Amílcar Cabral was born in 1924 in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents. He was an agricultural engineer, anticolonial theorist, and an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national independence movements worldwide.
Cabral helped to found and lead the anticolonial guerrilla movement during the Guinea-Bissau war of independence and, in 1956, launched the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde which garnered overwhelming power and influence before their eventual triumph over the Portuguese colonialists.
Although integral to its success, Amílcar Cabral would never live to see an independent Guinea-Bissau. In 1973, Cabral was assassinated months before the independence forces were declared victorious.

Translated from French by Michael Wolfers.

Wolfers was a writer and political activist born in 1938. After graduating in the early 1960s from Wadham College, Oxford, he was appointed as an Africa correspondent for The Times and later worked as a consultant to the new Marxist government in the Angolan capital, Luanda.