Sao Paulo Diary

PAIGC was formed in 1956, though its First Congress was held in 1964, It grew out of the Movement for National Independence of Guinea (MING). The PAIGC hud a clearer philosophy than MING and it had both a long and a short term programme. Its first phase was to be political independence to be followed by the construction of a society which would be free from the exploitation of man by man. Thus the end result of the national movement would be socialism. For the first few years it was urban-oriented. In 1959 it conducted a series of heroic labour strikes in which 50 people lost their lives. It was then that it shifted the main work to the rural areas and went underground in the process. A few years later