In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Firoze Manji. Manji, a Kenyan with more than 40 years’ experience in international development, health and human rights, is the founder and publisher of Daraja Press. His edited book is Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral.
Roberto Sirvent: Can you please share the impetus for putting together this collection of essays in Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral?
Firoze Manji: The first edition of this book came out in 2013, which was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Amilcar Cabral. And the second edition was published on the 100th anniversary of his birth. I believe that Cabral, along with Frantz Fanon, is one of the most important revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. His ideas are often relegated to being of relevance only to Africa, whereas a serious understanding of Cabral’s work demonstrates his profound commitment to a universalist humanity that is relevant worldwide. He was concerned about human emancipation, albeit that the terrain in which he operated was on the African continent. He was not just an Africa revolutionary. He was a revolutionary in Africa.
I was deeply moved by the news of Cabral’s assassination in 1973 while I was attending university in the UK. As students, we organized activities to show solidarity with the struggles of PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and MPLA in Angola—all three movements with which Cabral helped found. One of the many initiatives we undertook was hosting a weekend teach-in on the anti-imperialist struggles in the Portuguese colonies, featuring films, talks, discussions, music, and more. The entry fee was a pint of blood! Not everyone agreed to donate, but we collected many pints, which we arranged to send to East Germany. There, they were freeze-dried and shipped to the frontlines to support FRELIMO. The initiative inspired people to feel they had made a sacrifice and given blood for the revolution! So, it was involvement in such activities that led me to read and learn more about Cabral.
Years later in 2000, I founded Pambazuka News, which published a weekly newsletter on the struggles of people in Africa and, later, also published books. It was there that I developed the idea of bringing together an anthology on the legacy of Cabral. Unfortunately, my period of 12 years with Pambazuka News came to an abrupt end in 2012. So, in 2013, while working in Senegal, I decided to launch Daraja Press (Daraja in Swahili means a bridge — a bridge between the past and the future, a bridge connecting movements, intellectuals and activists in the struggle for human emancipation). And the first book we launched was the Cabral book (the second was The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa). I was especially motivated to do so following my first visit to Guinea-Bissau in 2012 where I discovered how Cabral continues to be celebrated by young people.
The current era we live in is marked by dispossession: the loss of land, resources, labor, rights, and freedoms of all kinds, and even the dispossession of life as illustrated by the genocide of Palestinians. But it is also a time of dispossession of memory: without memory of the past, we cannot understand the present or build the conditions for the future. Creating an anthology on the legacy of Amilcar Cabral was an attempt to reclaim a history at risk of being lost and to challenge the erasure of memory. I think what impressed me most about Cabral was that he was an organic revolutionary. His Marxism was not about expounding dogmatic rhetoric, but rather the development and enhancement of the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Mao and other revolutionaries through the practical experience of African people’s perspectives in their struggle for liberation.
When I first proposed the idea of a book, I expected maybe ten or so people to contribute chapters. But I was blown away by the response. It turned out to be much bigger project than I had imagined, and I was thankful to have had the help of Bill Fletcher Jr. in making the book happen. The book eventually grew to about 40 chapters, featuring contributions from a wide range of authors, including Samir Amin, Patricia Rodney, Helmi Sharawy, Stephanie Urdang, Walter Turner, Angela Davis, Maria Poblet, and many other intellectuals, as well as grassroots activists.
Your essay in the book is about the “politics of culture and identity”. How did you get introduced to the life and work of Amilcar Cabral, and why did this specific topic of culture and identity stand out to you?
Coming of age politically in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, in the movements I was involved in, we described ourselves as ‘Black,’ regardless of skin color, physical features, physiognomy, or our origins in the colonial world. It was a political identity. Years later, that political meaning has faded: we now too often describe ourselves as how Whites see us — ‘black,’ ‘brown,’ ‘Latina,’ ‘African,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Philippina,’ etc. We are not perceived as fully human. Our people are seen as ‘underdeveloped,’ and our countries called ‘developing,’ while the West is regarded as ‘developed.’ I saw this as a form of depoliticization associated with the rise of neoliberal capitalism.
