A Luta Continua : radical filmmaking,Pan-African liberation and communal empowerment

African revolution in the context of Black Power

The success of A Luta Continua evolved directly from the global appeal of the Portuguese African liberation struggles in the early 1970s. As the final front against classic imperialism, the Lusophone nationalist movements in Africa ranked among the world’s most important radical archetypes. The MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) began the first revolution against Portugal in Angola in 1961, with the well-organised PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) commencing its successful struggle a year later. FRELIMO was the last to launch its armed campaign in 1964. Though separated by thousands of miles, these three socialist nationalist organisations united behind a common international front known as the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies, or CONCP). Thus, while each operated independently, they shared a fundamental vision of egalitarian, socialist, democratic vanguard states replacing the white-dominated colonial structure. Outside of Vietnam, the CONCP groups represented the most successful ongoing military revolutions in the world. They attracted the attention of radicals across the globe, who looked to the movements as models for active resistance to the capitalist-imperialist system and positive examples of an ideal society in action. ⁶

The black community in the United States was especially interested in these movements. African Americans had developed a deep interest in African decolonisation as a global complement to rising demands for civil rights in the 1950s, but continued economic discrimination in the United States led young activists in increasingly radical directions. In the midst of the Cold War, militants in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers adopted Marxist ideologies to explain continued marginalisation and challenge the dominant power structure. This was not a Eurocentric communism but a leftism that drew on the Third World radicalism of states like Vietnam and Cuba fighting against Europe and the United States. Despite the multiracialism of this ‘tri-continental’ identity, African Americans most closely aligned themselves with a socialism that could claim Pan-African sources and examples. As it had been in the 1950s, race was the most accessible identity for cutting across national borders since colour was what demarcated African Americans as second-class citizens in the United States. According to Peniel Joseph, the era of Black Power drew directly on this ‘new militant race consciousness that placed black identity as the soul of a new radicalism’. ⁷ The emphasis on ‘blackness’ complicated African American views of both Cuba and Vietnam, establishing the Lusophone revolutions as the most widely acceptable symbols of self-determination, armed resistance and communal control. ⁸ Young blacks embraced the struggles for self-determination in southern Africa as inseparable from their own fight, drawing strength and inspiration from their success.

A core group of Black Power leaders became students of the transitional socialist ideology of the Lusophone Africans in the late 1960s. Amiri Baraka and Stokely Carmichael drew from readings of FRELIMO leader Eduardo Mondlane’s The Struggle For Mozambique, finished shortly before his assassination in 1969, along with the English translation of PAIGC Leader Amílcar Cabral’s ‘Theory as Weapon’ to help build their understanding of the struggle under America’s own iteration of colonialism. In the popular press, The Black Panther paid regular attention to the various movements, introducing its 100,000 weekly readers to revolutions that were largely ignored by the mainstream press. ⁹ In the early 1970s, self-consciously Pan-African groups emerged like the influential Students Organized for Black Unity (SOBU, later called YOBU), which established their own periodicals whose primary goals were to report on acts of African resistance domestically and abroad. ¹⁰ In collapsing the geographical, linguistic and political differences between Africa and America, the radical activists legitimised their own movements through celebrating continental achievements. In 1967, SNCC Chairman Rap Brown proclaimed that ‘the struggle against racism, colonialism, and apartheid is an indivisible struggle’ and that Mozambique and Angola were prominent fronts in this war. ¹¹

