Government of Timor-Leste

With only eight years of sovereignty, acquired in the globalization era, Timor-Leste is currently constructing and reconstructing its cultural identity. The roots of this identity were always well preserved, in spite of external impositions that the people were subject to. Not even the Portuguese colonization or the Indonesia occupations were able to cancel out the most characteristic and traditional aspects of the Timorese National Culture. This cultural difference was, in the past, one of the resistance’s weapons.

Now, in the present, the Government believes “that it will be essentially through culture that Timor-Leste should position itself, preserving, enriching and safekeeping its identity, without denying the opening to modernity”, just as can be read in the Program of the IV Constitutional Government. The Secretary of State, Virgílio Smith, considers that National Culture preservation starts by being a task of each citizen, through two actions: “practicing and living it. When we speak about preserving culture, we ourselves have to feel that we belong to the culture and that the culture belongs to us. We have to love, to appreciate and practice it. We cannot lose interest from our culture because this is our identity, which makes us different from the countries that surround us. We have our own dances, our music, our traditional architectural patrimony, such as the Uma Lulik (Sacred House) that have a traditional architecture that symbolizes our identity.

The Secretary of State for Culture still underlines that the Sacred Houses are by themselves a good example of richness and cultural particularity of Timor-Leste.. “In spite of the fact that there are resemblances (that reinforce our identity), the Uma Lulik are different in each district. Each one has its own expression”.

And it is to preserve this national culture and identity that Virgílio Smith launches an appeal to all Timorese: “We have to take care, we cannot allow the destruction of this culture, by others or, sometimes, even by ourselves. We shouldn’t appreciate only what comes from abroad, we should also look to what we have inside, to what is ours”.