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Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº.1, TD4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026

175

BODY, VOICE, AND ACTION: AMÍLCAR CABRAL’S DISCURSIVE PERFORMANCE

IN THE CALL TO ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE IN CABO VERDE AND GUINEA

BISSAU

RIVALDO MENDES FREIRE TAVARES

yc57719@um.edu.mo

PhD student in Literary and Intercultural Studies (Portuguese) at the University of Macau

(China). His research focuses on Cabo Verdean Modernist poetry, Portuguese literature in African

countries, and Chinese poetry. He co-authored the forthcoming book Vozes das ilhas: canções de

Cabo Verde, which explores these musical traditions from a pedagogical perspective. He also

translated Amílcar Cabral poetry into Chinese, presented at the seminar commemorating Cabral’s

centenary (University of Macau 2025). https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3979-4231

RAQUEL ABI-SÂMARA

raquelabisamara@um.edu.mo

Assistant Professor at the University of Macau (China), where she teaches literature, translation

studies, and Portuguese. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of

Rio de Janeiro. A translator from German into Portuguese, she has translated works by Paul

Celan, Franz Kafka, Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other authors. She co-edited the forthcoming

volume Beyond, Belated, and Out of Place? Non-Hegemonic Literary and Aesthetic Moments on a

Global Scale (Brill). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1300-9392

Abstract

This study proposes an original approach to understanding the success of Amílcar Cabral’s

leadership through an analysis of the performativity of his speeches. In light of the central

place of orality in African culture and the power of vocality - the physical presence and

embodied dimension of communication - the singularity and effectiveness of Cabral’s

engagement with his comrades become evident. His interventions simultaneously articulate

the call to armed resistance, ethical and moral formation, and the dissemination of scientific

knowledge among populations historically deprived of formal education. The corpus of analysis

is comprised of two fundamental sources: Análise de alguns tipos de resistência (Analysis of

some types of resistance; 1979), a transcription of lectures delivered in Creole at the African

Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) cadre seminar in 1969; and

the programming of Rádio Libertação, the party’s broadcasting station since 1967. This dual

corpus makes it possible to observe different modalities of enunciation and reception—from

the live word in the formative context of the seminar to the mediated word transmitted

through radio waves. The theoretical framework guiding the study is Paul Zumthor’s

Performance, recepção, leitura (Performance, reception, lecture; 1990), which argues that

the nature of performance directly shapes the knowledge produced and transmitted. Thus,

Cabral’s vocal performance not only communicates but also aims to transform and inscribe

knowledge into the bodies and memories of the combatants, constituting an act of culture and

a central instrument of formation and resistance.

Keywords

Amílcar Cabral, anticolonial resistance, discursive performance, Paul Zumthor.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

176

Resumo

Este estudo propõe uma abordagem original para compreender o êxito da liderança de Amílcar

Cabral através da análise da performatividade dos seus discursos. À luz do lugar central da

oralidade nas culturas africanas e da força da vocalidade, entendida como a presença física e

a dimensão corporizada da comunicação, torna-se evidente a singularidade e a eficácia do

modo como Cabral se relacionava com os seus camaradas. As suas intervenções articulam

simultaneamente o apelo à resistência armada, a formação ética e moral e a difusão de

conhecimento científico junto de populações historicamente privadas de acesso à educação

formal. O corpus de análise é constituído por duas fontes fundamentais: Análise de alguns

tipos de resistência (1979), transcrição de palestras proferidas em crioulo no Seminário de

Quadros do Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), em 1969;

e a programação da Rádio Libertação, estação radiofónica do partido em funcionamento desde

1967. Este duplo corpus permite observar diferentes modalidades de enunciação e recepção,

desde a palavra viva no contexto formativo do seminário até à palavra mediatizada difundida

pelas ondas radiofónicas. O enquadramento teórico que orienta a investigação assenta na

obra Performance, recepção, leitura (1990), de Paul Zumthor, segundo a qual a natureza da

performance condiciona directamente o conhecimento produzido e transmitido. Nesta

perspectiva, a performance vocal de Cabral não se limita a comunicar; procura igualmente

transformar e inscrever conhecimentos nos corpos e nas memórias dos combatentes,

constituindo-se como um acto de cultura e um instrumento central de formação e resistência.

Palavras-chave

Amílcar Cabral; resistência anticolonial; performance discursiva; Paul Zumthor.

How to cite this article

Tavares, Rivaldo Mendes Freire & Abi-Sâmara, Raquel (2026). Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar

Cabral’s Discursive Performance in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea

Bissau. Janus.net, e-journal of international relations. Thematic Dossier – Geopolitics of Anxiety:

Ideology, Identity, and (Un)Bordering in Contemporary Europe and Asia, VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD4,

October 2026, pp. 175-197. DOI https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.DT0726.8

Article submitted on 27 June 2026 and accepted on 18 August 2026.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

177

BODY, VOICE, AND ACTION: AMÍLCAR CABRAL’S DISCURSIVE

PERFORMANCE IN THE CALL TO ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE IN

CABO VERDE AND GUINEA BISSAU

RIVALDO MENDES FREIRE TAVARES

RAQUEL ABI-SÂMARA

Introduction

Amílcar Cabral’s leadership in the anticolonial struggle in Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau

has been widely studied from different perspectives political, military, diplomatic, and

pedagogical. However, a fundamental dimension of his activism remains relatively

unexplored: discursive performance, understood as the set of vocal, bodily, and relational

strategies that endowed his words with a singular transformative force. This study

proposes an original approach to understanding the success of Cabral’s leadership,

focusing on an analysis of the performativity of his speeches and his capacity to mobilize,

educate, and transform listeners into active subjects of resistance.

In light of the central place of orality in African culture and the power of vocality - the

physical presence and embodied dimension of communication - the singularity and

effectiveness of Cabral’s engagement with his comrades become evident. His

interventions simultaneously articulated the call to armed resistance, ethical and moral

formation, and the dissemination of scientific knowledge among populations historically

deprived of formal education. This multiplicity of discursive functions reflects Cabral’s

conception of the liberation struggle as an integral process of the transformation of

consciousness, in which the spoken word played a decisive a role as military action.

Declaration of Interest - The authors declare that there are no known financial, professional, or personal

conflicts of interest that could have appeared to influence this research. The authores have no competing

interests to declare.

