Overview

Academic studies on Amilcar Lopes Cabral are numerous. They appear in several languages, occupy a range of perspectives, and utilize several evaluative methods, biographical, prosopographic, ideological, or a mixture of all of these. These works rely on primary sources, that is texts authored by Cabral himself, contemporaneous materials, party ephemera, or synthetically-driven studies contextualizing Cabral and his work in the cannon on liberation historiography. In doing so, the studies project Cabral as a complex but refracted figure tugged and pulled by ideological factors, lived experiences, reflections shaping his weltenschauung, and tactical actions contradicting his overall visionary integrity. This paper explores these four aspects of academic studies on Cabral. It begins with a brief review of the secondary literature in the field. The paper then explores critically, the range of sources on which such secondary literature relies. The third section of the paper, explores the challenges that the extant primary, secondary and synthetic literature pose for an integrative study on Cabral. In its concluding section, the paper explores strategies to tackle the lacunae festering academic studies on Amilcar Lopes Cabral.