Mozambican War of Independence

At issue: Mozambique’s determination to achieve independence from Portugal

Date: September 25, 1964-September 25, 1975

Location: Mozambique (southeast Africa)

Combatants: Mozambican nationalists vs. Portuguese

Principal commanders:Mozambican, Filipe Magaia, Samora Machel (1933–1986); Portuguese, General Kaúlza de Arriaga (1915- ), General Tomas Basto Machado

Result: Mozambican nationalist victory

Background

Located in southeast Africa, Mozambique was one of the oldest European colonies in Africa. Vasco da Gama set foot on Mozambican soil in 1498. He and his successors claimed it and much of the East African coast as Portuguese territory. Because it was an area in which Arabs and Europeans were fiercely attempting to get a foothold, the Portuguese crown ordered the construction of forts and factories. This important activity was entrusted to intrepid captains and governors to ensure Portuguese monopoly over such trading commodities as gold, silver, wax, cloves, and, later, African slaves. Missionaries, mainly Jesuits and Dominicans, were sent to the coast and the interior of the colony to convert both the people and the authorities.

However, Arab and Dutch competition, the adverse climate, the long distance from the metropolis, corruption among the clergy, and the hostile attitude toward the church in Portugal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused a sharp decline in interest in the colony of Mozambique. During this period, Mozambique, just like Angola, simply became a source of slaves for Brazil, for the landholding institution called prazo in the Zambezi Valley, and for the French islands located along Africa’s eastern coast.

Portugal’s renewed interest in its east African territory occurred only during the 1880’s, in the wake of the European scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). Portugal was fearful that Great Britain, France, or Germany might deprive it of its old possessions on the continent. Having been, by and large, quite successful in preserving its empire, Portugal attempted to benefit economically from Mozambique by dispensing monopolistic rights on mineral, forestry, and agricultural resources to concessionaire companies. These companies were invariably owned by foreign entrepreneurs, even though the figurehead might be a Portuguese citizen. The system of concessionaires was abolished by Portuguese premier Antonio Salazar after 1932 and replaced by a system of partnership between the colonial government and private Portuguese companies. Under this policy, nonassimilated Africans were subject to forced labor on behalf of the government, Portuguese settlers’ companies, individual Portuguese, and assimilated Africans. Although the nonassimilated Africans had to pay taxes, their property could be expropriated without compensation by the colonial authorities and the settlers. Even though, for centuries, assimilation of Africans had remained the Portuguese official policy—bestowing on the colonized the rights of Portuguese citizenship—only a handful of Africans (indeed, less than 1 percent of the population) ever achieved that status in Mozambique. Political repression and oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural subjugation were the norm in the colony, especially during the 1950’s and 1960’s when the nationalist movement spread over Africa.

As elsewhere in Africa, Mozambicans attempted to form parties and demanded to have the right to dissent, petition, march in protest, and vote, but to no avail. Africans invited the Portuguese colonial authorities to sit down with them and negotiate a peaceful transition to self-government, as was happening in other parts of Africa. Claiming that Mozambique was a province of Portugal, the Portuguese not only refused to listen but also heightened their oppression. They arrested, imprisoned, and killed many Mozambicans. Using informers and their Policia Internacional para a Defesa do Estado (PIDE), a secret police force, the Portuguese created a true police state designed to maintain colonial law and order.

Action

In 1964, the first organized guerrilla activity was carried out by about 250 men in Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, under the banner of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), an amalgam of three nationalist movements: the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDENAMO), established in southern Rhodesia in 1960; the Mozambique African National Union (MANU), created in Kenya in 1961; and the African National Union of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI), created by exiles in Malawi in 1961. These liberation movements met in Dar es Salaam at the request of presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in 1962. There were other nationalist fronts, such as the Comite Revolucionario de Mocambique (COREMO), founded in Kenya in 1965, but they had virtually no impact on the war against the Portuguese government in the colony. Tanzania offered bases to FRELIMO to wage its war of liberation.

For its president, FRELIMO chose Eduardo Mondlane, a Syracuse professor who had received a doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University. However, in February, 1969, Mondlane was assassinated. After much bickering and acrimony within FRELIMO’s Central Committee, a former auxiliary nurse, Samora Machel, emerged as the successor to Mondlane as well as the new commander of the guerrilla war (the first commander, Filipe Magaia, had also been murdered under suspicious circumstances). The Soviet Union, China, and their allies provided massive financial, technical, training, and military assistance to the rebels, forcing the Portuguese to station some 60,000 troops in the colony. The more FRELIMO advanced and galvanized the minds of the Mozambicans, the more brutal the Portuguese reaction became, including massacres of innocent civilians (as happened in Wiriyamu, Tete), the accelerated use of the napalm bomb, the creation of hamlets to protect and control the population, the burning of homes and farms, and mutilations of suspects. Aided by its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the United States, Portugal vowed during the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s never to give up its “province” of Mozambique.

By 1970, FRELIMO forces had reached the Tete and Manica e Sofala districts, forcing the Portuguese to constantly reexamine their tactics and strategies. In an effort to wipe out the guerrilla offensive, the Portuguese government entrusted total control of the colonial army to Brigadier General Kaúlza de Arriaga during 1970–1973. Arriaga named his counterinsurgency plan Operation Gordian Knot. His strategy was to win the war on the battlefield by reinforcing the bombing of the enemy’s strategic areas and at the same time attempting to win the hearts of the Mozambicans. Treating the wounded with compassion, in the same hospitals as the Portuguese military, was one such approach. Protecting the civilians by creating “human walls” made of concrete houses and building schools, post offices, markets, technical colleges, and paved roads was another. Arriaga visited General William Westmoreland in Washington, D.C., in the hope of learning the lessons of the Vietnam War. As part of his overall strategy, Arriaga also attempted to block river routes and prevent infiltration of guerrillas, especially from Tanzania.

The operation was put in motion with such fanfare that the nationalists in Mozambique and Angola grew apprehensive. However, hampered by factors such as heavy rains, lack of resources, vast distances, low morale among the Portuguese troops, and FRELIMO’s determination to fight on, Operation Gordian Knot turned out to be such a failure that Kaúlza was replaced by General Tomas Basto Machado in August, 1973. Meanwhile, the war continued to rage.

Unexpectedly, on April 25, 1974, young officers of the armed forces, calling themselves the Movimento das Forcas Armadas, overthrew the government of Premier Marcello Caetano in Lisbon. In September, 1974, the new rulers signed an agreement in Lusaka that would hand over power in Mozambique to FRELIMO on September 25, 1975.

Aftermath

On September 25, 1975, Mozambique became the independent People’s Republic of Mozambique, with Machel, returning triumphantly from Dar es Salaam, as the first nonelected president. The new government proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist and, by 1977, had nationalized virtually every institution and resource in the country. FRELIMO also introduced a policy of eliminating all elements it called the “reactionary bourgeoisie.” Unfortunately, FRELIMO’s lack of experience, misplaced “revolutionary” zeal against the governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, mismanagement of the economy, repression, dogmatism, utter contempt for the Catholic Church, and the institution of forced collective villages resulted in widespread discontent in the country. The white-controlled regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa struck back with aerial bombardments of parts of Mozambique, targeted at guerrillas. These factors led to the emergence of the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) in 1977 and the bloody internal conflict that ended only in 1992. By then, most of the country’s infrastructure had been almost completely destroyed.

Bibliography

Azevedo, Mario. Historical Dictionary of Mozambique. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Finnegan, William. A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Minter, William. Apartheid’s Contras. London: Zed Books, 1994.

Newitt, Malyn. A History of Mozambique. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.