Review of A luta continua: (Re)Introducing Amilcar Cabral to a new generation of thinkers


 

 

Paraskeva, J. (2019, September 18). Review of A luta continua: (Re)Introducing Amilcar Cabral to a new generation of 
thinkers by P. K. Saucier. Education Review, 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v26.2737 

September 18, 2019 ISSN 1094-5296 

 

Saucier, P. K. (2017). A luta continua: (Re)Introducing Amilcar Cabral to a 
new generation of thinkers. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 

 
 Pp. 212                                                                                  ISBN 1569024766, 9781569024768 
                

Reviewed by João M. Paraskeva 
UMass Dartmouth 
United States 
 

The utopia is the metaphor for a hyper deficit 
that is formulated at the level at which cannot 
be fulfilled that is what it carries of 
importance is not what it says about the 
future, but the virtual archeology of the 
present that brings it forth. (Santos, 1995, 
p. 482) 

 
If one has to determine a guiding thread – and 
there are many and quite crucial – in Saucier’s 
A Luta Continua: (Re)Introducing Amilcar Cabral 
to a New Generation of Thinkers, that thread 
would certainly be Cabral’s poetic-critical 
philosophy of praxis, “return to the source.” 
Implicitly or explicitly, Saucier’s anti-colonial 
oeuvre helps educators really concerned with 
“social and cognitive justice” (Paraskeva, 2014, 
2016, 2018; Santos, 2014) to understand the 
importance of such ferociously “anti-colonial-
here we stand” commitment. As Robeson 
(1958) or hooks (2000) would put it, the 
historical struggle against colonialism, 
oppression and el patron colonial de poder 
(Quijano, 1991) can only be won by 
unequivocally refusing to rely on 
epistemological matrixes out of the Africana 
philosophy of praxis. Indeed, this is not a 



Review of A Luta Continua    

 

 

2 

minor issue, especially when, Saucier (p. xix) 
claimed, it has been “often misconstrued or 
tendentiously applied, often understood as 
returning to a premodern and/or primordial 
Africa; an exercise that is paramount to merely 
proving civilization and history existed to the 
white man.” Undeniably, Cabral argued (1973, 
p. 51), “the underestimation of the cultural 
values of the African people based upon racist 
feelings and upon the intention of 
perpetuating foreign exploitation of Africans, 
has done much harm to Africa.” In this 
context, Cabral claimed that the victory against 
colonialism was only possible by the return to 
the source, which was much more complex 
than a struggle against foreign domination. He 
stated:  

The return to the source is therefore 
not a voluntary step, but the only 
possible reply to the demand of 
concrete need, historically determined, 
and enforced by the inescapable 
contradiction between the colonized 
society and the colonial power, the 
mass of the people exploited and the 
foreign exploitive class, a 
contradiction in the light of which 
each social stratum or indigenous class 
must define its position. When return 
to the source goes beyond the 
individual and is expressed through 
groups or movements the 
contradiction is transformed into a 
struggle (secret or overt) and is a 
prelude to the pre-independence 
movement or of the struggle for 
liberation from the foreign yoke. 
(Cabral, 1973, p. 63) 

As the sine qua non condition of re-
Africanization, return-to-the-source (i.e. the 
return to “the human” accurately highlighted 
in Saucier’s rationale on p. xix) “is of no 
historical importance unless it brings not only 
real involvement in the struggle for 
independence, but also complete and absolute 
identification with the hopes of the mass of 
the people, who contest not only foreign 

culture but also the foreign domination as a 
whole. Otherwise, is nothing more than 
attempt to find short-term benefits –
knowingly or unknowingly a kind of political 
opportunism” (Cabral, 1973, p. 63). In this 
context, Woods (p. 194) claimed, “for Cabral, 
re-becoming African is a strategic move to 
forward an agenda of repossessing that which 
was stolen, political control over the territory 
that as a result of colonialism had come to be 
known as Guinea-Bissau.” Return to the 
source, according to Murillo, is a way of 
reading and being in the wor(l)d, one that 
jazzes both the “physical and metaphysical” in 
an autochthonous cartographical commitment 
as well. Poetically and politically, such 
commitment seeks “to grip the gravity (of the 
question, of the black position), to intensify its 
force, so that the ground, Ilha, comes clearer 
into view, closer, begins to take shape in the 
imagination” (p. 93). 

