Guinea-Bissau's War of Independence and the Purge That Followed It

The PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, turned to armed struggle against Portuguese rule on January 23, 1963, when its guerrillas attacked the Portuguese barracks at Tite in southern Guinea-Bissau. Within six months, PAIGC forces had effectively displaced Portuguese authority across much of the southern coastal region, running actual local government in territory Lisbon nominally still controlled. In February 1964, the movement’s founder, Amílcar Cabral, convened its first party congress at Cassacá, in the liberated southern forests, restructuring the guerrilla campaign into a more formal military organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, alongside the party’s political structure.

The war that followed became one of the longest and costliest of Portugal’s three simultaneous African colonial conflicts, a grinding stalemate in which Portugal deployed some 31,000 to 32,000 troops, a substantial share of them Black African soldiers recruited locally, against a PAIGC guerrilla force numbering roughly 7,000 to 10,000 fighters backed by the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and neighboring African states. By the early 1970s Portuguese forces held the main towns while the PAIGC controlled the countryside, an arrangement that produced heavy losses on both sides, roughly 2,069 Portuguese soldiers and 6,000 PAIGC fighters killed, along with an estimated 5,000 civilian deaths, without producing a decisive military outcome for either side. The financial and human toll of fighting three colonial wars at once, in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique simultaneously, became a central grievance behind the military coup that toppled Portugal’s own authoritarian government in the April 1974 Carnation Revolution. The PAIGC’s People’s National Assembly had already unilaterally declared Guinea-Bissau’s independence on September 24, 1973, eight months after Cabral’s assassination; Portugal’s new government formally recognized that independence in September 1974.

Independence did not end the killing. Guineans who had served in Portugal’s colonial security forces, commando units, or armed militias during the war were given a choice by the new PAIGC government: return home with back pay, or join the PAIGC’s own military. According to accounts corroborated by the PAIGC’s own party newspaper, Nó Pintcha, which acknowledged the killings in a November 1980 issue, an estimated 7,447 of these men were instead summarily executed and buried in unmarked mass graves in wooded areas including Cumerá, Portogole, and Mansabá, with the massacre at Bissorã cited as the largest single episode. The killings were carried out as reprisals against Guineans branded collaborators, a postwar purge that has received far less attention internationally than the independence struggle it followed, but that Guinea-Bissau’s own governing party eventually admitted to in print.