For a region purportedly a backwater of South African environmental history at the close of the twentieth century,1 the Cape has moved rapidly toward centre stage at the start of the new millennium. It now boasts a wealth of literature in international journals and last year saw the publication of the first book-length environmental histories of the region, with the promise of still more to come, not least from a strong crop of recently or nearly completed doctoral dissertations in academies round the north Atlantic rim.2 The Cape owes this distinction to being the oldest region of British missionary and imperial endeavour in the subcontinent, guaranteeing extensive archives in the northern hemisphere and explaining both the bias in the current scholarship towards the pre-1910 period and lack of a comparable scholarship on any other part of southern Africa.3 This anomalous florescence can also be read for likely future trends in a national historiography otherwise unanimously deemed moribund if not actually in decline for the past decade.4 What it reveals are two contending trajectories: the first a shift away from political economy to the history of ideas and the other a fidelity to the late twentieth-century radical social history tradition and its core theme of the social relations of production.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Bissau-Guineans fought a bloody war for independence. Typical narratives of the war emphasize the ethnic dimension of the liberation struggle, with Balanta freedom fighters opposing Portuguese-allied Fulbe. This dominant narrative is open to question, as it ignores the war as a ‘social condition’, and the role that local circumstances played in determining collaboration with the Portuguese, fighting in liberation militaries, or fleeing to neighboring states for personal safety. Oral and archival evidence suggests a more nuanced perspective that blurs the binary nature of this dominant narrative along ethnic fault lines, viewed as either resistance or collaboration. The argument presented in this article allows us to move past defining the war along ethnic or regional lines, and instead urges a view of the conflict as a complex, fractured experience for all Bissau-Guineans, shaped by the particularities of local circumstances.