As the wars of independence unfolded in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, someone snapped a photograph of a young woman in short-sleeved combat fatigues, smiling, wearing a cap on her head, carrying a baby on her right hip and a wood-handled revolver on the left. While it is not an image of Ana Maria Cabral, a lifelong diplomat and government official once married to the man who led that revolution, it could serve as a poster for her visit to New England starting this week in New Bedford.
Women, Cabral means to declare on her tour, were also fighting. They were not always carrying guns, or babies, but they served alongside the men who tend to get all the credit for throwing off Portuguese colonial rule and establishing in Cape Verde what is now considered by various measures the most democratic country in Africa.
Cabral, who was married to Amilcar Cabral for barely a year before the agronomist turned public intellectual and revolutionary leader was assassinated in 1973, turned 82 in January. She has devoted a life to diplomacy and government service, trying to make life better for women in Cape Verde and telling the more complete story of the revolution, a story that includes women.
“Mrs. Cabral has always been a force of nature,” said Jeanne Costa of New Bedford, head of the group that has arranged Cabral’s visit, who first met Cabral in Plymouth in the 1970s. “Even her age doesn’t stop her, she continues.”
Cabral, who lives in Praia, the Cape Verdean capital, arrived in New Bedford on Wednesday night, in time for Cape Verdean Recognition Week. A former diplomat — she served 21 years, until 2005, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from Cape Verde, and before that as Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau ambassador to the U.S. — she was facing a traveling dignitary’s busy schedule from Friday through Monday, July 10.
In New Bedford, Cabral is due to make a public appearance out front of City Hall at 1 p.m. Friday with Mayor Jon Mitchell and city councilors. On Saturday, she’ll join the 51st annual Cape Verdean Recognition Parade, then take the stage at the Verdean Veterans Memorial Hall on Purchase Street.
On July 5, Cape Verde’s Independence Day, she is scheduled to appear in East Providence with the mayor of that city, Roberto L. DaSilva. On July 6, she’ll appear at the Massachusetts State House with Rep. Antonio Cabral and Sen. Mark Montigny, and perhaps Gov. Maura Healey. Her itinerary also includes private events in New Bedford and Brockton.
Her visit was organized by the PAIGCV/PAICV Women Warriors Committee. The acronym — sometimes also appearing as PAIGC — stands for the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the political party that led the independence fight starting in the 1950s. A separate organization with common roots, the PAICV, is a main political party in Cape Verde, counting as a member the current president, Jose Maria Neves.
Costa, founder and chair of the Women Warriors group, says they’re trying to tell a full story of how Cape Verde, an archipelago nation now of some 600,000 people, and Guinea-Bissau, a country of two million on the West African coast, broke free of Portuguese rule with an effort that emerged, as many colonial liberation movements did, after World War II.
In this case, Cabral’s late husband, Amilcar Cabral, co-founded what was then known as the African Party of Independence in 1956, seeking not only independence, but also an alliance between Cape Verde and his native country, Guinea-Bissau.
Ana Maria Cabral’s visit to Massachusetts, Rhode Island
- Friday, June 30
1 p.m. New Bedford City Hall Steps with Mayor Jon Mitchell and city councilors. T-Shirts bearing an image of Ana Maria Cabral with the slogan “Viva Cabo Verde” on the front, and “Women Warriors” on the back with a roster of names of women who took part in the independence struggle will be on sale at Celia’s Boutique, across from City Hall, for $25. All proceeds go to the Amilcar Cabral Foundation. - Saturday, July 1
11 a.m. Cape Verdean Recognition Parade followed by stage greeting at Verdean Veterans Memorial Hall. - Wednesday, July 5
Noon. East Providence City Hall with Mayor Roberto L. DaSilva - Thursday, July 6
11 a.m. State House with Rep Antonio Cabral and Sen. Mark Montigny.
In his view, women were crucial to the party’s work, according to an account written by Yasmina Nuny Silva, a writer from Guinea-Bissau, which since independence has not been able to establish the stable democracy found in Cape Verde.
As the independence struggle went on, more women joined the party ranks, their numbers at party meetings grew to equal men, Nuny Silva wrote. They carried guns, tended to wounded people, smuggled messages past colonial authorities, ran a nascent school and broadcast the party message via radio.
They remain largely unsung, said Costa, whose father, Manuel E. Costa Sr., a civil rights activist and historian, wrote “The Making of the Cape Verdean,” an account of Cape Verdeans who migrated to New Bedford from the late 19th century to the 1970s.
Costa, who has remained friendly with Ana Maria Cabral over the decades and will host her and her daughter, N’Dira De Sa’Cabral Embalo, at her home in New Bedford, said “ever since the war and the struggle, these women have never been really recognized.”
Testifying to that is the difficulty finding specific information about who they were and what they did. Costa, her associates and scholars are piecing together the story of the “Women Warriors,” with oral history interviews and other research.
There was Ana Maria Cabral herself, of course, who told an interviewer about her experience working in a pilot school that was established by the party in the country next door to Guinea-Bissau, in Conakry, capital of Guinea, which had won its own independence from France in 1958. Her husband, whom she married in 1972, felt that education was important in cultivating a free society.
“We made and adapted books from other countries, taught Portuguese and also gave rudimentary French classes, because it was the language most spoken in Conakry,” Ana Maria Cabral said. “In parallel with the military aid, [Amilcar] Cabral tried to convince the countries that helped the PAIGC to give scholarships for professional courses and technical courses, because young people could not stay in the pilot school forever. They stayed two or three years at most and then went abroad to learn electricity, mechanics and nursing.”
There was Amelia Araujo, who was also known to radio audiences as Maria Turro, her broadcast name. Araujo, who did radio training in the Soviet Union, which backed the revolution, appears in a black-and-white photograph taken around 1967 in what appears to be a military fatigue shirt, her hair pulled back, reading from a sheet of paper into a microphone at Radio Libertacão, or Freedom Radio, also based in Conakry.
“Our radio program expressed the injustice of the war that was taking place in the Portuguese colonies in Africa,” she said in an interview conducted for Costa’s group. “Another one of our radio programs was geared towards the Portuguese soldiers who were fighting in Africa and dying away from their family. It was called saudade (nostalgia) in Portuguese. We called to the attention of our Portuguese audience that the war they were engaged in was an injustice to the people of the Portuguese colonies.”
There was Isaura Tavares Gomes, a pharmacist and women’s rights activist who became the first female mayor of São Vicente, Cape Verde, when she was elected in 2004. More than 30 years before, as she told an interviewer working with Costa’s group, she quelled her fear and took to the streets there, handing out pro-revolution leaflets that she and a friend had typed up.
The radio every so often carried news of a cadre’s arrest.
“I was a little afraid because once they apprehend one they will go after others,” she said.
There was Ernestina “Titina” Sila, the young woman holding the baby and packing the revolver. By 18 she was already emerging as a gifted leader and organizer in Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence. In the early 1960s she did a political internship in the Soviet Union and returned to the fight.
The 29-year-old was headed to the funeral of Amilcar Cabral in Conakry in January 1973 when she and a group of other guerrillas ran into Portuguese troops. She died in the encounter. That day, Jan. 30, is celebrated in Guinea-Bissau as National Women’s Day.
It will be a women’s day of a sort on Friday in New Bedford, and for several days following. The fight for independence ended long ago; Ana Maria Cabral’s campaign for another sort of recognition goes on.
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Editor’s note: Jeanne Costa is a member of The New Bedford Light’s board of directors. The New Bedford Light newsroom is scrupulously independent. Only the editors decide what to cover and what to publish. Founders, funders, and board members have no influence over editorial content.
