Question: Besides nationalism, is your struggle founded on any ideological basis?

Cabral: We believe that a struggle like ours is impossible without ideology. But what kind of ideology? I will perhaps disappoint many people here where I say that we do not think ideology is a religion.

But ideology is important in Guinea. As I’ve said, never again do we want our people to be exploited. Our desire to develop our country with social justice and power in the hands of the people is our ideological basis.

Never again do we want to see a group or a class of people exploiting or dominating the work of our people. That’s our basis. If you want to call it Marxism, you may call it Marxism. That’s your responsibility. You must judge from what I do in practice. If you decide that it’s Marxism, tell everyone that it is Marxism.

If you decide it’s not Marxism, tell them it’s not Marxism.

But the labels are your affairs; we don’t like those kind of labels. People here are very preoccupied with the questions: are you Marxist or not Marxist? Just ask me, please whether we are doing well in the field? Are we really liberating our people, the human beings in our country from all forms of oppression? Ask me simply this, and draw your own conclusions.

“What we must do is to modify, to radically transform, the political, economic, social and cultural conditions of our people.”

Amilcar Cabral in The African Liberation Reader, Vol 2.