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Africa Information Service Staff

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781583678046
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Amilcar Cabral, who was the Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), was assassinated by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973. Under his leadership, the PAIGC liberated three-quarters of the countryside of Guinea in less than ten years of revolutionary struggle. Cabral distinguished himself among modern revolutionaries by the long and careful preparation, both theoretical and practical, which he undertook before launching the revolutionary struggle, and, in the course of the preparation, became one of the world's outstanding theoreticians of anti-imperialist struggle. This volume contains some of the principal speeches Cabral delivered in his last years during visits to the United States. The first is his speech to the fourth Commission of the United Nations General Assembly on October 16, 1972, on "Questions of Territories Under Portuguese Administration." His brilliant speeches on "National Liberation and Culture" (1970) and "Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle" (1972) follow.

Second Address Before The United Nations

This speech was given during Amilcar Cabral’s last visit to the United States. Presented before the Twenty-Seventh Session of the Fourth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, October 16, 1972, its contents were identified: “Questions of Territories under Portuguese Administration.”

For the second time, I have the honor to address the Fourth Committee on behalf of the African people of Guine and the Cape Verde Islands, whose sole, legitimate, and true representative is the PAIGC. I do so with gratification, being fully aware that the members of the Committee are our comrades in the difficult but inspiring struggle for the liberation of peoples and mankind and against oppression of all kinds in the interest of a better life in a world of peace, security and progress.

While not forgetting the often remarkable role that Utopia could play in furthering human progress, the PAIGC is very realistic. We know that among members of the Fourth Committee, there are some who, perhaps in spite of themselves, are duty bound to adopt an obstructionist, if not negative attitude when dealing with problems relating to the struggle for national liberation in Guine and Cape Verde. I venture to say “in spite of themselves” because, leaving aside compelling reasons of State policy, it is difficult to believe that responsible men exist who fundamentally oppose the legitimate aspirations of the African people to live in dignity, freedom, national independence and progress, because in the modern world, to support those who are suffering and fighting for their liberation, it is not necessary to be courageous; it is enough to be honest.

I addressed the Fourth Committee for the first time on 12 December 1962. Ten years is a long and even decisive period in the life of a human being, but a short interval in the history of a people. During that decade sweeping, radical and irreversible changes have occurred in the life of the people of Guine and Cape Verde. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to refresh the memory of the members of the Committee in order to compare the situation of those days with the present, because most, if not all, of the representatives in the Committee are not the same. I will therefore briefly recapitulate the events up to the present.

On 3 August 1959, at a crucial juncture in the history of the struggle, the Portuguese colonialists committed the massacre of Pidgiguiti, in which the dock workers of Bissau and the river transport strikers were the victims and which, at a cost of 50 killed and over 100 strikers wounded, was a painful lesson for our people, who learned that there was no question of choosing between a peaceful struggle and armed combat; the Portuguese had weapons and were prepared to kill. At a secret meeting of the PAIGC leaders, held at Bissau on 19 September 1959, the decision was taken to suspend all peaceful representations to the authorities in the villages and to prepare for the armed struggle. For that purpose it was necessary to have a solid political base in the countryside. After three years of active and intensive mobilization and organization of the rural populations, PAIGC managed to create that basis in spite of the increasing vigilance of the colonial authorities.

Feeling the winds of change, the Portuguese colonialists launched an extensive campaign of police and military repression against the nationalist forces. In June, 1962, over 2,000 patriots were arrested throughout the country. Several villages were set on fire and their inhabitants massacred. Dozens of Africans were burnt alive or drowned in the rivers and others tortured. The policy of repression stiffened the people’s determination to continue the fight. Some skirmishes broke out between the patriots and the forces of colonialist repression.

Faced with that situation, the patriots considered that only an appropriate and effective intervention by the United Nations in support of the inalienable rights of the people of Guine and the Cape Verde Islands could induce the Portuguese Government to respect international morality and legality. In light of subsequent events, we might well be considered to have been naive. We believed it to be our duty and right to have recourse to the international Organization. In the circumstances we considered it absolutely necessary to appeal to the Fourth Committee. Our message was the appeal of a people confronted with a particularly difficult situation but resolved to pay the price required to regain our dignity and freedom, as also proof of our trust in the strength of the principles and in the capacity for action of the United Nations.

