With their new edited collection Globalizing Independence Struggles of Lusophone Africa: Anticolonial and Postcolonial Politics, Rui Lopes and Natalia Telepneva have gathered an exciting range of chapters by both early career and established scholars to bring Lusophone Africa more fully into conversations of global decolonization. The collection promotes a new direction in transnational histories of decolonization and anti-imperial struggles in Lusophone Africa.

The open-access text is organized in three thematic sections: “Ideas and Rhetorics of Liberation,” “Networks and Strategies of Solidarity,” and “The Economy and Policies of Independence.” The first part, as the editors put it, intends to “further explore the international and transnational aspects of Lusophone African ideological projects” (7). Alexander Marino begins the book with a study of Holden Roberto and the Angolan Revolutionary Government in Exile (GRAE), to better understand how GRAE’s activity fits the mold of bourgeois anti-colonial radicalism. Holden Roberto deployed Western anti-communism and a broad personal network to effectively challenge the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in its early years. Next, Rita Narra’s chapter evaluates the evolution of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) leader, educator, and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral’s uses of class with a reading of several of his lectures. Narra traces Cabral’s own reflection on the role of class in the independence struggle, even as she offers a “case study” of the “anticolonial appropriation of originally Western concepts” (64). The chapter is followed by Lazlo Passemiers’ examination of the Mozambique Revolutionary Committee’s (COREMO) ideology through its public discourse. Passemiers underscores themes of self-sufficiency, African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism in COREMO’s political thought. Whether by highlighting relatively understudied groups and figures—like Holden Roberto and COREMO—or emphasizing new facets of ideology of well-known figures—like Narra on Cabral—the scholars in this first part present the contours of the varied ideological narratives underpinning liberatory ideologies in Lusophone Africa.

Moving away from a focus on ideas around “statehood, culture, and national unity” (3), the following section, “Networks and Strategies of Solidarity,” shifts into the realm of the transnational to understand how Lusophone African revolutionaries built global networks of solidarity. R. Joseph Parrott examines how the Indian invasion of Goa and the onset of war in Angola, both in 1961, pushed the UN to consider its role in combating Portuguese colonialism. While the UN’s anti-colonial sentiment remained symbolic, Parrott argues that its support of claims made by nationalist movements in the global south caused the West to become suspicious of the UN. Next, Ana Moledo lays bare how cold war rivalries and increased international human rights debates shaped regional imaginaries in 1960s and 1970s Southern Africa. This is followed by Julião Soares Sousa’s chapter on the Sino-Soviet split and nonalignment within Lusophone Africa’s liberation movements. Sousa employs Portuguese defense archives and the paper collections of Lúcio Lara and Mario Pinto de Andrade, and Amilcar Cabral to argue that the Sino-Soviet split limited Third Worldism by examining how representatives of the MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO fought to maintain nonalignment under difficult conditions. Marçal de Menezes Paredes and Gisele Lobato then move to the Americas to treat Canadian liberation movement solidarity and Latin American movements against Lusophone African decolonization, rounding out a truly transnational set of papers.

The last section, “The Economy and Policies of Independence,” looks towards the debates that unfolded over the course that economic development should take in the liberated Portuguese African colonies. In this section, scholars are interested in how Lusophone African liberation movements and later governments dealt with the disappointment and difficulty of implementing socialist economic development. At moments, economic decolonization looked like resistance towards foreign interests in liberated Portuguese colonies: Aurora Almada e Santos examines the UN’s Decolonization Committee and its role in casting Portuguese development in the colonies as threatening self-determination in Lusophone Africa. Santos argues that the Committee’s campaign led to “overlapping fractures among member states” (174). Inês Nascimento Rodrigues and Gerhard Seibert take on the struggle to implement socialist reform in São Tomé and Príncipe, which can be contrasted with Cabo Verde, while Víctor Barros, Francisco Osvaldino Nascimento Monteiro, and Suzano Costa demonstrate the difficulty of jointly maintaining nonalignment and anti-imperialism in Cabo Verde. The book ends with a chapter on the PAIGC’s postcolonial project to forge a national identity through film, emphasizing the place of cinema within independent Guinea-Bissau’s political economy.

Importantly, the chapters gathered by Lopes and Telepneva function to bring Lusophone Africa more fully into the English-language historiography of African decolonization, the global Cold War, and the history of African liberation movements. Each of these papers productively breaks down Cold War barriers of East and West, demonstrating the transnational nature of liberation movement solidarities and anti-imperial ideologies. Select articles from Globalizing Independence Struggles of Lusophone Africa could be excerpted for advanced undergraduate courses, while the entire book will be of much use to graduate students and other academics interested in themes of anti-colonial resistance and decolonization in Lusophone Africa. Scholars interested in global decolonization, southern African liberation movements, and the global Cold War will have much to learn from the text.