This book is a translation of Amilcar Cabral’s key agrarian studies that have thus far remained underexplored. Amílcar Cabral was born on September 12, 1924, in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau. By the late 1940s, he was working as an agronomist, already committed to protecting both land and human life. While studying soil in Portugal, he came to a key insight: Africa’s path away from colonial control would depend on a relationship of care between people and the soil. Cabral developed an approach to soil study that went beyond listing its features—climate, terrain, living organisms. For him, soil could not be separated from history, nor from the work and presence of people. He warned of the damage caused by single-crop farming, colonial extractions, and private land claims, arguing that any study of soil must begin with the ways people live with and on it.  Cabral’s view held that earth, rain, stone, and breath shape the grounds we live from, and that only by tending to these connections could Africa remain liveable.  

Seventy years later, in 2017, the African Development Bank reported that 60% of Africa’s people still depend on farming to meet daily needs. Yet in 2023, the African Union Development Agency reported that between 75% and 80% of cultivated land was degraded. This erosion is linked to large-scale farming methods that treat land as profit-generating surface, rather than something to be maintained. Add to this the pressure of changing weather patterns, and the damage deepens. These figures echo Cabral’s warnings and remind us why he insisted that “to defend the earth is to defend the human.”  This reflection is a return to Cabral’s thought, not as memory but as direction. Across the continent, many still farm, but the ground beneath them is worn thin. His insistence on soil as both life source and political ground remains urgent. As he once asked, the earth preserves us—but when will we begin to preserve it?