Acknowledgments - The authors dedicate this study to the memory of Amélia Sanches Araújo (1933–2026),

whose voice became an instrument of liberation. In 1967, she took up a microphone in an improvised studio in

Conakry and helped free two peoples. Her voice continues to resonate far beyond the physical space she once

inhabited, remaining alive in the histories and memories she helped shape. This research was supported by

the University of Macau through Start-Up Grant SRG2024-00008-FAH “Avant-Garde Movements in Non-

hegemonic Portuguese-Speaking Contexts”. The authors gratefully acknowledge this support. Furthermore, the

authors acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot in assisting with the formatting of references and the

standardization of source citations in this work.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

178

The corpus of analysis comprises two fundamental sources, corresponding to two distinct

modalities of enunciation. The first is Análise de alguns tipos de resistência (Analysis of

some types of resistance; 1979), which gathers the transcripts of lectures delivered in

Creole at the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC)

cadre seminar in 1969, in the Conakry region. Here the context is of copresence, in which

Cabral’s living word addressed an audience of militants from various fronts of the

struggle, with heterogeneous levels of schooling and diverse ethnic origins. The second

source is the programming of Rádio Libertação, the party’s broadcasting station since

1967, which amplified Cabral’s voice beyond geographical and political borders, reaching

isolated combatants, populations under colonial occupation, Portuguese soldiers, and

listeners in the diaspora. This dual corpus makes it possible to observe different

modalities of enunciation and reception - from the live word in the formative context of

the seminar to the mediated word transmitted through radio waves - and to reflect on

continuities and discontinuities between bodily presence and the ubiquitous presence

enabled by technology.

The theoretical framework guiding the study is Paul Zumthor’s Performance, recepção,

leitura (Performance, reception, lecture), which argues that the nature of performance

directly shapes the knowledge produced and transmitted. Throughout a career dedicated

to the study of medieval poetry and oral traditions, Zumthor developed a set of

concepts—performance, vocality, antepredicative knowledge—in light of which Cabral’s

vocal performance not only communicates but also transforms and inscribes knowledge

into the bodies and memories of the combatants, constituting an act of culture and a

central instrument of formation and resistance.

The study has three sections: The first presents Zumthor’s theoretical foundations,

highlighting the notion of performance as an act of presence and the materiality of the

voice as an emanation of the body. The second analyzes Cabral’s discursive performance

at the 1969 seminar, examining his choice of Creole, didactic style and use of agrarian

metaphor, provocative tone and direct confrontation with militants, concern with ethical

and moral education, dissemination of scientific knowledge, and construction of a culture

of work and discipline of time. The third section addresses Rádio Libertação, the PAIGC’s

broadcasting station since 1967, as a device for amplifying Cabral’s voice, discussing its

multiple roles—military coordination, countering disinformation, political education,

cultural affirmation, psychological warfare, and international dissemination—and the

performativity of radio listening. The concluding remarks synthesize the main findings

and highlight the relevance of a performative approach to Cabral studies and to a broader

understanding of national liberation movements.

With this approach, the study aims to contribute not only to the historiography of the

anticolonial struggle but also to the dialogue between performance studies, intellectual

history, and postcolonial critique. In this sense, it aligns with recent theoretical proposals

that argue that the critical reevaluation of colonial narratives requires a “structural

change in institutional epistemologies” (Louwerse, 2025, p. 272), insofar as Cabral’s

discursive performance does not merely criticize colonialism but constitutes an “act of

re-creation… that subverts the traditional separation of past and present, challenging

established frameworks and foregrounding the knowledge held within ancestral

memories and lived experiences” (p. 272).

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

179

The Living Voice and the Present Body as Sites of Knowledge

Paul Zumthor’s work offers a particularly suitable conceptual framework for analyzing

communication in contexts marked by a strong presence of orality. Over the course of a

career dedicated to the study of medieval poetry and oral traditions, Zumthor developed

a set of concepts that allow us to think of the word not merely as a vehicle of information,

but as an event, as presence, as action.

Performance as an Act of Presence

In the opening chapter of Performance, réception, lecture, Zumthor evokes a childhood

memory that functions as the primal scene of his theoretical reflection. He recalls the

street singers who animated Paris in the 1930s, around whom small groups of listeners—

about fifteen to twenty people—would gather to hear songs of elementary melody,

purchase broadsheets with the printed lyrics, and, in the final stanza, sing the refrain in

chorus. The author emphasizes that the truly mobilizing element was not the song itself,

as a textual or musical object, but the spectacle in its entirety: the performer, their

gestures, the interaction with the group, and the surrounding urban environment. All

these elements—and not only the text or the melody —“were part of the song. They were

the song”

(Zumthor, 1990, p. 29). What remained from this experience, the author

writes, was the perception that the song could not be reduced to text or melody, but

included the performer, their gesture, the group, the street, the sky.

The childhood memory illuminates the central concept of Zumthor’s reflection on

performance as an act (its mode of concrete existence) through which a work is fully

realized in a context of the copresence of the emitter and the receiver. Zumthor draws

on the tradition of ethnological and linguistic studies of the 1970s to support this

perspective, citing “Breakthrough into Performance” by folklorist Dell Hymes, for whom

the activity of a person within their cultural group can be classified into three types:

behavior, defined as everything produced by any action; conduct, which is behavior

oriented by sociocultural norms, whether accepted or rejected; and performance, which

is conduct in which the subject assumes responsibility for communication (Hymes, 1973,

as cited in Zumthor, 1990, p. 31). Performance thus implies the subject’s commitment

to their act of speech. For Zumthor, performance realizes, concretizes, brings something

from virtuality into actuality, appearing as an emergence within a cultural and situational

context (p. 31).

This notion is particularly fruitful for understanding Cabral’s interventions at the 1969

seminar. Each lecture was a unique moment, an emergence that transformed the seminar

space into a site of intensive formation. More than transmitting information, Cabral

created, in each intervention, a shared experience in which the word became an act and

the listeners were converted into active participants in the process.

All translations from non-English works are by the authors except where other translators are credited.

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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

180

Vocality and the Materiality of the Voice

One of Zumthor’s most original contributions is the distinction between orality and

vocality. Orality refers to the fact that a discourse is transmitted through the voice;

vocality, broader in scope, involves not only the history and material presence of the

voice itself, but also the entire constellation of values, affects, and sensory experiences

that are mobilized in the act of listening. For Zumthor (1990), the voice “is a thing. It

possesses full materiality” (p. 85). Its traits are describable and interpretable, and upon

them multiple symbolisms—personal and mythological—are founded.

This materiality of the voice binds it inseparably to the body. The voice is “an emanation

of the body,” that which “sonically represents it in its fullness” (p. 27). When we hear a

voice, we do not access merely informational content; we establish a relationship with a

present body, even if mediated. Therefore, Zumthor insists on the idea that “the poetic

text signifies the world. It is through the body that meaning is perceived there” (pp. 77–

78). By “poetic,” Zumthor means here not a literary genre but a quality of language that

mobilizes the body in its totality, summoning sensory and affective energies that

everyday, merely informative language tends to attenuate or erase.

