African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4a
Amilcar Cabral
The text for this week (attached) is Amilcar Cabral’s speech on
National Liberation and Culture.
This speech was originally delivered on February 20, 1970, as part of the
Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture Series at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New
York. That is more than forty years ago, yet the speech is as fresh and as relevant
as if it had been written yesterday, and based on appraisal of our present
circumstances.
Foreign domination
“can be
maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of
the people concerned,” wrote Cabral.
Attempted assimilation is “a more or less
violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question.” It does not
work. In fact there are no ways in which the coloniser can succeed.
“…it is
generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads
to the structuring and development of the liberation movement,” says Cabral.
“…national
liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are
completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of
productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of
production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people
necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society
in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress,” says Cabral.
Cabral develops the idea that “…we must take into account the fact that, faced with the prospect of political
independence, the ambition and opportunism from which the liberation movement
generally suffers may bring into the struggle unconverted individuals. The
latter, on the basis of their level of schooling, their scientific or technical
knowledge, but without losing any of their social class biases, may attain the
highest positions in the liberation movement,” he warns.
Cabral concludes
“…the
liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and
survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and
development of these values within a national framework.”
In Portuguese: A luta continua!
Cabral’s “The Weapon of Theory” was used in
the introductory part of this course.
The importance that this
outstanding revolutionary Amilcar Cabral placed on cultural and intellectual
output is plain to see. The Mozambican scholar Aquino de Bragança, colleague of another intellectual (and like
Cabral, martyr) Ruth First, called intellectual work “an instrument of the
revolution”. It is the ground upon which the revolution stands.
Aquino de Bragança was
himself killed in the 19 October 1986 air crash in which President Samora
Machel also died, thirteen years after the murder of Amilcar Cabral.
We are not yet safe enough to
think that the killing of political intellectuals and political cadres is a
thing of the past, or that attempts at “organized
repression of the cultural life of the people” have ceased.
At least 13 of our
revolutionary writers were violently killed. One of them was killed since the
course was first given, and now. The revolution must strive to make the
murdered heroes live again through their writings.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Amilcar
Cabral, National Liberation and Culture, 1970.
