For Former Rebel in West Africa, Her Allegiance Still Lies With Russia

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — When her nation wanted arms to struggle its bitter liberation struggle towards its colonizer, it was the Soviet Union that offered them.

When her nation wanted medical employees to are inclined to the struggle’s wounded, it despatched her to coach as a nurse — within the Soviet Union.

So when Joana Gomes, now a lawmaker within the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, heard concerning the struggle between Russia and Ukraine, her allegiance was clear from the beginning: It will be with Russia, though she generally slips and nonetheless calls it the Soviet Union.

“It was with their arms that we received our independence,” Ms. Gomes, 72, mentioned on a current wet afternoon, cooking lunch at residence within the capital, Bissau. “If not for them, even right this moment we’d not have our independence.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, some voices had been absent from the worldwide live performance of condemnation, a lot of them African. Sixteen of the 35 nations that abstained from the United Nations vote to sentence Russia’s actions had been in Africa, as was one of many 5 that voted no, Eritrea.

For a lot of African nations, ties with Moscow run deep. The Soviet Union supported many African liberation wars, supplying coaching, schooling and weapons to freedom fighters like Ms. Gomes. Practically six a long time later, she hasn’t forgotten.

In 1964, when she stepped off a aircraft in the united statesS.R., the very first thing Ms. Gomes’s sponsors did was hand her gloves, a hat and a heavy coat.

She was 14. Till that time, she had by no means left Guinea-Bissau, a small West African nation that received independence from Portugal in 1974 after a decade-long struggle.

However her younger life had already been stuffed with drama, violence and tragedy. Her father, an outspoken proponent of the liberation struggle, was murdered by one among his comrades when Ms. Gomes was 13.

Heartbroken, she set out for the forested entrance strains of the struggle. She had determined that the one man who might assist her receive justice for her father was Amilcar Cabral, the chief of the liberation motion and one among Africa’s most iconic anticolonial philosophers and army leaders.

Her three-day march to fulfill Mr. Cabral within the hide-out utilized by him and his guerrilla fighters paid off. The accused murderer was arrested.

However the struggle towards the Portuguese was simply starting, and Ms. Gomes was thrust into one of many continent’s most brutal independence wars.

When Mr. Cabral, a founding father of the African Celebration for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, or P.A.I.G.C., despatched lots of of Guinean youth for coaching in the united statesS.R., Ms. Gomes was amongst them. When she returned 5 years later, a talented nurse fluent in Russian, the struggle had intensified.

She labored lengthy days on the entrance strains at makeshift clinics, alongside her comrades and docs from Cuba, binding troopers’ wounds and saving the lives of civilians caught within the crossfire. On one event, she pulled shrapnel from the chest of a lady who was eight months pregnant, saving each mom and baby.

One among her most unforgettable moments got here on New Yr’s Eve day, as 1972 was ending.

That morning she wore a pink gown as an alternative of army fatigues, as she anticipated a small social gathering to have a good time. She was in a village just a few miles from her base camp, ordered to retrieve a fellow soldier recuperating from a chest an infection.

However simply because the morning’s espresso was starting to boil on an open hearth, Ms. Gomes heard enemy gunfire, and she or he ran for the duvet of the forest. “Perhaps that is the time I die,” she recollects pondering to herself. However simply then, she tripped, and a small bazooka rocket zoomed above the place her head had simply been. She didn’t make it to the New Yr’s social gathering, however she did make it out of that ambush alive.

Stephanie J. Urdang, a journalist born in South Africa, spent two months reporting from the entrance strains of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle and wrote “Preventing Two Colonialisms: The Girls’s Wrestle in Guinea-Bissau” concerning the contributions ladies like Ms. Gomes made within the struggle for independence.

Assigned as nurses, lecturers and transporters of meals and weapons, the ladies had been trusted to make sure that guerrilla fighters had locations to stay and meals to eat, Ms. Urdang mentioned. However their roles in garnering common assist within the countryside had been maybe much more essential.

“Individuals within the villages knew what the Portuguese had been doing to them. They knew it by means of their incapability to promote their crops at a simply value, they knew it in the best way they had been taken for compelled labor,” Ms. Urdang mentioned.

“So when the P.A.I.G.C. got here in and had been going to do away with these oppressors, after which once they noticed colleges being constructed, well being facilities being constructed and literacy campaigns for folks, only a entire lot of providers had been offered that weren’t there earlier than — there was severe mobilization,” Ms. Urdang mentioned.

