BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Samora Moisés Machel September 29, 1933 – October 19, 1986 was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique. Machel led the country from independence in 1975 until his death in 1986, when his presidential aircraft crashed in mountainous terrain where the borders of Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa. Early life
Samora Machel was born in the village of Madragoa (today's Chilembene), Gaza Province, Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), to a family of farmers. He was a member of the Shangana ethnic group and his grandfather had been an active collaborator of Gungunhana. Under Portuguese rule, his father, like most black Mozambicans, was classified by the demeaning term "indigena" (native). He was forced to accept lower prices for his crops than white farmers; compelled to grow labor-intensive cotton, which took time away from the food crops needed for his family; and forbidden to brand his mark on his cattle to prevent thievery. However, Machel's father was a successful farmer: he owned four plows and 400 head of cattle by 1940. Machel grew up in this farming village and attended mission elementary school. In 1942, he was sent to school in the town of Zonguene in Gaza Province. The school was run by Catholic missionaries who educated the children in Portuguese language and culture. Although having completed the fourth grade, Machel never completed his secondary education. However, he had the prerequisite certificate to train as a nurse anywhere in Portugal at the time, since the nursing schools were not degree-conferring institutions. Machel started to study nursing in the capital city of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), beginning in 1954. In the 1950's, he saw some of the fertile lands around his farming community on the Limpopo river appropriated by the provincial government and worked by white settlers who developed a wide range of new infrastructure for the region. Like many other Mozambicans near the southern border of Mozambique, some of his relatives went to work in the South African mines where additional job opportunities were found. Shortly afterwards, one of his brothers was killed in a mining accident. Unable to complete formal training at the Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lourenço Marques, he got a job working as an aide in the same hospital and earned enough to continue his education at night school. He worked at the hospital until he left the country to join the Mozambican nationalist struggle in neighbouring Tanzania.
Independence struggle
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Machel was attracted to anti-colonial ideals and began his political activities in the Miguel Bombarda hospital in Lourenço Marques, where he protested against the fact that black nurses were paid less than whites doing the same job. Machel decided to leave Lourenco Marques, when a white anti-fascist, the pharmaceutical representative Joao Ferreira, warned him that he was being watched by the Portuguese political police, the PIDE. He slipped across the border, and made his way to join FRELIMO in Dar es Salaam, via Swaziland, South Africa and Botswana. In Botswana, he hitched a lift on a plane carrying recruits of the African National Congress of South Africa to Tanzania. Impressed by the young Mozambican, a senior ANC official J.B. Marks (according toJoe Slovo) bumped one of the ANC recruits off the flight to let Machel on.
In Dar es Salaam, Machel volunteered for military service, and was one of the second group of FRELIMO guerrillas sent for training in Algeria. Back in Tanzania, he was put in charge of FRELIMO's own training camp, at Kongwa. After FRELIMO launched the independence war, on September 25, 1964, Machel soon became a key commander, making his name in particular in the grueling conditions of the eastern area of the vast and sparsely populated province of Niassa. He rapidly rose up the ranks of the guerrilla army, the FPLM, and became the head of the army after the death of its first commander,Filipe Samuel Magaia, in October 1966.
Frelimo’s founder and first president, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by a parcel bomb on February 3, 1969. His deputy, Rev Uria Simango, expected to take over – but instead the FRELIMO Executive Committee appointed a presidential triumvirate, consisting of Simango, Machel and veteran nationalist and poet Marcelino dos Santos. Simango soon broke ranks, and denounced the rest of the FRELIMO leadership in the pamphlet “Gloomy Situation in Frelimo”.[8]This led to Simango's expulsion from the liberation front, and the election, in 1970, of Machel as Frelimo President, with dos Santos as Deputy President.
