African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4
Eduardo Mondlane
The attached text, given for reading as the main document of this fourth
part of the African Revolutionary Writers series, is Chapter 5 from Eduardo
Mondlane’s 1969 book, “The Struggle for Mozambique”. The chapter is called
“Resistance – the search for a national movement”. It is the part of the book
where Mondlane relates the foundation of the united liberation movement,
FRELIMO.
The creation of FRELIMO – the
movement that in 1975 achieved victory over the Portuguese colonialists in
Mozambique – owed a lot to Mondlane’s work. Yet a large proportion of this
remarkable chapter is devoted, not to political manoeuvres and negotiations,
but to the cultural and intellectual origins of Mozambican national
consciousness, some of them quite small. It is evidence of the high degree of
importance that this great revolutionary, Eduardo Mondlane, placed upon all
kinds of intellectual artefacts, and not just literature.
The place of intellectual
output in revolutionary processes is part of “the point” of this African
Revolutionary Writers series. It is notable that in this part, which includes
three great Lusophone revolutionaries, Mondlane, Cabral and Neto, and one, Ruth
First, who devoted the last years of her life to Mozambique (where she was
assassinated by a South African apartheid-regime letter-bomb) they all give us
strong cause to think how “to unite
political militancy and intellectual work” and make intellectual work “an instrument of the revolution”. These
quoted words are from a note by Aquino de Bragança, Director of the Centre of
African Studies where Ruth First was working when she was killed by the South
African bomb.
Mondlane, too was
assassinated, as was Amilcar Cabral. Mondlane’s successor Samora Machel was
also killed, in the contrived downing of the aircraft he was in. Aquino de
Bragança also died in that crash.
Mondlane relates that in
Mueda, Mozambique, on 16 June 1960, over 500 people were shot down by the
Portuguese. This was in the same year as the infamous Sharpeville massacre in
neighbouring South Africa. The Mueda massacre, he writes, propelled increased
numbers of Mozambicans into the armed struggle.
Yet this event is hardly spoken of or written about in the English
language.
The rediscovery of the texts
used in this series was difficult, and took many months. No suitable text has
yet been found to represent the thinking of Samora Machel in this series. Such texts of Samora Machel do exist – the
references in books such as Barry Munslow’s “Mozambique: the Revolution and its
Origins” are good evidence of their existence – but they are in Portuguese.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Eduardo Mondlane,
The Struggle for Mozambique, 1969.
