Up to 80% of Africa’s cultivated land is now degraded by intensive farming and climate change. Together with development economist Carlos Lopes and earth politics researcher Lesley Green, environmental researcher Anselmo Matusse recently co-edited a book of translations of agronomist and liberation leader Amílcar Cabral’s writings on farming and rural livelihoods. Here, he sets out Cabral’s ideas on how restoring the continent’s soils means looking beyond farming alone to the links between the environment, history, politics and society.
Who was Amílcar Cabral?
Amílcar Cabral was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean anti-colonial leader, poet, pan-Africanist and agronomist (crop and soil scientist).
Born in 1924, Cabral is well known for his involvement in Guinea-Bissau’s independence struggle. He led a guerrilla warfare movement there against the Portuguese government, until his assassination in 1973.
A lesser-known facet of Cabral’s career was his work as an agronomist. In the 1940s, he studied agronomy (soil studies) as a young scholar in Portugal. This education would come to define his thinking on Africa’s independence. Namely, that a central part of independence should be the reintroduction of a care-based human-soil relationship.