In examining the creation of this ‘fictive kinship’, scholars have tended to overlook the fact that Portuguese African nationalists were more than mere objects. They actively cultivated international support as part of a common CONCP strategy. Leaders like Mondlane and Cabral believed that gaining allies overseas would undermine Portugal’s war effort, since the small Iberian state depended on its western allies for military and political aid. ‘[T]he internationalization of colonial aggression’, FRELIMO wrote in 1970, ‘must be opposed with internationalized anti-colonial and anti-imperialist action.’ ¹² The socialist freedom fighters naturally looked to radical African states like Algeria and eastern bloc countries including Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union for weapons and military training, but they also hoped the West would isolate Portugal. Overtures to the American government had proved fruitless in the 1960s, but the CONCP parties believed that a mass movement could force a change in official policy. Mondlane had been educated in the United States, so FRELIMO became the initial conduit for these appeals. The party president travelled widely until his assassination in 1969. After this date, FRELIMO’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Sharfudine Khan, became the primary contact lecturing and mentoring activists nationwide. Cabral and the PAIGC later used these networks to establish their own presence. ¹³ Personal connections established with groups like the Black Panthers and YOBU amplified national calls for political action. ¹⁴ Organising in the black community and a subsequent change in American foreign policy, FRELIMO and the CONCP believed, would aid their independence campaign and concretely illustrate the connections that united the anti-imperial movement into a single global struggle.

Yet commitment to the CONCP cause remained confined in the 1960s to a small cadre of activists and Black Power leaders. Any effective change to the official policy that sustained Portugal would require a mass movement: this kind of support remained scarce. Martha Biondi has written that the average person had trouble embracing Pan-Africanism in their daily lives. YOBU member Mark Smith recalled that the average individual he met could not force such solidarity to ‘connect up, either [as] an explanatory framework or an action path, with the conditions that people felt in their lives’. ¹⁵ The problem for FRELIMO and its American allies was how best to make an African revolution relevant. Texts did not reach the entire black population, and their theoretical foundations often proved challenging. Most stories in newspapers focused on military achievements and meant little to all but the most militaristic youths. FRELIMO needed something that would appeal to wide numbers of people and explain complicated socialist concepts in a practical manner. The Panthers had faced a similar problem, and they had found the solution in cinema. Huey Newton explained to one southern African interviewer: ‘the people, maybe they don’t read as much as they should; so we found in our political education that it is very helpful to show films.’ The Panthers promised that, if nationalists were to send films, they could find an interested audience. ¹⁶ This simple solution was to provide the perfect vehicle for dramatising FRELIMO’s revolution.

Robert Van Lierop and radical cinema of the CONCP

Radical filmmaking emerged in the 1960s as a way of critiquing Cold War American society and documenting leftist alternatives. As a mass medium, films extended the popular challenge to the accepted international order beyond the rarified air of universities and intellectual salons. They offered a more emotional educational experience than texts through their combination of narration, images and music. As Hector Amaya has argued in his study of radical Cuban cinema, creating and watching such films acted as signals for participation in a particular group, but they also helped form the activist agenda in leftist circles. ¹⁷ Filmmakers created scripts for analysing, resisting, and organising against the dominant American capitalist system. Given the limited space for resistance within Cold War America, filmmakers looked abroad for evidence of success in the fight against racism, domestic poverty, economic exploitation and state brutality. Such films were clearly sympathetic to the anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, but their primary mission was not building real solidarity. Most viewed foreign events through the lens of domestic problems. Stock footage of foreign revolutions added needed drama and narratives of progress to American events. Transnational commonalities were limited to cycles of exploitation and violence, as evidenced in the popular comparison between the Attica Prison riots and the Vietnam War. ¹⁸ Such associations provided few guidelines for practical action, especially in a country where armed revolution was not a real option. As did most revolutionary parties, FRELIMO mixed the destructive with the constructive, emphasising the creation of a unified nation in conjunction with the elimination of the colonial structure. The party’s goal was to create a film that could distil this complex ideology in a way that was comprehensible and practical for foreign audiences. Real solidarity action would combat both foreign imperialism and domestic inequality through communal organising and institution-building.