  Building on Saucier’s approaches, I argue 
that Cabral's return to the source is the very 
cradle of a very “practical utopia grounded, 
rooted (as no doubt befitting an agronomist) 
in the land and the realities of his people” (p. 
103). This implies a non-negotiable 
commitment against modern Western 
Eurocentric thinking, which is an abyssal 
thinking. It consists  

of a system of visible and invisible 
distinctions, the invisible ones being 
the foundation of the visible ones. 
The invisible distinctions are 
established through radical lines that 
divide social reality into two realms, 
the realm of “this side of the line” and 
the realm of “the other side of the 
line.” The division is such that "the 
other side of the line" vanishes as 
reality, becomes nonexistent, and is 
indeed produced as nonexistent. 
Nonexistent means not existing in any 
relevant or comprehensible way of 
being. Whatever is produced as 
nonexistent is radically excluded 
because it lies beyond the realm of 



Review of A Luta Continua    

 

 

3 

what the accepted conception of 
inclusion considers to be it's other. 
What most fundamentally 
characterizes abyssal thinking is thus 
the impossibility of the co-presence of 
the two sides of the line. To the extent 
that it prevails, this side of the line 
only prevails by exhausting the field of 
relevant reality. Beyond it, there is 
only nonexistence, invisibility, non-
dialectical absence. (Santos, 2007, p. 
45)  

The motto of such abyssal thinking goes well 
beyond the radical impossibility of co-
presence and a fundamental radical negation 
of [the] [an]other existences (Paraskeva, 2011). 
The radicalization of such abyssal episteme is 
outshined by the “intensely visible distinctions 
structuring social reality on this side of the 
line are grounded on the invisibility of the 
distinction between this side of the line and 
the other side” (Santos, 2007, p. 46). In a way, 
Santos goes well beyond Todorova (1997) 
regarding the “incomplete other.” That is, 
there is no incomplete other (and incomplete 
self) because there is nothing beyond the 
abyssal line. 

Invisibility and nonexistence of the “one 
side” are the roots of visibility and existence 
of the “another side.” Knowledge and 
modern law are two major and distinct, yet 
interrelated and complex areas that represent 
the most refine accomplishments of such 
cultural politics of radical nonexistence and 
negation (Santos, 2007). The visible and 
legitimate belligerent battles among science, 
philosophy, and theology – one should not 
forget that we belong to a civilization that 
used to burn people alive because of their 
claim that the world was not flat – cartelize 
the Western Cartesian modern side and “their 
visibility is premised upon the invisibility of 
forms of knowledge that cannot be fitted into 
any of these ways of knowing” (Santos, 2007, 
p. 47). That is,  

popular, lay, plebeian, peasant, or 
indigenous knowledges on the other 
side of the line [vanish] as relevant or 
commensurable knowledges because 
they are beyond truth and falsehood. 
It is unimaginable to apply to them 
not only the scientific true/false 
distinction but also the scientifically 
unascertainable truths of philosophy 
and theology that constitute all the 
acceptable knowledge on this side of 
the line. On the other side of the line, 
there is no real knowledge; there are 
beliefs, opinions, intuitive or 
subjective understandings, which, at 
the most, may become objects or raw 
materials for scientific inquiry. Thus, 
the visible line that separates science 
from its modern others is grounded 
on the abyssal invisible line that 
separates science, philosophy, and 
theology, on one side, from, on the 
other, knowledges rendered 
incommensurable and 
incomprehensible for meeting neither 
the demands of scientific methods of 
truth nor those of their acknowledged 
contesters in the realm of philosophy 
and theology. (Santos, 2007, p. 47)  

Cabral’s return to the source is thus above all 
the supreme step towards an “epistemology of 
liberation that requires the liberation of the 
epistemology itself” (Santos, 2014; see also 
Paraskeva, 2014), not only challenging 
modern Western epistemological despotism 
with an Africana epistemological matrix, but 
also providing simultaneously the source and 
a for instance of how to de-link and to engage 
in a radical co-presence as Mignolo (2011) and 
Santos (2014) would put it – which  implies a 
perpetual epistemological disobedience. In 
this sense, Cabralism, is a serious challenge to 
Eurocentric forms of modern critical theory, 
not just because of the inherent complex 
metamorphosis of such process, but also “in 
the sense that his critical theory is not 
quarantined to the life-worlds and life 



Review of A Luta Continua    

 

 

4 

struggles of white workers in capitalist 
societies” (Rabaka, 2014, p. 152). Cabral’s 
critical theory, Rabaka (2014) claimed, relied 
upon his conscious reading that dominance 
and oppression were beyond the capitalist 
system and were determined by a world 
system that urges for the need of a common 
theory and praxis of liberation respectful of 
the idiosyncrasies of the oppressed. Cabral 
indeed “urges us to develop our theories and 
strategies by directly engaging with the 
specific economic, political and cultural 
locations of our struggles” (Daves, 2013, p. 
466). Saucier’s anti-colonial anthology grasps 
the issue accurately. 

