It is a great honour to take part in this ceremony held in homage to our companion in struggle and worthy son of Africa, the late lamented Dr Eduardo Mondlane, former President of FRELIMO, who in a cowardly way was assassinated on 3 February 1969, in Dar-es-Salaam by the Portuguese colonialists and their allies.

We should like to thank Syracuse University and particularly the Programme of Eastern African Studies, directed by the scholar and teacher Marshall Segall, for this initiative. It is evidence not only of the respect and admiration you feel for the unforgettable personality of Dr Eduardo Mondlane, but also of your solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Mozambican people and of all the peoples of Africa for national liberation and progress.

In accepting your invitation – which we regard as addressed to our people and our combatants – we wanted once more to demonstrate our militant friendship and our solidarity with the people of Mozambique and their beloved leader, Dr Eduardo Mondlane to whom we were linked by fraternal ties in the common struggle against the most retrograde of all colonialisms, Portuguese colonialism. Our friendship and solidarity are most sincere, even though we did not always agree with our comrade Eduardo Mondlane, whose death was moreover a loss for our people too.

Other speakers have already had the chance to draw a portrait and to give a welldeserved eulogy of Dr Eduardo Mondlane. We should merely like to reaffirm our admiration for the figure of the African patriot and eminent man of culture that he was. Similarly we should like to say that Eduardo Mondlane's great merit was not his decision to struggle for his people's liberation. His greater merit was being able to integrate himself in his country's reality, to identify with his people and to acculturate himself by the struggle he led with courage, wisdom and determination.