea Bissau) that lasted a decade. Unfortunately, Cabral was assassinated in early 1973, eight months before Guinea Bissau declared independence from Portugal.

Cabral was many things, as his own writings and those about him reveal, including an agronomist, revolutionary theoretician, philosopher, poet and diplomat. He is often compared with other notable 20^th century revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. What distinguished Cabral as a revolutionary was his emphasis on painstaking political preparation, both in theory and in praxis, before launching armed struggle.

His influence in Africa spread far beyond Guinea Bissau, notably inspiring and assisting contemporaries like Agostinho Neto (1922-1979) and Eduardo Mondlane (1920-1969) to found the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1956 and the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) in 1962 respectively, which like PAIGC engaged in armed struggle against colonial rule in Portuguese West Africa (today Angola) and Portuguese East Africa (today Mozambique) respectively.

Cabral, however, is not well known today outside West African, Lusophone and postcolonial African studies’ spheres. Today in Guinea Bissau, his remains are interred in a mausoleum in the military headquarters in Bissau. Access is highly restricted: would-be visitors have to apply in writing to the military; upon approval they are given a specific date and time for their visit, and are required to carry flowers that must be bought from a particular shop next to the headquarters at an exorbitant price; upon entry they are escorted by armed military personnel to the mausoleum to place the flowers and quickly pay their respects before leaving promptly. Cabral’s mausoleum cannot be freely visited at any time due to ‘security reasons’, according to the military.

Guinea Bissau’s government is deliberately preventing its citizens from remembering Cabral. In Africa this erasure of past heroes from official memory is not unique to Guinea Bissau, but common in other countries, for instance the Democratic Republic of Congo (Patrice Lumumba), Burkina Faso (Thomas Sankara, until very recently), Zimbabwe (Joshua Nkomo), Cameroon (Ruben Um Yobe) and Nigeria (Ken Saro-Wiwa).

Africans have made use of multiple ways of remembering their heroes: oral tradition (folklore, poetry), music, dance, the written word, art exhibitions, audio and video recordings, monuments, places and things named after them, and memorial events. How do they remember those who their governments make effort to forget?

Memory and action become acts of resistance against state amnesia. For this resistance to have staying power it must go beyond conventional periodic remembrances like annual memorial lectures and commemorations, compilations of famous quotes, and listening to recordings of past speeches on the Internet, to putting into daily practice the principles that these people lived and died by. Majority of African adults spend most of their time at work, thus the workplace is the best location for praxis of this resistance. In the case of Amilcar Cabral, how can Guinea Bissauans and Cape Verdeans resist state-sanctioned forgetting of their son?

Honesty: telling no lies

Cheating is common in the workplace. Employees cheat in many ways, including stealing money from the company coffers and stock from the shelves, and engaging in personal business during office hours. Employers cheat by withholding wages, failing to reveal to their employees the true state of their organization’s finances, and often making critical decisions without adequate consultation especially with those who will be most affected.

The first part of Cabral’s most famous exhortation stresses the importance of truth. It is from a speech titled The Weapon of Theory which he gave at an Afro-Asiatic-Latino conference in Cuba in January 1966. He was addressing leaders of revolutionary movements represented. The immediate context was leaders being honest with their comrades and with the masses during revolution. Today this applies also to the workplace. Dishonesty hurts both the employer and the employee, negatively impacting the bottom line of the organization. It is in all their interests to be honest.

Eschewing short cuts: claiming no easy victories

When carrying out any task at work, the temptation to take the path of least resistance is always strong. Hard economic times encourage cost-cutting in the corporate world, even to the detriment of product quality and safety standards. An example is using substandard materials and/or techniques in the public sector construction industry in Africa. Roads and buildings may be built in record time by governments to impress the electorate that the promise of development is being fulfilled, but if not done right (and this takes time) they wear out quickly and collapse respectively, jeopardizing the lives of end users.

The second part of Cabral’s most famous exhortation warns against getting to the finish line quickly by any means necessary, even unscrupulous ones, so as to have an excuse to pat oneself on the back. Instead, work should be done in the best way possible, with the best tools and techniques, with diligence and thoroughness, and following things through to the end.

Continuous self-improvement: the struggle against internal weaknesses

Competition in any industry drives organizational efforts to improve products and internal processes. Beating the competition to become the market leader is the measure of corporate success. Similarly, the importance of ‘getting ahead in life’ drives many people to improve themselves by increasing their academic credentials and learning new skills, as these broaden their horizons especially with regard to financial opportunities. Getting rich and climbing the corporate ladder are measures of personal success. But is success only about being better than rivals and competitors?