In contrast to the more famous Cuban example, the CONCP parties did not make their own films but looked to international allies for help. Using foreigners and their expertise had two clear benefits. First, allies could tailor the Lusophone socialist messages to the specific organisational and cultural contexts of their homelands. Second, it allowed the parties to concentrate their meagre resources on their armed struggles. By the 1970s, such collaboration had produced a number of films. The Yugoslavian director Dragutin Popovic had worked with FRELIMO to produce the first solidarity film, Venceremos, around 1966, followed by a handful of western groups. These included the British TV journalist programme World in Action’s episode on Cabral and the PAIGC titled A Group of Terrorists Attacked . . ., another film on Guinea-Bissau called West Africa, Another Vietnam, and People’s War in Angola on the MPLA. ¹⁹ While these first steps helped introduce the CONCP parties and their social programmes to wider audiences, the movies that reached English-speaking audiences often fixated on combat and not the social revolutions that FRELIMO wanted to emphasise. This changed in 1971 when Margaret Dickinson, a British labour activist and one of Mondlane’s ghostwriters on The Struggle for Mozambique, produced Behind the Lines. The film concentrated on FRELIMO’s campaigns to expand education, build health centres and create gender equality. Dickinson believed that this emphasis on the non-violent aspects of the revolution would appeal to radicals in Europe seeking encouragement to challenge the system. ²⁰ Behind the Lines played around the United States, but it spoke primarily to the European Left. An American – and uniquely African American – iteration of the FRELIMO story was needed to put people on the streets of Chicago, Boston and Washington.

A Luta Continua was one of the last of these films, but it proved to be arguably the most influential. Like its international predecessors, it emerged from a long collaboration between FRELIMO and ally Robert Van Lierop, a radical young lawyer, active in solidarity movements. Khan and Mondlane specifically tapped Van Lierop, despite the fact he had no training in cinema. Van Lierop, however, was knowledgeable about the Mozambican struggle and committed to changing race relations in the United States and abroad. The African American New Yorker had been strongly influenced by Malcolm X’s commitment to Pan-Africanism, which inspired a journey to the continent after he had finished law school in 1967. Through contacts in New York, he met Eduardo Mondlane and began a lengthy collaboration with FRELIMO. He worked as an assistant counsel for the NAACP while continuing to pursue his activism through leadership positions in the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and the short-lived Pan-African Solidarity Committee (PASC). ²¹ Van Lierop, however, was frustrated by the state of solidarity in black America. ACOA had difficulty making inroads into the black community due to its elite nature and suspicions of its predominantly white leadership, while the collapse of the PASC illustrated the lack of unity in the black community. ²² He became convinced that FRELIMO’s film idea would deepen revolutionary consciousness at the grassroots level.

In late 1971, Van Lierop journeyed to Mozambique with the goal of crafting a film that could explain the FRELIMO struggle to the black community. He recruited SNCC photographer Bob Fletcher as his cinematographer and made preparations with FRELIMO to begin filming. This racially homogenous crew would allow the film to gain a more fluid reception in black circles suspicious of white activists. At the same time, Van Lierop refused to be hamstrung by racial nationalism, reaching out to progressives and churches associated with ACOA and Mondlane to finance the picture. Camera in hand, Van Lierop and Fletcher accompanied a FRELIMO contingent into the liberated territories, joined for part of the journey by an African American educator named Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller). The two Americans captured the heart of the Mozambican revolutionary transformation – the institutional changes that sought to turn oppressed peoples into a proactive nation. The pair created a slide show of their journeys in early 1972 and released the completed film later that year, with Van Lierop providing the narration. Van Lierop selected the Portuguese phrase for ‘the struggle continues’ as the title, a common refrain among the socialist CONCP parties and the phrase with which Mondlane would end his letters. ²³ The short film ran just one reel, but it would have a major impact on how blacks came to view African liberation in the United States.

A Luta Continua and FRELIMO ideology

A Luta Continua reflects FRELIMO’s carefully constructed international image as a social-minded revolution. More importantly, the film reveals the practical implications of this ideology, depicting how Mozambicans lived under the new regime and the lessons it offered to African Americans. Brevity and Van Lierop’s sympathetic gloss minimise foibles and the brutality of the conflict, but do not caricature the revolutionaries. All simplifications reflect FRELIMO preferences, hewing closely to the image the party presented abroad. The film emphasises three themes common to CONCP narratives: the global nature of the anti-imperial struggle; the predominantly social character of the revolution; and the complete implementation of socialism, including gender and racial equality.