This emphasis on the materiality of the voice points to what Zumthor, following Maurice

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, designates as “antepredicative knowledge”—a

knowledge prior to discursive rationality, accumulated through sensation and constituting

the ground upon which all aesthetic experience is built. In dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s

notion of an originary perception preceding conceptual reflection, Zumthor considers it

“an accumulation of knowledge belonging to the order of sensation and which, for

whatever reason, does not surface at the level of rationality, but constitutes a substratum

of knowledge upon which the rest is constructed” (p. 78). This knowledge “cannot be

reduced to the decoding of analyzable signs; it derives from a process irreducible to

particular movements” (p. 79). Poetry, like performance, activates this antepredicative

knowledge, making the body the privileged site of perception and meaning-making.

This conception of knowledge emerging from sensation and the body resonates with

contemporary approaches to the relationship between aesthetics and decolonization.

Louwerse (2025) observes that contemporary Black artists have activated

“characteristics of the Baroque—theatricality, illusion, excess and hybridity—[to]

construct alternative narratives that challenge the ‘false absences’ of the European self-

narrative and center Black identities” (p. 276). Just as Cabral’s vocal performance

mobilizes the listeners’ “antepredicative knowledge,” inscribing knowledge into the body,

Black baroque aesthetics operates as a “practice that emerges from and engages traits

characterized as baroque but specifically accommodates the experience of New World

slavery and its continuing impacts” (Willis, 2023).

Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance at the 1969 Seminar

In November 1969, in the Conakry region, a PAIGC cadre seminar was held that brought

together militants and party officials from the various fronts of struggle. Over six days,

Cabral delivered a series of lectures in Creole, in which he addressed the different

dimensions of resistance—political, economic, cultural, and armed—later transcribed into

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

181

Portuguese in Análise de alguns tipos de resistência. This seminar was part of the broader

strategy of political education pursued by the PAIGC, which conceived of the war of

liberation not merely as a military confrontation but as a struggle for the transformation

of the combatants’ consciousness. The audience, heterogeneous in ethnic origins and

levels of schooling, posed a considerable pedagogical challenge: to communicate

effectively with former sepoys (locally recruited African soldiers who had served under

Portuguese colonial command), peasants from the liberated areas, and young students

who had joined the struggle. The choice of Creole, instead of Portuguese, as the language

of the living voice highlights Cabral’s concern with establishing immediate communication

with his listeners.

The Choice of Creole: Language of Recognition and of Experience

The decision to speak in Creole is, in itself, a performative act of great significance.

Portuguese was the language of the colonizer, of administration, of the schooling to which

few had access. Creole, by contrast, was the language of the tabanca (village), of the

family, of shared experience. By choosing Creole, Cabral was not only ensuring linguistic

comprehension but also establishing a relationship of complicity with his comrade-

listeners, inscribing his discourse within the cultural and affective universe familiar to

them. As Serinaldo Araújo (2024) emphasizes, paraphrasing Paulo Freire, Cabral “did not

speak or write in a complicated way that would hinder understanding for the people and

his fellow fighters” (p. 243).

This linguistic choice corresponds to what Zumthor designates as vocality: It is not merely

a matter of using the voice to transmit words, but of mobilizing an entire set of values

and affects linked to the experience of listening. Cabral’s voice in Creole was not the

same voice that spoke Portuguese at international conferences or in the party’s official

documents. It was a voice that drew closer, that created intimacy, that spoke to the body

and not only to reason. This linguistic option is inscribed in what British sociologist John

B. Thompson (2011) defines as the ideological modus operandi of unification, specifically

in the strategy of standardization or symbolization of unity. By speaking in Creole, Cabral

forged a collective identity that transcended ethnic divisions—Balantas, Fulas,

Mandingas, Manjacos (all ethnic groups native to Guinea-Bissau)—that had historically

been exploited by the colonizer to divide and dominate.

It is important to note that Cabral recognized the limitations of Creole as a language

incapable, at that time, of expressing all the concepts necessary for political and scientific

education. In the seminar, he explicitly addressed this issue, revealing a pragmatic

attitude toward language:

For us, it makes no difference whether we use Portuguese, Russian, French,

or English, as long as it serves us - just as it makes no difference whether

we use tractors from the Russians, the English, the Americans, etc., as long

as, once we have taken our independence, they serve us to till the land.

Because language is an instrument, but it may happen that we already have

a language that can serve and that everyone understands. So we are not

going to make everyone learn Russian - it is not worth it - especially since

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

182

we have a language, Creole, which is similar to Portuguese (Cabral, 1979, p.

106).

This passage reveals an instrumental conception of language, but also a concern with

accessibility. Creole is chosen not on a whim or for linguistic imposition, but because it

is the language that “everyone understands,” the language that makes it possible to

establish immediate communication with the seminar’s audience.

Analysis of Discursive Performance in the Transcripts

The transcription of the lectures preserves, albeit imperfectly, significant traces of the

discursive performance of 1969. A close reading of the text allows, in part, the

reconstruction of Cabral’s discursive strategies and the ways in which they were

deliberately crafted to generate powerful effects on his listeners.

Didactic Tone and Use of Agrarian Metaphor

Cabral frequently resorts to metaphors drawn from the everyday experience of his

peasant listeners in order to explain abstract political concepts. Right at the opening of

the first lecture, devoted to political resistance, he establishes an analogy between the

resistance of a people and the decision of a peasant family:

Our resistance, comrades, can be compared to the following. Take, for

example, a family, a tabanca in our land, who needs to cultivate rice. They

have two measures of rice. They know that if they take one measure to sow,

there will be a shortage, because the rice will not be enough to eat. But they

take that measure, sow it, and, if it works well, they may later harvest ten,

twenty, or even thirty measures, depending on the land. This is similar to the

resistance of a people, comrades (Cabral, 1979, p. 7).

The image is immediately comprehensible to a rural audience. It translates, in concrete

terms, the logic of sacrifice made in the name of a future harvest. Resistance, like sowing,

requires an initial investment that seems to contradict immediate necessity, but which is

the condition for long-term survival. This ability to translate complex concepts into simple

images can be seen throughout the work. In the same lecture, Cabral defines resistance

in terms that any peasant would have understood: “Resistance is a natural thing. Every

force exerted upon any object gives rise to resistance, that is, to a counterforce. And the

counterforce to colonialist and imperialist power is the national liberation movement” (p.

