African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 4
Eduardo
Mondlane
The linked, downloadable text, 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, 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.
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 has been
difficult, and it has taken 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.
Please download and read this text:
Eduardo Mondlane, The
Struggle for Mozambique, 1969 (6938
words)
Further reading:
Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of
Theory, 1966
(7710 words)
Ruth First, Workers or
Peasants? 1983 (4922 words)
Ruth First, Libya
- the Elusive Revolution, 1974 (5141 words)
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