The new commander of the Portuguese army in Mozambique, Gen. Kaúlza de Arriaga, boasted that he would eliminate FRELIMO in a few months. He launched the largest offensive of Portugal's colonial wars, Operation Gordian Knot, in 1970, concentrating on what was regarded as the FRELIMO heartland of Cabo Delgado in the far north. Kaúlza de Arriaga boasted of destroying a large number of guerrilla bases – but since such a base was just a collection of huts, the military significance of such supposed victories was dubious. Machel reacted by shifting the focus of the war elsewhere, stepping up FRELIMO operations in the western province of Tete. This was where a massive dam was being built at Cahora Bassa, on the Zambezi, to sell electricity to South Africa. Fearful that FRELIMO would attack the dam site, the Portuguese set up three concentric rings of defence around Cahora Bassa. This denuded the rest of Tete province of troops, and in 1972 FRELIMO crossed the Zambezi, striking further and further south. By 1973, FRELIMO units were operating in Manica and Sofala Province and began to hit the railway from Rhodesia to Beira, causing panic among the settler population of Beira, who accused the Portuguese army of not doing enough to defend white interests.[9]
The end came suddenly. On April 25, 1974, Portuguese officers, tired of fighting three unwinnable wars in Africa, overthrew the government in Lisbon. The coup was almost bloodless. Nobody came onto the streets to defend Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano. Within 24 hours, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was in full control of Portugal.
Independence
Frelimo’s immediate warning was that there was no such thing as democratic colonialism, and that nobody should imagine that Mozambicans would tolerate Portuguese rule just because there had been a change of government in Lisbon. Frelimo’s fears were well-founded. The MFA allowed General Antonio de Spinola to become the first post-coup President. He had been commander of the Portuguese forces in Guinea-Bissau, and was believed to be deeply implicated in the assassination of the Guinean nationalist leader, Amílcar Cabral.
Spinola had no intention of letting Mozambique and Angola go. He dreamed of a Lusophone commonwealth run from Lisbon, and wanted a referendum on independence. Machel rejected such plans with the pithy remark “You don’t ask a slave if he wants to be free, particularly when he is already in revolt, and much less if you happen to be a slave-owner”.[10]
Initial discussions between Frelimo and the new Portuguese government, held in Lusaka in June 1974, proved fruitless. It was clear to Machel that the Portuguese foreign minister, Socialist Party leader Mario Soares, had no power to negotiate independence. So Machel sent one of his top advisers, Aquino de Braganca, to Lisbon to find out who really held power in Portugal. His answer was that Frelimo should really be talking to the MFA, particular to military intellectuals such as Col. Ernesto Melo Antunes, whose power was on the rise, as that of Spinola waned.
Machel refused to give the Portuguese the ceasefire they wanted. For as long as there was no commitment to Mozambican independence, the war would continue. Frelimo re-opened its front in Zambezia province, and stepped up operations throughout the war zone. There was little resistance. Following the collapse of the Caetano government, rank and file Portuguese soldiers saw little point in continuing to fight, preferring to stay in their barracks.[11]
More serious talks between the Lisbon government and Frelimo ensued, and this time the MFA played a dominant role. The result was an agreement, signed in Lusaka on September 7, 1974, which agreed to transfer full power to Frelimo with the date for independence set for June 25, 1975. That day there was a short lived settler revolt against the agreement, put down within a day by Portuguese and Frelimo troops acting jointly. A transitional government was set up, containing ministers appointed by both Frelimo and Portugal, but headed by Frelimo’s Joaquim Chissano as Prime Minister. Machel continued to run Frelimo from Tanzania. He returned home triumphantly, in a journey “from the Rovuma to the Maputo” (the rivers marking the northern and southern boundaries of the country), in which he addressed rallies in every major population centre in the country.
The journey was interrupted at the beach resort of Tofo, in Inhambane Province, for a meeting of the Frelimo Central Committee, which drew up Mozambique’s first Constitution. This gave the outline of the one-party, socialist state which Frelimo intended to establish. Frelimo was constitutionally the leading force in Mozambican society, and the President of Frelimo would automatically be President of Mozambique.[12] On June 25, 1975, Machel proclaimed “the total and complete independence of Mozambique and its constitution into the People’s Republic of Mozambique”. This, Machel said, would be "a state of People's Democracy, in which, under the leadership of the worker-peasant alliance, all patriotic strata commit themselves to the destruction of the sequels of colonialism, and to annihiliate the system of exploitation of man by man".
Machel’s government moved quickly to bring key areas under state control. All land was nationalized – individuals and institutions could not hold land, but leased it from the state. On July 24, 1975, just a month after independence, all health and education institutions were nationalized. National health and education services were set up, and all private schools and clinics were abolished. The Catholic Church immediately lost the privileged position it had held in these areas. On February 3, 1976, the government nationalized all rented housing. “Landlords? What do we want landlords for in our country for?”, asked Machel at the rally announcing the measure. Private ownership of houses was not banned. Anyone, Mozambican or foreign, could own a house for their own use - but building private property for rent was forbidden. This changed the face of Mozambican cities – black Mozambicans moved from the suburbs into blocks in the centre of the cities, occupying houses and flats, once owned by Portuguese landlords, and many of which had now been abandoned.