9).

The physical law of action and reaction becomes a political metaphor. Colonial oppression

naturally generates resistance. It is not a matter of moral choice, but of a necessity

inscribed in the very nature of things.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

183

Provocative Tone and Direct Confrontation

Cabral’s speech assumes a provocative tone, confronting militants with their

shortcomings and limitations. In the section devoted to economic resistance - where he

identifies agriculture as its “main aspect” (p. 48) - he openly criticizes “some leaders and

party officials, who at all levels have not given due importance to our economic

resistance” (p. 44). In particular, he points out that political commissars and other

officials rarely reflected on the country’s wealth in livestock (in the case of Guinea-

Bissau), and at the same time they neglected to increase agricultural production.

This frankness, far from discouraging, appealed to the need to overcome obstacles.

Cabral, who himself shared the same difficulties and demanded of everyone the same

level of commitment, spoke from within and to the party. The critique is all the more

effective insofar as it is accompanied by concrete examples and proposed solutions, as

can be seen in the following passage:

There was, for example, a case in which one of our officials wrote asking me

to send milk for two newborns because there was no milk to give them. But

the children had been born in an area of our land where there were cows that

had calved—all of them. In truth, anywhere, in any household where there

were cows that had calved, he could have found and obtained milk for the

children. I told him to look for cows to get the milk, because I would not send

any. And he succeeded (Cabral, 1979, pp. 51–52).

The anecdote illustrates one of Cabral’s central concerns: the need to foster initiative and

autonomy among trainees, rather than letting them passively wait for solutions from

above. Narrating this episode in vocal performance ensures that the lesson strikes the

listeners with an immediacy rooted in their lived reality, making it not only intelligible but

also highly memorable, as it is anchored in a concrete story and a recognizable situation.

Ethical and Moral Education

One of the most notable aspects of Cabral’s lectures is his constant concern with the

ethical formation of militants. The liberation struggle, according to Cabral, aimed, on the

one hand, to expel the colonizer from “our land” and, on the other, to construct a new

man, capable of building a just and free society. This ethical dimension permeates his

entire work. As Jiménez Martínez (2023) observes, “for Amílcar Cabral and his followers

it was not only a matter of making the population of the liberated territory literate, but

also of ensuring that it became part of the vanguard fighting for independence” (p. 194).

In a particularly significant passage, Cabral defines the objectives of resistance in terms

that transcend the mere conquest of political power:

Our objective cannot be to take over the governor’s palace in order to do in

our land what that governor intended to do. Nor to occupy the house of the

district chief or the administrator. Our objective is to dismantle the colonial

state in our land so that we may create a new, different state, founded on

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

184

justice, on labor, and on equality of opportunity for all the sons and daughters

of our land, in Guinea and in Cabo Verde (Cabral, 1979, p. 10).

This vision required a profound transformation of behaviors and attitudes. Cabral does

not hesitate to denounce practices he considers incompatible with the values of the party,

such as theft, corruption, or abuse of power over the population. In a passage that

reveals his concern with the integrity of the combatants, he declares:

Our combatants are honest, serious, decent, and dignified people - the finest

sons of our people. Therefore, when one of our combatants, in the course of

war, comes across a watch, a bracelet, a gold chain, or any other item taken

from the enemy, he must show it to his commander, to his leadership, and

not keep it for himself. Otherwise, he is no longer a combatant for the

liberation of his land, but a highway robber (p. 68).

The distinction between the combatant and the bandit is fundamental. The combatant

fights for a collective cause; the bandit exploits war for personal gain. By vocally

articulating this distinction with clarity and force, Cabral’s performance contributes to

shaping the listeners’ ethical consciousness, creating a sense of honor and dignity

associated with being a combatant. The concern with ethical formation also extends to

relations with the population. Cabral repeatedly warns against abuse:

In order to advance our struggle within the framework of economic

resistance, we must avoid overburdening our people, lest they think that our

party also seeks to exploit them.

We have always given comrades the directives not to abuse the people’s

goods - their chickens, their cows. If they offer, we accept, but we must not

demand anything, nor should we take anything by force (p. 60).

This insistence on respect for the population was as much a matter of principle as it was

a strategic necessity. The liberation war could only be won with the active support of the

masses. Any abuse undermined that support and, with it, the chances of victory.

Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge

Another notable dimension of Cabral’s performance is his concern with spreading

scientific knowledge in an accessible way. In the section devoted to cultural resistance,

we find passages in which he explains natural phenomena traditionally attributed to

supernatural forces. Referring to the “iran,” a spiritual entity in which many believed,

Cabral ironically remarks:

Concretely, for example, I am African, and it could be that, like other Africans

who still exist, I might convince myself that for certain things to happen in

my life, it would be necessary to satisfy the will of the “iran.” And the “iran”

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says that what I asked of it in our conversation can only be fulfilled if I take

alms from a little three-year-old girl, to kill, to make a sacrifice, and then

everything I desire can be realized. This still exists in Africa and, if we look

closely, perhaps there are still people who believe in it in our land (pp. 72–

73).

Cabral’s response to this belief is blunt: “Let us go and look for this ‘iran’ until we find it,

to kill it, because this is an ‘iran’ of the Tugas [a popular and colloquial designation for

the Portuguese, used in various African contexts]; it was the Tuga who put it there, it

does not belong to our land” (p. 73). Irony and humor function as instruments for

dismantling superstitions that, in his view, kept the people in a state of dependence and

fear. Yet it is in his explanation of meteorological phenomena that his effort to

disseminate scientific knowledge becomes most evident:

In our culture, everyone must know, by tomorrow, even if we hold dances

when there are thunderstorms, that a thunderstorm is the collision of two

clouds—one charged with positive electricity and the other with negative

electricity—and when they collide, they produce a spark, which is the

lightning, and a noise, which is the thunder. It is like when one takes two

electric wires, positive and negative, and touches them together, producing

a spark. That is what lightning in the sky is: the electricity of the clouds. The

noise is the meeting of two clouds, which is called thunder (p. 85).

But Cabral does not limit himself to describing the physical phenomenon; he teaches his

listeners how to calculate the distance at which a storm is located, thereby demonstrating

the practical usefulness of scientific knowledge:

So much so that, taking into account the speed of sound in air, when one

hears the thunder, one can calculate where one cloud meets the other,

because light travels faster than sound. One sees the lightning and after a

while hears the noise of the thunder. Between the moment when the lightning

is seen and the moment when the noise is heard, if for example it is five

seconds, we can calculate where the two clouds meet, at what distance from

us, because the speed of sound in air is 340 meters per second. Therefore, if

one counts the seconds from the moment the lightning is seen [to the

moment the thunder is heard], then in our example, multiplying five by 340,

one obtains 1,700 meters. That means that the two clouds met at a distance

of 1,700 meters from where we are and produced the thunder and the

lightning (pp. 85–86).

