TRANSCRIPT: AND SIXTY THOUSAND ARMS GO UP IN THE AIR
After ten years, I’m invited to teach at Dar es Salaam University. Julius Nyerere is the President. And the summer vacations are so long in England, I could teach for a whole term in Dar es Salaam and still have a bit of holiday afterwards and get back in time for the September-October term starting in England. And it was very exciting being there with the two little children, Alan and Michael, they learned to swim in Dar es Salaam. Staying in a lovely beach side hotel. And then I’d take a car to the university every day, the worst potholes I’ve known in my life. So, a kind of paradise, potholes, university. University had buildings; it had a library that you could see there was support for… I think they got independence in ’66… so support for three years, books up to ‘69 and then it stopped. Not a book after that. But the most fired up lecturers. The most alert students. Many of them quite critical of Nyerere not being radical enough. But it was a total delight to teach there.
The Soweto Uprising as we called it, had happened while I was in Dar es Salaam. In 1976, school children in Soweto just said enough is enough is enough. And they rebelled against the forced imposition of Afrikaans in their schools, and they were shot down, they were mowed down. And in the end, hundreds were killed, hundreds were killed. It was so dramatic; it was so terrible and so exciting. Our people were rebelling and fighting back. And you felt Tanzania was totally on our side. And the Black Consciousness Movement emerging from that and heavy, heavy debates. And it was very ironical because Mark Shope who was one of the ANC leaders saying, ‘We don’t want black consciousness, we want revolutionary consciousness.’ And Joe Slovo, who’s one of the targets of black consciousness, saying, ‘This is fantastic! This is fantastic! The people are fighting, they’re fighting back. And they’ll come into the revolutionary struggle, and they’ll find out, you start with black consciousness, and you develop an inter-revolutionary consciousness. You don’t suppress… you bring your blackness, if you like, in with you as part of the struggle against white domination.’ And there was a whole new energy kind of emerging from that.
At the end of my 8 weeks teaching, we take the Tazara Railway, built by the Chinese, to Zambia. And now we’re in Lusaka. Lusaka! Lusaka! That was like the headquarters of the ANC in exile. We spent time with Jack and Ray Simons, with their famous paw-paw trees and avocado trees. And it’s a marvellous meeting place and intellectual centre. Very, very vivid in Lusaka life. We go down to Victoria Falls, Livingstone, the planes are circling overhead. There’s death. There’s death. We felt that so strongly that there’s blood in this water. There’s fighting going on in Zimbabwe and you felt that sense of war at that boundary.
And then I decide I want to see Mozambique. We knew nothing about the Portuguese colonies as they were called, nothing. And they become independent. I fly from Lusaka to Maputo, the plane lands and big sign in Portuguese, which I learnt afterwards, ‘You are now entering the liberated zone of humanity.’ It was a different kind of a culture. It wasn’t just independence. It was a liberated zone. And I felt fantastic. Just getting off the plane, it was the light, it was the people. And I saw a soldier, FRELIMO soldier, standing with a gun and I felt great, a gun on our side – a gun that it is now defending freedom not suppressing freedom.
26<sup>th</sup> of September is the day in which the armed struggle was launched in Mozambique. It’s now a public holiday. And we go to the Machava Football Stadium. And it’s packed with people and someone’s saying ‘There’s Samora! There’s Samora!’ And I see a little guy in a uniform, and he’s coming up and there’s excitement in the audience. And he starts off ‘Viva Maputo…’ [speaks Portuguese]. Then I couldn’t follow Portuguese. And 60 000 arms go up into the air and my right arm goes up. I got my courage back in Mozambique, spontaneously. And I felt, the revolution works! And it is the revolution that had given a texture and an energy and a sense of unity. And I’m hearing about the struggle inside FRELIMO between the progressives and the reactionaries. The reactionaries saying women can’t take part in armed combat, their job is to look after the men who do the fighting, that’s African culture and tradition. And Josina Machel and the others saying, ‘we as women want to take part in the highest duties and responsibilities and tasks of the nation. We want to fight, we want to carry guns’. And Samora is supporting the progressive line. What to do with captured Portuguese soldiers? Reactionaries saying, they’re coming to kill us – we kill them. And Samora and the others are saying, ‘No, these are children of peasants. They’re exploited themselves. Let them see who we are. They will become the strongest supporters of freedom in Mozambique when they understand who we are. And even when we’re short of food, we give them food. We don’t kill them; we don’t abuse them.’ And I’m thrilled by all this. It’s the progressive line as they called it.
