Does Cabral's view on culture and national liberation align with Sukarno's ideas on Third World culture/liberation?

At a glance, Cabral and Sukarno seem to differ more than they agree. For the former, the question of culture is inextricable from all conversations of colonialism and struggles of national liberation; meanwhile, Sukarno sees culture as a fact to be worked with, and more importantly, across. At the 1955 Bandung Conference, he invites leaders from various previously colonized African and Asian countries to set their cultural/social/racial differences aside to unite under a common cause. He says, “But what harm is in diversity, when there is unity in desire? This Conference is not to oppose each other, it is a conference of brotherhood”. Cabral sees a similar diversity but within Africa; he writes, "In the same way that from an economic and political point of view one discovers the existence of several Africas, so also are there several African cultures”. What unites them here is an acknowledgement of the diversity among those entangled in the struggle against colonialism, even though Cabral’s purely African concerns are removed from Sukarno’s dreams of a Pan African-Asian alliance.

Cabral recognizes the colonial violence directed towards a nation’s culture when he claims, “[i]ndeed, to dominate a nation by force of arms is, above all, to take up arms to destroy or at least, to neutralize and paralyze its culture”. Thus, he sees the central role culture plays in providing the fervour and strong sense of identity that must preface the struggle for independence. Sukarno does not seem to see culture as ultimately the site of colonial violence and therefore independence, and when he does not invoke the notion of culture to underline the need to unite under a common cause, he subscribes to notions of Africa and Asia being the source of “faiths and ideas” that ultimately spread over the world. In this claim, he treads uneasily close to what Cabral cautions against: the uncritical touting of one’s cultural superiority.

In fact, Cabral insists on the dynamism and constantly evolving nature of culture that Sukarno on the other hand does not see with respect to temporality. For the latter, culture is essential, timeless, ahistorical. For Cabral, it is almost a palimpsest, allowing for the space to be rewritten, redefined, critically examined and ultimately reflective of a nation’s socioeconomic structure over time. His ultimate claim (and this coincides with Sukarno’s concerns with progress) is that culture be aligned with values of social and scientific progress. While he does caution against seeing Africa as a monolith, most of his rhetoric and “manifesto” is addressed to Africa as a whole, emphasizing the commonality of their situation and struggle, a point that Sukarno constantly emphasizes when he states that the experience of colonialism binds Asia and Africa, and that because of this shared history alone, they must be able to see the larger picture, as it were, and ultimately overcome cultural differences for a common desire. What’s interesting here is that Cabral employs similar rhetoric but on a smaller scale. While Sukarno emphasizes unity across nations, Cabral recognizes the cultural disparity amongst social classes and ultimately advocates for a national culture that binds them, believing that ultimately, unity is the only way to render the independence struggle effective. Thus, one can see that while their views on culture and how central it is to their cause remain vastly different, they have more in common than not because ultimately, their injunction is the same; one claims “unity across” and the other champions “unity through” culture.