In explaining the relationship between the speed of light and the speed of sound, Cabral

not only demystifies the phenomenon of thunder and lightning, but also offers his

listeners an instrument of understanding and control over the world around them. This

knowledge, accessible to all, stands in contrast to belief in the “iran” - which could only

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be accessed through intermediaries and which kept the population in a state of

dependence and fear. Science, in this context, is not bookish or elitist knowledge - it is

a tool of practical emancipation, returning to people mastery over their environment.

Cabral goes further, projecting this need for scientific knowledge into the future of the

nation. In a particularly incisive passage, he confronts his comrades with the deficiency

of their own knowledge: “But comrades, tomorrow, to advance seriously, not only the

leaders, but all children of nine years of age, must know what the acceleration of gravity

is. In Germany, for example, all the children know this” (pp. 104–105). He contrasts the

scientific backwardness of his land with the advancement of European countries, not to

humiliate his listeners, but to challenge them: Scientific knowledge is not an innate

privilege of Europeans; it is a conquest that any people can achieve, provided they

organize and discipline themselves. For Cabral, science is a factor in development and

autonomy—an indispensable condition to ensure the future nation does not exchange

colonial dependence for a new form of subalternity.

These passages on the importance of disseminating scientific knowledge in the

construction of a new nation illustrate well Cabral’s conception of culture: It is not a

matter of preserving traditions intact, but of transforming them in light of scientific

knowledge, thereby losing one’s identity in the process. Vocal performance is the

privileged vehicle of this emancipatory pedagogy. By explaining complex phenomena in

accessible language, Cabral affirms above all the possibility of a rational understanding

of the world, a necessary condition for the construction of a free and developed society.

The Construction of a Culture of Work and of a Discipline of Time

A recurring theme in Cabral’s lectures is the valorization of work, particularly agricultural

labor. In a society marked by the colonial hierarchy, which despised manual labor and

associated culture with bookish knowledge, Cabral seeks to invert this scale of values:

At the same time, we must try, as I have told you, to develop more and more

each day respect for those who work, to raise high the value of labor, to

convince the children of our land that agricultural work must not be despised;

on the contrary, it is the purest, healthiest, and most valuable work in our

land today. Unfortunately, in our African minds, working is still considered

something of little worth, especially plowing the land—for those who plow the

land only get things to eat, because it is the work of the wretched (p. 46).

This passage reveals a sharp awareness of the symbolic hierarchies inherited from

colonialism. Agricultural labor, devalued and associated with “misfortune,” needs to be

rehabilitated. Cabral does not limit himself to defending this rehabilitation in abstract

terms; he proposes concrete measures:

What we want tomorrow in our land is the following: that the names of those

who are praised be only those who produce the most. Those who produce

the most rice in our land—whether a person, a family, or a cooperative—are

the ones whose names must be raised high, with prizes. Whoever produces

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the most groundnuts, whoever is able to produce the most palm oil, and so

on, comrades, are the best people of our land. And we must punish severely,

criticize severely those who do not work to produce what is necessary within

our land, within the framework of our economic resistance (p. 61).

The proposal to associate social recognition with agricultural productivity is a way of

transforming the culture of work, of creating new values and new models of excellence.

Vocal performance, by enunciating this proposal with clarity and conviction, contributes

to its dissemination and internalization.

This new culture of work, however, requires a fundamental complement: time discipline.

Cabral insists on the need for militants to respect schedules and meet deadlines: “We

must have a notion of time, in our culture, in our action. It was not we who invented the

clock, but we must have a notion of time, comrades” (p. 91). This critique of

unpunctuality is not a mere administrative remark; it is a pedagogical intervention on

the very notion of time:

If it is necessary to get up at five in the morning, they get up at nine; if it is

necessary to make an ambush starting at four in the afternoon, on that day

they do not arrive, they only show up the next day and find that the Tugas

have already passed… How many times have our commanders failed attacks

or ambushes, simply because of delay. Some delays are justifiable, because

our conditions are difficult, but others are merely a lack of interest, lack of

awareness, lack of order, of decision.

Sometimes a comrade is given a mission to deliver a letter quickly to a certain

place. On the way, if he finds some form of amusement, he immediately

stops for three or four days, and eventually arrives one day. That cannot be.

In this way, we cannot even win the war, much less build a country (p. 92).

In a culture where, as Cabral observes, “we think of an ambush, we are very satisfied,

but we take no practical measures to ensure that everything goes well” (p. 93), keeping

to schedules is a form of discipline that transforms will into concrete action. Unpunctuality

is not a fatality; it is a choice that compromises the effectiveness of the struggle.

The Transcript as a Monument of a Performance

The publication of the lectures in book form raises an interesting theoretical problem.

The 1979 book is a trace, a vestige of a performance that we cannot recover in its

fullness. The voice, the gesture, the presence, and the reaction of the audience have

been lost. Zumthor’s Performance, recepção, leitura helps us think through this issue.

The reading of a poetic text, he writes, is always “the apprehension of an absent-present

performance” (Zumthor, 1990, p. 56). The reader strives to restore, through imagination,

the lost unity of the original performance. In the case of Cabral’s lectures, the reading of

the transcribed words summons in us the image of a voice, of a body, of a historical

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moment. The transcription is a monument that allows us, albeit in mediated form, to

access the performative energy carried by the words. This mediation, however, is not

neutral. The passage from orality to writing always entails losses and transformations.

As Zumthor (1990) notes:

In the situation of pure orality, ... “formation” takes place through the voice,

which carries the word; the first “transmission” is the work of a figure who,

in word, uses his living voice, which is necessarily linked to a gesture.

“Reception” is effected through hearing accompanied by sight, both directed

toward the discourse thus performed. [...] In the situation of reading, by

contrast, formation passes through writing, and reception is a second-degree

vision (pp. 65–66).

Despite these limitations, the transcript preserves precious elements of the original

performance. The rhythm of the sentences, the repetitions, the direct addresses to

comrades, the changes of tone - all of this, in some way, survives on the written page

and can be recovered by an attentive reader. The analysis presented here is, in this

sense, an attempt to restore, through critical imagination, the presence of Cabral’s voice

at the founding moment of the 1969 seminar.

