Body, voice, and action: Amílcar Cabral’s discursive performance in the call to anticolonial resistance in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau

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.