subcutaneous reviewed Armed Struggle in Africa by Gérard Chaliand (Modern Reader)
A solid technical guide
4 stars
This is a very cut-and-dry report on the PAIGC's anti-colonial revolutionary war. It's broken into three main parts: first, background on the colony; the centerpiece, reporting on a journey across the nation-to-be with the party's leaders, who are interviewed and quoted at length; lastly, some comparative analysis with other revolutionary movements in Africa and latin amerika.
The book is fairly narrowly focused on practical how-a-revolution-gets-made questions, and it provides useful, clear answers to those questions. It's not really written to be a compelling story, though if you care about the Guinean revolution you'll likely find interesting stories in here anyway. The author's analysis is straightforward, and like others who actually spent time with the guerrillas he correctly observed that they were comeptent to a much greater degree than many of their contemporaries.
If you had to look up the acronym PAIGC, I might not recommend starting this book until …
This is a very cut-and-dry report on the PAIGC's anti-colonial revolutionary war. It's broken into three main parts: first, background on the colony; the centerpiece, reporting on a journey across the nation-to-be with the party's leaders, who are interviewed and quoted at length; lastly, some comparative analysis with other revolutionary movements in Africa and latin amerika.
The book is fairly narrowly focused on practical how-a-revolution-gets-made questions, and it provides useful, clear answers to those questions. It's not really written to be a compelling story, though if you care about the Guinean revolution you'll likely find interesting stories in here anyway. The author's analysis is straightforward, and like others who actually spent time with the guerrillas he correctly observed that they were comeptent to a much greater degree than many of their contemporaries.
If you had to look up the acronym PAIGC, I might not recommend starting this book until the general story of 20th-century anticolonialism in Africa is more familiar to you. You'd probably get a lot more out of it that way.