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Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex

Last with more first-hand accounts of events that shaped our world.

And today we go back to the 1960s and 70s to look at the battle against Portuguese rule in the

West African colony of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and the tragic story of Amulcarabral, one of the legends of the African liberation movement

who played a central role in ending Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. For 500 years, since the time of Vascot-Gana, the Portuguese have been going to Africa and there they have stayed, longest of all

the old colonial powers.

In the 1960s and 70s Portugal was at war in Africa. The country's long standing right-wing

dictatorship had sent a huge army to fight liberation movements in its African colonies.

In the early 1960s, Portugal, the poorest country in Europe,

started fighting in earnest on three African fronts,

in Angola, in Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

The Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in West Africa was one of the main battlegrounds.

Commander Manuel Doss Santos was a liberation fighter there.

He'd grown up in Cape Verde under Portuguese rule in the 1940s and 50s.

It was enough, he says, to make him want to join the struggle.

You know, I was born in Cape Verde Islands.

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