GUINEA-BISSAU Part I: the Colonial Experience by Barbara Harrell-Bond and Sarah Forer
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GUINEA-BISSAU Part I: The Colonial Experience by Barbara Harrell-Bond and Sarah Forer In a three-part series, the author explores conditions in this small sub-Saharan nation that led Portugal to impose and then oerpetuate weak colonial rule. Fragmented pnd impoverished, Guinea-Bissau had few bdvantages at Independence except the onds forged in the antlcolon~alstruggle. The American Universities Field INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERS American Staff, Inc.,founded in 1951, is a non- University of Alabama profit, membership corporation of Brown University American educational institutions. It Universities employs a full-time staff of foreign California State area specialists who write from UniversityIFullerton abroad and make periodic visits to California State Field Staff member institutions. AUFS serves UniversityINorthridge the public through its seminar pro- Dartmouth College grams, films, and wide-ranging pub- Indiana University lications on significant develop- for Shipboard ments in foreign societies. Education University of Kansas Michigan State University University of Pittsburgh Ramapo College of New Jersey Utah State University University of Wisconsin System AUFS Reports are a continuing Associates of the Field Staff are series on international affairs and chosen for their ability to cut across major global issues of our time. the boundaries of the academic dis- Reports have for almost three ciplines in order to study societies in decades reached a group of their totality, and for their skill in col- readers-both academic and non- lecting, reporting, and evaluating academic-who find them a useful data. They combine long residence source of firsthand observation of abroad with scholarly studies relat- political, economic, and social trends ing to their geographic areas of in foreign countries. Reports in the interest. Each Field Staff Associate series are prepared by writers who returns to the United States periodi- are full-time Associates of the cally to lecture on the campuses of American Universities Field Staff the consortium's member institu- and occasionally by persons on leave tions. from the organizations and univer- sities that are the Field Staff's spon- sors. THE AUTHOR BARBARA E. HARRELL-BOND is a the Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden. Ap- social anthropologist who has conducted pointed a Senior Research Fellow at the research in England and in West Africa. School of Law, University of Warwick, in Her special interests are family, urban 1976, Dr. Harrell-Bond joined the Field problems, law, and the history of the irn- Staff in 1978 to report on West Africa. position of alien law in colonial Africa. She received a B. Litt. and D. Phil. in anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her publications include Modern Marriage in Sierra Leone: A Study of the Professional Group and Community Leadership and the Transformation of Freetown (1801-19761, the latter being co-researched and written with two historians, Dr. Allan Howard and Dr. David Skinner. She has also published widely in academic journals, lectured in a number of universities including the Uni- versity of Illinois (Urbana), the University of Helsinki, and the University of 1981,American Universities Field Warsaw, and was a Visiting Scholar at Staff, Hanover, NH by Barbara Harrell-Bond and GUINEA-BISSAU Sarah Forer Part I: The Colonial Experience [BHB-3-'811 During the night of Friday, Novem- recent severe shortages of rice-the strategy emphasizing social justice ber 14, 1980, tanks moved through staple food of the Guinean people. and a fair distribution of benefits. the streets of the capital city of Bottles of imported alcohol graced Bissau and soldiers went round the store shelves but essential pro- This, the first of three Reports, will warning the populace not to leave visions were not available. Accusa- look at the colonial history of their homes: a coup dfQtathad just tions of corruption had been leveled Guinea-Bissau. Part II will describe ousted Luis Cabral, President of the against Luis Cabral and the Volvo- the development of the nationalist Republic of Guinea-Bissau since its driving, Paris-garbed bureaucrats of movement, the ideology of Amilcar establishment as an independent his regime. Cabral, its leader, and the armed state more than seven years before. struggle which began in 1963. Part Cabral, a mestizo (whose father Cabral, holidaying at the time on Ill will discuss the experiences and came from the neighboring Cape Bubaque, an offshore island, was problems of the country since inde- Verde Islands) in 1956 co-founded, put under house arrest. Two senior pendence.' members of the government who with his half brother Amilcar Cabral, Portugal's "Empire" the Guinean nationalist party, PAIGC resisted the takeover were killed, and a third, injured, sought asylum When Portuguese navigators and (Partido Africano de Independencia sailors, probably in 1446, first de Guine e Cabo Verde, the