At the core of the film is an attempt to explain FRELIMO’s scientific theory of anti-imperialism in concrete terms. Though sometimes simplistic, this Marxist reading of world events was vital in tying Mozambique to black living conditions in the United States. The film’s opening scenes lay out the systemic interaction of capital and labour that forcefully integrated Mozambique into the western sphere. Portugal acts as the imperial power, but its own poverty prevents it from properly developing its colonies. According to FRELIMO, the ‘neocolony’ of Portugal depends on its richer allies in South Africa and the West for the investment needed to exploit its imperial possessions. Foreign companies like Gulf Oil contract with Portugal to exploit its overseas resources, while South African mines utilise Mozambican labour in a form of updated slavery. In direct correlation with the African American experience, Portugal invests little of its profits from the Lusophone African economy into improving the lives of black colonials. FRELIMO wants to replace this state of affairs with a wholly egalitarian nation, removing distinctions of class, ethnicity and gender by asserting local control of politics and the economy. By presenting FRELIMO’s fight against the larger capitalist-imperial system at the outset, Van Lierop establishes the national liberation struggle as a challenge to neighbouring minority states and American forces complicit in exploitation. ²⁴

Despite the necessary destruction of the old system, the film concentrates on the positive social aspects of revolution. The true goal is the creation of a ‘new and popular social order’; before his death, Mondlane had written that FRELIMO had always preferred ‘gain[ing] independence by peaceful means’. However, Portuguese recalcitrance had made this impossible, forcing the turn to arms. ²⁵ A Luta Continua echoes this perspective and de-emphasises the centrality of violence, presenting the work of revolution as a complex multi-step process. The narration explains that ‘the people of Mozambique place their weapons in the proper perspective as tools. They are tools just as the pencil and the farm hoe are tools’. Military manoeuvres, which take up barely one-sixth of the thirty-minute playing time, are secondary to the societal institution building evidenced by new schools, clinics and co-operative farms. The film visually depicts Mondlane’s assertion that the reconstruction of the nation ‘must be undertaken even while the colonial state is in the process of being destroyed’. ²⁶

These destructive and constructive aspects are inseparable. In one example, the film portrays a military training centre as ‘an educational institution, an agricultural institution, a health institution, and a social services institution’ – not simply a gun range. The film privileges such activities as farming, washing and nursing. Its images, of bespectacled teachers and attentive children, differed from the stock depictions of massed soldiers expected by American audiences. The explicit message: revolution occurs within these people, not necessarily in battle. As Van Lierop explains, ‘one of the things that the revolution must do is to change the pattern of life for the people waging the struggle’. Communities must organise to meet their own needs, since the government and capitalism had failed to do so. ²⁷ Removing violence from the equation was key for Van Lierop, since an armed revolt on the model of FRELIMO or the Vietnamese was impractical in the United States. It was much more important to identify those ideas and actions that African Americans could implement in reality. This viewpoint contrasted sharply with some Black Power perspectives that made a fetish of violence and the ‘Mau Mau type of revolutionary movement’. ²⁸ The focus on social transformation served as a corrective for dangerously simplistic readings of revolution based solely on racial animosities and armed response.

In line with FRELIMO’s scientific socialism, A Luta Continua defines real victory as the achievement of equality and social cohesion. The discipline and organisation of FRELIMO party cadres are the ultimate models to emulate. According to the film, liberation leaders are first among equals, since all members act as ‘policymakers’. The narration explains that FRELIMO members ‘have learned to submerge their own individual egos and individuals do not assume positions of responsibility with the idea that he or she has inherited a position of prestige or power’. Van Lierop is clearly targeting middle-class civil rights leaders and politicians who viewed populist demands for community action inherent to the Black Power movement as threats to their leadership. This comparison becomes explicit in the commentary on FRELIMO’s education system. For Mozambicans, the narrator states that ‘education is not a way to achieve upward mobility or isolate themselves as an intellectual elite nor is it a meaningless abstraction that leads to dependence on external economic conditions’. Education lifts students out of ignorance in a way that undermines the class divisions associated with capitalist exploitation:

When school is out, the teachers do not go one way, into cars for a trip home to exclusive suburbs, while the students go another way deeper into a ghetto. Instead, they are all part of the same mass movement, and the teachers live, work, and struggle in the bush with all of the people. ²⁹

Here, FRELIMO offered the solution to the weakness of the black American community. Committed activists had to sacrifice the trappings of the Cold War liberal order in favour of communal unity if there was to be any hope of sustaining a meaningful revolution in living conditions.

The focus on equality also extended to the issue of gender. Gender equality was a central goal of the FRELIMO programme. The party had provided political and military training to women since 1966, and some fought in combat alongside men. ³⁰ Women held vital leadership positions, especially in the spheres of mobilisation and political education. Eduardo Mondlane’s white American wife Janet headed the Mozambique Institute, and Josina Machel directed social programmes in the liberated territories. Van Lierop highlighted this dual struggle for national and sexual equality as one reason for the party’s success. Images of women bearing arms and men helping to cook challenge traditional gender roles, implying an assignment of tasks according to ability and fairness. The narration proclaims to audiences that ‘the FRELIMO guerilla army sets an example of mobilization and effective utilization of all components’. The film admits that traditional taboos about age and gender still linger, but it explains that the revolution is an ongoing ‘process, and not an event’. ³¹ The enacting of the Portuguese African ideal of gender equality stood in stark contrast to the experience of women within the American movement. It represented yet another practical application of scientific socialism that aimed to shape American organising.

A Luta Continua not only presented the FRELIMO ideology to Americans but it offered a way to interpret and forward the creation of communal organisations to express solidarity and change realities in the United States. Instead of using brief glimpses of international revolutions as parallels to the ongoing struggles in the US, it explored FRELIMO’s new society and allowed viewers to relate this to their own experiences within the American system. Van Lierop offered his own gloss to guide the thinking of audiences lightly interspersed between longer discussions of FRELIMO activity. Though the film did minimise the harsh realities that sometimes accompanied the dismantling of traditional society and colonialism, it distilled FRELIMO’s ideas down to their universal essence. It presented an African ideology with a clarity few Americans had realised, let alone seen performed for them on screen.

Radical film as activist mobilisation

On its release in 1972, the film became the key text explaining FRELIMO and, more broadly, CONCP African ideology to American audiences. A Luta Continua’s encapsulation of FRELIMO’s struggle spoke directly to domestic concerns and ambitions, demonstrated by the positive popular reaction to screenings. In that it was a radical film, few if any mainstream theatres screened Luta, but the personal presentations by Van Lierop and other activists became part of its appeal and effectiveness. FRELIMO’s strategy of mass mobilisation relied upon interaction and replication, and the film became the primary tool for expanding support at the grassroots level.

The effectiveness of the piece owed much to the fact that Van Lierop was incredibly liberal with viewing rights. The activist recalls that he never considered A Luta Continua to be his story but FRELIMO’s: ‘I was merely the instrument – the vehicle – through which the story would get told.’ Effectively any organisation that could raise the money to order a reproduction could use it. ³² Groups like the Tricontinental Film Center, YOBU, ACOA and dozens of local organisations offered copies for screening and rent. This decentralised distribution system makes it difficult to gauge how many times the film played, but evidence suggests A Luta Continua appeared nationwide and internationally. ³³ Advertisements attest to showings in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, Lansing, Jackson in Mississippi, the Bay Area, Washington, DC, Atlanta and additional cities small and large. At least one television broadcast was aired in both Boston and New York, though local public access stations probably broadcast it in other metropolitan areas. ³⁴ In Chicago alone, the Committee for the Liberation of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea (CCLAMG) held over 100 screenings between spring 1973 and 1974. ³⁵ Even the American government attempted to obtain a copy for military training purposes. ³⁶ Though the MPLA and PAIGC were subjects of existing films, the popularity and effectiveness of A Luta Continua meant that it often headlined events supporting other revolutionary movements, as an example of socialist ideology in practice. As such, the film introduced the promise of all liberation struggles in southern Africa to thousands of Americans.

