Born in 1912, Amílcar Lopes de costa Cabral was a prolific Marxian theorist who not only led the war of independence that toppled Portuguese rule in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde but influenced the fight for decolonization across the continent.

The first battle — a thirteen-year war of liberation that came to be known as “Portugal’s Vietnam” — pitted ten thousand members of Cabral’s African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) against thirty-five thousand Portuguese troops and mercenaries. For decades, the Portuguese had run a deeply exploitative, deeply repressive colonial regime. Then on August 3, 1959, colonial authorities killed fifty dockworkers striking under the PAIGC’s leadership. The massacre convinced many in the liberation movement that a peaceful path to national independence was impossible. They would have to take up arms.

An agronomist by training, Cabral was a committed pan-Africanist and socialist — advocating independence for all of Portugal’s African colonies, while also working to create a socialist bloc by unifying Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. In the areas liberated during the war, Cabral set about building a quasi–social-democratic economy that featured state planning, state-owned enterprises, cooperatives, and small private enterprise. While Cabral didn’t live to see a free Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde — he was killed on January 20, 1973, likely by a Portugal-backed assassin — the liberation struggle he led helped spark the fall of Portugal’s fascist dictatorship and its colonial empire.