Rádio Libertação and the Mediatized Word

As Amélia Sanches Araújo, the main announcer of Rádio Libertação (Radio Liberation),

recalls in a 1998 interview published in Aristides Pereira’s (2003) book, the PAIGC began

regular broadcasts of the mediatized word, transmitted over the radio waves, from

Conakry on July 16, 1967 (p. 330). The first attempts to create a radio station date back

to 1965, with a small Soviet short- and medium-wave transmitter, but the experiment

failed due to the weak signal power, which did not allow it to reach Bissau (p. 333). It

was Cabral who recognized the importance of the idea of a party station and nurtured it,

eventually, in 1966, sending Araújo and four other comrades for nine months of training

in the Soviet Union (Pereira, 2003, p. 333). The team began by broadcasting for fifteen

minutes, three times a day, progressively increasing airtime to half an hour as reception

in good conditions was confirmed (p. 333).

The creation of a party radio station was part of a broader phenomenon that spread

across Southern Africa, where guerrilla radios established themselves as “a very powerful

technology for disseminating insurgent propaganda messages of the liberation movement

and for mobilizing African workers, peasants, students, and youth in the struggle against

white minority domination in the entire region” (Lekgoathi, et al., 2022, p. 4). This

regional development was, in turn, embedded in a global phenomenon in which

broadcasting was used as a political weapon, a practice that intensified during the Cold

War (Cummings, 2021). Much like the CIA’s clandestine broadcasts to Eastern Europe or

the resistance radios of World War II (Ribeiro, Wagner, & Morriss, 2020), the PAIGC’s

station aimed to break the state’s information monopoly and win hearts and minds.

However, unlike many of those experiences, Rádio Libertação based its effectiveness not

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merely on external propaganda, but on the creation of a listening community that, as will

be shown, lay at the very heart of the nation-building process (Kind-Kovács, 2019).

Rádio Libertação, which broadcast in Portuguese, Creole, and several Guinean

languages—Balanta, Biafada, Mancanha, Manjaco, Fula, and Mandinga—was “a radical

experiment in collective cultural production” and “a praxis that is itself a source of

anticolonial ideas about culture” (Reza, 2022, p. 859). The reach of the station went far

beyond the borders of Guinean territory, extending to “Cabo Verde, Senegal, and even

to some European countries, where our emigrants managed to capture the broadcasts”

(Pereira, 2003, p. 334). The radio was part of the broader effort to break what Cabral’s

close comrade Mário Pinto de Andrade called the “obscurantism” of Salazarist

propaganda, which isolated the Portuguese colonies on the world stage and turned them

into “zones of silence” (Fele, 1957, p. 71).

Rádio Libertação did not replace Cabral’s presence, but amplified it, granting him a

ubiquity that his body could not have. According to Amélia S. Araújo, Cabral was the

most assiduous contributor to the station, writing most of the editorials and texts that

unmasked colonial propaganda (Pereira, 2003, p. 335). Cabral himself compared the

broadcasts of Rádio Libertação to the “mouth cannon” (canhão de boca) of the national

liberation struggle, a warlike metaphor that highlights the understanding of the

mediatized word as a front of combat as decisive as military action (Pereira, 2003, p.

333). In the 1969 seminar, when reflecting on the means of propaganda and information

at the service of the struggle, Cabral emphasized the strategic importance of Rádio

Libertação:

For this very reason, one of the greatest victories of our party is our Rádio

Libertação, our newspaper, our press, our information, both inside and

outside our land. We all know the strength, the value of our party’s Station,

which makes propaganda for our people and which we must be able to

improve every day, because this is an essential element, an essential means

of our propaganda for propagating our resistance (Cabral, 1979, 96).

This approach by the PAIGC stands in stark contrast to the broadcasting policy of the

Portuguese colonial regime itself. While Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State) demonstrated

a chronic disinterest in investing in shortwave broadcasts to its empire, neglecting to

create a unified and effective voice for the colonies (Ribeiro, 2014), Cabral recognised in

radio a central instrument of struggle. Rádio Libertação, therefore, not only filled an

informational void but also exposed the fragility of the colonial propaganda machine,

which was never able to compete with the agility and authenticity of the PAIGC’s “voice”.

Zumthor observes that auditory media and the written word share three fundamental

characteristics: They abolish the physical presence of the speaker; they free themselves

from chronological time by making the voice reiterable and indefinitely repeatable; and

they tend to erase the spatial references of the living voice, creating an artificially

composed space (Zumthor, 1990, p. 14). Still, he acknowledges that “what is lost with

the media, and thus necessarily remains so, is corporeality, the weight, the warmth, the

real volume of the body, of which the voice is only an expansion” (p. 16). He sees auditory

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media as “a kind of revenge, a forced return of the voice” (p. 15). The revenge of the

voice, in the context of anticolonial struggle, was its capacity to reach where the body

could not be. In Zumthor’s vision, the proliferation of song from the 1950s onward and

the disdain of youth for reading are symptoms of a “resurgence of the vocal energies of

humanity, energies that were repressed for centuries in the social discourse of Western

societies by the hegemonic course of writing” (p. 15). This reflection proves relevant

because it allows us to understand anticolonial radio not as a mere substitute for physical

presence, but as a technology that reactivated vocal energies long silenced by the

dominance of writing—a phenomenon that, in the context of anticolonial struggle,

acquired a political and liberating dimension.

For the PAIGC combatants, hearing Cabral’s voice on the radio was a paradoxical

experience. It was a form of presence, insofar as the voice carried with it the memory of

the body, the familiar intonation, the recognizable rhythm. But it was also a form of

absence, for the leader was not there, could not be touched, did not answer questions.

This tension between presence and absence is, for Zumthor, constitutive of the

experience of the media. The radio allowed Cabral’s word to cross borders, overcome

blockades, and reach combatants isolated in forests and populations living under

occupation. In this sense, technical mediation did not annul presence; rather, it multiplied

and diffused it, transforming the leader’s voice into a device of ubiquitous presence that

operated beyond the geographical and political limitations imposed by colonialism.

The Role of Rádio Libertação

Rádio Libertação assumed multiple roles in the PAIGC’s political and cultural strategy.

One of its central functions was the coordination and moralization of the fighting forces.

According to Amélia S. Araújo, the dissemination of combat actions on the various fronts

encouraged and incentivized combatants and militants (Pereira, 2003, p. 334). At the

same time, the radio became a central instrument in the fight against colonial

disinformation. Amélia S. Araújo emphasizes that the station put an end to the time when

the colonialists, including “Spínola and his agents, could freely spread their lies without

the PAIGC being able to refute them” (p. 335). Cabral assigned information a central

place in the anticolonial strategy, considering it a domain that required constant attention

and systematic collection (Reza, 2022, p. 861).