Cabral’s critical return to the source(s) 
suggests in no uncertain terms that 
Africana critical theory of contemporary 
society concern itself with the 
deconstruction of European-derived 
continental and diasporan African 
philosophical discourse, and the 
reconstruction of a radically decolonized 
and re-Africanized critical theory and 
praxis tradition – that is to say, what I have 
been referring to as the Africana tradition 
of critical theory and revolutionary praxis. 
This deconstruction presupposes that 
modern workers in Africana philosophy, 
and Africana studies in general, have the 
analytical skills and intellectual tools to 
undertake such an endeavor (p. 25).  
 

However, Cabral was very sentient of what I 
have called indigenoustude (Paraskeva, 2011), the 
tendency to romanticize and exoticize an 
indigenous past, an issue insightfully grasped 
in Saucier’s (p. 20) piece.  

For Cabral, Africa, which is to say 
Africa’s histories, cultures, and 
peoples, are much more complex, 
their cultures more wide-ranging and 
diverse than previously noted by 
colonial anthropologists, 
ethnologists, missionaries, and 
others, including European-educated 
(or, rather, European-miseducated) 
Africans and their all-encompassing 

theories of Africa’s ancient and 
glorious past. This, of course, is not 
in any way to imply that Africa did 
not have an ancient and glorious 
past, but only to emphasize that not 
everything in Africa’s past was 
paradisiacal and that contemporary 
Africana critical theorists should 
employ Cabral's distinct dialectical 
and historical materialism when 
approaching Africa's histories, 
cultures, and struggles. 

That is, such “return” is not to a stagnant 
tradition or a-historical Negro-African values a 
la Senghor. The “return” is a redeeming of the 
blocked historicity of the colonized. It is a 
tangible reclaiming of the humanity and 
freedom of the formerly colonized, and 
according to Serequeberhan, the genuine re-
insertion into history of “an African people 
that realizes its right to independence” (pp. 80-
81). Cabralism is at odds with “the reduction 
of African existence to a Westernized/modern 
and an Indigenous/exotic object of Occidental 
manipulation, curiosity, and control” (p. 75). It 
is in such sense, that it is crucial to understand 
Cabralism as a de-linking momentum, a full 
blast decolonial thinking that involves a 
nonnegotiable desprendimento total, a decolonial 
link (Mignolo, 2011, p. 3). Following 
Mignolo’s (2011, p. 45) examination of 
Quijano’s reasoning, desprendimento or 
desprenderse (i.e., delinking) implies  

epistemic de-linking or, in other 
words, epistemic disobedience. 
Epistemic disobedience leads us to 
decolonial options as a set of projects 
that have in common the effects 
experienced by all the inhabitants of 
the globe that were at the receiving 
end of global designs to colonize the 
economy (appropriation of land and 
natural resources), authority 
(management by the Monarch, the 
State, or the Church), and police and 
military enforcement (coloniality of 
power), to colonize knowledge 



Review of A Luta Continua    

 

 

5 

(languages, categories of thoughts, 
belief systems, etc.) and beings 
(subjectivity). “Delinking” is then 
necessary because there is no way out 
of the coloniality of power from 
within Western (Greek and Latin) 
categories of thought. (p. 45)  

That is, one needs to desprenderse de las 
vinculaciones de la racionalidad- modernidad con la 
colonialidad, en primer término, y en definitiva con 
todo poder no constituido en la decisión libre de gentes 
libres [extricate oneself from the linkages 
between rationality/modernity and coloniality, 
first of all, and definitely from all power which 
is not constituted by free decisions made by 
free people]” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 45).  

Delinking implies epistemic disobedience 
rather than the constant search for ‘newness’s' 
[and] takes us to a different place, to a 
different ‘beginning’ (not in Greece, but in the 
responses to the ‘conquest and colonization' 
of America and the massive trade of enslaved 
Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and 
building rather than to a new temporality 
within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, 
to Paris, to London, to Washington, DC)” 
(Mignolo, 2011, p. 45). In Cabral's anticolonial 
mind, it implies a decolonial approach to 
“prioritize local reality” (p. 106). As Cabral 
(1980) argued, “only through a principled 
study of reality, of the strictly here and now, 
can a theory of revolutionary change be 
integrated with its practice to the point where 
the two become inseparable” (p. xi). In this 
sense, decoloniality is “the energy that does 
not allow the operation of the logic of 
coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the 
rhetoric of modernity” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 46). 
Decoloniality, blatantly, is not just a call to 
interrupt the Cartesian model of modernity. It 
offers a solution for another word, another 
world. It is one of the best for instances “to 
learn to unlearn in order to relearn” 
(Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 32), deeply 
sentient of the fact that since the “national 
liberation is the overcoming of the colonial 

interruption of the historicity of the colonized, 
it is a returning to the source out of which the 
colonized actuated their ek-sistence” (p. 75).  

