African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 4a
Amilcar Cabral
The text for this week (download linked below)
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 in the interval between the last time the course
was given, and now.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Amilcar
Cabral, National Liberation and Culture, 1970.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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