triotism? Why was alcoholism made
widespread and prostitution and the
disintegration of the family encouraged,
and why were whole families removed
from their home regions and forced to
abandon their ancestral lands, their
cattle, houses and few possessions?
Why did all this happen in many places in our country, as the unmistakable
mark of the Portuguese colonialists?
Could this have been a sadistic manifestation of the evil genius of a people,
the result of the bestial wickedness of
a man or group of men?
Let us not deceive ourselves about
this. Portuguese colonialism was the
form that imperialist domination assumed in our country, the exploitation
of a whole people and their resources
by foreign capitalism, both Portuguese
and from other countries. It was in
order to exploit our labour power that
thousands of Mozambicans were enslaved and taken to the coasts of the Americas, where the few who arrived were
sold as commodities. It was in order
to exploit our sweat that the colonial
administrators seized us and sent us
into forced labour.
It was in order to appropriate the wealth
of our soil that entire regions were set
aside for certain crops, such as cotton,
which the people were forced to grow,
dying of hunger while the big concessio-
narv companies accumulated fabulous
profits.
It was in order to plunder our sub-soil
that the big multinationals were granted
concessions and mining facilities which
they used to drain our country of its
wealth.
It was in order to keep our people
subjected to its domination that colonialism tried — in some cases, particularly in the urban areas, with some
success — to destroy our personality,
sow division and create a slave mentality towards the foreigner. Assimilation was not merely the fascist caprice
of a senile dictator, but was in fact
mental enslavement to the foreigner in
its purest form, a deliberate process of
negating all the culture, history and
traditions of our people. A man thus
spiritually destroyed became a living
corpse, a docile receptacle for the colonisers' way of thinking, acting and
living.
Religion, and especially the Catholic
church, was a powerful factor in the
cultural and human alienation of the
Mozambican, to make him a docile instrument and object of exploitation, and
smash any display of resistance in the
name of Christian resignation.
This is the heritage we are reaping
today. A heritage of poverty and social and economic backwardness which
the superficial beauty of the skyscrapers
and grassy hills can never hide. One
need only travel the length and breadth
of our country, one need only know
that the expression «from the Rovuma
to the Maputo» is not a mere slogan
for us, but a reality we feel in our
flesh and blood, to understand that the
age-old backwardness, disease, nakedness, hunger and ignorance are the
bountiful fruit of the very tree that
sprouted, grew and thrived together
with colonialism, and which is known
as exploitation.
It is an evil and noxious tree which we
have not as yet uprooted; it is a leech
which is still sucking our blood, weakening our resistance, ability and intelligence. It is a python which is today dressing itself in the skin of the
very same victim that it would have
swallowed yesterday.
We are not going to trace here the
history of the national liberation process through the events which took
place in it. But a recapitulation of the
political process involved, albeit brief,
is needed in order to understand the
birth today of the People's Republic
of Mozambique and the line that guides it. In Mozambican history, the
fight for a revolutionary political line
has been intrinsically bound up with
the fight for unity.
The struggle to defend and consolidate
unity, the driving force of the liberation struggle, demanded permanent vigilance and action to neutralise and
eliminate the manoeuvres of the enemy
and of national opportunist and reactionary forces. This same struggle required a constant fight to clarify and
develop FRELIMO's political line, especially as regards the definition of
who is the enemy and the nature, methods and objectives of the fight.
The successive dividing lines that were
drawn within FRELIMO and the process of cleansing our ranks which was
established, revealed in practice that
the contradictions which arose reflected
antagonistic interests, the contradiction
between the working masses and a
handful of new exploiters who wanted
to take the place of the colonial bourgeoisie as an exploiting class.
By defining racism, regionalism and
tribalism as enemies to be fought
against, just like colonialism, the Central Committee meeting held in October 1966 deprived the opportunists of
the   chief   instruments   of   their   anti-
-people manoeuvres. The same meeting
put an end to the contradiction between political militants and military
militants by defining the struggle as a
politico-military one, thus enabling the
most vanguard elements to free themselves from the control of marginal
reactionary elements. The historic decision to entrust the People's Forces
for the Liberation of Mozambique with
creating the Women's Detachment,
women's instrument in their historic
struggle for emancipation, broadened
the base of mass support for our
struggle and brought new decisive forces into the revolutionary fight.
These ideological victories permitted
the impetuous advance of the liberation
struggle, the destruction of substantial
enemy forces, the expansion of the
armed struggle to Tete Province, the
transformation of the semi-liberated
areas into areas free from the system
of exploitation and the beginning of
the process of creating operational
bases.
Our politico-military victories having
made Portuguese colonialism more desperate and increased the isolation of
the strata among us with exploitative
designs, the contradictions between the
masses and the exploitative system became more marked.
In a desperate attempt to stave off their
inevitable defeat, the colonialist and
reactionary forces joined forces and
launched an offensive of manoeuvres
and crimes against the correct political
line headed by Comrade Eduardo
Mondlane.
The Second Congress of FRELIMO,
which was held in the liberated areas
of Niassa Province in June 1968, exposed and neutralised the reactionary
forces and their ideas, enabling the
broad masses to consolidate their unity
behind FRELIMO's just and clear
objectives.
This fresh victory unleashed a wave of
reactionary violence in which new national exploiters, now openly allied with
the colonial-imperialist forces, started
a process of physical liquidation of revolutionary militants and leaders, a
process which culminated in the barbarous assassination of Comrade Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane on 3 February
1969.
The assassination of the leader who
embodied the national and revolutionary dimension of our struggle and the
actual implementation of FRELIMO's
line and practice, was aimed at decapitating  the   Mozambican   Revolution
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