Among many of his writings, I was really struck by Cabral’s speech to PAIGC cadre, where he reminded them that before being Africans, we are human beings who belong to the whole world. Cabral’s starting point was that we are part of humanity. So, what was the path from being humans to becoming African? I argue in that essay that Africa was an invention of Europe during its process of defining itself as ‘Europe.’ Europe began defining itself as Europe only after the defeat and expulsion in 1492 of the 700-year-old civilization of Al-Andalus, established in the Iberian Peninsula by African peoples. The term ‘African’ was a European shorthand for those on the continent they considered less than human (or even non-human), which enabled them to carry out genocide, mass killings, rape, torture, looting, enslavement, occupation, and other inhumane actions against the continent’s peoples—just as today, Palestinians are viewed as less than human to justify similar atrocities. But the crucial point about his perspectives on identity was that they were founded on the belief that Africans are humans. Therefore, the pathway from being colonized was to reclaim our humanity, if not invent what it means to be human.
But that proclamation that before we were Africans we were humans, does not deny that a central tenet of being African was to have a culture of resistance. Like Fanon, he distinguished between ‘custom’ and culture. He viewed resistance as fundamentally intertwined with culture and the radical project of reclaiming and reinventing humanity in the face of centuries of systematic dehumanization. The colonial system required the systematic destruction of existing African cultures, languages, histories, and capacities to define Africans as non-humans. Cabral argued that, at its heart, culture is a form of resistance against this attempt at destruction. The anti-colonial struggle thus became a necessity to regain the historical personality of the people and achieve a "return to history". This process required a "reconversion of minds" or "re-Africanization", which is completed only through the collective experience and sacrifices required by the liberation struggle. For Cabral, the identity of “African” must be defined politically—by shared commitment to emancipation—rather than taxonomically by race or geography. He warned that delinking the concept of African identity from this emancipatory struggle reduces it to a mere taxonomic term, which is a form of dehumanization. As Fanon put it: “To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow. One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation.”
Both Cabral and Fanon were critical of the post-independence outcome. Cabral famously argued that the colonial state must be "burned to ashes" because it is structurally incapable of serving the people’s interests, emphasizing that the problem is the existence of the administrator, not merely their skin colour. Fanon warned that post-independence elites often succumb to the pitfall of replicating colonial violence and institutions. Ultimately, Cabral stressed that the struggles of African peoples are for universal humanity, reminding comrades that "before being Africans we are … human beings, who belong to the whole world". Their struggles offer crucial insights that transcend colonial classifications and contribute to the reclamation of humanity for all.
You are founder and publisher of Daraja Press. How is the mission and practice of Daraja Press different from more traditional book publishers? Are there any books coming out in the next few months that you’re especially excited about?
I am often asked about what makes our approach distinct. The difference lies not just in what we publish, but in why and how we operate. Our mission is fundamentally about bridging critical knowledge and social movements, particularly from the African continent and the “Global South”. It is fundamentally about contributing to the struggle for human emancipation.
Traditional publishers often operate within a market-driven paradigm, where a book's viability is primarily measured by its sales potential. While we certainly want our books to be widely read, our core metric is different: it is giving legitimacy to radical perspectives from the Global South, that is to say, the colonized and the neocolonized, whether geographically located in the “south” or within empire itself. We seek out works that challenge coloniality, neoliberalism, and oppressive power structures, and that amplify the voices of activists, organic intellectuals, and communities engaged in struggle. Our goal is to put vital analytical tools into the hands of those shaping a more just world. We are less concerned with creating bestsellers and more with creating essential resources for political education.