In a humanity that requires a sub-humanity 
to exist (Santos, 2018) “the struggle against 
colonialism is thus a reaction: a process of 
firmly opposing the colonial smothering of the 
particular human ek-sistence of the colonized” 
(p. 75). De-linking is not “to limit ourselves to 
an isolated reality, within our village, as it 
would be impossible to imagine how we 
should go and struggle against colonialism; it is 
crucial to knowing our reality and knowing 
also all the realities” (Cabral, 1980, p. 63). De-
linking is an ideological commitment, towards 
a post-abyssal momentum (Santos, 2007), or 
as I have examined elsewhere, non-abyssal 
momentum (Paraskeva, 2016), which entails a 
radical co-presence, as Santos (2014) 
advocates. “Practices and agents on both sides 
of the line are contemporary in equal terms” 
(Santos, 2007, p. 66), implying an ecology of 
knowledges “premised upon the idea of the 
epistemological diversity of the world, the 
recognition of the existence of a plurality of 
knowledges beyond scientific knowledge” 
(Santos, 2007, p. 67). In so doing, post-abyssal 
thinking, in a hegemonic sense, renounces a 
general epistemology, providing the political 
clarity that “we probably need a residual 
general epistemological requirement to move 
along: a general epistemology of the 
impossibility of a general epistemology” 
(Santos, 2007, p. 67). Cabral exposed the real 
epistemological colors of pragmatic re-
visionary heterotopia, as Santos (1995, 2018) 
would put it. Precisely because Cabral was a 
“praxis-oriented person” (p. 104) deeply 
rooted in the Global South’s epistemological 
matrix, Cabral utopianism, as Williams noted, 
was undeniably palpable, a people’s utopia that 
reflected his own people. In Cabral’s terms, 
“the utopia is the metaphor for a hyper deficit 
that is formulated at the level at which cannot 
be fulfilled that is what it carries of importance 
is not what it says about the future, but the 
virtual archeology of the present that brings it 



Review of A Luta Continua    

 

 

6 

forth” (Santos, 1995, p. 482). In Williams’ 
approach, Cabral’s utopia jazzes with Bloch’s 
and Wright’s “concrete/real utopia” in African 
critical – as it denotes an anticipatory 
consciousness, an alternative anticipatory 
African philosophical consciencism 
(Nkrumah, 1964), thus “recognizing what is 
practically possible, grounded in productive 
and progressive human agency” (p. 107). 
Precisely because “the desired future is not 
simply ‘there,’ but very much carefully 
constructed through the ongoing practice of 
those who desire it” (p. 107), Cabralism puts 
forward a pragmatic re-visionary heterotopia 
(see Santos, 2018). That is, both the utopia and 
the multiple paths towards it cannot be 
wrapped and anchored only within the 
framework of modernity and its coloniality 
(Paraskeva, 2019). Cabral’s utopian’s 
legitimacy relies on a “new epistemology and 
psychology, which resides on the virtual 
archeology of the present” (Santos, 1995, p. 
481). This implies moving from traditional 
hegemonic and counter-hegemonic utopian 
frameworks and engages in what Santos (1995) 
defines as heterotopia: 

Rather than the invention of a place 
elsewhere or nowhere, I propose a 
radical displacement within the same 
place: ours. From orthotopia to 
heterotopia, from the center to the 
margin. The purpose of this 

displacement is to allow a telescopic 
vision of the center and a microscopic 
vision of what the center is led to 
reject, in order to reproduce credibility 
as the center. (Santos, 1995, p. 481) 

Such pragmatic re-visionary heterotopia, based 
on a “praxis based of democratic 
substantiveness” (Freire, 2009, p. 172), implies 
also to be quite sentient of the role of 
education, as “Cabral’s call for liberation 
schools in Guinea-Bissau that can be used in 
the training of cadres to combat the negative 
aspects of the beliefs and traditions of our 
people” (p. 176). Epitomized by Freire (2009) 
as the pedagogue of the revolution, Cabral 
pragmatic re-visionary heterotopian success 
relies in his permanent call to return to the 
source a dynamic philosophical praxis of a 
pedagogy of emergencies (Santos, 2018), 
which crosses Saucier's A Luta Continua. 
Saucier's volume is a must-read for those really 
engaged in the struggle against the 
epistemicide (Santos, 2018) and the reversive 
epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2019), against 
institutional racism, genderism, and classism 
so rooted in the daily life of our public 
institutions. A sublime anti-colonial example 
towards the demonumentalization of 
coloniality (Santos, 2018) so well grasped by 
Saucier and colleagues.

