 African political thought. This is one of those areas where the minute you start examining individual thinkers you begin to understand just how complex a general label like African political thought really is. And don't forget a lot of thought was borrowed and adapted from influences outside of Africa. Influences that were involved in their own liberation struggles, for instance. So on the Embeki mantelpiece in South Africa, the two sons, Tarbo Embeki, who later became president of South Africa, Maletsi Embeki, who later became a considerable businessman and public intellectual, would remember listening to their father, Govan Embeki, who spent many, many years in prison alongside Nelson Mandela on Robin Island. They would remember Govan talking to them about his political philosophy. And on the mantelpiece of the family home there were two portraits. One was of Karl Marx and the other one was of Gandhi. These were two iconic titans of thought and action in their day and they inspired people around the world, including in Africa. And we're going to be discussing today how they inspired, separately, two African leaders. What to start over with a brief recapitulation of one of two of the things that we discussed last week. We had a brief look at the whole concept, the whole dynamic phenomenon of negritude that was really formed by people from both West Africa and the West Indies studying in Paris as they came under the influence of French philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre came underneath the influence of great artists like André Breton and how the whole idea of black is beautiful, infused not only European thought but later became a motif in the black liberation struggles in the United States of America. But there were other thinkers from different parts of the world, people who shared in the black diasporic experience, who began thinking differently even though they were studying also in Paris. People like Fanon, for instance, came to Paris to study. He later became very very immersed in the Algerian revolution, even though he came originally from the French Caribbean territory of Martinique. And a whole mythology, a whole legend has developed about Fanon and his influence on black thinking, political thinking and the role of violence. I should say two things. Fanon was deeply implicated not only in the philosophical movements of his day but also in the psychoanalytic movements of his day. So when you have a very close look at his books then two things stand out. A very great deal of his work is to do with psychoanalytic case studies of trauma. This is what the colonialists did to us. The whole need to rise up was because of trauma inflicted by colonial occupation. In a way his works are highly technical. And I think the technical and the technological aspects of African thinking and writing are often left out of the equation. Fanon was also of course deeply involved in French politics. A very great number of his books, most of which have never been translated into English, were commentaries on French political life. He wanted a version of the metropole located in the periphery. In other words, he wanted full political access of citizens in Africa along the same lines as it took place in France. This was a vision. How do we get from point A to point Z? How do we accomplish for ourselves what has already been accomplished in Europe? Now when you look at in this way, it makes of many African thinkers, not so much revolutionary thinkers, but very progressive reformist figures. And this bears some discussion as we try to take them out of context in today's discussion. But I want to have a look at today to think is what have a look at Amacal Cabral, who was a freedom fighter as well as a thinker. He was a leader of liberation in a military sense in the Portuguese territories, particularly in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. He was a frontline leader, a fighter. But a lot of people forget that he was also a very considerable technocrat. He was a technocrat who had trained in Lisbon. He was a graduate agronomy student. He knew about agriculture. He knew about scientific agriculture, so that when many people look at his ideological work, people have the sense that he was in some way a Marxist. But it goes far beyond that. Again, looking at it in the context of those days, his most famous works were actually speeches that he made in gatherings of solidarity movements in places like Cuba. So he used a certain language to appeal to his audience. And he certainly talked about class divisions, and he certainly talked about productive forces. For instance, in one of his famous speeches in Havana, he talked about how the revolution, the fight for liberation, could not be located within the pseudo-bouchevalerie. Because the pseudo-bouchevalerie, however nationalist, cannot effectively fulfill its historical function, which is to direct the forces of production towards liberation. But that begs several questions. What was being produced, in fact, in Guinea-Bissau in Cape Verde? And so far as anything was produced, it was produced on a subsistence basis by local peasant communities. Nevertheless, what Amacal Proud did was to take the struggle against colonialism into the countryside, into the areas in which peasants lived, and to try not only to raise their consciousness, not only to direct combat against colonial powers from the countryside, but and this is, I think, the important thing, to direct scientific thought to the cultivation of better production in the countryside. He was an agronomist. He was a fighter. As a fighter, he had a very great deal of support from political leaders in other parts of Africa. Kwame and Kruma of Ghana gave permission to Cabral to base his military units in Ghana. And from there, they were able to infiltrate back into Cape Verde and into Guinea-Bissau. But his soldiers were taught how to teach local farmers better farming techniques. His soldiers not only fought, but they're taught farmers to increase productivity. The soldiers taught the peasants how to feed their families and to have surplus in order to feed the soldiers. Not only that, but he set up a trading system so that food produced that was surplus could be traded within a rural economy and at prices lower than could be produced by the colonial farmers. Not only that, but he established hospitals, he established schools, and he was able to care not only for wounded fighters, but also to care medically for the local population. The success of Cabral was such, not only in terms of mobilizing people along the lines of resistance to colonialism, but also in establishing an alternative form of provision and governance that he was the target of Imperial forces. He was assassinated before independence came to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, and it was his half-brother, Louis Cabral, who became the leader of Guinea-Bissau and later the first president. But what you have here is a curious combination in which ideology and thought certainly played a large part, but in which science and thought also played a large part. It answered precisely Fanon's question as to what was the black man who thought and fought. In other words, it was not just philosophy that someone like Cabral was interested in, but in productive forces as a technological project. What you had, however, in other jurisdictions where there was not this kind of militarized struggle, in a country like what we now call Zambia, for instance, northern Rhodesia, is an example of precisely the national pseudo bourgeoisie trying to assert a nationalist agenda. What you had in northern Rhodesia was a marginalization of what would normally be the bourgeoisie, the black bourgeoisie, in the sense that they were subject to deprivation on the part of the white minority government of that particular territory. On independence, Zambia only had 99 university graduates, and only two of those were, in fact, medical graduates. What, however, Kenneth Kowanda did when he was campaigning against the British and hiding underground, was to accept shelter from the Indian community. And from the Indian community, he received literature written by Gandhi. So you had the very curious phenomenon in Zambia, of a nationalist leader basing his principles of resistance on Gandhi's work, on nonviolent resistance, and on becoming leader of independent Zambia, having to establish an educational project which had been denied to Zambian people by British authorities. He was deeply influenced by the British. So next week, we're going to have a discussion as to exactly how he was influenced. But let us say that Kowanda's original philosophy would not look out of place in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party of today.