Abstract: Cabral's theory of culture is a unique response to the African experience of colonia history. In Cabral's view, to rebuild African culture, African people ought to overcome conservative nationalist sentiments and go beyond the cultural “homogeneity” and the exclusive “pitfalls of nationalism.” “Return to the source” is not an abstract and static return to tradition, but to recapture the history usurped and stolen by the colonists and restore a nation's inalienable right to retain its own history and a nation's freedom to safeguard the development of its national productivity. Culture is a key factor in the national liberation struggle, whereas the reconstruction of African culture can only be completed in concrete revolutionary practice. It is a revolutionary process of “re-Africanization.” What Cabral constructed is an “African style of cultural materialism,” which accentuates the “primary” and “subjective” status of culture in historical development and national liberation, and will exert an enlightening impact upon the worldwide surge of the Postcolonial and other theories that criticize the imperialist cultural hegemony.

Key words: Cabral, African culture, “return to the source”, “re-Africanization”, national liberation