A Message from Joaquim Chissano, Former President of Mozambique

A Message to the Gotabgaa Conference 2010 from President Joaquim Chissano, Former President of Mozambique and Elder Statesman of Africa

Friends, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to greet you all at this occasion that I have been given to address the Gotabgaa Conference 2010. I feel honored to be with you when you are preparing your efforts to unite yourselves as Kenyans in order to promote your citizenship, although you are far away from your country.

I have been given the privilege of helping in some way to restore peace and unity in your country during the conflict which was generated after the last elections, and pleased that all efforts have been made inside the country and outside the country to promote this peace.

I know that we can search for peace looking into the unity of each other, but this cannot be effective—cannot be effective— while we don’t have a peace each one in himself. We have to have our internal peace first. We have to know deeply what we are. And there are many ways of knowing oneself. We know the societies, the history of each society, and so on.

But for one to know himself, he must be living in a deep knowledge of his inside. There are many ways of looking for where we’re coming from and where we’re going to. But to know ourselves we can reach when we practice a meditation which brings a silence for some time every day, so that we be ourselves out of the tensions we create every day.

We live in tensions, we live in stress, and so we cannot find ourselves. We are preoccupied with external things which surround us, and we forget about ourselves. So each day we have to find ourselves through a deep meditation, and this I have learned to get it through Transcendental Meditation, which is a very simple practice.

It takes only 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon—or any time of the day where you can be in silence with yourself—without making any big efforts to try, and to dispel all the tensions, all the preoccupations which you accumulate during the day. Then you re-regulate yourselves, and then you can now know how to care about the others. You care about yourself, and you can know how to care about the others—how to share and how to bring more peace in your relations with other people, and the relations in the community, and the relations among the people of your nation.

So, you will be contributing to build a new world just by practicing this kind of meditation because it dispels the stress from yourself, and then it dispels the stress from your relations with the others, and so on. And so this has got a multiplying effect. So this is what I have learned. I have felt it when I was initiated in this meditation. So if you have someone who offers to explain to you in depth about the meditation, you’ll be accumulating a big gain, which you can then share with your countrymen by studying from you who are participating in this conference.

Thank you.

President Chissano meeting with faculty and students at Maharishi Invincibility Institute, South Africa