After the struggle was received, thanks partly to that mobilization, Ms. Gomes went again to the Soviet Union, the place she educated as a health care provider earlier than returning to Guinea-Bissau in 1987 to work in native hospitals.

She turned director of the nationwide bodily rehabilitation middle and later labored as an inspector of well being amenities for the Ministry of Well being, a begin to her authorities expertise.

Then, just a few years in the past, she determined to as soon as once more deploy her medical information on the entrance strains — of politics, this time, not struggle.

In 2019 within the nation’s rural southwest, throughout her marketing campaign for a seat in Parliament, Ms. Gomes oversaw an effort to ship dozens of recent beds to a small hospital. She wished to indicate she was decided to do one thing concerning the dire well being care system in Guinea-Bissau, whose residents have a median life expectancy of 58.

Ms. Gomes received her election, however her efforts to enhance a well being care system that sits close to the underside in world rankings have run into endemic obstacles.

Since independence, Guinea-Bissau has struggled to search out its footing amid each inside combating and international pressures. There have been 4 coups and lots of extra tried.

On this nation so dominated by water, mangroves swamps and islands, it could actually appear as if residents are at all times ready for the tide to alter to allow them to get someplace — the bodily tide or the political one.

Ms. Gomes’s small concrete residence in Bissau is in a continuing state of destruction and reconstruction. So is her nation, the place residents should cope with unreliable hospitals, colleges and infrastructure.

Then in Could, the president, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, dissolved the Nationwide Meeting, deepening the nation’s cycle of political instability.

Together with her parliamentary work attempting to enhance the nation’s well being care system now on maintain, Ms. Gomes has had extra time to replicate on the struggle between Russia and Ukraine.

Her nurse coaching was in Kyiv, then a part of the Soviet Union, and she or he mentioned she is sympathetic to either side.

“I spent my youth in Ukraine, I’ve associates there, I don’t need folks to undergo. I want there could possibly be an understanding between Ukraine and Putin,” she mentioned. “I used to be in a struggle, I do know what struggle is, I do know what it’s to undergo in a struggle.”

However for all of the day by day struggles which might be nonetheless a part of life in Guinea-Bissau, one hard-fought achievement continues to be intact: independence.

And the Kremlin’s function in that’s nonetheless gratefully remembered, and she or he disagrees with the various who take into account the struggle an act of unjustified Russian aggression.

“Ukraine, why did they wish to be part of NATO?” Ms. Gomes requested. “Russia doesn’t settle for that.”

NATO, she famous, “is an enemy of the Soviet Union. If somebody is my enemy and I inform my father I’m going to their home — to my enemy’s home — is that good?”

In her assist of Russia, she is much from alone in Guinea-Bissau, or certainly the broader area, the place a complete era received liberation from colonial oppressors with Soviet support.

Manuel dos Santos, a former freedom fighter in Guinea-Bissau who has served in varied ministerial posts, was additionally clear about his assist. “If I needed to take sides on this second — and I don’t should — however let’s say I needed to, I might say that Russia had been provoked in each approach,” he mentioned.

Not removed from the Nationwide Meeting constructing in downtown Bissau, on the Guinea-Bissau Nationwide Liberation Museum, many Soviet-supplied weapons are displayed.

“I used to have a Kalashnikov. The Portuguese had American weapons,” Mr. Dos Santos mentioned. “It’s so simple as that.”

“I perceive the sense of dedication due to what the Soviet Union did,” mentioned Ms. Urdang, the author. “However that was the Soviet Union. Russia is totally different now.”

Whichever aspect they’re on, folks in Guinea-Bissau have felt the struggle’s results firsthand.

Strains at gasoline stations had been worst this spring, when gas shortages meant drivers spent hours ready to replenish. However only in the near past, costs for buses and taxis elevated due to increased vitality prices.

Regardless of her appreciation for the united statesS.R., Ms. Gomes didn’t embrace its atheism. On a current Sunday, she obtained able to attend one of many three evangelical church buildings the place she worships.

Whereas there, she deliberate to hope for an finish to Guinea-Bissau’s political crises.

She famous she had been combating for her nation since she was a youngster. However now, it felt like all she might do was look forward to the tide to alter.

“I really feel ache, as a former liberation fighter. What did we struggle for?” she requested. “Guinea-Bissau, it’s with out a authorities, with out something proper now.”