This mission directly shapes our practice in three key ways:
- Accessibility: We challenge the often-prohibitive cost of knowledge. Alongside quality paperback and hardcover editions, we simultaneously release affordable digital editions. Furthermore, we practice a form of “circulation activism”, making many of our works freely available as downloadable PDFs on our website, believing that ideas for liberation should not be locked behind paywalls.
- Collaborative Publishing: We see ourselves not as gatekeepers, but as collaborators. Our editorial process is a dialogue with authors, many of whom are scholar-activists. We work to preserve the political urgency and accessible language of their work, ensuring it remains relevant to both academic and movement audiences. There are many radical publishers around the world. We see ourselves as one instrument in an orchestra, and in that sense, we have no “competitors”.
- A Political Project: Daraja—meaning "bridge" in Kiswahili—is exactly that. We aim to bridge the gap between the academy and the street, between theoretical critique and on-the-ground organizing. Every book we publish is a node in a larger network of resistance and re-imagination.
As for our recent publications, we have received outstanding materials from Palestine. We have published stories by a 17- and 18-year-old writing about the experiences of genocide in Gaza (Gaza Held in Time: A Tapestry of Two Lives), We are Still Here that is written by students of Gaza’s universities sitting amongst the rubble of destroyed homes, hospitals and institutions. The book has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. One of our forthcoming books, Beyond the Neocolonial: Africa and the Dialectics of Emancipation, argues that the profound cause of contemporary global crises is the continued existence of neocolonial capitalism. The book contends that the neocolonial state, which inherited and adapted repressive colonial features, operates through pseudo-sovereignty to reproduce the interests of a kleptocratic oligarchy. He posits that popular anti-colonial revolts did not lead to true emancipation because revolutions are “true as movements and false as regimes,” failing when they attempted to achieve popular liberation through the state. To move beyond this failure, the work advocates a return to dialectical thought as the core feature of any genuine politics of emancipation. This politics must be understood as a collective thought-practice based on universal equality and humanity, rejecting the limitations of state power, which is always rooted in special interests. And we will soon be publishing Viyyukka – The Morning Star: Voices of India's Women Revolutionaries, perspectives of women guerrilla fighters whose voices are rarely heard.
Why is Cabral’s work especially important for revolutionary struggles today? Cabral famously said, “We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults at it.” What lessons can social movements learn from this insight?
What distinguished Amilcar Cabral from so many other revolutionary thinkers was that his theory was not forged solely in the lecture hall or the library, but in the arduous, daily practice of building a popular movement in Guinea-Bissau. For Cabral, the intellectual was not an external commentator but an organic part of the struggle, and the struggle itself was the ultimate teacher. This understanding is rooted in a living dialectic: the process by which engaging in political action for emancipation fundamentally changes how one thinks, and how that transformed consciousness, in turn, refines and deepens the struggle. We, as subjects of history, are constantly in a state of becoming through this very process.
This praxis—the seamless fusion of theory and action—was the engine of the PAIGC, the party he founded and led. Under his guidance, they did not merely wage a war of liberation; they built a new society in the shell of the old. While facing constant terror attacks from Portuguese troops, the PAIGC liberated two-thirds of the country and established functional, democratic structures. In these zones, peasants, teachers, health workers, and women’s organizations collectively made decisions about education, agriculture, justice, and healthcare. This was prefigurative politics in its most potent form: they were not waiting for independence to begin building the world they wanted to live in.
While often pigeonholed as an African theorist, Cabral’s profound relevance lies in his universalist project: the reclamation of our identity as full human beings, liberated from both colonial and internalized oppression. He famously critiqued a left that only points fingers at imperialism. While acknowledging its destructive role, he used the powerful proverb, “Rice only cooks inside the pot.” This was a dual challenge. First, it demands an honest analysis of our own social realities—the class dimensions, the internal contradictions, and the cultural weaknesses that imperialism exploits. Second, and more crucially, it insists that critique is insufficient. Our primary task is to build today the world we want to live in. And we must move from an oppositional politics of protest to a propositional politics of creation.
