gion holds an important place in keeping
the masses subjugated, science plays a
fundamental role in «improving)) the
methods used to exploit and alienate the
masses, while culture becomes yet another gadget, something to entertain the
exploiting strata and to fill their leisure
time. It is even an anti-culture, a means
for dehumanising man. For example,
colonialism, which once brought us missionary puritanism, is now giving us
commercialised sex. This anti-culture is
definitely intended to create a subjugated
society in which selfishness and corruption take their most extreme forms, the
better to maintain capitalist and foreign
exploitation.
Indeed, in our country, once the problem
and the necessity of revolution i.e. of
destroying one structure in order to establish another, had been raised, it went
without saying that the need for a new
culture would arise. The struggle between cultures is a part of the very logic
of revolution.
It is a question of destroying dialectically,
that is, of negating the old colonial and
traditional societies by transcending them.
It goes without saying that while transcending them all the positive values of
the past, that culture forged almost
clandestinely in the popular struggle in
our country and throughout the world,
are adopted, reintegrated into the new
context.
NATIONAL VALUES
Today we are building a new culture, a
national culture which is negating and
transcending both the tribal micro-cultures and the colonial anti-culture, a culture which is assuming the geographical
and historical dimensions of the whole
people, a culture which is making the
masses in a given region assume the values
of another region as their own. The
Gaza dances are known and danced in
Cabo Delgado, the people in Niassa are
getting to know and further developing
the musical rhythms from Manica t Sofala
and Tete, Makonde carving is ceasing
to be exotic and foreign and becoming
national. Monomotapa's historic resistance has been assumed by all and the
1960 peasant revolt in Mueda has become
the resistance of the Mozambican peasantry.
It is a culture in which the demarcation
line between the old and the new has
been clearly drawn, that is to say, a culture which is fighting to introduce new
values and rejecting those of colonial
capitalism and feudal tradition.
In this way our culture is creating a sense
of responsibility and of collective participation, enhancing the value of manual
labour, releasing the creative energy of
the masses and putting an end to the
oppression   of women  and  the youth.
In this respect, we say that the spark of
artistic creativity arises out of the coming
together of intelligence and sensitivity
with the hand and the soil. This is why
our new culture, because it assumes the
revolutionary values of the people, is universal at the same time as being national,
because it is a part of the struggle of all
of mankind for social and cultural liberation.
It is within this context that the role of
the artist must be seen. At the 2nd Conference of our Department of Education
and Culture, our President Comrade Samora Machel, issued the following watchword to all the education and culture
workers:
EDUCATE MAN TO WIN THE WAR,
CREATE A NEW SOCIETY AND DEVELOP THE COUNTRY.
As artists our place is not in libraries
and museums. Our role is not to be in the
middle of the public square on monuments; we should be there only when the
people have created freedom there. Like
the hero, the artist must give concrete
form to the values of the people, the
sensitivity of the people in their struggle.
We are not working for a gadget culture,
a luxury culture; our art, our culture,
emerges from our involvement in day-today life. Our art grows with the maize we
are cultivating in the co-operatives, with
the adults and children to whom we are
teaching literacy, with the enemy bases
we are destroying. Because our art is
revolutionary, it both dies and is born in
praxis. Our theatre, our music, our songs
our sculpture, our painting, our literature,
are all forged with the active participation
of the masses, without the distortion
created by the contradiction between the
public as object and the creator as subject.
THE ROLE OF THE PARTY
This possibility of solving the contradiction between an object public and a
creative public starts with the artist joining the political formation which is leading the people to transform society, or at
least with the artist seeing his activity as
a task and this task being bound up with
the revolutionary process of transformation.     This  does  not  mean that the
Party directs the artist administratively.
Quite the contrary, the Party provides
the basic ideological definition without
which the artist would isolate himself in
aesthetics, removed from the peoples'
problems and their concrete struggle.
The authenticity of the artist is then to be
found in the coherence between his creative work and his life, his integration with
the masses.
In this context, the form of expression,
because it goes with an authentic content, takes on its true significance as a
means of communicating sensitivity. The
form becomes a kind of soft and fresh
skin covering a harmonious body. All
attempts at aestheticism only result in
rendering this skin a flabby, empty and
repulsive object.
Language is a special problem, because
culture requires a linguistic basis for expression.
There is no majority language in our
country. Choosing one of the languages
as a national language would, at present
be an arbitrary choice which could have
serious consequences. Moreover, the
technical facilities and personnel now
available to us do not as yet allow us to
carry out the kind of research work required to make the languages operational
particularly in the field of science.
We have therefore been forced to use
Portuguese as our teaching language and
for communicating among ourselves, sometimes using interpreters, like at meetings,
for example.
In fact, in the dialectical process of the
revolution, the Portuguese language, an
instrument of alienation, has become an
instrument of liberation, the knife that
colonialism had wanted to drive into our
chests having been turned against it to
destroy it. At the same time, having been
liberated from colonialism, the tribal languages are flourishing anew.
This rich experience we are living through
is the result of the advance of the people's
liberation war, without which the material conditions for this cultural revolution
could never have existed. The correctness of FRELIMO's political line, which
has released our creative energy, has defined our objectives and made our success
possible.
We can therefore conclude with a saying
by one of our poets, that in our country
flowers  are  growing  from  the bullets.