RESPONSE BY PREMIER
LET me salute you in the name of the fallen heroes of the South African struggle - especially the victims of the Matola raid.
A raid that was unprovoked. A raid that insulted the sovereignty of the Mozambican people, defiled their national dignity, violated their territorial integrity and challenged the very concept of African independent statehood. But I believe there is something more than the Matola raid which brings us together here.
For a people engaged, day and night, in a continuing struggle against poverty and want, our common desire is to seek ways in which we can provide a better life for all our people.
The history of Mozambique and South Africa has always been intertwined. We were one people. History put us together on this continent from time immemorial.
We evolved together, shared a common African culture, traded with one another and dealt each with the other as human beings, whether in times of war or in times of peace, whether in circumstances of hunger or in conditions of plenty.
Then came the colonialists. Despite the heroic resistance of our forebears, from the Cape of Good Hope to the north of Africa, the colonialists succeeded to transform us from a free people into a subject people. They became our masters.
To perpetuate our subjugations, they divided us. We ceased to be one people. We became foreigners to one another, living in Portuguese East Africa, British Rhodesia, German East Africa, British Natal, Boer Republics.
This was the pattern throughout the continent. Africa became British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian.
In their eagerness to plunder, divide and oppress, the colonialists and the racists failed to notice that they were creating new conditions for our oneness, for our unity. Together we had become the dispossessed, dispossessed of our independence and of our countries.
It was in the course of the struggle against this system that we recreated our oneness on a much broader scale and at a qualitatively much higher level.
We became one mighty army of revolution fighting in various detachments on many fronts throughout the world - an army of comrades.
It was as comrades-in-arms that the commanders and combatants of FRELIMO and the ANC trained, worked, ate and sang together in Algeria, Tanzania and elsewhere.
It was because of that comradeship that commanders of FRELIMO and Umkhonto we Sizwe found themselves in the war zones of Cabo Delgado and Niassa in 1967 and Tete in 1970.
And so here we are today. British, French, Belgian, Portuguese and other colonialists have been defeated; and yet an intense struggle is being fought by all of us – a struggle against underdevelopment and for social progress.
Just like we responded to crimes committed by colonialism against our people, we need to respond as one in the fight against poverty.
That is the least we can do to honour our fallen heroes.
I thank you.