In a 1969 article about the importance of the anti-colonial movement being led by the best sons and daughters of Guinea Bissau, Cabral wrote that: “Struggle is daily action against ourselves and against the enemy.” To his readers, he meant that it was not only the Portuguese colonialist enemy that needed to be subdued, but also the parts of the self that were holding back achievement of the objective of liberation. Today, the same can be said of the workplace.

Continuous self-improvement should go beyond being better than others to also being a better self. This involves identifying personal and organizational weaknesses and mitigating them. For individual employees it could be punctuality issues, being easily distracted, lack of personal discipline, addiction to drugs or alcohol, etc. For organizations it could be wastage, unnecessary expenditure, wrong marketing strategy, bad corporate image or brand, misguided risk taking, etc. In reality, the bigger hurdle to advancement is often not external competitors but internal weaknesses.

Overcoming resistance to positive change: our people are our mountains

Change upsets and alters the status quo, making people respond differently to familiar circumstances. In the workplace, this usually involves performing the same tasks differently, adjusting targets and redirecting efforts. This naturally causes discomfort that breeds fear which becomes a stumbling block to the change. If the change goes against a person’s self-interest or requires him to learn something new, it is resisted more.

A good example is the introduction of various technologies in the workplace, like computers, e-mail, the Internet, mobile money transfers, online banking and social media. Workers have had to change how they communicate, send and receive money, seek and store information they need, and so on. Most times, such changes in an organization are initiated from its leadership, with the rank and file following the example of the leaders so that at all levels the changes are speedily actualized in the day to day operations. Resistance to change is manifested at the individual level before the collective level. Consequently, it is in the individual that it is first overcome.

In ‘Our People Are Our Mountains’, a 1972 reflection on how far the Guinea Bissauan revolution had gone, Cabral noted that the successes and failures of the revolution thus far were caused by the individual and collective actions of all the people who took part. Moreover, the obstacles that prevented them from getting to where they wished to go, and becoming who they wished to be, were not external but within them. Today at work, we ought to pay as much attention to ourselves as to our environments, as very often we are our own mountains standing in the way of what we desire to achieve.

Unity of purpose: class suicide

Typically, organizations have unambiguous articulations of their visions, missions and core values. These state clearly their long-term and short-term goals, and their ethos of achieving them. All employees of an organization are expected to play their part to make these things a reality in their day to day activities. In theory, this should not be too difficult, as it is what is signed up for. But often in practice, self-interest gets in the way of this, causing them to pull in different directions.

As individuals they develop their own personal objectives which may be directly opposed to those of the organization. For instance an employee maximizing his profits, say through scrupulous earning of allowances on top of the wage or salary, will be doing so at the expense of the organization maximizing its profit because it will incur increased operational costs as a result. A crossroads of sorts is reached by each employee, and a decision must be made whether to put personal selfish interests first or the organization’s interests first. This is not a new dilemma today.

In his famous 1966 address in Cuba, Cabral described something similar: the decision the petit bourgeoisie (middle class, relatively educated, mostly urban Africans) were faced with in the anti-colonial revolution in Guinea Bissau, to either side with the Portuguese colonialists and stooge upper class elite Africans by defending their privilege and status, or to side with the masses (mostly rural peasants, also urban poor) by ‘committing suicide as a class’, i.e. renouncing their colonial privilege and instead dedicating their resources and talents to the service of the revolution.

Employees today face the same decision in their work. Putting their organization’s interests first involves killing their own selfish interests, a ‘suicide’ of sorts, so as to direct all their efforts to the achievement of the organization’s goals. When it is done by all employees, the result is unity of purpose that makes achievement of the organization’s goals easier and sooner.

In conclusion, Amilcar Cabral was just one of many exemplary Africans who did their part in their time to improve the lot of their people and of humanity. As Africans, putting into practice daily the good principles of our heroes is a more effective way of keeping them in our minds and hearts than any periodic remembrance. It is also an important act of resistance against our governments that would rather have them forgot.

Your life continues in those who continue the revolution. – Samora Machel

References and further reading:

1. Davidson, Basil. No Fist is Big Enough To Hide The Sky: The Liberation of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74. 2^nd Edition. Zed Books. 2017
2. Firoze Manji & Bill Fletcher Jr. Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. CODESRIA. 2013
3. 2014 online article: The Revolutionary Legacy of Amilcar Cabral by Carlos Martinez http://www.invent-the-future.org/2014/09/amilcar-cabral/
4. Cabral’s 1966 address in Cuba: The Weapon of Theory: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm