Samora Machel
Eduardo Mondelane’s successor as leader of Mozambique’s Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or FRELIMO, was a younger, comparatively sparsely educated, but far more radical liberation leader. This was Samora Machel.
Machel has been described as a Castroesque revolutionary, imbued with the iron-hard discipline of the revolution and committed to armed struggle. Like Castro, his favorite color was olive drab, and like Castro too, he ruled with a sense of pre-destiny that precluded any opposition.
The Portuguese fought hard and bitterly to retain their colonies, and the liberation movements in all of their colonies fought no less hard and bitterly for independence. Unlike Angola, however, Mozambique had just one, ubiquitous liberation party, FRELIMO, and Machel was firmly at the head of it.
The war of liberation in Mozambique was hard-fought and bloody, and Machel led it as a composite military and revolutionary struggle. His personal charisma and enormous courage inspired a people to continue the fight against crippling odds, and against a brutal and uncompromising regime. Machel pioneered the concept of a popular revolution, involving an entire population committed to a single objective. This required great leadership skill, on many fronts, and as such Machel remains the quintessential African revolutionary.
Portuguese rule in Africa collapsed after a left-leaning military coup toppled the fascist government in Lisbon. The ‘Carnation Revolution‘ marked the moment when Portugal gave up the fight, and power was handed over in both Mozambique and Angola to whoever was in place to receive it. In Angola, that prompted a lingering civil war, but in Mozambique, there was no question that Samora Machel would be the first independent president of the nation.
While Machel’s hard-left social and economic policies may not have succeeded as well in practice as they did in theory, he retained the affection of his people, and the Mozambican revolution remains to this day of and for the people.
Mozambique, however, did not escape civil war, and in its own bid to survive, white South Africa invested huge economic and military resources into destabilizing Mozambique. The result of this was a somewhat manufactured civil war that crippled Mozambique for two full decades after independence. In an ideological compromise, Machel was forced in the end to deal with the South Africans, but on the eve of the signing of a non-aggression pact, the Nkomati Accord, Machel was killed in an aircraft accident. The date was October 19, 1986.
Peace only came to Mozambique when liberation came to South Africa, but to this day, Samora Machel remains an icon, not only of the Mozambican liberation struggle but of the African revolution as a whole.