African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 0
Weapon of Theory
Next week, the SADTU Political Education Forum begins 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 2012.
The course
on African Revolutionary Writers will be followed by three further ten-week courses,
on Basics, on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, and on Hegel’s Philosophy of Dialectics,
Logic and Right.
As a
suitable introduction to the new course, herewith attached is 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-six
more years have passed since the Tricontinental. A lot has been achieved in
that time, including our South African democratic breakthrough, eighteen years
ago, and the unbanning of the ANC, twenty-two 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 2012
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.
- A PDF file of the reading text is attached
- To download the full African Revolutionary Writers course in PDF files, please click
here
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