Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War: De-gendering the History of Anticolonial Struggle

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Drawing on rich archival sources and summarizing extensive interviews with women who participated in the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War as spies, guerrilla fighters, and weapons transporters, this open access book helps correct an egregious gender bias in contemporary accounts of a major episode in 20th-century African decolonization.

Here Aliou Ly outlines how both popular an scholarly accounts of Portuguals defeat in 1974, which ultimately led to Portugal's abrupt withdrawal from their African colonies, continue to focus on the charisma of male leaders and on male-dominated high politics and ideology. Yet as Ly finds, women were often more active and effective than men during the war, and this because their motives for participating were more concrete. Unlike most male participants, for example, many women joined the struggle in order to help fight for their families food security.
Yet their contributions were often overlooked or outright betrayed, as women faced discrimination both during the war and immediately afterwards. They had to fight internally to be able to engage in active combat, and they returned to home to find that they were expected to take a back seat in the post-independence era, a trend that continues to this day.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Reviews

This book tells the forgotten story of women's participation in the Struggle for the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau, one of the most remarkable guerrilla wars of the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century * Catarina de Castro Laranjeiro, Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal *
In this highly original and carefully researched work, Aliou Ly peels back decades of bias to reveal the powerful and fundamentally transformative role of women in Guinea Bissaus liberation. Framed provocatively as an incisive methodological inquiry, Ly exposes how womens accomplishments were literarily and figuratively concealed, minimized, and erased by successive generations of male combatant-cum-politicians even as isolated individuals were celebrated as national heroines. Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War dramatically recasts prevailing historical narratives such that the remaining survivors of the independence struggle, both male and female, may finally recognize themselves and their achievements. Bissau women may not have shared the fruits of liberty with their male counterparts, but future generations of citizens may now appreciate the complexity and significance of their revolutionary acts. * Benjamin N. Lawrance, University of Arizona, USA *
Readers interested in gender studies in Africa and decolonialization as well as anthropologists and oral historians more broadly will find this book particularly relevant. * Review for Democracy *

Author Bio

Aliou Ly is Associate Professor in the History Department at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. His work focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa, with specialisms in the political history of Guiena Bissau and the relations between womens emancipation and national liberation struggles. He has published his findings across multiple edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.