(Sorry for the length, btw, sort of a favourite topic of mine)
Many people know Cabral as one of the foremost political theorists and authors active in the African liberation wave, with his writings being crucial to the "language of freedom" employed by others across the continent. A lesser-known aspect of his life was his outstanding work as an agronomist (which he trained to become in Lisbon.) Considered by his professors to be a prodigy and graduating 4 years early, he returned to Portuguese Guinea to start the Experimental Farm of Pessubé (then situated very far from the centre of Bissau) in a poor neighborhood at the periphery.
The Pessubé Farm was his point of departure from conventional agronomic studies in favor of new theories like those outlined by Norman Borlaug (a personal hero of Cabral) to start putting in practice a number of developments adapting Bourlag's thought to African conditions that would take decades to become part of the standard toolkit. He began a programme of experimentation based on the identification of cultivation techniques for different types of farming (compass, land demarcation, fertilization, and sowing period), of tests for various adaptations (rice, sugar-cane, mancarra, banana, cotton, and horticultures), of plagues and illnesses, valorization of local varieties of certain species like “jute,” and the introduction of new species well-suited to local conditions such as sesame, soy, and sunflower. He also began work on a number of high-yield strains of millet and sorghum, attempting to replicate Borlaug's successes on Mexican wheat with native crops, while resurrecting the cultivation of a number of "lost African crops" left unused by previous European agronomists.
Some developments he made went beyond those of Borlaug. Cabral was the first to experimentally question the system of agriculture based on monoculture, at the time - mancarra, which represented a danger to the economy as the annual crop price fluctuations in the external markets put the farmer in a situation of dependence, risk, and uncertainty. Furthermore, in the case of mancarra, monoculture provoked an irreversible degradation of the soil, especially through erosion. The dangers and limits of agricultural mechanization were exhaustingly addressed in a 1953 text, since he was confronted immediately upon his arrival in Bissau with a thesis very much in vogue that attributed the backwardness of Guinean agriculture to the non-use of farm tractors. He called attention to various aspects of technical and socio-economic order, including that of the majority of agricultural soils (slopes and upland) being of shallow useful depth and with a tendency for erosion, so that the use of the soil for tractors could prove to be prejudicial. He favored gradual mechanization instead of the aggressive crash mechanization promoted by his contemporaries, a position validated by modern agronomic studies.
For two and a half years, Cabral traveled all over Guinea, observing, studying, and writing on facets of Guinean agriculture, until funding for both his Experimental Farm and his Agricultural Commission was cut by the Portuguese government. Reportedly, one Portuguese offical directly told Cabral that "Lisbon did not care if Africans had food or not." Enraged by the lack of care from Portugal and with nothing but time on his hands, he got increasingly involved with the independence movement. In March of 1955, Cabral left Bissau in an Air France plane by order of the colonial political government authorities that accused him of exercising conspiratorial activities for the independence of Guinea. In 1959, at thirty-five years of age, he came to Bissau the same year that the massacre at the port of Pindjiguiti occured, a determining moment for Cabral in his understanding that the conquest of independence would have to be obtained by armed struggle and not by the peaceful resistance for which he originally strived.
So what would have happened if there was a different Cabral, one perhaps who had been given the sorely needed funding to continue his research? Would West Africa see a miraculous Green Revolution from his adaptation of new studies to local conditions? Would there be an earlier understanding of the harmful effects of monoculture agriculture on developing economies? Would many of Africa's "Lost Crops" now be popularly cultivated?
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