The introduction offers an overview of the Tricontinental worldview and its place in the historiography. Secular, socialist, and militant, Tricontinentalism aimed to empower states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to mount a revolutionary challenge against the unjust international system and Western imperialism through armed revolts and confrontational diplomacy. More closely aligned with communism, this iteration of Third Worldism broke with Bandung’s self-conscious neutralism by reuniting socialism and the global revolution for national liberation. In recognizing this shift, the introduction offers a revised framework and chronology of Third World internationalism by challenging the idea of a single, evolving movement. Instead, it argues Tricontinentalism was one component of a century-long Anti-Imperial Project that existed in the overlapping goals of diverse movements that ultimately informed the Third World challenge to the Cold War. This project encompassed an array of competing ideologies and alliances that hoped to achieve sufficient unity to advance the interests of the Global South, with Tricontinentalism emerging as the most prominent worldview in the 1960s and 1970s.

The chapter positions the revolutionary African theorist Amílcar Cabral as part of a Tricontinental generation that believed coordinated, parallel liberation struggles would erase inequalities between Global North and South. A dedicated nationalist, he viewed socialism as a toolkit for evaluating and challenging the international system. His party, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), combined armed revolt and social reconstruction in an attempt to erase the economic inequalities and racism central to Euro-American imperialism. As the PAIGC became enmeshed in diverse solidarity networks that sustained its war, Cabral refined his ideology to better explain his party’s position at the intersection of Third World anti-imperial traditions, international socialism, and Pan-Africanism. Identarian and ideological frictions hampered the movement, but PAIGC philosophy legitimized the creation of an inclusive revolutionary coalition and proved effective at building solidarity in North and South. As a result, Cabral became a leading political theorist of revolution and anti-imperialism, placing him in the foundational canon of the Tricontinental movement.

Amílcar Cabral is the founding father of two countries: the island nation of Cabo Verde and the mainland state of Guinea-Bissau. As the first and most influential leader of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde, or PAIGC), Cabral spent much of his life trying to achieve independence for two places that he considered home. While they are two separate countries today, the revolutionary Cabral envisioned a single postcolonial nation that would unite the former Portuguese possessions. The metropole had for centuries viewed the colonies as uniquely interrelated, using the more assimilated and racially mixed populations of the islands of Cabo Verde to help administer the mainland in Guinea, where relatively few Europeans had settled. Cabral was born in Portuguese Guinea to Cabo Verdean parents filling such intermediary roles, and it therefore seemed natural for him to envision a united struggle. Cabral fought to bring independence to two colonies connected—not separated—by water and shared history.

Cabral's biography is important here because his revolutionary ideology owes much to his ambiguous relationship with his own island identity. Cabo Verde had not been permanently inhabited when the Portuguese first settled the archipelago in the fifteenth century. The culture that surrounded Cabral during his formative years grew from the intermixing of Europeans and enslaved Africans brought from the mainland. By the time of Cabral's birth, a majority of its population claimed a mixed-race heritage and received privileges associated with Portuguese citizenship, though insufficient education and dire poverty on the drought-prone islands prevented any claims to true equality with the metropolis. Rather, the archipelago existed somewhere between Europe and Africa. By embracing this latter heritage, Cabral rejected Portuguese domination, claiming an historically informed identity that tied the islands directly to the African continent despite centuries acting as an intermediary. This vision of unity proved vital for the success of the revolution. The archipelago was too closely controlled by the Portuguese to launch a large-scale guerrilla movement, so the PAIGC looked to Guinea-Bissau when planning its armed independence struggle. In 1963, the PAIGC launched a revolution on the mainland with an army of mostly local soldiers led disproportionately by Cabo Verdeans.