Aliou Ly. Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War: De-gendering the History of Anticolonial Struggle. Zed Books, 2024. xiv + 217 pp. $35.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9781350383081.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aliou Ly'sWomen of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War joins the scholarship that has challenged the erasure and minimization of women in war and conflict.Ly's work performs a historiographical intervention that uses oral testimonies secured through intentional interview questions, archival fragments, and critical reflections, to contest the silencing of women within the liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau.By taking on this work, Ly contributes to the growing corpus of African feminist historical recovery.Through six chapters, Ly examines colonial policies and their impact on female work and women's participation in the armed struggle.He also looks at war narratives and how war was gendered through heroization of fighters, as well as the aftermath of the war on gender roles and equality.In so doing, Ly invites deeper theoretical questioning about memory and the politics of narrative silence, agency, gendered roles, postindependence betrayals, gendered forgettings, and narrative form.Ly challenges the colonial obscuring and transmutation of roles and gender through comprehensive historical analysis and centers women's own role in such obscuring.Thus, he offers a theoretical apparatus for understanding that historical silence is not merely imposed through hierarchies but is internalized, performed, and reified by the subjects themselves.The book goes further by making substantiated claims about why women's narratives are excluded, what such exclusion means in the bigger picture of a struggle, and what results from that exclusion.In a brilliant narrative, Ly raises the prominence of women's roles as a counternarrative to the self-paradox discourses, challenging a pattern where women's roles and responsibilities during war are normalized and, in that process, relegated to secondary roles while elevating the role and tasks that men took charge of.To challenge the self-paradox patterns, Ly ascribes equal importance to women's roles by arguing that "it was in fact, revolutionary to cook, fetch, and do laundry in military or guerrilla base settings, rather than in households, because military or guerilla bases had always been considered exclusively male environments" (71).What was more profound was the way women asserted the essence and centrality of the domestic roles they played.According to Ly, a former combatant retorted: "do you think the men could win the fight without us women fighting with them?No, because empty stomachs will not help in combat operations" (90).Ly's insight on how conflict reorganizes gendered roles bears resonance with my own ethnographic encounters in conflict-ridden Kaduna, Nigeria.In those
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".