The attack on Tite and Portugal's war in Guinea, 1963 to 1974

Gabriel Moura was on sentry duty at Tite when the shooting started, in the small hours of 23 January 1963. Tite, a small post in the southern region of Quinara, held the headquarters of a Portuguese infantry battalion, a mortar platoon and a maintenance detachment. Moura, a soldier from Gondomar, was the first to fire back. By his fellow veterans' account, he emptied his magazines, probably three, and threw both of the grenades he had been issued.3 sources3 sources

The attackers were men of the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. The historian José de Matos, drawing on the governor's telegram to Lisbon that day, counts 15 to 20 of them. They kept the barracks under heavy fire for about half an hour.1 source1 source

One Portuguese soldier died: Veríssimo Godinho Ramos, a driver from Vale de Cavalos, near Chamusca. Veterans still do not know whether the shot that killed him came from the attackers or from his own side. Matos gives one Portuguese dead and two wounded, and three attackers killed. A 1981 summary of the battalion's record, quoted by veterans, counts one dead and one wounded, and eight attackers confirmed dead.3 sources3 sources

It was a small fight, but both the PAIGC and Portugal's own commission for the history of the African campaigns date the war in Guinea from Tite. It lasted until 1974.3 sources3 sources

Portuguese Guinea was a small, flat, river-cut territory on the West African coast between Senegal and the French colony of Guinea, which became independent in 1958. Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo, the dictatorship built by António de Oliveira Salazar, and it treated its colonies as overseas provinces that could never be given up. In 1961 war had broken out in Angola; Guinea followed in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964.3 sources3 sources

The man who organised the revolt was Amílcar Cabral, born in Bafatá on 12 September 1924. He won a scholarship to the Instituto Superior de Agronomia in Lisbon in 1945, where he joined other African students searching for their roots, and went home as an agronomist to carry out Guinea's agricultural census. The colonial authorities soon allowed him to stay in Guinea only once a year.2 sources2 sources

According to the accepted account, Cabral proposed a party for the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde to a circle of friends in Bissau on the afternoon of 19 September 1956. It was called the African Party for Independence (PAI). The PAIGC still celebrates that date: it marked its 70th anniversary in Lisbon on 19 September 2026, naming six founders, among them Cabral, his brother Luís Cabral and Aristides Pereira.3 sources3 sources

The turning point came on the Bissau waterfront. In July 1959 the sailors and dockers of the river boats, most of them Manjaco men who also loaded and unloaded cargo, demanded higher pay from the trading house Casa Gouveia. On the morning of 3 August a meeting with its manager, António Carreira, failed, and the boat captains called a gathering on the Pidjiguiti quay for three in the afternoon to hand back the boats.1 source1 source

At about four, a police chief ordered the men back to work, pushed them and slapped one. The sailors fought back with oars, sticks, iron bars and harpoons. Police reinforcements arrived and an order to fire was given, by the military commander or, in other accounts, by a police lieutenant. For about five minutes police and soldiers fired and threw grenades at strikers trying to escape through the quay's closed gates, and kept firing at those who fled into the water and across the mud.1 source1 source

Nobody agrees how many died. The colonial inquiry named nine dead and fourteen wounded; an account based on the Catholic mission counted 13 to 15 bodies on the quay and more carried away by the river. In January 1960 an anti-colonial manifesto spoke of 50 dead, and that figure, never proved and blurring dead, wounded and missing, became the one repeated ever since.1 source1 source

The PAI does not seem to have been behind the strike. The historian Leopoldo Amado, quoted by Duarte Silva, credits activists of a rival group, the Movement for the Liberation of Guinea, and says the PAIGC claimed the day as its own only later. But Cabral drew the lesson. At a meeting in Bissau on 19 September 1959 the nationalists decided to stop urban protests, organise the peasants, prepare for armed struggle and move part of the leadership abroad, with Cabral going to Conakry, capital of independent Guinea.2 sources2 sources

From Conakry the party trained cadres and looked for weapons. Czechoslovakia became an early sponsor in 1961, providing arms, cash and training; Cabral preferred smuggling guns in through Morocco and Algeria to the sabotage his Czechoslovak sponsors urged on him. In early 1963 the Guinean government agreed to let arms reach the PAIGC freely through Conakry.1 source1 source

The PAIGC presented Tite as the start of a war launched by decision of the party. Arafan Mané, who led the attack and is said to have fired the first burst, told a different story in 2001, in an interview with the Guinean armed forces' paper O Defensor. As summarised by Portuguese veterans, he described a haphazard raid by young fighters, with no clear command and without the approval of the party's leadership. He was perhaps 17 at the time.3 sources3 sources

