The Nigerian student chanting a luta continua is thinking of some forces of oppression in the most fuzzy and abstract terms. He is not thinking of tribal hatred and religious bigotry – two of the most significant negativities that Samora Machel and his generation of African freedom fighters and thinkers defined the struggle against.
I was wet behind the ears. I was a Jambite. It was matriculation day at the University of Ilorin. After matriculation on the main campus of the University, I returned to the mini-campus in the company of new friends – fellow Jambites. At the entrance gate to campus, we ran to a chaotic mass of policemen, soldiers, tanks, guns, tear gas.
Students, advanced, retreated, advanced, retreated, screaming, chanting, rallying. In all the chaos, the protesting students (Nigerian authorities always demean their struggles by calling them rioting or rampaging students) had one rallying call which fascinated us as Jambites:
A luta continua
A luta continua
A luta, a luta
A luta continua
Thus it was that on my very first official day of University life, on matric day, I had to return to Isanlu for two months because the University was closed down. The two months I spent in Isanlu was not a waste. When Baba Adesanmi heard me chanting “a luta continua” one day, he asked: “Bola, who taught you that thing you are saying?”
I told him that the chant was the energizing spirit of the student protest that had sent me back to Isanlu. All the senior students were chanting and screaming “aluta” and all the Jambites joined them. He smiled casually and took out two books from a shelf in the family library. One was entitled, Mozambique: Sowing the Seeds of Revolution, authored by a man called Samora Machel. The other was an edited selection of the speeches and writings of the same Samora Machel.
I knew enough of African and world affairs to know that SamoraMachel was the President of Mozambique who had died in a plane crash in 1986. But I did not know that he was one of Africa’s greatest sons, one of Africa’s greatest freedom fighters, one of Africa’s greatest revolutionaries, one of Africa’s greatest radical theorists, one of Africa’s greatest thinkers.
Samora Machel was thus my entrance into the intellectual force field of African radical revolutionary thinkers and freedom fighters. Samora Machel was the path that led me to the writings and work of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Steve Biko, Patrice Emery Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. Beyond Africa, Samora Machel was the path that led me to a life time of reading the writings and thought of Dr. Ernesto CheGuevara, Fidel Castro, Paulo Freire, and Regis Debray but I am jumping ahead of myself.
A luta continua! Generations of Nigerian students have chanted it, have been defined by it. Portuguese for “the struggle continues”, Samora Machel and his FRELIMO freedom fighters originated that call as their antiphonal call and response formula for mobilizing and motivating the people of Mozambique in their historic struggle against the evil Portuguese colonialists.
Samora Machel developed a musical, deeply-textured and sequentially sequenced way of screaming “a luta” from the podium when delivering his rousing speeches and the people would respond in unison, “continua”!
Samora Machel’s call to struggle moved across Africa and the rest of the world to become the rallying call of struggles and protest movements. In Nigeria, it became part of our national lexicon and the very definition of the student experience. Of course, we took Samora Machel’s chant out of context and divorced it from the totality of his meaning. We would not be true Nigerians if we didn’t do such an anti-intellectual thing.
Thus, very few Nigerian students actually know the origins of a luta continua. I wager that few in the post-1980s generation have even ever heard of Samora Machel and FRELIMO. Fewer still in the newer generations would know that Samora Machel never stopped at screamin
Culled from Sahara reporters
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