When Africans of Portugal's empire began at last to make their voices heard in the world outside their barricaded colonies, soon after the middle of the 1950s, they found few to listen to them and fewer still to understand the importance of what they were proposing to do. The outside world, they learned, knew little of Portugal itself, let alone of ‘Portuguese Africa’; and, knowing little, cared even less.

Yet these Africans and their companions in struggle, fewer than 20 years later, had moved into the very heart and centre of the world's attention. And no wonder: for, whether greatly admired or as greatly hated, they were seen by their own efforts to have wrecked the 40-year-old dictatorship of fascist Portugal and destroyed the Portuguese empire. They were seen to have radically changed the balance of African power and influence in decisive areas of the continent, and above all in relation to the racist regimes of the far south and the various African agents of those regimes. They were seen to have built powerful movements of revolutionary challenge and changed the course of African history. And all this they were seen to have done in territories where a more or less complete ‘colonial silence’ and stagnation had previously reigned.

How was this possible among populations reputed to be among the most ‘backward’ in all Africa: populations having only one or two per cent of literate persons, possessing almost no access of any kind to modem technology, or to modem ideas, or to modern forms of organisation, and meanwhile suffering from the most repressive of all the colonial regimes? How could it be done?

It may be too soon for history's definitive answers. But just as the importance of what these Africans achieved is now very clear, whether in relation to their own territories or to the more general issues of anti-colonial and post-colonial change, so are some of the reasons for their success.