Amilcar Cabral: an African liberation legend

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We remember Amilcar Cabral, who led the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in West Africa in the 1970s and speak to Dr Nayanka Perdigao about his legacy. Plus the shocking fallout of the Indian rail strike in 1974 which was - at the time - the biggest industrial action on record and from a century ago, the Tulsa race massacre, when thousands of African Americans were left homeless and hundreds were killed. We'll also find out how Lotfia Elnadi became the first Arab woman pilot in 1933 and the story behind the first big charity fundraising rock concert in the Soviet Union when communism broke with its antipathy toward western pop music.

Photo: Rebel soldiers on patrol in Guinea Bissau during the Portuguese Colonial War in West Africa, 1972. Credit: Reg Lancaster/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson joined
0:04.8	as ever by dedicated reporters from the Witness History team on the World Service.
0:09.7	As we present firsthand accounts of moments that have shaped our world.
0:13.2	Coming up this week we have stories from India, West Africa, America, the Soviet Union and Egypt.
0:19.2	And with me this week are Alex Last, Mike Lanchin and Claire Bowes.
0:22.3	Claire, first of all, what have you been up to?
0:24.5	I've been looking at what was at the time the biggest ever recorded strike action,
0:30.9	and it happened in India in 1974 and it was the railways that went on strike and
0:36.2	as you can imagine it brought the country to a halt and it's also regarded as one of the things
0:41.5	which prompted the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
0:44.4	to usher in the infamous state of national emergency the following year which was a
0:50.0	suspension of civil rights.
0:52.2	And Mike?
0:53.0	Well Max, today we're taking to the skies and I've got the fascinating story from Egypt in the 1930s,
1:00.0	so quite a long way back, and the first woman in the Arab world to become a pilot.
1:05.3	The first up is Alex last and you're taking his back Alex to West Africa in the 1970s.
1:11.1	Yeah that's right Max it's a story I've been wanting to tell for a the against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, a place that is now Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde,
1:26.0	and this war really only came to an end in the mid-1970s.
1:31.3	But it's also a story about the leader of that struggle, a man named Amilka Cabral, who became a legend of the wider struggle against Portuguese rule across Africa.
1:42.0	And Cabral was a sort of almost a Che Guevara type figure a man
1:46.1	about whom many songs were written so I set out to find someone who knew him and I was put in touch with this old liberation
1:55.0	war veteran, Commander Manuel D'O Santos, also going by the nickname Mannequas, who agreed to speak to me
	...

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