Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Portuguese first arrived in what is now Guinea-Bissau in about 1450 and began trading in slaves, gold, ivory, and pepper. They gradually started building forts, and it became Por tuguese Guinea. The Portuguese only ventured into the interior from the 1880s; prior to that they had been happy to trade with the people along the coast. In the 1920s, however, the Portuguese government decided to keep out foreign companies and let Portuguese businesses run Guinea and the rest of the Portuguese Empire. The result was that most of the peasant population of Guinea-Bissau who were not working on subsistence farms had to be laborers on plantations growing peanuts.In Bissau, the capital of Portuguese Guinea, on September 19, 1956, a number of nationalists led by Amilcar Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independencia do Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) to fight for independence for both Portuguese Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, after, if necessary, an armed struggle. To this end, the PAIGC started recruiting African bureaucrats, artisans, and laborers. In 1959 they managed to organize a strike at the Pijiguiti dockyards, located on the Geba River in Bissau. There the longshoremen refused to work and picketed the place. The Portuguese responded by shooting and killing 50 strikers and wounding another 180. The Pijiguiti Massacre, as the event became known, not only inflamed many people ... log in or subscribe to read full text