An independent Guinea-Bissau was supposed to become an egalitarian society that rejected colonial structures. Instead, its economy rests on a ‘cashew capitalism’ whose foundations lie in colonialism’s resource-concentrated, subsistence-eroding agriculture. That economic logic has endured through colonial warfare, independence, neoliberal structural adjustment, climate crises, and organized crime. The cashew nut—and political instability—are the closest thing Guinea-Bissau has to historical continuation. Guinea-Bissau’s economic system has always depended, in large part, on who is doing the work. From the colonial plantation to the structural adjustment years to today’s narco-economy, it has been women who have cultivated, processed, and sold cashews in small volumes on local markets—sustaining households that the formal economy has never reliably served. Their labour has been invisible to every administration that has governed Guinea-Bissau, Portuguese or otherwise. That invisibility is not incidental but rather a load-bearing phenomenon. The colonial nut The first cashew tree was planted in the Bissau-Guinean archipelago in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Portuguese settlers, ostensibly to broaden smallholder livelihoods and promoted as a cash crop by Governor Sarmento Rodrigues in the mid-1940s. In practice, the crop’s introduction represented Portuguese colonial exploitation at its most systematic, laying the groundwork for Guinea-Bissau’s fragile economy and its long-term vulnerability to organized crime. Cashew production is almost exclusively export-oriented and more than 90 percent of the production leaves the country as raw, unprocessed nuts. The crop’s low entry value yields minimal returns for smallholder farmers trapped in a monocultural cycle in which foreign processing companies have secured advantageous market shares. Local producers remain exposed to severe price volatility, while food production has been progressively displaced by the expansion of cashew cultivation. The practical consequence is a country that produces an enormous quantity of a single commodity it cannot afford to eat, and from which others profit through processing. Once cashews were established as an export crop, it quickly became apparent that they could deliver revenues to the Portuguese empire. Alongside groundnuts, cashews became a useful cash crop within a system designed to maximize returns to the colonial centre while depleting the periphery’s food sovereignty. Throughout the colonial period running from 1588 to 1974, Guinea-Bissau remained a neglected stepchild in Portugal’s imperial family. Investment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare was negligible. Under Portuguese colonial law, racial hierarchy was institutionalized and access to education and administrative office was restricted to a small, assimilated Creole elite, which left the African majority deliberately excluded from both knowledge and power. Portugal’s own precarious position within Europe did little to encourage industrial investment in its colonies. Quick cash revenues from export crops became a matter of colonial survival. After the official abolition of slavery, European colonizers devised new mechanisms for maintaining forced labour. In Guinea-Bissau, state-sanctioned coerced labour remained standard practice until 1962, when the global wave of decolonization and the colonial war in Angola finally forced reforms. Ripening cashew fruit on Bolama Island Guinea Bissau Wikimedia Commons 2018 MR Online Ripening cashew fruit on Bolama Island, Guinea Bissau (Wikimedia Commons, 2018) The forced labour system affected men and women differently—a difference by design. Men were pressed into plantation work, their labour visible, counted, and therefore controllable. Women became responsible for family subsistence: organizing agriculture, processing cashews in small quantities, feeding households on whatever remained after colonial taxation had taken its share. This work appeared in no colonial ledger. It was structurally necessary to the system and officially invisible within it—a combination that would prove remarkably durable across every subsequent political dispensation. The hunger that this system generated was not a natural disaster. It was a policy outcome. Pressured deeper into the monocrop economy, many farmers felt compelled to abandon subsistence crops entirely and grow only cashew nuts in order to pay colonial taxes. The logic was self-reinforcing: the less diversified the agricultural landscape, the more exposed the population to commodity price swings, and the more dependent on a market—the colonial market struck by hunger and political turmoil in Europe—that was structurally indifferent to their survival. Amílcar Cabral’s warning The armed resistance that ignited in 1963 against Portuguese colonial rule was the product of five hundred years of deliberate humiliation and systematic violence. The imposed agricultural model was itself an act of violence, argued Amílcar Cabral, agronomist and co-founder of Guinea-Bissau’s and Cape Verde’s liberation movement: African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC). Employed as a young man by the colonial administration, Cabral came to know the country’s farmers intimately. Monoculture was catastrophic; the population’s narrow range of income-generating crops was a reliable recipe for famine. Cabral’s 1956 agronomic survey is a forensic account of colonial impoverishment. It documents how the Bissau-Guinean peasantry was driven ever deeper into the monocrop economy—a trap that cemented long-term food insecurity and created a structural dependency on volatile external commodity markets. It also documents the specific mechanisms through which colonial taxation forced farmers off subsistence cultivation and into a cashew monoculture that served the empire’s interests rather than their own. Yet Cabral did not see rapid industrialization as a universal solution. Agriculture and land stewardship require more than technology, he argued—technology itself has no agency of its own; it is carried forward only by a greed-based logic of land exploitation that runs counter to the relationship between people and the earth that Friedrich Engels described as one of “flesh, blood and brain.” For Cabral, the cashew monoculture was not simply economically destructive. It represented a severing of the peasantry from the land as a source of life, autonomy, and cultural identity—a form of dispossession that could not be remedied by switching one crop for another, or one set of owners for another. The problem was the structure itself. What Cabral understood, and what his agronomic training gave him the language to articulate, was that colonial agriculture did not merely exploit labour. It reorganized human relations to the land in ways that produced permanent dependency. The cashew monoculture was not a neutral technical choice. It was a political instrument that ensured Guinea-Bissau’s smallholders could never accumulate, never diversify, and never eat their way to self-sufficiency. The colony that planted cashew trees in the 1840s was not providing a livelihood option. It was installing a mechanism of control. Cabral’s critique also had a gendered dimension that his successors would largely fail to act on. Women’s subsistence labour—the cultivation of food crops, the small-scale processing of cashews, the management of household food security—was what made the colonial cash crop system viable. Without that unacknowledged floor of reproductive and subsistence work, the men working colonial plantations could not have been fed, and the system could not have functioned. Cabral saw this. The movements and governments that followed him, with rare exceptions, did not. Cabral’s empirical work in the 1950s became the intellectual foundation of the liberation struggle launched in 1959, and the well of knowledge from which PAIGC drew its inspiration before taking up arms in 1963. His insight—that colonial underdevelopment was a system, not a condition—is the lens through which everything that followed must be read. The practical consequence is a country that produces an enormous quantity of a single commodity it cannot afford to eat, and from which others profit through processing. For Cabral, the cashew monoculture was not simply economically destructive. It represented a severing of the peasantry from the land as a source of life, autonomy, and cultural identity.