 
 
References 
 
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Press.  
Cabral, A. (1980). Unity, and struggle: Speeches and writings. London: Heinemann. 
Daves, A. (2013). Memories of Black Liberation. Amilcar Cabral. In F. Manji & B. Fletcher (Eds.), 

Claim no easy victories. The legacy of Amilcar Cabral (pp. 463–67). CODESRIA & Dajara Press.  
Freire, P. (2009). Amilcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the Revolution. In S. Macrine (Ed)., Critical pedagogy in 

uncertain times. Hope and possibilities (pp. 167–88). New York: Palgrave.  
hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand. New York: Routledge. 
Mignolo, W. (2011). Epistemic disobedience, and the decolonial option: A manifesto. Transmodernity. 

Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2), 44–66. 
Nkrumah, K. (1964). Consciencism. New York: Monthly Review Press. 
Paraskeva, J. (2011) Conflicts in curriculum theory: New York: Palgrave. 



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Paraskeva, J. (2014). Conflicts in curriculum theory: New York: Palgrave [Updated paper back edition]. 
Paraskeva, J. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide. New York: Routledge. 
Paraskeva, J. (2018). Towards a just theory. New York: Routledge. 
Paraskeva, J. (2019). Qué sucede con la teoría crítica (currículum)? La necesidad de sobrellevar la 

rabia neoliberal sin evitarla. En R. M Vasquez (Comp.) Reconocimiento y Bien Comun en 
Educacion (pp. 191-238). Madrid: Morata.  

Quijano, A. (1991). Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad. Perú Indígena, 29 (1), 11–21. 
Rabaka, R. (2014). Concepts of Cabralism. Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory. Lanham: Lexington 

Books. 
Robeson, P. (1958). Here I stand: Boston: Beacon Press. 
Santos, B. (1995). Towards a new common sense. New York: Routledge. 
Santos, B. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking. From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review, 

XXX (1), 45–89. 
Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies from the South. Boulder: Paradigm. 
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Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Tlostanova, M., & Mignolo, W. (2012). Learning to unlearn. Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the 

Americas. Ohio State University Press. 
 
About the Reviewer 
 
João M. Paraskeva is a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of 
Massachusetts Dartmouth, founder and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership, and 
program and director of the doctoral program in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (2010-
2016). He was director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University 
Massachusetts Dartmouth (2012-2016), honorary fellow (2000-2004) at the University of Wisconsin 
Madison, a professor at the University of Minho, Portugal, as well as visiting professor at the 
University of Coruna, Spain, University of Florence, Italy, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, Federal 
University of Pelotas, Brazil, and University Agostinho Neto, Angola. He was appointed the 
European Union Promodoc Ambassador of the Erasmus Mundus Graduate Program and was 
founder (2010) and senior editor of the Journal Curriculum without Borders 
(www.curriculosemfronteiras.org). With more than 50 books published in Europe, Latin America, 
Asia, and the US, Professor Paraskeva championed the struggle against the epistemicide in education, 
perpetrated by modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platforms. He works within and beyond 
critical and poststructuralist platforms swimming within anti-colonial, indigenous and southern-
theories to better understand and unpack systems of dominance. In his work he attempts to open up 
the veins and the canon of the Western Eurocentric power matrix to denounce how education is part 
of the Western Eurocentric epistemicide. He challenges critical educators not just to examine 
education within the dynamics of ideological production (in which class, race, gender and ethnicity 
crosses with categories such as economy, culture and politics) but also to decolonize, inclusively the 
“decolonial.” Paraskeva put forward the Itinerant Educational and Curriculum Theory (ICT) as 
people’s theory, the best way to promote social and cognitive justice. His books include: Conflicts in 
Curriculum Theory, Challenging Hegemonic Epistemicides, Curriculum Epistemologies, Towards an Itinerant 
Curriculum Theory, International Critical Pedagogy Reader (with Antonia Darder and Peter Mayo), Towards a 
Just Theory: The Epistemicide, Curriculum: Decanonizing the Field, Curriculum: Whose Internationalization? and 
Unaccomplished Utopia. Neoliberal Dismantling of Higher Education in Europe. He just finished a new book 
The Generation of Utopia.  
 

http://www.curriculosemfronteiras.org/


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