The way anti-imperial activists used the film to advance their cause was even more important than the number of showings. As Michael Chanan has written in The Cuban Image, radical filmmakers believed a cinema remained ‘incomplete without the actively responsive audience taking it up’. ³⁷ This corresponded closely with FRELIMO’s and Van Lierop’s vision for the film. The director and his activist distributors participated in screenings, helping to mediate the film for the local viewers. Occasionally, nationalists like Sharfudine Khan would provide a direct bridge between the audience and the subject. They urged real identification not only with FRELIMO but with all of the CONCP parties, and they succeeded. At one screening in Los Angeles, an impressed viewer told Van Lierop after the presentation ‘You took me all over Africa; I’ve never been to Angola, but, Man, you took me there. That’s my people, all over.’ ³⁸ Identification was the first step towards organising, and activists used these showings to build support for the nascent solidarity movement. A pamphlet that accompanied the film captured the essence of this strategy. It recommended that inspired audience members should take action by organising boycotts of southern African goods, initiating educational campaigns, and engaging in ‘mass political actions against identifiable imperialist targets (e.g. [local/regional] corporations with investments in southern Africa; communications outlets that have failed to report on the wars of national liberation)’. ³⁹ The film acted as the visual centrepiece of programmes to construct a transnational African revolutionary identity and a framework for active black participation that began in their own communities. ⁴⁰

An examination of the way the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) used the film during its celebrations of African Liberation Day (ALD) illustrates its power. The ALD was primarily the initiative of Owusu Sadaukai, who had accompanied Van Lierop into Mozambique. After consultations with FRELIMO, Sadaukai launched the project to organise African Americans around the public expression of solidarity with southern Africa through mass demonstrations. They hoped to institutionalise this unity in a way that would give blacks greater control of American foreign and domestic policies. To achieve this goal, ALD organisers – which included YOBU and Amiri Baraka’s Congress of Afrikan People – had to find a way to overcome old ‘thinking patterns of the black community’ that could only see the struggle as ‘pieces of the whole’. ⁴¹ Local organisers used A Luta Continua to dramatise the transnational nature of the anti-imperial struggle and overcome public indifference. ⁴² Audiences received the message enthusiastically. ALSC member Sylvia Hill remembers leaving a screening and ‘for the first time having this sense that you can have a science of change because you have to think methodologically about what you’re doing. It’s not just haphazard and just occurring willy-nilly all based on chance factors.’ ⁴³

The film’s theme of unity through organisation and self-sacrifice offered a positive message for achieving black unity and communal transformation. The Institute for the Black World declared that A Luta Continua vividly showed how ‘oppressed people … overcome their own weakness in order to unite and build a new life’. It urged that the film ‘be viewed widely in the black community’, so that viewers could draw on its lessons for their own organising. ⁴⁴ These overwhelmingly positive responses helped overcome individual reservations about Africa’s domestic applicability and make ALD celebrations a success. In 1972, roughly 40,000 blacks participated in solidarity marches in Washington, San Francisco and Toronto. A year later, between 40,000 and 60,000 (with some estimates claiming 100,000) attended events in thirty cities across the country, as organisers took up the challenge to make anti-imperialism a local phenomenon. From this peak, a smatter of local celebrations would continue annually until the end of the decade. ⁴⁵ The ALSC, YOBU and Baraka used this transnational unity as the foundation for year-round activity, promoting boycotts of southern African goods, greater black labour activism and the development of community co-operatives. ⁴⁶ Van Lierop’s film allowed African Americans to reimagine demands for self-determination within the context of the larger global struggle, with FRELIMO as a model of institution building.