African in the Swedish Embassy. The inter- national press carried reports of sighted the green and swampy Party for the Independence of coast of present-day Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Cape Verde). demonstrations in the streets of Bissau celebrating the overthrow of they were no doubt unaware of the The coup (which is discussed in Cabral's government. fact that they were beginning to lay detail in Part Ill of this series of Re- the foundations of an international ports) was led by the country's Though circumstances surrounding economic and political system that Prime Minister and an important the coup remain unclear, one thing more than five hundred years later leader in the PAIGC, Jose Bernardo is fairly certain-it at least brought would still continue to dominate the Vieira ("General Nino"), a native a temporary halt to moves to unite lives of the majority of the world's Guinean. Nino, already regarded by Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde inhabitants. .. Nor did the Portu- his fellow-countrymen as a legen- Islands. (Bothcountries had suffered guese sailors realize that the land dary figure at the age of 41, had from and fought together against they were about to "discover" earned his reputation as one of the Portuguese colonial rule, which had would not only be among the very chief guerrilla leaders of the PAIGC lasted more than 500 years.) first included in this world system during the II-year liberation struggle yet to be born, but also be among against Portugal. The coup had Guinea-Bissau was one of the first the very last to be forced to belong been carefully timed: many leading countries in sub-Saharan Africa to to it in its classical form of direct members of the government were achieve independence from its colo- colonialism. 2 nial rulers through guerrilla warfare. out of the country and the atmos- While most accounts credit Portugal phere was tense in the wake of the As the PAIGC gained control of with being the first "colonial power" parts of the country during the war, in Africa, at least one demytholo- I spent time in Guinea-Bissau it had introduced into these areas an gizes its early adventures there: during July and August 1980. alternative social and economic Sarah Forer, an American study- structure which won it the support What is true is that the Portuguese ing for her master's degree in of the majority of the peasantry maritime pioneers achieved a trading economics at the University of before the war was over. Since inde- and raiding presence along the Paris, assisted in the research and pendence, the government of coast after the 1440s; in the Congo writing as an AUFS student Guinea-Bissau has been fairly suc- estuary and along the northern part intern. 1 am particularly grateful cessful in maintaining a policy of of the coast of Angola after 7480; for her work translating French nonalignment, and during its first and at a few points on Africa's sources. seven years of self-rule it has Indian Ocean seaboard.. .. This faint attempted a unique development early presence they were gradually A relic of the early days of slaving, part of the fort at Cacheu. interests in Portugal could no longer protect their trading monopoly be- cause of the occupation of the mainland by Spain from 1580 to 1640. Cape Verde was "a sort of first edition of the American colonies.. [which] enjoyed a period of splendor at the beginning of Portuguese mer- cantile capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before entering a decline with the rise of the Antilles and Brazil." As the Dutch gained control of a substantial portion of the Asian trade, followed by the French and the English, the focus of the Portu- guese trading empire shifted from the west coast of Africa to Angola and Brazil. Moreover, during the six- teenth century, relatively few Portu- guese- perhaps 10,000-manned the overseas empire. Portugal itself was ill-served by the capital its able to transform into permanent he granted the King of Portugal and overseas territories yielded. Rather emplacements and small trading his successors "the monopoly of the than developing the home economy, settlements. trade with the inhabitants of the either manufacturing or agriculture, newly-discovered regions," al- capital flowed through Lisbon and .. Portugal cannot be said to have though he forbade them to sell arms into Holland and England and even, wielded any real control over these to the "enemies of the Faith."4The in the case of Brazil, to other colo- territories until late in the nineteenth quest for gold from the Guinea nies. The west coast of Africa con- century, or even, for regions far coast, as well as other trade, led to tinued to be a rich source of slaves, from their main bases, until early in the establishment of a series of but Angola became Portugal's main the twentieth. This weakness de- trading centers and forts along the source of manpower for the planta- rived partly from the industrial and African coasts, and forts on the east tions and mines in its colony of technological backwardness of coast were built to protect the spice Brazil.