The guerrillas spread fast in the south. Carlos Fabião, who served in Guinea as a major under Spínola and headed its government in 1974, wrote that Portugal lost control of the south and centre-west of the colony in the first months of fighting, keeping the east, where the Fula people stayed loyal, and the island of Bissau. Attempts to retake the south in 1964 to 1967 ended in defeats, he wrote, starting on the island of Como.2 sources2 sources

In January 1964 Portugal launched Operation Tridente on the Como islands, which José de Matos calls the largest operation ever mounted in Guinea. A pro-PAIGC account in Ghanaian newspapers that year said the force of some 3,000 men withdrew in April, leaving Como in guerrilla hands. Meanwhile, from 13 to 17 February 1964, Cabral held the party's first congress at Cassacá, in the liberated south; his biographer Carlos Comitini calls it a decisive change in the course of the struggle.3 sources3 sources

The congress also dealt with abuses. José Teixeira, a Portuguese veteran who later spoke to men on both sides, writes that some guerrilla chiefs recruited by force and killed village heads who refused, and that Cassacá was called partly to end such abuses and win back the people's trust. By November 1965 the party's watchwords called for political committees of commissars and commanders in every unit of the People's Army.2 sources2 sources

By the late 1960s the PAIGC ran what it called liberated areas, with their own schools, health services, administration and courts. In December 1968 Cabral claimed they covered about 60 per cent of the territory and half the population. Portugal dismissed such claims; in October 1973 its foreign minister, Rui Patrício, told the Americans that the PAIGC's claim to control three-quarters of the country was “a complete lie”.2 sources2 sources

In April 1972 three UN diplomats from Ecuador, Sweden and Tunisia crossed from Guinea-Conakry and spent six nights in the liberated areas. They visited a school hidden in the forest for fear of air attack, where 65 children learned in temporary huts, and recorded the PAIGC's claim of more than 200 schools with over 20,000 pupils. Their report concluded that Portugal “no longer exercises any effective administrative control in large areas” of the territory.1 source1 source

The war fell hard on villagers. The UN mission reported “widespread and indiscriminate bombing of villages and the use of napalm to destroy crops”. Four villages in its vicinity were destroyed during the visit, and the PAIGC said Portuguese forces had destroyed two hospitals, a health centre and three schools and killed 25 people in the area during those days. Former PAIGC fighters have told Portuguese veterans of terror by Portuguese troops in inland villages that drove them into the bush and into the war.2 sources2 sources

The PAIGC's weapons came mostly from the Soviet bloc. The historian Natalia Telepneva puts Soviet aid between 1963 and 1973 at 21.7 million roubles in military help and 4.4 million in humanitarian aid. Cuban advisers arrived in large numbers after 1966, though Cabral often disagreed with them over strategy.2 sources2 sources

The PAIGC freed captured Portuguese soldiers in 1968, and Cabral urged the people of Portugal to demand their sons back from “an unjust cause”.1 source1 source

At the end of May 1968 Brigadier António de Spínola arrived in Bissau as both governor and commander-in-chief. He found the PAIGC in control of the whole south and pressing on the west, and he sent several senior commanders home. Then he gathered his unit commanders in the governor's palace and set out his plan.2 sources2 sources

Under the slogan “Por uma Guiné Melhor”, for a better Guinea, Spínola promised schools, health posts and cheap housing. He wrote that the war would be won by “the force of reason” more than by arms. People's congresses, whose final sessions in Bissau grouped delegates by ethnic group, advised the government. An African Force of local troops and militias defended the new villages.2 sources2 sources

The core of the plan was resettlement. Scattered hamlets were concentrated into strategic villages, the reordenamentos, which were easier to defend and to supply. At Nhabijões, near Bambadinca, about 2,000 people from four villages were moved into a camp of 300 houses between 1969 and 1971. Officially nobody was forced; colonial reports, the researcher Francesca Vita found, describe people reluctant to leave their sacred land, and old villages destroyed once they had gone.1 source1 source

Spínola also gave up posts he could not hold, among them Madina do Boé, in the east. He tried force beyond the border: in November 1970 a Portuguese raid on Conakry freed 26 prisoners but failed to topple the Guinean government. And he tried talks, through President Léopold Senghor of Senegal, who proposed a ceasefire, autonomy and eventual independence. According to Fabião, Marcelo Caetano, Salazar's successor, stopped the contacts, saying Portugal could accept a military disaster in Guinea but never a political concession.3 sources3 sources

