Introduction

The resurgence of far-right racist violence in Portugal1 serves as a stark reminder of the living legacies of the historical convergence of the Estado Novo fascist regime in Portugal (1933–1974) and the brutal denouement of Portuguese colonialism.2 The anticolonial and antifascist struggles against Portugal by Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé offer crucial lessons for today.

For the “Fascisms” special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies, we asked Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César to share some of their collaborative work on the political education initiatives and films of the PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde / African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde). The PAIGC was founded in the mid-1950s and engaged in eleven years of armed struggle for national liberation against Portuguese colonial rule and counterinsurgency from 1963 until 1974. The PAIGC and PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral were vital not only for achieving independence from Portugal but as influential examples in the movement for global decolonization more broadly.3

An indispensable yet still relatively underappreciated feature of PAIGC organizing was its political education initiatives, including the documentary films and mobile screening programs of such Guinean filmmakers as Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes. In 1967, Cabral sent N’Hada, Gomes, José Bolama Cubumba, and Josefina Lopes Crato to study revolutionary filmmaking with Santiago Álvarez at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos in Havana as part of a larger training program Cuba launched in support of the PAIGC liberation struggle.4 In 2011, N’Hada first met Filipa César and showed her the remnants of the PAIGC cinematic archive—canisters of film, much of it unedited or unfinished, in various states of erosion—that survived the 1998–1999 civil war in Guinea-Bissau.5

César and Sónia Vaz Borges have been instrumental in bringing attention to the political education endeavors, film production, and everyday politics of the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau. In addition to César’s remarkable work as a filmmaker, artist, and writer, she began collaborating with the National Film and Audiovisual Institute in Bissau and the Institute Arsenal for Film and Video Art in Berlin to transfer and digitize the PAIGC archive. During this process, César notes, “We stopped calling it an archive and instead a collective milieu, an assemblage of shrapnel. To deal with the shrapnel of colonialism means to deal with all the violence that comes through it; it means embracing the conflicts related with a permanent ‘decolonization of thinking’ as a condition and as a never-accomplishable task.”6 At the end of 2014, in part reenacting the PAIGC mobile political education programs of the early 1970s, César, N’Hada, the radio broadcaster Aissatu Seidi, and a small crew toured Guinea-Bissau for four weeks with a portable screening unit, publicly exhibiting selections of images and sound from the PAIGC collection and inviting the audience to collectively discuss this history and its ongoing relevance in their lives. Vaz Borges’s important 2019 book Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC Education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 brings long-overdue critical attention to the PAIGC political education programs.7 Vaz Borges’s scholarship has been key for moving analysis of the PAIGC from the usual focus on Cabral to thinking with the everyday people who collectively waged the struggle for liberation and for developing a more substantive understanding of what she calls “militant education.”

Included here as examples of political education documents are links to selections from several films by Vaz Borges and César. These projects assemble recovered archival fragments from the work of Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes for the PAIGC but also serve as their own critical practice and pedagogic reflection on the history and ongoing significance of the PAIGC liberation struggle. The following essay by Vaz Borges and César was originally commissioned and published in German in conjunction with the exhibition Education Shock, curated by Tom Holert at HWK (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin in 2021.8