No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky

The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74

Basil Davidson

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786990662
• eBook ISBN: 9781783609994
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: History

No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky stands as a key text in the history of the eleven-year struggle against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Though perhaps less well known than the struggles in Angola and Mozambique, the liberation war waged by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) easily ranks alongside those conflicts as an example of an African independence movement triumphing against overwhelming odds.

Basil Davidson, a leading authority on Portuguese Africa who witnessed many of these events first hand, draws on his own extensive experience in the country as well as the PAIGC archives to provide a detailed and rigorous analysis of the conflict. The book also provides one of the earliest accounts of the assassination of the PAIGC's founder, Amilcar Cabral, and documents the movement's remarkable success in recovering from the death of its leader and in eventually attaining independence. Featuring a preface by Cape Verde's first president, Aristides Pereira, and a foreword by Cabral himself, No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky remains an invaluable resource for the study both of the region and of African liberation struggles as a whole.

1. Why?

Les plus grands, ce sont ceux qui ont su donner aux hommes l’espoir.

JEAN JAURES

The small jet bomber dives from around five thousand feet, its engine drilling like a monstrous fly. Two others follow: Fiats, I think, of the type they make in Western Germany. About five miles away.

We stand near the edge of the clump of trees that conceals our base, a dozen huts, a small dump of 75 mm. shells: watching. It is otherwise a quiet Monday morning. 9 October 1967.

A great wedge of black smoke fans out above the skyline fringe of coconut palms.

‘Napalm’, says the man from the Vietcong who is standing beside me, a visitor like myself. His tone is of the bitter weariness that a doctor in a plague might use when identifying yet another onset. Tran Hoai-nam, veteran member of the central committee of the Liberation Front of South Vietnam has seen it all before, has seen it many times.

I myself have seen no warfare since 1945; and then at least there was no napalm. Besides, this isn’t Vietnam. This is West Africa. Would the Portuguese – even these Portuguese of Dr Salazar’s most imperial Portugal – really drop napalm on villages and ricefields in rural Africa? Somehow I still have a hope that it isn’t true.

We move that afternoon. No pintcha, as Pascoal is always saying: ‘Forward, on our way, let’s go’. An appeal as well as a command. It takes me back to Yugoslavia in 1943, to the hills of Bosnia and the plains of Srem: pokret, a word to galvanize the limbs even of the weariest partisan alive, a flag of victory or a flail of fear, take it as you can.

No pintcha. We get into line and move out across the ricefields, walking easily. This time it is neither victory nor fear, but routine. We are on a tour of inspection, and Cabral is in a hurry. Guerrilla warfare is nothing if not movement, constant movement, merciless movement, movement in the mind even when you are sitting still, sitting still and calculating what has happened, what is going to happen. Here inside this country which is called a Portuguese ‘overseas province’, a country of strange wilderness and beauty about the size of Switzerland or Holland, we have moved and we shall move for days and nights.

We slop across ricefields yellow with the weak sunlight of the last of the rains. We splash through miles of ankle-deep water, our rubber soles clopping and clucking to each other. Three villages, one after another on our route, are each encircled by a clump of trees in this thin near-coastal forestland. More rice-fields. After that a big waterway, a mile-width of bottle-green sea that penetrates upcountry from the Atlantic and looks like a river but isn’t one. A majestic landscape, superb, defiant.

Canoes. We can stop walking. We load into these long dugouts until their freeboard laps an inch or two above the waterline, and crouch with a relief that doesn’t last. There is nothing less comfortable than a crowd of men in a canoe, for you can neither sit nor stand. Balante paddlers take us out into the current. Someone’s rifle is sticking into my back. Someone’s boots are cradled in my stomach. Never mind. No pintcha.

I think of the last time I was waterborne on a guerrilla expedition, crossing the moonlit Danube in the summer of 1944. Now it is daylight, sleepy tropical afternoon-time, but otherwise the mood is pretty much the same. It is so uncomfortable, in a sense so unreasonable, that we have to laugh. The laughter echoes back and forth between the walls of mangrove forest. You might think the Portuguese were a hundred miles away. Actually they are eight or nine: but hard watched, well contained. This is a liberated zone, the coastal zone of Quitafine. Here it’s how the kids were singing in a guerrilla school the other day:

The guerrilla walks proudly on the land
While the little Portuguese commands the clouds …

Those Balante paddlers, their rifles slung, swing their blades as though they will go on for ever. There are moments when I think this is what they are going to do. But all things come to an end, even journeys by canoe. We climb up a bank of mud and walk into the forest as twilight falls. Now it is only the ants, the marching ants, that bother us. Linger in one of their trails for an instant and their black little teeth will be stinging into your ankles, your legs, your thighs. Whenever this happens, we break into a trot, slapping at our trousers, stamping our feet. As for snakes, nobody worries any more. Pascoal said the other day, ‘We have learned to live with the snakes.’

