Adrian Matus reviews Aliou Ly’s Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War. De-gendering the History of Anticolonial Struggle. London: Bloomsbury Publishing / Zed Books, 2024, 216 pages. ISBN 9781350383043.
To what extent have the memories of anticolonial struggles in the 20th century silenced the voices of important participants? Aliou Ly’s Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War. De-Gendering the History of Anticolonial Struggle aims to bring a fresh understanding to this troubling question. It approaches an anticolonial struggle in Africa from a de-gendered perspective, writes Adrian Matus in this review.
Ly manages to develop a nuanced interpretation of this costly conflict that was colloquially known as “Portugal’s Vietnam.” For more than a decade, the author dedicated himself to exploring the history of colonial and post-colonial West Africa, with a specific focus on women’s participation in national liberation struggles. Drawing on this expertise, Ly is an Associate Professor at Middle Tennessee State University where he teaches courses such as Scramble for Africa: Nationalism and Decolonialization.
When analyzing participation in liberation wars, historians tended to employ a rather simplistic definition: in most cases, participation was taken to mean direct participation in combat. Aliou Ly challenges this assumption as early as his introduction and finds that even when individual agency during, and the formation of memory of the liberation war was discussed, both academic scholarship and more popular forms of remembrance favoured stories around male figures such as Amílcar Cabral, one of the key revolutionary figures during the conflict. To examine this issue critically, three main questions guide the book’s investigation: the reasons why historiography did not account for female combatants’ roles; the roles of women in the liberation war; and methodological questions related to the gathering of sources that are relevant from a gendered point of view.
Posing these main questions, the book explores three key themes: colonial policies and women in Portuguese Guinea, understanding women’s participation in combat, and gendering war spaces. By revisiting the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War, Aliou Ly reveals the range of tactics and strategies employed by women. His case study thus offers insights about gendered war spaces in African liberation movements that can be applied more broadly.
At the same time, Aliou Ly aptly places the liberation movement in broader contexts. While the Mozambican nationalist and revolutionary group FRELIMO created a separate Women’s Detachment through which women would participate in direct combat operations, the Portuguese Guinea’s main revolutionary group called PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde) had different strategies in different periods.
To explain the specificities of the case, Ly’s first move is to provide historical context. Chapter 1, “Colonial Policies and Women in Portuguese Guinea,” sheds light into the complexities of the pre-colonial and colonial Portuguese Guinea. Different groups in society had different understanding of gender dynamics – the Balantas lived in villages with egalitarian structures, while the Islamized communities of Fula and Fulani had more hierarchical ones during colonial times. The second and third chapters in turn present the women’s roles within the conflict and how female characters have subsequently tended to downplay their own roles during it. A key concept of the book is “self-paradox discourse”, which can help account for how and why women’s participation got obscured. In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts to the implications of the heroinization of female fighters and the creation of gendered war spaces. The last chapter, “Gender Roles and the First Republic,” follows the extent to which the new-born republic truly changed colonial gender-related policies, by pinpointing issues such as polygyny and forced marriages.
The book’s key achievement lies in the way it unfolds the multiple memory layers that obscured the gender aspect. First and foremost, most scholars who previously discussed the liberation movement in Portuguese Guinea did not refer to women and gender issues at all. To aggravate this, when presenting the struggles, most male participants, as well as later historians of the period, focused on the macro-narratives about nationalism, Marxism, leadership or anti-colonialism. These two layers combined to form a biased memory that has been perpetuated throughout the decades. According to Aliou Ly, the books of anti-apartheid activist and writer Stéphanie Urdang were the only ones to challenge the dominant paradigm.
While this form of deconstruction is not necessarily new in theoretical terms, one more puzzling aspect makes this book a must-read even for those not especially interested in colonial and postcolonial Africa: women who had engaged in the liberation war were to downplay the importance of their own role at first. This aspect became clear to Ly when he was interviewing key female actors but could understand little about women’s role as a result. As the author underlines, to tackle this silence, a methodological change was needed:
All the women combatants I interviewed took the same approach until I redirected my questioning to their own roles. It was at that point that the narrative of the liberation war changed from the standard nationalist point of view to a different and more complex perspective of the war. (p.59)
The concept of self-paradox agenda aims to explain such situations in which the idea of women’s emancipation was not broadly accepted within the liberation movement and how women aimed to challenge it. While the concept helps build the main claim of the book in a convincing way, in some places it could have been related to broader debates in anthropology and oral history about silences, research on which already has a strong tradition in these fields. By placing this concept within broader methodological debates could indeed prove its usefulness to a broader community of researchers that deal with interview materials. Despite these shortcomings, methodology remains an outstanding element of the book. Aliou Ly reveals once again that oral history interviews can prove fundamentally important as primary sources only when they are used patiently and with a proper grasp of the subtleties they contain.
Another limitation of the book lies in its rather cursory exploration of transnational dimensions. The liberation war took place in the context of the Cold War – and Ly’s fieldwork offers relevant hints in this regard. The women the book refers to – Carmen Pereira, Titina Silla, Francesca Pereira, Eva Gomes Ernestina “Titina” Silla and others – in fact studied in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Ghana. Interpreting such facts more elaborately could have helped the author develop a more nuanced understanding of broader phenomena.
Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War belongs to a broader current trend that aims to rethink decolonization from a gendered perspective. Studies such as The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies by editors Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Toyin Falola, which was published in 2021, and African Women’s Movements. Transforming Political Landscapes by editors Aili Mari Tripp, Isabel Casimiro, Joy Kwesiga, and Alice Mungwa, published back in 2008, also present the diversity of African women’s intersectional experiences.
In sum, confronting silences both in scholarship and among the interviewees, the major strength of Ly’s book lies in its multidisciplinary approach to the layers of memory formation. In this way, Ly manages to argue convincingly that women’s voices may offer a new understanding of the meaning and outcomes of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War and, more generally, of the different manners of decolonialization. Readers interested in gender studies in Africa and decolonialization as well as anthropologists and oral historians more broadly will find this book particularly relevant.