On the evening of Saturday 20 January 1973, Cabral left a reception at the Polish embassy in Conakry and drove home. At about half past ten, as he got out of his car, a group of PAIGC men seized him. Cabral resisted and was shot dead, by Comitini's account by Inocêncio Kani, a former commander of the party's navy who had been removed for serious misconduct. He was 48.3 sources3 sources

The killers tied up his deputy, Aristides Pereira, and other leaders and took them to sea in PAIGC patrol boats. President Ahmed Sékou Touré ordered the port closed, and the boats were stopped with the help of a Soviet destroyer. Captured, the plotters said in recorded statements that they had worked for the Portuguese. Lisbon called the killing “a grave and condemnable act” and denied any part in it.2 sources2 sources

Who stood behind Kani is still argued over. The US State Department's analysts thought the confessions of doubtful value and saw signs of a feud between Cape Verdeans and mainland Guineans in the party, without ruling out Portuguese complicity. An RTP history series by Fernando Rosas says Guineans killed him in a plot with the PIDE, the political police; that has never been proved. The Diário de Notícias notes that several historians blame opponents inside the party. Some of the accused were executed summarily; others were pardoned.4 sources4 sources

Cabral's death did not stop the plan he had prepared. Late in March 1973 the PAIGC fired its first Soviet Strela shoulder-launched missiles, and several Portuguese aircraft were shot down in quick succession that March and April. Fabião called it the end of Portugal's command of the air, the advantage on which every operation in Guinea depended. The US embassy in Lisbon reported in September that new Portuguese tactics had since blunted the weapon.4 sources4 sources

From May the guerrillas besieged the border post of Guidage and pressed Gadamael, and the garrison of Guileje was withdrawn. Without air cover, supply and medical evacuation became hard; Lusa later wrote that the effect on the troops' morale was devastating. Spínola went home that year and was replaced by General Bettencourt Rodrigues, whose orders, Fabião wrote, were to resist until his means ran out.2 sources2 sources

On 24 September 1973, in the liberated region of Madina do Boé, the People's National Assembly, elected in the liberated areas at the end of 1972, proclaimed the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. By Fabião's count, 86 countries soon recognised it, more than had diplomatic relations with Portugal. Luís Cabral, Amílcar's brother, became its president.3 sources3 sources

On 2 November 1973 the UN General Assembly welcomed “the recent accession to independence of the people of Guinea-Bissau” and condemned Portugal's “illegal occupation” of parts of the new state. Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil and Greece voted against.2 sources2 sources

The revolt that ended the war began among the officers who fought it. On 13 July 1973 a decree let conscript officers with a tour of duty behind them join the regular officer corps after a two-semester course, overtaking graduates of the Military Academy. On 21 August, 51 regular officers met secretly in Bissau and on 28 August sent a protest to the President and the Prime Minister. On 9 September, 136 officers met at Alcáçovas, near Évora, the meeting later counted as the birth of the Armed Forces Movement.1 source1 source

On 22 February 1974 Spínola published Portugal e o Futuro, which admitted that Portugal could not win its wars by arms. On 25 April the Armed Forces Movement overthrew Caetano, and Spínola received power from him at the Carmo barracks in Lisbon. In Guinea, Fabião recorded 102 actions between 25 April and 31 May, costing the Portuguese five dead and 79 wounded.2 sources2 sources

Talks in London and Algiers followed. On 26 August 1974 in Algiers the two sides agreed that Portugal would recognise Guinea-Bissau on 10 September and withdraw all its forces by 31 October. The recognition was signed by the President of the Republic, the same António de Spínola.2 sources2 sources

The Portuguese side's losses are better documented. The army's official history, as quoted by the Algarve paper Barlavento, counts 2,070 Portuguese servicemen dead in Guinea out of 8,290 in all three African wars. The sources used here give no comparable count for PAIGC fighters or Guinean civilians.2 sources2 sources

Guinea-Bissau marks 23 January as the Day of the Combatants for the Freedom of the Homeland. In 2025 the government decorated about 70 veterans in Bissau, while their spokesman complained of abandonment and the PAIGC criticised the removal of the date from the official holidays.1 source1 source

The Guineans who fought for Portugal paid a price of their own. About 600 men served in three companies of African commandos; after independence the Portuguese army left them behind, and many were persecuted and shot. In 1977 the Portuguese commandos' association brought out about 90 who had fled to Senegal.1 source1 source

Cabral's house in Conakry, where he was killed, is now Guinea-Bissau's embassy there.1 source1 source