Amílcar Cabral

“We are moving from the position of a colony that has a Liberation Movement and that the people have already liberated, in ten years of armed struggle, the greater part of its national territory, to the position of a country that runs its own State and that has a part of its national territory occupied by foreign armed forces.”

“I think that the left and the international working-class movement should confront those states that claim to be socialist with their responsibilities; this does not, of course, mean cutting off all their possibilities of action, but it does mean denouncing all those states that are neocolonialist.”

“We also believe that our struggle helps to influence the attitudes of people in other dominated African countries, especially in Southern Africa, although, of course, we are also aware that whatever other peoples can do by way of destroying colonialism or racism in their countries helps our struggle enormously. We could talk about this for hours; that’s the briefest answer I can give you.”

“We are not fighting against the Portuguese people, against individual Portuguese or Portuguese families. Without ever confusing the people of Portugal and Portuguese colonialism, we have been forced to take up arms in order to extirpate from the soil of our African fatherland, the shameful Portuguese colonial domination.”

“All post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo colonial domination, and independence has not solved this problem. The development of new elites within independent societies, often buttressed by neo colonial institutions; the development of internal divisions based on racial, linguistic or religious discriminations; the continued unequal treatment of indigenous peoples in settler/invader societies—all these testify to the fact that post-colonialism is a continuing process of resistance and reconstruction.9”