The Guinea-Bissau War of Independence (Portuguese: Guerra de Independência da Guiné-Bissau), also known as the Bissau-Guinean War of Independence, was an armed independence conflict that took place in Portuguese Guinea from 1963 to 1974. It was fought between Portugal and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC), an armed independence movement backed by the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Algeria and Guinea. The war is commonly referred to as "Portugal's Vietnam" because it was a protracted guerrilla war which had extremely high costs in men and material and which created significant internal political turmoil in Portugal.
After the assassination of PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral in January 1973, the military conflict reached a stalemate: Portuguese forces were largely confined to major cities and various fortified bases and were patently unable to dislodge PAIGC from the so-called liberated zones. In September 1973, the PAIGC-dominated People's National Assembly unilaterally declared the independence of a new Republic of Guinea-Bissau; the declaration was recognised by several foreign countries. After the Carnation Revolution, the new Portuguese government agreed to grant independence to Guinea-Bissau in September 1974 and to Cape Verde a year later. PAIGC thus became the first sub-Saharan African liberation movement to achieve independence – if only indirectly – through armed struggle.
Background
Portuguese colonialism
Portuguese Guinea (as well as the nearby Portuguese Cape Verde archipelago) had been claimed as a Portuguese territory since 1446 and was a major trading post for commodities and African slaves during the 18th century. However, the mainland was not fully "pacified" until the late 1930s, by which time the Portuguese regime of António de Oliveira Salazar was preoccupied with the development of its Angolan and Mozambican colonies. There were various changes to the colonies' legal status and governance structures during this period and in subsequent decades, but they were primarily "cosmetic" in effect.
In the phrase of Patrick Chabal, Guinea was "the smallest and most backward of the Portuguese colonies", partly due to its inhospitable climate and apparent dearth of natural and mineral resources. There were few European settlers in Guinea, and the footprint even of the Portuguese administration was minimal and "crude", remaining centralised under the governor. Portugal invested little in the colony and made only minor gestures towards promoting its economic and social development. Nonetheless, a colonial economy existed on the Guinean mainland, controlled primarily by the Companhia União Fabril and consisting primarily of cash crop exports; traditional Guinean economies were disrupted both by the imperative to cultivate export crops and by Portuguese taxation. Moreover, Portugal was attached even to its most "dispensable" colony, viewing its maintenance as integral to Portugal's hold on other more economically important colonies, particularly Angola and Mozambique.
The revolutionary insurgency which ultimately launched the war was led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Portuguese: Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC), a liberation movement founded in 1956 by Rafael Barbosa and nationalist intellectual Amílcar Cabral. From the outset, its main objectives were the unity of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and their independence from Portuguese rule. In its first three years, PAIGC was preoccupied with mostly fruitless exercises in constitutional-legal agitation, concentrated in Bissau and other major cities and sometimes involving collaboration with local trade unions. However, on 3 August 1959, PAIGC was involved in organising a major dockworkers' strike at the Port of Bissau. The Portuguese authorities broke up the strike by force, leading to what became known as the Pidjiguiti massacre, in which at least fifty people were killed and several hundreds wounded.
The massacre led PAIGC to rethink its policies: in the aftermath, it reiterated its commitment to national liberation, but with a new emphasis on the political mobilisation of the rural peasantry. Cabral ordered the party to go underground and its political cadres to organise in exile in Conakry, the capital of the newly independent Republic of Guinea on the southern border of Portuguese Guinea. Between 1960 and 1963, PAIGC was "totally transformed" as it prepared for armed struggle against the Portuguese regime. Scores of cadres were trained in Conakry and sent to the Guinean countryside to mobilise the population, while the political leadership launched a diplomatic offensive that secured the full cooperation of the government in Conakry, the "tacit support" of the Senegalese government, and contacts with several other liberation movements and left-wing political parties.
On April 18, 1961 PAIGC together with FRELIMO of Mozambique, MPLA of Angola and MLSTP of São Tomé and Príncipe formed the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) during a conference in Morocco. The main goal of the organization was cooperation among the different national liberation movements in the Portuguese Empire. Also in 1961 PAIGC commenced sabotage operations in Guinea-Bissau. At the start of hostilities the Portuguese had only two infantry companies in Guinea Bissau and these concentrated in the main towns, giving the insurgents free rein in the countryside. The PAIGC blew up bridges, cut telegraph lines, destroyed sections of the highways, established arms caches and hideouts, and destroyed Fula villages and minor administrative posts. In late 1962 the Portuguese launched an offensive and evicted the PAIGC cadres that had not integrated with the local population. Open hostilities broke out in January 1963.
Belligerents and forces
Liberation/PAIGC forces
Guinea-Bissau's liberation movement was led and dominated by PAIGC, which was led by Cabral until his assassination in January 1973. By the early 1970s, PAIGC had the support of a majority of the Guinean population, but its combat strength was estimated at no more than 7,000. However, the movement was "well trained, well led, and well equipped", and its guerrilla campaign benefitted both from the terrain – its forces operated primarily from Guinea's dense jungles – and from external support.
