:11:01
The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau.
:11:03
In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves
a gesture of good-bye to the shore;
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he's right, he'll never see it again.
:11:10
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later
on the canoe that was bringing us back.
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Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president.
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All those who remember the war remember him.
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the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was
of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,
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and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
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which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle
wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
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I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who had fought in conditions so inhuman
:11:45
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.
:11:49
That I heard.
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And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly
:11:54
even if inadvertentlythe word guerrilla
to describe a certain breed of film-making.
:11:59
A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates
and also to bloody defeats on the ground.
:12:04
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
:12:07
and not only in terms of military conquests.
:12:10
He knew his people,
he had studied them for a long time,
:12:12
and he wanted every liberated region
to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.
:12:15
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.
:12:18
The social democracies fill the People's Stores.
:12:21
May the extreme left forgive history
but if the guerrillas are like fish in water
:12:26
it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
:12:29
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguitieshe knew the traps.
:12:32
He wrote: "It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms,
:12:38
with people who are trying to cross it and drown,
but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side."