Скачать или смотреть Samora Machel: Colonialism's Legacy, Impact on Mozambique

It was in order to appropriate the wealth of our soil that entire regions were set aside for certain crops, such as cotton, which the people were forced to grow, dying of hunger while the big concessionary companies accumulated fabulous profits. It was in order to plunder our subsoil that the big multinationals were granted concessions and mining facilities, which they used to drain our country of its wealth.

It was in order to keep our people subjected to its domination that colonialism tried, in some cases, particularly in the urban areas, with some success, to destroy our personality, sow division, and create a slave mentality towards the foreigner. Assimilation was not merely the fascist caprice of a senile dictator, but was in fact mental enslavement to the foreigner in its purest form, a deliberate process of negating all the culture, history, and traditions of our people.

A man thus spiritually destroyed became a living corpse, a docile receptacle for the colonizer's way of thinking, acting, and living. Religion, and especially the Catholic Church, was a powerful factor in the cultural and human alienation of the Mozambican to make him a docile instrument and object of exploitation, and smash any display of resistance in the name of Christian resignation. This is the heritage we are reaping today, a heritage of poverty and social and economic backwardness, which the superficial beauty of the skyscrapers and grassy hills can never hide.

One need only travel the length and breadth of our country, one need only know that the expression from the Rovuma to the Maputo is not a mere slogan for us, but a reality we feel in our flesh and blood to understand that the age, old backwardness, disease, nakedness, hunger, and ignorance are the bountiful fruit of the very tree that sprouted, grew, and thrived together with colonialism, and which is known as exploitation.