Weapon of Theory – The Full Course

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1

Weapon of Theory – Full Course

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We will meet at 17h00 on 9 September 2010. The venue will be confirmed by e-mail on Tuesday.

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Comrades of the Communist University,

In the previous post you were asked for assistance in compiling a list of African revolutionary writers, from which to construct a CU course.

I received suggestions from as far away as Argentina; New Jersey, USA; and East London, South Africa. Please, continue to send suggestions, and if possible, texts, be they articles, speeches, links to pages on the Internet, or text files.

We have to begin this course next week Thursday. Therefore to have something to discuss, please accept today Cabral’s “Weapon of Theory” (download linked at the bottom), which has to be part of this course even though we have circulated it only a few weeks ago, as part of the “Philosophy and Religion” course.

It has to be, because Cabral is the most profound and most sublime of African revolutionary writers. He is one African (but not the only one) who contributed indispensable new lessons to the universal revolutionary legacy.

When there is more time, and at a later stage in this course, we will return to Amilcar Cabral and to the great single-volume compendium of his work called “Unity and Struggle”, recently republished in South Africa (look for it!).

Here is the revised “African Revolutionary Writers” list with some links, dates and titles of possible works that we might use. (Below it is the previously-circulated intro to Cabral’s “Weapon of Theory”.) More suggestions, please!

Name	Dates	Main Candidate Text	Date
Olaudah Equiano	1745 - 1797	Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano	1789
Toussaint L’ouverture	1743 - 1803	Haiti Constitution	1801
Frederick Douglass	1818 - 1895	My Bondage and My Freedom	1855
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje	1876 - 1932	Native Life in South Africa	1916
George Padmore	1903 - 1959	What Must Be Done?	1931
Moses Mauane Kotane	1905 - 1978	Cradock Letter	1934
CLR James	1901 - 1989	Notes on Dialectics	1948
Gamal Abdel Nasser	1918 - 1970	Memoirs of 1st Palestine War	1955
Paul Robeson	1898 - 1976	Here I Stand	1958
WEB Du Bois	1868 - 1963	Africa in Battle Against Colonialism	1960
Albert Luthuli	1898 - 1967	Peace Prize acceptance	1960
Ousmane Sembene	1923 - 2007	God’s Bits of Wood	1960
Patrice Lumumba	1925 - 1961	Speech in front of Baudouin	1960
Frantz Fanon	1925 - 1961	The Wretched of the Earth	1961
Govan Mvuyelwa Mbeki	1910 - 2001	The Peasants Revolt	1964
Kwame Nkrumah	1909 - 1972	Neo-Colonialism, Last Stage of Imperialism	1965
Oginga Odinga	1911 - 1994	Not Yet Uhuru	1967
Martin Luther King	1929 - 1968	Beyond Vietnam	1967
Ayi Kwei Armah	1939 -	The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born	1968
Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane	1920 - 1969	The Struggle for Mozambique	1969
Oliver Tambo	1917 - 1993	Speeches ex ANC web site	1970
Malcolm X	1925 - 1965	By Any Means Necessary	1970
Alex La Guma	1925 - 1985	In the Fog of the Season’s End	1972
Ngugi wa Thiong’o	1938 -	Homecoming	1972
Henry Winston	1911 - 1986	Strategy for a Black Agenda	1973
Walter Rodney	1942 - 1980	How Europe Undeveloped Africa	1973
Agostinho Neto	1922 - 1979	Sacred Hope	1974
Julius Kambarage Nyerere	1922 - 1999	Freedom and Development	1974
Samora Machel	1933 - 1986	Sowing the Seeds of Revolution	1974
Sékou Touré	1922 - 1984	Strategy and tactics of the revolution	1978
Bantu Stephen Biko	1946 - 1977	I Write What I Like	1978
Amilcar Cabral	1924 - 1973	Unity and Struggle	1980
Cheikh Anta Diop	1923 - 1986	Civilisation or Barbarism	1981
Angela Davis	1944 -	Women, Race and Class	1981
Ruth First	1925 - 1982	Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant	1983
Jabulani “Mzala” Nxumalo	1955 - 1991	Cooking the rice inside the pot	1985
Thomas Sankara	1949 - 1987	Thomas Sankara Speaks	1987
Albert Memmi	1920 -	Coloniser and colonised	1991
Mahmood Mamdani	1947 -	Citizen and Subject	1996
Ahmed Ben Bella	1918 -	Cubans aid Algerian revolution	1998
Issa Shivji	1946 -	The Struggle for Democracy	2003
Samir Amin	1931 -	The American Ideology	2004
Muammar Gadaffi	1942 -	The One-State Solution	2009

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The Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America was held in Havana in January, 1966, 46 years after the Baku Conference of the Peoples of the East and seven years after the Cuban Revolution.

Forty-three more years have now passed since the Tricontinental. A lot has been achieved in that time, including our South African democratic breakthrough, sixteen years ago, and the unbanning of the ANC, twenty years ago.

The full defeat of Imperialism has not yet occurred. What we can say is that from early in the 20^th-Century the historical agenda was set by the liberation movements, and that Imperialism represents the degeneration and the decline of bourgeois class power, and not its heyday.

The great political change in the world in the last century was the taking of sovereign independence by the formerly oppressed people of the former colonies, affecting the great majority of the population of the planet and opening the road of democracy for them.

This gigantic movement and huge change was achieved with the weapon of theory.

43 years ago Amilcar Cabral [see image, above] in the speech to the Tricontinental that has always been known by the title “Weapon of Theory” (please find the link to the download, below) also said the following:

“It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces.

“For this reason, in our opinion, any national liberation movement which does not take into consideration this basis and this objective may certainly struggle against imperialism, but will surely not be struggling for national liberation.

“This means that, bearing in mind the essential characteristics of the present world economy, as well as experiences already gained in the field of anti-imperialist struggle, the principal aspect of national liberation struggle is the struggle against neo-colonialism.”

Amilcar Cabral was a true vanguardist. He was both a great leader, and a great intellectual.

Please download the document via the link given here.

Please download and read:

The Weapon of Theory, 1966, Amilcar Cabral (7710 words)