They’re very dismissive of the ANC. ‘Why do you people take so long?’ South Africa seen as complicated struggle. Enormous respect for Oliver Tambo. Respect at a distance for Nelson Mandela, Robben Island. But Oliver Tambo was the face of South Africa and very close to Samora and very respected, held in enormous regard and he really did our movement and our struggle proud.
But I’m very exalted, very excited. I want to go back to Mozambique. And Stephanie’s coming, she not coming, she’s coming, she’s not coming, she’s coming, she’s not... Eventually she decides not to go to Mozambique with the children. She stays on in London. I go to Mozambique.
Maputo is a fairly old town; it was the old Delagoa Bay. It was the nearest port to Johannesburg. And it flourished during the early period of the gold mines. And then it became a port dependent on sending mineworkers to South Africa, who’d be paid in gold that went straight to the Portuguese government and the workers only got a proportion of the pay; and also, on the trade through Delagoa Bay.
I’d been in Mozambique I think less than a week. And I’m teaching in the law school, I’m learning Portuguese. And they had what was called a Red Sunday. And that was when all the people from all over the world working there to support the revolution would get together with Mozambican workers and do some voluntary work Sunday morning. I’m told it’s going to be cleaning up at the docks.
The city was divided into what they call the Cement City and the Reed City. It was very dramatic. You’d go through the Cement City, where the colonists live and some of the better off local people, and suddenly you’re in the Reed City where the houses are made of reeds.
But high up on the hill nearby, big new blocks of flats, modern flats, put up in the ‘60s, at a time when Salazar and the rulers in Portugal decided they would invite capital from South Africa so that South African capital will help defend the Portuguese colony. So, there you see these big 12, 13, 14, 15 storey buildings, tall and proud up on the hill. So now I have to wander through these tall buildings, down through the old Maputo, to find the docks. And I can’t speak Portuguese and I’m feeling very elated, very solitary. But finally, I find the docks and I see all the people working there, I’m an hour or two late and they’re almost finishing, and I quickly grab a broom at the end because I want to be part of the Red Sunday! And we’re cleaning up, cleaning up and eventually we all gathered together and a trade unionist, shop steward from the Port Workers Union, addresses us.
We’re standing there, maybe two or three hundred. And he said, ‘What countries have you all come from?’ And then he mentions the different countries. ‘France?’ And then a few hands go up. ‘Viva o’povo de France for giving all the support to us.’ And everybody goes ‘Viva!’ And then he says Italy, and Italy, everybody smiles. ‘Viva’ Brazil, everybody smiles. Canada, serious again. United States, big applause. And I’m thinking, what am I going to do? Should I go with the English, or should I say South Africa but? I’m so tired of saying I’m South African but. And eventually we go through all the different countries. Soviet Union, serious applause. German Democratic Republic, serious applause. Portugal, prolonged applause. The former colonising country. And eventually I say ‘África do Sul!’ ‘Viva o’povo da África do Sul, fighting for their liberty.’ It was fantastic. I felt so ashamed that I’d even been unsure. ‘Long live the just struggles of the oppressed people! Down with the oppression of women! Long live internationalism!’
It was a very thrilling time. That sense of uniting the country, coming together. The viva’s would be very strong. The down withs… down with racism, down with tribalism, down with regionalism. I never had this in England. It was a different country in that sense. And it was the revolution, and we were from all over the world. And we went back partly by train and people were singing in the train and there was this sense of joy and enthusiasm and solidarity that was just enormous. And I said – the revolution works. It’s brought freedom to the people of Mozambique. It’s uniting everybody over progressive policies and all the doubts we had about is revolution right or not and so and so. It’s working, it’s solving the problems of Southern Africa. And I wrote to people at the time commenting on this, all my kind of enthusiasm.