Organisation
In 1964, PAIGC held its Cassaca Congress, which decided on reforms to discourage militarism inside the organisation. Thereafter the war effort was carried out not by autonomous guerrilla groups, but by guerrilla units within a nationwide army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People (Forças Armadas Revolucionárias do Povo, FARP). From then until the close of the war, the basic fighting unit in FARP was the highly flexible "double group" (bi-grupo), which comprised two distinct commandos of 15 to 25 men each, normally operating together but also capable of remaining operational if separated (or if joined with other double groups). Also from 1964, PAIGC implemented what Chabal calls a "dual command" at all levels of its military apparatus: at every level, leadership was exercised jointly by two men, one military commander and one political commissar.
External support
Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor was generally pro-Western and he cooperated closely with Portuguese leaders in attempting to broker a political solution to the conflict. (Brazil, itself a former Portuguese colony, also offered to mediate.) At the same time, however, Senegal provided safe haven to PAIGC from 1966, when Senghor's government formally agreed to allow PAIGC soldiers free movement in and out of Senegal, where PAIGC would be allowed to establish bases. Simultaneously, PAIGC retained its headquarters-in-exile in Guinea-Conakry, Guinea's other neighbour and a continued ally of PAIGC.
Elsewhere in Africa, PAIGC received material support from Libya, then under Muammar Gaddafi, and from the new revolutionary government of Algeria. A Marxist organisation operating at the height of the Cold War, it was also supported, from the early 1960s, by socialist states further afield, including the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. Between 1966 and 1974, PAIGC was supported by the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which deployed a handful of doctors, military instructors, and technicians to PAIGC camps. Cuban soldiers saw some limited combat while in Guinea, but the Cuban military mission was small – it averaged 50–60 men at any time, primarily artillerymen – and Cabral declined its repeated offers to take a more active role in combat. Other Eastern Bloc countries – Poland, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Romania – "engaged minimally" with PAIGC, providing limited non-military support in the form of propaganda support and scholarships for technical training and political education. A similar dynamic adhered in PAIGC's relationships with Yugoslavia and Sweden. Between mid-1969 and mid-1975 PAIGC received 45.2 million Swedish kronor in aid from the Swedish state, representing two-thirds of the Swedish assistance to African liberation movements during this period. Sweden was the most important donor of non-military material for PAIGC during the latter phase of the liberation war.
Finally, PAIGC received significant support from the Bissau-Guinean diaspora, which burgeoned as a result of mass displacement during a 1964 PAIGC offensive and during Portuguese bombing campaigns in 1965 and 1967. By 1970, an estimated 106,000 Guineans – almost 20 per cent of the territory's population – had fled the war and relocated to the neighbouring states of Guinea-Conakry and Senegal. These migrant populations, particularly those resident in border regions, provided PAIGC forces with refuge and helped PAIGC soldiers to move regular shipments of weapons from Guinea-Conakry and Senegal into Portuguese Guinea. On a monthly basis, materiel was trucked from Koundara, Guinea-Conakry into Senegalese towns, including Vélingara, where pro-PAIGC forces maintained a warehouse, and then was transported across the border on foot.
Portuguese Armed Forces
PAIGC was countered by the colonial army of the Portuguese Armed Forces stationed in Guinea, which proliferated in the early years of the war. For most of the war, from 1968 until August 1973, General António de Spínola was both governor and military commander in Portuguese Guinea, succeeding General Arnaldo Schultz in both capacities. The strength of his forces in Guinea was estimated at between 31,000 and 32,000 in 1974, and the forces comprised both metropolitan soldiers and locally recruited Guineans.
They will remember you. Portuguese soldier. You, who continue in the colonial army: to take part in crimes against our people: to contribute to ruining your country… ONLY FOR THE PLEASURE OF THE MONEY-GRABBERS OF YOUR COUNTRY
— PAIGC leaflet distributed in Guinea, early 1970s
Africanization
The "Africanization" of the war effort by Portugal, also pursued in the Angolan and Mozambican theatres, proceeded with particular speed in Guinea, particularly after General Spínola's appointment. It entailed the integration of indigenous Guinean Africans into the Portuguese military forces which fought PAIGC. Until the 1950s, the Portuguese military forces permanently stationed in Guinea included a small force of locally recruited African colonial soldiers (caçadores indigenas), commanded by white officers; non-commissioned officers were a mixture of whites, overseas soldiers (African assimilados), and native or indigenous Africans (indigenato). Spínola planned – and fought with Lisbon – to abolish the distinction between and discrimination among metropolitan soldiers and local recruits, undertaking instead to create a regular and coherent African army whose structure mirrored that of the metropolitan army.
Africanization fostered a large increase in indigenous recruitment into the armed forces. By the early 1970s, an increasing percentage of Guineans were serving as non-commissioned or commissioned officers in Portuguese military forces in Africa. Elite local troops were trained at Portuguese Centres for Commando Instruction, including inside Guinea, where the first such centre was established in 1964, but in many cases in Angola. The Portuguese forces recruited Africans mainly from among the populations of the territories they controlled. In particular, members of the Fulbe ethnic group were over-represented in the Portuguese army, partly because many Fulbe lived in eastern regions which were controlled by Portugal until late in the war and where local chiefs had "generally amicable" relationships with the Portuguese. Portuguese recruitment was also assisted by colonial propaganda, coercion, and the offer of salaries to conscripts.