Colonialismagronomist (Higher Institute of Agronomy)member of the House of the Students of the Empireleader of the Centre for African Studiesfounder of the PAIGC
Born
12 September 1924, Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau)
Died
20 January 1973, Conakry
An agronomy student in Lisbon from 1945, he met Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de Andrade and Marcelino dos Santos at the House of the Students of the Empire, and was one of the leaders of the Centre for African Studies. He founded the PAIGC and was assassinated in Conakry in 1973.
He was born in Bafatá, in Guinea, in 1924, and went to Cape Verde as a child, where he went to school. In 1945, on a scholarship, he entered the Higher Institute of Agronomy in Lisbon, where he came into contact with anti-fascist groups; at the House of the Students of the Empire he met Mário Pinto de Andrade, Agostinho Neto and Marcelino dos Santos.1
He was a member of the House’s Cape Verde section. In a letter of 1948 he wrote that he had been at a general meeting “until 2 in the morning”, arguing for the purchase of a house on the outskirts of Lisbon.3 According to the testimony of António Tomás Medeiros, he was one of the leaders of the Centre for African Studies, which in 1951 was set up on Rua Actor Vale.4 He returned to Bissau in 1952.5
In 1959 he founded, with others, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).1 Of the manifesto of the Anti-Colonialist Movement, launched in 1957 by nationalists from the colonies who were studying in Europe, he said that it was “the preface to our struggle”.2 He was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973, by two members of his own party.13
A medical student in Lisbon from 1948, he was active in the House of the Students of the Empire, the MUD Juvenil and the Centre for African Studies. Arrested several times by the PIDE in Lisbon, he was the first president of independent Angola.
A poet from São Tomé whose Lisbon home, on Rua Actor Vale, housed the Centre for African Studies from 1951. Arrested in 1965 and imprisoned in Caxias, she later wrote the words of the anthem of São Tomé and Príncipe.
A Mozambican poet, she lived in Lisbon from 1951 to 1964, published in the House of the Students of the Empire’s “Mensagem” and attended the Centre for African Studies, until her opposition to the Estado Novo (“New State”) forced her into exile in Paris.
A general and author of “Portugal e o Futuro” (Portugal and the Future), he received Marcelo Caetano’s surrender at the Carmo Barracks, presided over the National Salvation Junta and was President of the Republic until he resigned, on 30 September 1974. On 11 March 1975 he fled to Spain.
A Portuguese-Angolan writer, the author of “Luuanda”. The prize that the Portuguese Society of Writers gave him in 1965, while he was imprisoned at Tarrafal, led the PIDE to question the jury and detain three of the jurors, and the regime to wreck the SPE’s headquarters and dissolve it.
Notes on the sources2
The year the PAIGC was founded: 1959, according to the Aljube Museum and the text of the Wikipedia article; the infobox of the same Wikipedia article gives 1956.
The year of his return to Bissau, 1952, comes only from Wikipedia.
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Sources
1Amílcar Lopes Cabral. Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade (EGEAC) — consulted on 2 October 2026