Women also gravitated towards the gender inclusiveness of the film and CONCP ideology. Women had played important if underappreciated roles in the earlier Civil Rights Movement, but the aura of blatant masculinity around much of Black Power had sidelined all but a handful of female leaders. African Americans found support in A Luta Continua for reshaping these gendered roles in the evolving solidarity movement with southern Africa. Its depiction of FRELIMO women served as an important resource in this critical re-examination, which women used to understand the relationship between feminism, socialism and race. ⁴⁷ Female ALSC leadership referenced their African sisters as proof of the vital role that women had to play in advancing the revolution. At one ALD seminar featuring the film, Abla Thomas of YOBU summarised the primary lesson. FRELIMO’s success demanded ‘that the status of both Black men and women be flexible enough to compliment [sic] one another. No longer should certain tasks be expected to be performed solely by the members of one sex.’ ⁴⁸ The example of the African revolutionaries forced the leadership of this more moderate Black Power element evolving in the mid-1970s to reassess its core values. A socialist solidarity movement did not require overt masculinity when it decentralised the role of violence. The goal of political unity relied on universal participation. Both Baraka and YOBU chief Nelson Johnson urged the study of continental revolutions the better to understand how they dealt ‘with the status of women in order to maximise the effectiveness of their movement’. ⁴⁹ Much as FRELIMO’s ideology did not erase all elements of gender discrimination within Mozambique, this moment of self-reflection could not remove the masculine imperative from black society. Yet it did help open pathways for individuals like Sylvia Hill to become part of the leadership generation that would guide the anti-apartheid movement of the next decade.

Finally, the popularisation of Portuguese African scientific socialism had a major impact beyond the African American community. Van Lierop had produced the film with the black experience in mind, but he had never envisioned confining it to that setting. Its distribution by multiracial organisations and the religious groups that helped fund the project took it beyond the confines of the black community. ⁵⁰ Records kept by the CCLAMG reveal that requests for screenings of the film were evenly divided between black, school or college and religious communities, with presentations to multiracial audiences almost equalling those provided to African Americans. ⁵¹ Luta provided a common reference point and understanding of the revolutions for these distinct communities, which helped facilitate discussion and co-operation across racial and ideological boundaries. In the wake of its release, greater co-operation developed over solidarity activities between predominantly black and white organisations. Though such connections had existed prior to the film, the creation of a common vocabulary and an emphasis on the domestic reform that had to accompany solidarity helped bridge the gap. In 1973, white activists even requested inclusion in ALD celebrations. Though founded as a Black Power organisation, the majority of the ALSC leadership had incorporated enough of the southern African socialist tenets to open up its 1973 activities to any willing participant, de-emphasising racial solidarity in favour of anti-capitalist, anti-imperial rhetoric a year later. ⁵² Van Lierop created A Luta Continua to speak directly to the experience of the African American population, but his depiction of the hopeful future envisioned by Eduardo Mondlane and FRELIMO helped to build a wider movement in the United States, emphasising a leftist critique of the United States and its allies that bridged the racial gap.

A Luta Continua continued to be the pre-eminent solidarity film after the collapse of the Portuguese imperial regime in 1975. The year before, the strain of three decades-long African wars had pushed frustrated young army officers to topple the Lisbon dictatorship. The new government gave into colonial demands and transferred power to its African colonies. Van Lierop recognised that the end of the fighting did not complete the social revolution and attached an introductory slide to the film addressing these developments. ‘In all three countries’, he said of the now independent former colonies, the revolution was continuing to create ‘new men and women and new societies where there will be no more exploitation of any human being by another.’ ⁵³ Showings shifted from an emphasis on the Portuguese colonies to Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and South Africa, where armed struggles were beginning. Many such solidarity benefit screenings also included Van Lierop’s second film in a projected trilogy, O Povo Organisado (The People Organised), which documents in more overtly political tones the independence celebration and the ongoing progress of FRELIMO’s vision for a new nation. ⁵⁴

