The deepest spirit of human understanding and brotherhood brings us to address this message to you. The moment is grave and every man or woman should have the necessary courage to grapple with the responsibility of his conscious attitude towards the aspirations and the struggle of the African peoples.

Your colonialist forebears conquered Guinea by force of arms. They enslaved, sold, massacred, dominated and savagely exploited the Guineans during five centuries. Today, in order to defend the interests of certain Portuguese and non-Portuguese companies, the colonialists persecute, imprison, torture and massacre the Guineans and Cape Verdeans who are struggling to reconquer the freedom and dignity of the Guinean people. With slaves wrested from Africa, above all from Guinea, the Portuguese slavers and colonialists created an entrepôt for the slave trade in Cape Verde. When they had been freed from slavery, the Africans in Cape Verde and their descendants, through their labour, won the right to dispose of themselves and all the resources of the archipelago which is today their native country. But the Portuguese colonialists do not recognise the right of Cape Verdeans to build for themselves, in freedom and national independence, a life of progress in which they will never again be the victims of the exploitation, misery and hunger that Portuguese colonialism has imposed on them.

The peoples of Guinea and Cape Verde, who are linked by indestructible ties of blood and history, are determined to put an end to Portuguese colonial domination. They want to build in peace, in dignity and in the African context, a free, democratic and progressive country, in which any man, of any origin, will have the opportunity for free development of personality and to contribute effectively for the progress of all. But the colonialists stubbornly maintain their odious domination over our peoples. To do this, they persecute, imprison, torture and massacre; they foment hunger, misery, and ignorance; they constantly strengthen their armed forces and cynically prepare to go on drowning in blood all attempts at liberation on the part of our peoples. You know all this, because you are either authors or witnesses of all that happens in our land. You were authors or witnesses of the massacre in the Pidjiguiti Docks (Bissau, 3 August 1959). You were present at the death of more than 30 000 Cape Verdeans, decimated by starvation between 1942 and 1947.