Conflicting Winds: The liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau and the quest to decolonize the Cold War

This article discusses the role of the elusive, multi-layered ways of imagining the Cold War in the history of decolonization. On the one hand, the article argues that the PAIGC’s foreign strategy during its armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (1963-74) involved a quest to defy the Cold War’s entanglement with African decolonization by exploring the former’s ambiguity. The PAIGC’s founding leader, Amílcar Cabral, sought to conciliate non-alignment with anti-imperialism while trying to circumvent the Cold War’s ideological, security-focused, geographical, and alliance-based scopes. On the other hand, the article analyses how the plurality of Cold War logics posed widespread challenges to this quest. Drawing on recent literature as well as on interviews, archival research, and published sources, the article concludes that, although Cabral’s efforts were partly successful, his party was not able to fully isolate Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship from its core Western partners.