What was the Fourth Committee told at that time? First of all, PAIGC clearly described the reasons for and purposes of its presence in the United Nations and explained that it had come as the representative of the African people of “Portuguese” Guine and the Cape Verde Islands. The people had placed their entire trust in PAIGC, an organization which had mobilized and organized them for the struggle for national liberation. The people had been gagged by the total lack of fundamental freedoms and by the Portuguese colonial repression. They considered those who had defended their interest in every possible way throughout the preceding 15 years of Africa’s history to be their lawful representatives.

PAIGC had come to the Fourth Committee not to make propaganda or to extract resolutions condemning Portuguese colonialism, but to work with the Committee in order to arrive at a constructive solution of a problem which was both that of the people of Guine and Cape Verde and that of the United Nations itself: the immediate liberation of that people from the colonial yoke.

Nor had it come to inveigh against Portuguese colonialism, as had already been done many times—just as attacks had already been made and condemnations uttered against Portuguese colonialism, whose characteristics, subterfuges, methods and activities were already more than well known to the United Nations and world opinion.

PAIGC had come to the Fourth Committee because of the situation actually prevailing in our country and with the backing of international law, in order to seek, together with the members of the Committee, including the Portuguese delegation, the shortest and most effective way of rapidly eliminating Portuguese colonialism from Guine and the Cape Verde Islands.

The time had come for our people and party to dispense with indecision and promises and to adopt definitive decisions and take specific action. We had already agreed to make great sacrifices and were determined to do much more to recover our liberty and human dignity, whatever the path to be followed.

It was not by chance that our presence in the Committee had not been considered indispensable until then. The legal, human and material requisites for action had not existed. In the course of the preceding years those requisites had been gradually accumulating, both for the United Nations and for the people engaged in the struggle, and PAIGC was convinced that the time had come to act and that the United Nations and the people of Guine and Cape Verde could really do so. PAIGC thought that, in order to act, it was necessary to establish close and effective co-operation and that it had the right and duty to help the United Nations so that it, in its turn, could help it to win back national freedom and independence. The help which PAIGC could provide had been mainly specific information on the situation in our country, a clear definition of the position adopted and the submission of specific proposals for a solution.

After describing the situation prevailing in the country, especially with regard to the intensified police and military repression, the fiction of the so-called “reforms” introduced by the Portuguese Government in September 1961 and the future prospects for our struggle, PAIGC analysed the problems relating to the legality or illegality of the struggle.

I will pass over some parts of that statement and confine myself to recalling that it was said that the resolution on decolonization not only imposed on Portugal and the people of Guine and Cape Verde the obligation to end colonial domination in that country but also committed the United Nations itself to take action in order to end colonial domination wherever it existed, with a view to facilitating the national independence of all colonial peoples. The people of Guine and Cape Verde were convinced that the Portuguese Government could not continue obstinately and with impunity to commit an international crime and that the United Nations had all the necessary means at its disposal for ordering and applying practical and effective measures designed to ensure respect for the principles of the Charter, impose international legality in our country and defend the interests of peace and civilization.

The representatives of the people of Guine and the Cape Verde Islands did not come to ask the United Nations to send troops to free our country from the Portuguese colonial yoke, because, even though it might have been able to do so, we did not think it necessary as we were sure of our ability to liberate our own country. We invoked the right to the collaboration and practical assistance of the United Nations with a view to expediting the liberation of our country from the colonial yoke and thus reducing the human and material losses which a protracted struggle might entail.

PAIGC was aware not only of the legality of our struggle but also of the fact that, fighting as we had been by all the means at our disposal for the liberation of our country, we had also been defending international legality, peace and the progress of mankind.

The struggle had ceased to be strictly national and had become international. In Guine and Cape Verde the fight for progress and freedom from poverty, suffering and oppression had been waged in various forms. While it was true that the victims of the fight had been the sons of the people of Guine and Cape Verde, it was also true that each comrade who had succumbed to torture or had fallen under the bullets of the Portuguese colonialists was identified—through the hope and conviction which the people of our country cherished in their hearts and minds—with all peace-loving and freedom-loving men who wished to live a life of progress in the pursuit of happiness.

In our country the fight had been waged not only to fulfill aspirations for freedom and national independence but also—and it would be continued until victory was won—to ensure respect for the resolutions and Charter of the United Nations. In the prisons, towns and fields of our country, a battle had been fought between the United Nations, which had demanded the elimination of the system of colonial domination of peoples, and the armed forces of the Portuguese Government which had sought to perpetuate the system in defiance of the people’s legitimate rights.