Another decisive role of the radio was the political and ideological formation of its

listeners, through the transmission of Cabral’s speeches, editorials, and messages, as

well as information about the clandestine political struggle in Cabo Verde and programs

of encouragement for militants who, “in the midst of the enemy, devoted themselves to

mobilizing the people” (Pereira, 2003, p. 335). This formative function is crucial to

understanding the PAIGC’s political strategy: The liberation struggle was not reduced to

military action; it required a profound transformation of consciousness, and the radio

was one of the main instruments of that transformation.

This work of cultural valorization through radio resonates with the experience of other

guerrilla radios in the region. Akinniyi (2025) highlights that the “inclusion of women’s

contribution within liberation movements” in various struggles “sheds light on women’s

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agency in shaping the discourse and direction of Southern Africa’s liberation struggles

through radio” (p. 678). This is equally applicable in the case of Rádio Libertação, where

announcers such as Amélia Sanches Araújo played a central role.

The broadcasting of songs from different ethnic origins contributed to the construction of

a national identity that transcended particular ethnic affiliations. The diffusion of songs

satirizing Salazar, for example, reveals how popular culture appropriated the political

message and transformed it according to its own logics (Reza, 2022, p. 873). As José

Linga Nafafé (2013) observes:

The sort of national culture that Cabral envisaged appears possible only in

the milieu imposed by colonialism, which is characterized by exploitation and

domination without distinction, of all the ethnic groups of Guinea-Bissau. In

effect colonialism itself becomes the common enemy (p. 35).

The radio was also an instrument of psychological warfare, particularly through the

program dedicated to Portuguese soldiers. The demoralizing impact of Rádio Libertação

on the colonial forces fits into a pattern documented in the armed struggles in

Mozambique and Angola. “The gravity of this threat is underscored by colonial counter

propaganda and particularly a PIDE [the regime’s secret police] official’s assertion that

these broadcasts were ‘no less dangerous than the armed war”’ (Akinniyi, 2025, p. 679).

On this subject, Amélia S. Araújo tells us:

There was a special program exclusively dedicated to the Portuguese soldier.

It was a program that sought to raise the soldiers’ awareness of the absurdity

of that war and to mobilize them against the war they were fighting without

knowing why. As a consequence, many desertions began to occur. Indeed,

many Portuguese soldiers deserted, and those of them who were willing were

interviewed on Rádio Libertação. That gesture had a tremendous impact on

those who remained. It demoralized them (Pereira, 2003, p. 334).

This testimony reveals that the effectiveness of the radio was measured not only by its

capacity to reach allies, but also by its ability to strike the adversary, sow doubt, and

open fissures in the cohesion of the colonial army. The success of the program - attested

to by the sheer number of desertions - demonstrates that the word, amplified by the

radio, operated as a psychological weapon of great reach. Finally, the radio fulfilled the

function of international dissemination of the struggle, making known to the world the

reality of the war and the support obtained by the PAIGC (Pereira, 2003). The capacity

to produce and broadcast its own programming, without depending on the colonizer’s

means, was already a form of resistance and an affirmation of sovereignty (Reza, 2022,

p. 875).

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The Reception of Rádio Libertação

The reception of Rádio Libertação cannot be understood merely as a process of

transmission and reception of information. Zumthor’s theoretical distinction between

reception and performance offers an illuminating conceptual framework for thinking of

listening to the radio as a transformative act. This understanding is corroborated by

recent studies on guerrilla radios in Southern Africa, which demonstrate how “the

invisibility and transience of sound allowed guerrilla radios to have sonic presence

‘beyond the jurisdiction of colonial law but within the broadcast range of the colonial state

and its territory”’ (Akinniyi, 2025, p. 679).

Friederike Kind-Kovács (2019) demonstrates how, Radio Free Europe in the early Cold

War, keen to understand the impact of its broadcasts, resorted to interviews with

refugees to capture stories of clandestine listening, transforming them into evidence of

its effectiveness and into narratives of resistance. Analogously, the collective and

clandestine listening practices of Rádio Libertação were recalled by Amélia Sanches

Araújo (Pereira, 2003) and documented by Reza (2022), testifying that the word

amplified by the radio created communities of listeners who, through shared listening,

collectively constructed the meaning of the struggle.

This distinction allows us to understand listening to Rádio Libertação as a performative

act. Each moment of listening was not a passive reception of information, but a

performance that actualized the virtualities contained in the word, and emitted and

transformed them into lived experience. Zumthor (1990), drawing on John Langshaw

Austin’s theory of speech acts, affirms that “in poetry, ‘to say is to act”’ (p. 56). According

to Austin (1962), certain utterances do not describe reality but produce an action in the

very act of their enunciation, conferring upon language a performative dimension that

goes beyond its merely constative function.

Applying this framework to Rádio Libertação, we can affirm that listening to the radio

was not a passive act, but a performative one that involved the body, emotion, and

interpretation. Cabral’s voice, as it crossed the radio waves and penetrated the domestic

space or the forests where combatants hid, inscribed itself in the bodies and memories

of listeners, shaping their sensibility and their political identity. As Zumthor (1990) puts

it, “The voice rests in the silence of the body. It emanates from it, then returns” (p. 85).

Cabral’s word emerged from his body and his conviction; when heard, it penetrated the

body of listeners, inscribing itself in their memory and shaping their consciousness.

Listening to the radio was thus a moment of political formation that operated beyond the

rational content of the discourse, mobilizing the sensory and affective energies of the

listeners.

This performative dimension of listening is particularly visible in the collective listening

practices that the radio elicited. Stephanie Urdang’s testimony about the PAIGC militant

Teodora Gomes is illustrative:

One of Teodora’s treasured possessions... was a small, black, scratched-up

short wave radio. It accompanied her everywhere. Each evening a group of

cadres would cluster around to listen to the news from Lisbon . . . suddenly

the clear voice of the Portuguese announcer cut through the evening air…

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when the newscast ended, everyone talked at once. Excitement competed

with disbelief and loud voices argued each other down . . . Teodora’s radio

continued to bring word from outside (Urdang, 2017, p. 148)

The clandestine listening practices, documented by Reza in the wake of historian Marissa

Moorman, reinforce this reading. Moorman (2018) describes “scenes of secret or semi-

secret listening” by audiences who tuned in to guerrilla radios in Angola (p. 251). A

Portuguese soldier stationed in Guinea confessed that he listened to Radio Libertação’s

programs “on the sly,” without the knowledge of the base officers (Reza, 2022, p. 866).