In February 1977, at its 3rd Congress, Frelimo declared that it was now a Marxist-leninist party, dedicated to the building of socialism, based on the “worker-peasant alliance”. The Congress re-elected Machel as President of Frelimo, and thus automatically as President of the Republic.
Frelimo was reorganized into “celulas” (branches) throughout the county. The party was to be a Leninist vanguard, and state institutions, at whatever level, were to be subordinate to the party. In 1978 elections were held. Since this wa a one-party state, there as no organized opposition. Instead candidates were presented by Frelimo at meetings – and were sometimes rejected when people complained of offences ranging from wife-beating and drunkenness to acting as an informer for the PIDE during the colonial government.
Frelimo faced a hostile environment, with the white minority governments of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa on Mozambique’s borders. In March 1976, Machel’s government implemented United Nations sanctions against the Smith government, and closed the borders with Rhodesia. In retaliation, Smith’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) recruited dissatisfied Mozambicans and former Portuguese settlers and helped set up an anti-Frelimo movement. Initially this “Mozambique National Resistance” operated as an auxiliary branch of the Rhodesian armed forces. Frelimo dismissed them as “armed bandits”.
As part of the repressive measures accompanying the new Frelimo government, Machel introduced "reeducation centers" in which petty criminals, political opponents, and alleged anti-social elements such as prostitutes were imprisoned, often without trial. These were later described by foreign observers as "infamous centers of torture and death."[16] It is estimated that 30,000 inmates died in these camps.
Rhodesian Bush War
Frelimo had longstanding links with Zimbabwean nationalist movements. Even during the independence war, guerrillas of ZANLA (Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army), the armed wing of ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), were able to operate from Frelimo-held areas in Tete province into northern Zimbabwe. After the implementation of the UN sanctions against the Rhodesian government, the entire length of the border was now available for nationalist incursions into Zimbabwe.
ZANU leader Robert Mugabe, released from a Rhodesian jail in 1974, made his way into Mozambique the following year. Initially Machel was suspicious of the apparent coup within ZANU that had brought Mugabe to power, and he was effectively rusticated to the central city of Quelimane, where he taught English.[18] Tired of the divisions within Zimbabwean nationalism, Machel sponsored an alternative to both ZANU and its rival ZAPU. This was the Zimbabwean People’s Amy (ZIPA), which took credit for many operations in eastern Zimbabwe, and was enthusiastically promoted by the Mozambican media. But it soon turned out that the dominant force within ZIPA were ZANLA guerrllas who had never abandoned their loyalty to ZANU and to Mugabe.
Machel accepted the reality that the people doing most of the fighting in Zimbabwe were ZANLA. To bring the war to a successful conclusion, Machel embarked on a dual strategy, military and diplomatic. He sent Mozambican units into Zimbabwe to fight alongside ZANU guerrillas, while also insisting that the new British Conservative government, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, should resume its responsibilities as the colonial power.
The British government hosted a conference at Lancaster House, London, aimed at ending the Smith government and drawing up a constitution for an independent Zimbabwe. Mozambicans, notably Machel’s British-trained advisor, Fernando Honwana, were in London to advise the ZANU delegation – and ensured that Mugabe accepted the Lancaster House deal, despite its failure to solve the land question, with a small minority of white commercial farmers still holding most of the fertile land. Machel, with his own intelligence teams on the ground, was certain that ZANU would win any fair election. Indeed, ZANU won 57 of the 80 seats reserved for black Zimbabweans, while the second nationalist movement, ZAPU, won 20. Smith's Rhodesian Front took the 20 seats, which Mugabe had reluctantly agreed to allocate to the whites.
Machel was fully aware of the dangerous ethnic divisions in Zimbabwe, with ZANU drawing most of its support from Shona-speakers, and ZAPU from the minority Ndebele people. On his first state visit to Zimbabwe, in 1980, Machel gave a prescient warning: "To ensure national unity, there must be no Shonas in Zimbabwe, there must be no Ndebeles in Zimbabwe, there must be Zimbabweans. Some people are proud of their tribalism. But we call tribalists reactionary agents of the enemy".
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