“To Defend the Earth is To Defend the Human” Amilcar Cabral on Soil, Society and Freedom

Edited by Anselmo Matusse, Carlos Lopes and Lesley Green. Translated by Anselmo Matusse

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?

HSRC Press

Product Information

Categories:

Africa, History, Politics, Philosophy & Social Sciences

Format:

234×156 mm

Pages:

272pp

ISBN-13:

978-0-7983-0551-8

Publish Year:

March 2026

Rights:

World Rights

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List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Some Considerations About the Rains
Chapter 2: In Defence of the Land
Chapter 3: The Problem of Soil Erosion
Chapter 4: Understanding the Problem of Soil Erosion in Guinea
Chapter 5: On the Mechanisation of Agriculture in Portuguese Guinea
Chapter 6: About Land Use in Black Africa
List of translated works
About the author
About the translators and editors
Index

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?

Anselmo Matusse

Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town

Anselmo Matusse is currently a Research Officer at Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town, South Africa, within the Critical Zones Africa project funded by the Science for Africa Foundation, and an associate of Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. He holds a PhD in Anthropology, a master’s degree in the Digital Humanities from Linnaeus University, Environmental Science from Linköping University, and Higher Education Research and Teaching from Göteborg University, in Sweden. His research interests include soil and society, digital ecologies, higher education research, and creative methodologies. A former National Geographic Explorer and Social Science Research Council fellow, he is currently building the African Lusophone Environmental Humanities Network (ALEHN) to connect African

Lusophone environmental writers, scholars, activists and artists and foster an African environmentalism.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0995-513X

Carlos Lopes

Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town

Professor Carlos Lopes is an Honorary Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town. Visiting Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, London. He has been associated with several high-level boards, including the Global Commission for Economy and Climate, Global Commission for the Future of Work, Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation and the Commission on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa. He is a current member of the boards of Jakaya Kikwete Foundation, Hailemariam and Roman Foundation, the Graça Machel Trust, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, the Global Advisory Board of the African Leadership Institute, Waterloo University International Advisory Board, Board member of Invest Africa, African Center for Cities Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the World Resource Institute, Advisory Council of the African Climate Foundation, as well as Honorary Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and Lifetime Member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. Professor Lopes is past chair of the 222 Lisbon University Institute (2009 to 2017) and past head of several institutions at the United Nations, including the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UN System Staff College and UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary, Economic Commission for Africa, (2012–2016). He has occupied prominent positions such as UN Assistant Secretary-General and Political Director for Secretary-General Kofi Annan and was appointed as African Union High Representative for Partnerships with Europe in 2018 and as a member of the African Union Reform Team led by President Paul Kagame

in 2017.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6754-7017

Lesley Green

Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town

Lesley Green is a Professor of Earth Politics and Founding Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. She leads the Critical Zones Africa project, a partnership of five African Universities, investigating biogeosocial production of habitability. She has held multiple fellowships internationally, including a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of California Santa Cruz; a Mandela Fellowship at Harvard; the Leeds University Cheney Visiting Fellowship; a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and a visiting professorship at the Institute for Global

Physics at the University of Paris Cité. Her research focuses on African environmentalism, and the re-grounding of the social sciences in local Earthly processes. She is a member of the Club of Rome. Her book_Rock | Water | Life (Duke / Wits 2020) won the 2023 Humanities Book Prize from the Academy of Science of South Africa.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4140-7862

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