Late at night we stumble through trees into another base, at this time the main military base for Quitafine, a regular camp well sentried and composed. Here is Mateus, commander in Quitafine along with Pascoal who is regional commissar. A tall grave figure in the night. Mateus is a veteran of three years’ fighting just like Pascoal. Limping from an old wound, Mateus makes us welcome, inquires for news, offers his own.

We stand about, relaxed and even happy. Really there is nothing happy about guerrilla warfare. There are only moments of good effort made successfully, of tasks accomplished, that one afterwards remembers with a certain joy. There are others, of a different kind, that one remembers with horror: or tries not to remember. This is one of the good moments.

The guard section who have come with us go off to feed and rest. We sit in a hut and wash our feet, gently comfortable. The paraffin lamp makes a shadow play. We see each other as fleeting shadows, but as solid ones. Cabral who is the founder of this movement, its inspirer, its leader, its relentless critic: a man of unforgettable moral resonance and strength of purpose whom I first met in 1960 when he came to my house in London, then as ‘Abel Djassi’, and whom I have stayed in touch with ever since. Tran Hoai-nam and Pham Van Tan of the Vietcong who are as tired as I am but, unlike me, would never think of saying so. Another old friend, Mario de Andrade from Angola, a poet with the history of his people in luminous eyes and dancing hands, a fine intelligence who has not allowed his Latin and Greek, seminary-learned, to cloud a shrewd appreciation of the world.

Amilcar looks across at me. ‘What would you say to a glass of Scotch?’

‘Ah, don’t be silly.’

‘You never know,’ says Mario, whose talent is for not being surprised.

And after all Amilcar has brought a bottle of Scotch. ‘First appearance on this scene,’ he chuckles: ‘just like you. You see, we think of everything.’

We sit with our feet in warm water and pass the bottle round.

* * *

Next morning we learn that yesterday’s bombing was lucky for the Portuguese. After weeks of trying they struck an anti-aircraft gun served by two guerrilla soldiers. One of these was burned to death. The other managed to fling himself clear of the gunpit, but with major burns.

Cabral goes off on business of his own, visiting military units and schools and village committees. Pascoal Alves takes us four visitors to see the wounded man.

On the way we pass another anti-aircraft post, consisting of one four-barrelled gun and with two single barrels, all three from Czechoslovakia and served by eight or ten young guerrillas. These guns are well placed in good pits with an open field of fire all round. The gunners explain their weapons. But will they use them when it comes to the point? After all, these gunners are out there in the open and they know about yesterday’s bombing. I don’t ask this question. But I think it.

A few minutes later, when we’re half a mile along the path, today’s bombing begins. The Portuguese seem to come every day at about eleven in the morning, and sometimes after lunch – after their lunch, I mean – with two or three planes from the airbase at Bissau, the country’s capital. This time they come with two planes: Fiats again. They go back and forth over us at about four thousand feet and drop high-explosive on a fancied target some six miles away. But my question is answered: down the path our gunners open up on them at once, and with calm short bursts which continue till the planes go away again.

The hospital is in a forest clearing. A few beds for casualties and serious civilian cases, but mainly a clinic and dispensary for the neighbouring population. Daily clinics. One doctor, a quietly confident young man who has lately returned from six years of medical training in Moscow; and three nurses (normally, he explains, there should be five) who have each had one year’s nursing training in the Soviet Union. I chat with the nurses in the little Russian that I have. It seems odd to find these young women speaking Russian: but why any odder, after all, than if they’d spoken French or English? Like the doctor, they are absolutely indigenous, absolutely of the country: young women who have gone from their Balante villages and learned a useful trade and now come home again to exercise it.

In a darkened hut there is Tengbatu, a Balante soldier. A long figure made huge with bandages that cover almost his whole body. About 23. A nurse hovers. The doctor reassures her. He says to us: ‘Tertiary burns only on the extremities. We shall save him.’ A few days later the army takes out Tengbatu to a base hospital near Boke in the Republic of Guinea. He went on the same boat as myself.

