Work of leadership

Let us look at another principle of our party which is the following: our struggle is based fundamentally on the work of our party, the PAIGC.

You know what struggle is. You have understood already that struggle is a normal condition of all realities in motion. In everything that moves, that exists, if you like (for everything that exists is in motion), there is always a struggle. There are contrary forces which act on each other. For every force operating in one direction there is another force operating in the opposite direction.

Take a tree, for example. It is an enormous struggle for a tree to grow, live, bear fruit, seed or another tree. First for its root to pierce the soil and find sustenance in the ground. There is an enormous struggle between the root and the resistance of the ground. Moreover a certain capacity is needed, a certain strength to extract from the dampened soil the sustenance which enters the plant's root. When the sustenance has been extracted it must be carried to other parts of the plant. There is always a resistance against a resistance. In addition there is resistance to rain and to storms. And the plant has one great disadvantage: the plant cannot move from its position.

Plants, like animals (and even a piece of wood or iron) contain a struggle within, and there may be thousands of such struggles. But the fundamental struggle is between the capacity for preservation and the destruction which time brings to things. Iron rusts, wood crumbles to dust, the passage of time is written on things, from man to the most trifling thing. All this is expressed in struggle. But the struggle is more visible, evident, when an object exerts a force on another object, when it takes place between two distinct objects.

Our struggle is the consequence of the pressure (or oppression) which the Portuguese colonialists exert on our society. Anyone who acquires a certain awareness, or who was witness to some event, or who has some interest in regard to Portuguese colonialism, faces the following choice: to wage his own struggle or not to wage any struggle. Many folk were struggling in our land, in Guinea and in Cape Verde, and sometimes wrote poems or some other thing as a call to struggle.