Only a little while ago, just a few years, Amílcar Cabral's name was among those that angry youth in Europe and America were hurling in defiance at the establishment of the societies under challenge. They went onto the streets and proclaimed their faith in a new world, when they brandished like a weapon portraits of Che Guevara, the Latin American, and of Amílcar Cabral, the African. These two men, although very different, were the Revolution.

If Che's life story was fairly well known, that of Cabral, although still living and at the peak of activity, was much less so. For the young challenging the old world, Cabral was undeniable evidence of Africa's struggle against anachronistic colonialism – the natural outcome when society was justifiably called in question – and therefore of struggle against modem imperialism which sought the same aims as colonialism by much more formidable means.

In Africa Cabral's name was already spontaneously linked with those of Nkrumah and Lumumba. In fact in the tragic history of revolutionary Africa, so many of whose leaders have left only a faint memory, three great figures stand out indisputably: Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary; Patrice Lumumba, the martyr; Amílcar Cabral, the unifier. As a unifier and mobiliser, he was both a theoretician and a man of action indefatigably in pursuit of reality, by revealing the deep roots, fundamental causes, so often blurred in the tumult of revolutionary action. For Guineans and Cape Verdeans, he is the founder of the nation and the guide: his watchwords remain binding and current as specific targets that two peoples born out of a common history are engaged in fulfilling. But how did this son of the Cape Verdeans, kept out of the stream of time by obsolete colonialism and isolated from the world on a remote island in the Atlantic, become that man of international dimension?

Amílcar Cabral was born on 12 September 1924 at Bafata in Guinea.The civil registers suggest that his father, Juvenal Cabral, had given him his forename in memory of the great African who made the Roman empire shake – spelling it Hamilcar. Juvenal Cabral, an ‘obscure non-graduate schoolmaster’, had been teaching since 1913 in various regions of Guinea, notably at Cacine and Geba. He came from a farming family on the Cape Verde island of Santiago which also numbered teachers and priests, the learned, as they were then described.