Next morning, back at base camp in Quitafine, I walk across the parade ground and find, in the shadow of a hut, a large fragment of an unexploded napalm canister dropped at the same time as the one that scorched Tengbatu. It is neatly printed with its identity: FCM-1-55 NAPALM 300 KG – 350L M/61. It is part of the military material which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization supplies to Portugal. For the defence of the Free World. A strange region, this Free World.

Napalm, like high-explosive, has been used by the Portuguese in Africa since the early months of the Angolan revolt in 1961. They use napalm a great deal, although they do not make it themselves, any more than they make jet bombers. The little hospitals and clinics of guerrilla-held Guine are filled with its victims, not only men but women and children as well. Some die from it. Others are mutilated by it.

War is a dirty business. This kind of war can sometimes be – and on this occasion, thanks to NATO, is – the dirtiest of all.

* * *

Genuine revolts against an established order begin with necessity. The penalties of guerrilla warfare can be accepted, can be justified, only when they are suffered as part of a necessary self-defence. This is a hard lesson that has nothing to do with revolutionary verbalism.

A few leaders may understand, from the start, this necessity to use violence both in self-defence and as the only means of opening the door to a better future. But they remain powerless until and unless large numbers of people also feel and acknowledge it. Only then can the bitterness and hope take fire.

The examples are there in the history of our times. Not to speak of the great antecedents in Russia and China, this was how it was in Yugoslavia during 1941 and 1942, when Nazi and Nazi-prompted massacres drove the peasants to fight back. It was so in Vietnam, during the reign of Diem in 1954-9, when the peasants saw their newly-given lands being taken away from them again. It was so in Cuba after the horrors of Batista. It was so in Kenya during the Emergency of the early 1950s. And it has been so in Guine.

‘I understand the need for violence,’ observed the Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, the courageous Monsignor Helder Camara, not long ago: ‘I respect those men who have chosen to accept it.’¹ He was thinking of his own Latin America. He might have been thinking of Guine.

This country of Guine is a small one, having within it fewer than a million Africans and perhaps three or four thousand civilian Portuguese. Much separates it from its neighbours and gives it an interest of its own. But there are also certain ways in which Guine may be more than interesting in itself, may be microcosmic in meaning – a paradigm of the African situation in the late 1960s: a place not only worth observing for itself but also worth learning from.

The history of Guine under the Portuguese is what explains the armed revolt which began in 1963.

But the history of the Portuguese is much older here than the history of colonialism. This, too, has something to do with the case. Long ago, even before the end of the fifteenth century, the pattern here was set. These were the latitudes where the trans-Atlantic slave trade saw its first beginnings. ‘The people who live round the Rio Grande’ – so named by the Portuguese because it was the largest ocean inlet south of the Gambia river – ‘are Gogolis and Beafares [Beafadas] ’, Duarte Pacheco Pereira was reporting in 1506, ‘and are subjects of the king of the Mandinka’, of the king of Mali. ‘They are very black in colour and many are naked while others go clothed in cottons. Here you can buy slaves at the rate of six or seven for a horse, even a bad horse; you can also buy gold, though not much …’²

The dusty centuries that followed brought little change. Europeans of various nationalities set up small trading stations where they bought and sold what they could while the coastal peoples of the Rio Grande took what profit they could find, resisting enslavement as best they might. It was always a small trade, never on the large scale achieved at other points along the Guinea Coast.

So it went on until the rise of European imperialist ambitions after the middle of the nineteenth century. Then the pace began to quicken. This vague territory, which the Portuguese had called Os Rios de Cabo Verde, became ‘allocated’ to Portugal, largely by British support against French advance, and was renamed Portuguese Guinea, or Guine. Its frontiers as they are today were drawn upon a map by a Luso-French convention of 1886. Thereafter the Portuguese had a new colony.

But for a long time they had it only in name. Their frontiers ‘enclosed’ a country about which the Portuguese knew almost nothing except that its populations were hostile to them, and where they had not a single post beyond sound of the sea. It became necessary, in colonial parlance, to ‘show effective occupation’ and ‘pacify the country’. This proved difficult. There was African resistance. Wars followed.

It m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Zachariah Mampilly
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note to the 1981 Edition
• Preface by Aristides Pereira
• Foreword by Amilcar Cabral
• 1. Why?
• 2. How? With Whom?
• 3. Under What Precise Conditions?
• 4. By What Political Principles and Organization?
• 5. By What Military Methods?
• 6. Involving What Obligations?
• 7. Towards What Future?
• 8. With What Wider Meaning?
• 9. Carrying Through: 1968–72
• 10. Meeting the Bitterest Loss: 1973
• 11. The End of Colonial Rule
• 12. Building and Rebuilding
• Note on Further Reading in English