Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War: De-gendering the History of Anticolonial Struggle

In this open access book, Aliou Ly draws on extensive archival sources and documents an entirely new oral history of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War that corrects the gender bias inherent in many current accounts of the war. The Portuguese Guinea Liberation War is a major episode in 20th-century decolonization, as Portugual's defeat ultimately led to their abrupt withdrawal from their African colonies in 1974. Yet current accounts of the war, both popular and scholarly, usually focus on the charisma of male leaders and on male-dominated high politics and ideology, and they rarely ask how women contributed to independence. Summarizing extensive interviews with women who participated in the war as spies, guerrilla fighters, and weapons transporters. Ly shows that women played major roles in winning the war, this largely because their motives for participating were often uniquely concrete: unlike most male participants, for example, many women joined the struggle in order to help fight for their families' food security. Ly also shows how women faced discrimination both during the war and immediately afterwards. They had to fight internally to be able to engage in active combat, and they returned to home to find that they were expected to take a back seat in the post-independence era, a trend that continues to this day. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Introduction Chapter 1. Colonial Policies and Women in Portuguese Guinea 1938-1962 Chapter 2. Female Work and Participation in the Armed Struggle in Portuguese Guinea Chapter 3. Female Combatants and Portuguese Guinea National Liberation War Narratives: Do They Tell the Whole Story? Chapter 4. Gendering War Space and Heroinization of Female Fighters Chapter 5. Gender Roles and the First Republic Chapter 6. Conclusion