A stunning, yet under-reflected, manifestation of this was the abolition of money in the liberated zones. This was not merely the abandonment of Portuguese currency; it was a conscious decision not to replace it with another. Instead, economic life was reorganized around barter and what we now term ‘mutual aid’. This was a radical, concrete step toward dismantling the logic of capital itself, demonstrating that a society not mediated by cash was not a utopian fantasy but an achievable reality.
This is the enduring lesson of Cabral. His legacy is not a frozen dogma, but a dynamic method visible in contemporary movements like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, whose story we published in Jackson Rising. They, like Cabral, understand that self-determination begins by building the new world here and now, within the shell of the old. Our task is not to mourn the world we oppose, but to actively cook the rice of a new one in the pot of our own communities.
A lot of readers are also familiar with Cabral’s theorizing about class suicide. Can you share why this was so important for Cabral’s organizing? And why is it important for thinking about community organizing today, especially with so many celebrity activists and academics purporting to be committed to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle?
The revolutionary concept of “class suicide,” introduced by Amílcar Cabral, has often been tragically misunderstood and reduced to a simple, pragmatic strategy. The common interpretation suggests that under colonialism—where technical and administrative expertise was monopolized by the white supremacist state—the educated petty bourgeoisie had to temporarily side with the masses to win the war. This is a profound misreading. For Cabral, it was not a tactical alliance but a fundamental, existential transformation. It was not about the domination of popular movements by a vanguard class, but their total renunciation of their class privilege and psyche.
Cabral argued that the petty bourgeoisie, having been educated within and shaped by the colonial system, inherently harbors a deep-seated aspiration to replace the colonizer, not to dismantle the system of exploitation. They dream of becoming the new bosses, the new owners, the new elite. “Class suicide” was the radical process of killing this internalized colonial desire. It meant that the educated individual had to consciously shed their class allegiance and ego, immersing themselves so completely in the life and struggle of the peasant and working classes that they were spiritually and politically reborn—no longer as a privileged “leader” but as a servant of the revolution.
The tragic reality of many contemporary social movements is a living testament to the failure to heed Cabral’s warning. Far from committing suicide, a class of "celebrity activists" and NGO professionals often performs a vampiric inversion of the process. They draw new life, prestige, and career capital by draining the energy, creativity, and legitimacy of the masses. This dynamic is fueled by a fundamental misconception: the belief that social transformation can be purchased with sufficient funding.
This is where we must confront the uncomfortable relationship between money and revolution. As contemporary thinkers like John Holloway have insisted, money is not a neutral tool; it is a social relation that commodifies life and is itself a primary cause of exploitation. It structures our world towards accumulation and hierarchy. To believe the revolution can be “financed” is to believe the master's tools can dismantle the master's house. Just as Gil Scott-Heron proclaimed “the revolution will not be televised,” we must internalize a more fundamental truth: the revolution will not be funded.
Funding inevitably comes with strings—explicit or implicit. It demands professionalization, report-writing, measurable outcomes, and non-threatening frameworks that rarely challenge the root causes of the system. It transforms radical energy into manageable projects, and potential revolutionaries into grant applicants. This system, often called the “non-profit industrial complex,” effectively neutralizes dissent by making it dependent on the very capital it seeks to overthrow.
Therefore, to return to Cabral’s radical premise, the true creative power of a movement lies in its break from this logic. The ultimate conclusion of “class suicide” is not just the suicide of the individual from their class, but the suicide of the entire economic paradigm they represent. This is why the PAIGC’s experiment in abolishing money in the liberated zones was so significant. It was a concrete step towards abolishing the social role of the “money-owner.” A genuine movement must prefigure the world it desires, and if that world is one of mutual aid and collective ownership, it cannot be birthed through the medium of capital. The reclamation of a new humanity requires the invention of new social relations, and this creative, world-making work begins precisely where the rule of money ends.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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