The question had risen as to who was actually engaged in the fight. When a fighter had succumbed in our country to police torture, or had been murdered in prison, or burnt alive or machine-gunned by the Portuguese troops, for what cause had he given his life?

He had given his life for the liberation of our people from the colonial yoke and hence for the cause of the United Nations. In fighting and dying for the country’s liberation, he had given his life, in a context of international legality, for the ideals set forth in the Charter and resolutions of the United Nations, especially for the resolution on decolonization.

For our people, the only difference between an Indian soldier, an Italian pilot or a Swedish official who had died in the Congo and the combatant who had died in Guine or the Cape Verde Islands was that the latter, fighting in his own country in the service of the same ideal, was no more than an anonymous combatant for the United Nations cause.

PAIGC believed that the time had come to take stock of the situation and make radical changes in it, since it benefited only the enemies of the United Nations and, more specifically, Portuguese colonialism.

We Africans, having rejected the idea of begging for freedom, which was contrary to our dignity and our sacred right to freedom and independence, reaffirmed our steadfast decision to end colonial domination of our country, no matter what the sacrifices involved, and to conquer for ourselves the opportunity to achieve in peace our own progress and happiness.

With that aim in view and on the basis of that irrevocable decision, PAIGC had defined three possible ways in which the conflict between the Government of Portugal and the African people might evolve and be resolved. Those three possibilities were the following: (a) a radical change in the position of the Portuguese Government; (b) immediate specific action by the United Nations; and (c) a struggle waged exclusively by the people with their own means.

As proof of its confidence in the Organization, and in view of the influence which some of the latter’s Members could certainly exert on the Portuguese Government, PAIGC had taken into consideration only the first two possibilities and in that connection had submitted the following specific proposals:

(a) With regard to the first possibility:

The immediate establishment of contact between the Portuguese delegation and the PAIGC delegation;

Consultations with the Portuguese Government to set an early date for the beginning of negotiations between that Government’s representatives and the lawful representatives of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands;

Pending negotiations, suspension of repressive acts by the Portuguese colonial forces and of all action by the nationalists.

(b) With regard to the second possibility:

Acceptance of the principle that United Nations assistance would not be really effective unless it was simultaneously moral, political and material;

Immediate establishment within the United Nations of a special committee for the self-determination and national independence of the Territories under Portuguese administration;

Immediate commencement of that committee’s work before the close of the General Assembly session.

PAIGC also stated that it was ready to co-operate fully with that committee and proposed that the latter should be entrusted with the task of giving concrete assistance to our people so that we could free ourselves speedily from the colonial yoke. Since those proposals were not favorably received by the Portuguese Government or the United Nations, the patriotic forces of our country launched a general struggle against the colonialist forces in January 1963 in order to respond, by an armed struggle for liberation, to the colonial genocidal war unleased against the people by the Government of Portugal.

Almost 10 years later, PAGIC is again appearing before the Fourth Committee. The situation is completely different, however, both within the country and at the international level. The Fourth Committee and the United Nations are now better informed than ever before about the situation. In addition to the current information (reports, information bulletins, war communiques and other documents which PAIGC has sent to the United Nations), PAIGC has, in those 10 years appeared before the Decolonization Committee to describe the progress of the struggle and prospects for its future evolution. Dozens of film-makers, journalists, politicians, scientists, writers, artists, photographers, and so on of various nationalities have visited the country on their own initiative and at the invitaton of PAIGC and have provided unanimous and irrefutable testimony regarding the situation. Others—very few in number—have done the same on the colonialist side at the invitation of the Portuguese authorities and, with few exceptions, their testimony has not completely satisfied those authorities. For example, there was the case of the team from the French radio and television organization which visited all the “overseas provinces,” and whose film was rejected by the Lisbon Government because of the part relating to Guine and Cape Verde. That film was shown to the Security Council in Addis Ababa. Another case was that of the group of representatives of the people of the United States, headed by Representative Charles Diggs, whose report on their visit to the country merits careful study by the Committee and anyone else wishing to obtain reliable in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Map of Guinea (Bissau)
• Map of Cape Verde Islands
• Second Address Before the United Nations, Fourth Committee, 1972
• National Liberation and Culture
• Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle
• Connecting the Struggles: an informal talk with Black Americans
• New Year’s Message
• Further Readings