The simple act of tuning in to the forbidden frequency constituted a transgression that

anticipated, on the symbolic plane, the political rupture that the armed struggle sought

to consummate on the military plane. Clandestine listening was already a form of

resistance—an affirmation of autonomy in the face of colonial authority. To quote Akinniyi

(2025), “Both broadcasting and listening to guerrilla radio became subversive acts,”

strategically employed by liberation movements “to challenge the colonial monopoly on

information and public discourse” (p. 679).

Among the combatants, the impact of the radio was profound, functioning as a factor of

moralization and cohesion. Among the populations, the pleasure of hearing their

language and their music on the radio was a form of recognition and affirmation of their

dignity. Amélia S. Araújo imagines “the pleasure with which the populations, both from

the liberated regions and from Bissau, . . . listened to their songs” (Pereira, 2003, p.

334). This pleasure, which Zumthor (1990) identifies as “the highest value of the spirit”

(p. 108), resulted from the capacity of word and music to touch the body and mobilize

vital energies—a process that radio performance fully actualized. Among the enemy, the

radio provoked demoralization and desertion, to the point that colonial authorities

attempted to interfere with the broadcasts.

The reception of Rádio Libertação, in light of Zumthor’s theory, thus reveals itself as a

performative process that transformed listeners into active participants in the struggle.

Listening was not an isolated act, but a collective practice that generated spaces of

debate, interpretation, and political formation. The radio, by amplifying Cabral’s voice

and disseminating Guinean culture, created a community of listeners who, through

shared listening, collectively constructed the meaning of the struggle and prepared

themselves for the task of building a new nation. The word, amplified by technology and

rooted in a community of listeners, operated transformations that physical violence alone

could not produce, constituting itself as a device for the production of political subjectivity

and the formation of a national consciousness that transcended ethnic and geographical

boundaries. This process was not exclusive to Guinea-Bissau: Research on guerrilla

radios in Southern Africa also reveals testimonies of listeners “who attribute their political

awakening to these broadcasts, demonstrating that guerrilla radio stations not only

On Salazar’s singular broadcasting policy in Portugal and its African colonies, which consistently neglected

shortwave investments and failed to create a unified imperial voice, see Ribeiro (2014). For a broader context

on the use of international radio broadcasting as a political weapon during World War II, which influenced

subsequent Cold War strategies, see Ribeiro, Wagner, and Morriss (2020). On CIA clandestine radio operations

during the Cold War, including their role in psychological warfare (Cummings, 2021).

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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

194

disseminated information but also inspired and mobilized individuals to join the liberation

struggles” (Akinniyi, 2025, p. 679).

Conclusion

This study sought to demonstrate that the effectiveness of Amílcar Cabral’s leadership

cannot be explained exclusively by the coherence of his political strategy, the accuracy

of his sociological analysis, or the depth of his anticolonial vision. There is a dimension

which, although frequently mentioned in the memory of his contemporaries, has been

less explored in academic production: the performative dimension of his word. Paul

Zumthor’s theoretical framework, centered on the notion of performance as an act of

presence and on the materiality of the voice as an emanation of the body, proved

particularly fruitful in illuminating this dimension, allowing us to understand how Cabral’s

word—whether spoken in person at the 1969 seminar or amplified through the waves of

Rádio Libertação—operated transformations that went far beyond the transmission of

information.

At the 1969 seminar, the choice to use Creole as the language of the living voice

constituted a performative act of recognition and complicity, inscribing the discourse

within the cultural and affective universe of the listeners. The didactic tone, accessible

and punctuated by agrarian metaphors, allowed abstract political concepts to be

translated into images immediately comprehensible to a rural audience. The provocative

tone and direct confrontation of the militants’ shortcomings, far from discouraging them,

appealed to their overcoming and assumption of responsibilities. The constant concern

with ethical formation—the distinction between the combatant and the bandit, respect

for the populations, the construction of a “new man”—reveals that Cabral conceived the

liberation struggle as a profound moral transformation, for which the word was the

privileged instrument. Finally, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, in accessible

language and without arrogance, affirmed the possibility of a rational understanding of

the world, a necessary condition for emancipation. In all these dimensions, vocal

performance aimed to inscribe knowledge into the body and memory of the listeners,

mobilizing the “antepredicative knowledge” of which Zumthor speaks and making the

word a transformative event.

Rádio Libertação, for its part, did not replace Cabral’s presence but amplified it. The

mediatized voice shared with the living voice the same intonation, the same rhythm, the

same conviction, but operated on a different register: It reached where the body could

not be, crossed borders, overcame blockades, and penetrated domestic spaces and the

forests where combatants hid. Zumthor’s distinction between reception and performance

made it possible to understand that listening to the radio was not a passive act, but a

performative one that involved the body, emotion, and interpretation. The collective and

clandestine listening practices documented in the sources testify that the word amplified

by the radio created communities of listeners who, through shared listening, collectively

constructed the meaning of the struggle and prepared themselves for the task of building

a new nation. The radio, by disseminating Guinean music and languages, affirmed a

national identity that transcended ethnic affiliations, while at the same time demoralizing

the enemy and opening fissures in the cohesion of the colonial army. The effectiveness

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 175-197

Body, Voice, and Action: Amílcar Cabral’s Discursive Performance

in the Call to Anticolonial Resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

Rivaldo Mendes Freire Tavares, Raquel Abi-Sâmara

195

of Rádio Libertação lay in its dual capacity: it served as an effective psychological warfare

weapon, following the patterns of Cold War clandestine radios (Cummings, 2021), but,

more importantly, it acted as a catalyst for the creation of a shared national identity,

filling the void left by the neglect of Salazar’s broadcasting policy (Ribeiro, 2014). In

doing so, the PAIGC’s radio anticipated post-colonial struggles for cultural and media

sovereignty.

In synthesis, Cabral’s discursive performance - both in the living word and in the

mediatized word - constituted a central device for the production of political subjectivity

and the formation of a national consciousness. Its effectiveness lay not only in what he

said, but also in how he said it, a dimension that forms the primary focus of this article:

in the materiality of his voice, in its relation to the listeners’ bodies, in its capacity to

transform listening into experience and experience into action. This approach, inspired

by Zumthor, makes it possible to move beyond a merely instrumental conception of

language and to recognize the centrality of performance in the historical processes of

social transformation. In this sense, it aligns with contemporary perspectives that

understand performance not as mere representation or critique of the past, but as a

creative act that actively intervenes in the present and projects possible futures

(Louwerse, 2025). Performance, in this vision, goes beyond deconstruction to effect a

structural transformation of forms of knowledge and relationships, forging new modes of

connection between individuals, communities, and their histories.

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