Lilica Boal

She was one of the founders, in 1981, of the Organização das Mulheres de Cabo Verde, an organization that aimed to support women's autonomy. Boal handled the organization's international partnerships.

In 1980, after a military coup brought João Bernardo Vieira into power in Guinea-Bissau, she returned to Cape Verde and began working as inspector-general of education. She then worked at the Instituto Cabo-verdiano de Solidariedade until her retirement. She also became the first woman elected to the nascent National Assembly of Cape Verde.

From 1974 to 1979 she was the director of the party's Instituto Amizade in Guinea-Bissau, and she was later appointed to the No. 2 spot at the Ministry of Education, serving as director-general of coordination from 1979 until the end of 1980.

Boal later said of Cabral, who was a significant African anti-colonial leader until his assassination in 1973, "Amílcar cared about the issue of gender. He said that women had to fight for their freedom. He chose women for all aspects of the struggle: education, health, information, logistics.

At the invitation of Amílcar Cabral, in 1969 she became the director of the Pilot School of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, which was launched in Conakry in 1965 with the goal of educating young fighters and war orphans.

In June 1961, Boal returned to Africa along with other African students in a "flight to the fight," as they called it, with the goal of fighting for independence for their countries. Their trip was clandestine and took them through Porto, San Sebastián (where they were imprisoned for 48 hours), France, and Germany before they finally arrived in Ghana.

At the University of Coimbra, she met Manuel Boal, an Angolan medical student and later a fellow freedom fighter. The couple married in 1958 and had two daughters, Sara and Baluka, who were raised in part by Lilica Boal's mother during the height of the liberation fight.

Maria da Luz Freire de Andrade (born 1934), better known as Lilica Boal, is a historian, philosopher, educator, and anti-fascist activist in Cape Verde. She fought for the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and against the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship.

Boal was born in 1934 in Tarrafal, Cape Verde, on the island of Santiago. Her parents were fairly well-off merchants: Dona Eulália Andrade, better known as Nha Beba, and José Freire Andrade, better known as Nho Papacho.