African Revolutionary
Writers, Part 0
Introduction: Weapon
of Theory
Next week, the YCLSA
Political Education Forum begins receiving a ten-part course on African
Revolutionary Writers. This will be the first of four ten-week courses to
be run through this e-mail channel in 2015.
As usual, the CU gives you
original texts, attached to a short introduction or “opening to discussion”.
You are welcome to reply to the CU postings, continuing the discussion, or
adding your own new comments on the text.
As a suitable introduction to
the new course, herewith attached
please find Amilcar Cabral’s “Weapon of Theory”.
Cabral is the most profound
and the most sublime of African Revolutionary writers. He is one of those
Africans who contributed indispensable new lessons to the universal
revolutionary legacy. “The Weapon of Theory” is relevant to our course as a
whole, and to all our courses, for that matter. At a later stage in this course
we will return to Amilcar Cabral and to the great single-volume compendium of
his work called “Unity and Struggle”, recently republished in English in South
Africa.
The Weapon of Theory
The Tricontinental
Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America was held in
Havana in January, 1966, 46 years after the Baku Conference of the Peoples of the
East and seven years after the Cuban Revolution.
Forty-nine more years have
passed since the Tricontinental. A lot has been achieved in that time,
including our South African democratic breakthrough, almost twenty-one years
ago, and the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP, twenty-five years ago.
The full defeat of
Imperialism has not yet occurred. What we can say is that from early in the 20th
Century the historical agenda was set by the liberation movements, and that
Imperialism represents the degeneration and the decline of bourgeois class
power, and not its heyday.
The great political change in
the world in the last century was the taking of sovereign independence by the
formerly oppressed peoples of the former colonies, affecting the great majority
of the population of the planet, and opening the road of democracy for them.
This gigantic movement and
huge change was achieved with the weapon
of theory.
In 2015, with direct
Imperialist armed aggression still taking place on the continent of Africa it
is, however, clear that the struggle continues.
In this connection we can
note that Amilcar Cabral, in the
speech to the Tricontinental that has always been known by the title “The Weapon of Theory”, said the
following:
“It is often
said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely
control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national
independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of
expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis
of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of
international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own
history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right
usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of
the national productive forces.
“For this
reason, in our opinion, any national liberation movement which does not take
into consideration this basis and this objective may certainly struggle against
imperialism, but will surely not be struggling for national liberation.
“This means
that, bearing in mind the essential characteristics of the present world
economy, as well as experiences already gained in the field of anti-imperialist
struggle, the principal aspect of national liberation struggle is the struggle
against neo-colonialism.”
Amilcar Cabral was a true
vanguardist. He was both a great leader, and a great intellectual.
The struggle against
neo-colonialism continues.
·
The Weapon of Theory (PDF download)
·
A PDF file of the reading text is attached
·
To download the full African Revolutionary Writers
course in PDF files, please click here