By 1975, A Luta Continua had become a major symbol not only of African independence, but of American solidarity. Showings now spoke to a revived momentum in the battle for African self-determination and reinforced the activist belief that the revolutions could triumph. Reflecting in 1976 on the impact of the film, one commentary in a black newspaper noted that the film had become ‘an important organizing tool for peace, solidarity, and anti-imperialist groups around the country’. ⁵⁵ In that sense, A Luta Continua made a special contribution to the mobilising of United States citizens against US-supported colonialism in Mozambique and South Africa, so much so that the title itself has become part of the movement’s vernacular.

Conclusion

A Luta Continua represented in visual form all the positive aspects of the southern African struggle for independence. In thirty minutes, it distilled FRELIMO’s ideology, moderated and narrated for an American audience. Its impact both as a film and as a centrepiece for radical organising was recognised formally and informally throughout the decade. In its success, Luta highlights a key moment during an era when radical filmmaking helped make movements. Rejecting a mainstream media uninterested in seriously covering global revolution, it helped craft a counter-narrative that allowed African Americans to see themselves as part of a larger revolutionary unit seeking to upset the interlinked structures of imperialism and racial discrimination. Robert Van Lierop was not the only filmmaker working on this topic nor the only one focusing on Portuguese Africa, but his mixture of ideological clarity, practical tactics and personal activism meant Luta had a much larger impact than any other single film in forming early American bonds with revolutions on the continent. The solidarity he helped forge would last into the next decade.

The impact of the film drew directly from its decision to showcase FRELIMO rather than reducing African revolutions to formulaic guerilla wars. A Luta Continua provided one of the first three-dimensional portraits of revolutionaries with whom many Americans had begun to identify. This was not the voiceless stock footage used by Third World Newsreel and other domestic collectives, but a real transnational collaboration that provided new and incisive video documentation of an ongoing revolution. It rejected the US-centric lens that prioritised subjugation and rebellion in favour of a more goal-oriented focus on reconstruction in Mozambique. These African events provided Van Lierop with a platform to discuss common attributes of a potential American reconstruction plan. His narrative gloss provided starting points for viewers to apply these seemingly alien lessons to their own domestic concerns, bridging the gap between American and African lives that had retarded the growth of solidarity organising in the black community. Studying this picture gives life to the filmic ‘transnational networks’ that Cynthia Young argues were at the heart of the US Third World Left. ⁵⁶ It also returns a modicum of agency to the African nationalists who collaborated with allies like Van Lierop in order to cultivate radical support overseas. A Luta Continua’s transnational origins allowed it to reach across state borders in the representation of revolutionary African ideology and directly shape domestic American activism.

This article contributes to a growing if still small literature on transnational anti-imperialism beyond South Africa, which both preceded and contributed to the more heralded anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. During the African National Congress’ difficult decade of the 1970s, other nationalist actors contributed to the construction of a multiracial network that helped legitimise leftist liberation movements. A Luta Continua helped overcome American ambivalence toward the southern African problem and lay institutional groundwork that activists later utilised to challenge official policies supporting the minority regimes. The importance of this earlier organising is apparent in the formation of leadership figures like Sylvia Hill, but its impact was more vital for the broad education it provided at the grassroots level. When anti-apartheid activists went looking for people to support protests and divestment campaigns aimed at South Africa, they found, according to Joseph Jordan, ‘a receptive audience among people whose consciousness had been raised during the campaigns of the 1970s’. ⁵⁷ This new consciousness owed a debt to A Luta Continua’s popularisation of FRELIMO and the CONCP ideology and the role it played in mobilising action in communities – black, white and in between.