Samora Machel

Like the late Mondlane, Machel identified himself with Marxism–Leninism, and under his leadership these positions became central to FRELIMO, which evolved from a broad front into a more Marxist party.

In 2007, however, Jacinto Veloso, one of Machel's most unconditional supporters within Frelimo, had sustained in his memoirs that Machel's death was due to a conspiracy between the South African and the Soviet secret services, both of which had reasons to get rid of him. According to Veloso, the Soviet ambassador once asked the President for an audience to convey the USSR's concern about Mozambique's apparent "sliding away" towards the West, to which Machel supposedly replied "Vai à merda!" (Go to hell!). Having then commanded the interpreter to translate, he left the room. Convinced that Machel had irrevocably moved away from their orbit, the Soviets allegedly did not hesitate to sacrifice the pilot and the whole crew of their own plane.

A memorial at the Mbuzini crash site was inaugurated on January 19, 1999, by Nelson Mandela and his wife Graça, and by President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique. Now the monument is made professional and the memorial service is held on October 19 each year. Designed by Mozambican architect José Forjaz, at a cost to the South African government of 1.5 million Rand (US$300,000), the monument comprises 35 steel tubes symbolising the number of lives lost in the air crash. At least eight foreigners were killed there, including the four Soviet crew members, Machel's two Cuban doctors and the Zambian and Zairean ambassadors to Mozambique.

Helped by weapons airdropped by the South African Defence Force (SADF), Renamo spread its operations across the entire country with the exception of the far north. Frelimo reacted with a series of authoritarian measures, some of which deeply shocked its supporters inside and outside the country. The death penalty, already in force for serious security offences, was now extended to a range of economic crimes. In addition, corporal punishment was imposed as a penalty for a range of offences. Both laws fell into disuse within a year or so but had done severe damage to Frelimo's image. It is widely believed that, at about this time, former Frelimo officials regarded as “traitors” were executed, including Simango and his wife Celina. To this day, Frelimo has published nothing about the circumstances of the execution, though in the Mozambican parliament, in 1995, former security minister Sergio Vieira publicly confirmed “the traitors were executed”. Renamo supporters published colourful versions claiming that the executions happened in 1977, but a date of 1983 seems more likely. In either case, this violated a promise which Machel gave to the Tanzanian and Zambian Presidents, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda in 1975.

On 19 October 1986, Machel attended a summit in Mbala, Zambia, called to put pressure on Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, over his support for the Angolan opposition movement UNITA. The strategy of the Front Line States was to move against Mobutu and Banda in an attempt to end their support for UNITA and Renamo, who they regarded as South African surrogates. Although the Zambian authorities invited Machel to stay in Mbala overnight, he insisted on returning to Maputo. He had a meeting scheduled for the following morning at which he intended to reshuffle the leadership of the armed forces. Machel thus overrode the instruction from the Security Ministry that the President should not travel at night – with fatal consequences. The plane never reached Maputo. That night it crashed into a hillside at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa. Machel and 33 others died. Nine people sitting at the back of the plane survived.

But the deteriorating military and economic situation drove Frelimo to give the apartheid government what it said it wanted – a non-aggression pact. On March 16, 1984, on a railway carriage in the non-man's land between South Africa and Mozambique, Machel and South African President P. W. Botha signed the Nkomati Accord on Non-Aggression and Good Neighbourliness. The deal expressed in the agreement was extremely simple – South Africa would drop its support for Renamo in exchange for Mozambique dropping support for the ANC.

At the Frelimo Fourth Congress, in April 1983, Frelimo reaffirmed its commitment to Marxism, but admitted economic mistakes, particularly in agriculture. Machel was re-elected President of Frelimo, and once again warmly embraced Oliver Tambo.

During the 1980s, the South African government took an increasingly hostile attitude to the Front Line States. Mozambique, in particular, was accused of harbouring military bases of the African National Congress. On June 30, 1981, South African commandos attacked three houses in the southern city of Matola, killing 12 ANC members as well as a Portuguese electrician. While those killed were members of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK - Spear of the Nation), the houses were not a guerrilla base, as visiting diplomats and journalists soon confirmed. A fortnight later, Machel threw down the gauntlet. At a rally in Maputo's independence square, he embraced ANC leader Oliver Tambo and declared "They want to come here and commit murder. So we say: Let them come! Let all the racists come!... Let the South Africans come, but let them be clear that the war will end in Pretoria!"

Machel was fully aware of the dangerous ethnic divisions in Zimbabwe, with ZANU drawing most of its support from the Shona majority, and ZAPU from the minority Ndebele people. On his first state visit to Zimbabwe, in 1980, Machel gave a 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".

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 was a one-party state, there was 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.

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 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”.

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. On June 25, 1975, Machel proclaimed "the total and complete independence of Mozambique and its constitution into the People's Republic of Mozambique". This, he 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 annihilate the system of exploitation of man by man".

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.

Machel's second wife, Graça Simbine, joined Frelimo in 1973 after graduating in modern languages from Lisbon University. She worked as a teacher, first in Frelimo-held areas in Cabo Delgado province, and then at the Frelimo school in Tanzania. She became Minister for Education and Culture in newly independent Mozambique. She and Machel were married three months after Independence, in September 1975. In April 1976 a daughter, Josina, was born, and in December 1978 a son, Malengane. At Independence Machel's five older children joined Josina Machel's son Samito in the Presidential household. In 1998, twelve years after Samora Machel's death, Graça Machel married Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa, thus becoming the only woman to have been First Lady of two countries.

Machel was not married to either Tchaiakomo or Buque. When he joined Frelimo in 1963 it was widely believed that the war for independence would last years, if not decades, and that the chances of Frelimo cadres being reunited with their families in Mozambique were vanishingly small. Josina Abiatar Muthemba, who had been active in the anti-colonial student organisation NESAM, arrived in Tanzania in 1965, on her second attempt to flee Mozambique. In Tanzania she worked first as an assistant to Janet Mondlane, Eduardo Mondlane's wife and director of the Mozambique Institute. She became one of the earliest recruits to the Women's Detachment of the guerrilla army, and campaigned vigorously for women's full inclusion within all aspects of the liberation struggle. She and Machel were married at Tunduru in southern Tanzania in May 1969. In November their only son Samora, known as Samito, was born. Josina returned to work as head of Social Affairs, with special responsibility for the welfare of war orphans, and for the health and education of all children in the war zones of northern Mozambique. But she felt increasingly unwell. In 1970 she travelled to the Soviet Union to seek a diagnosis for her chronic ill-health, but to no avail. She was probably suffering from leukaemia, although pancreatic cancer is another possibility. She died on April 7, 1971, aged twenty-five. Machel was devastated.

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.

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”. 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.

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.

Machel started to study nursing in the capital city of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), beginning in 1954. In the 1950s, 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.

In the late 1950s, when Machel was working as a nurse on Inhaca Island, he met a local girl, Sorita Tchaiakomo, and set up house with her. Their first child, Joscelina, was born on Inhaca in 1958. Idelson (1959) and Olívia (1961) were both born after the family returned to the mainland, where they lived in Mafalala, a suburb of Lourenço Marques. Machel returned to the Miguel Bombarda Hospital and was accepted onto a course of further training. At the hospital he began a relationship with another nurse, Irene Buque. She gave birth to their daughter Ornila in February 1963, three weeks before Machel left Mozambique to join Frelimo. N’tewane, Tchaiakomo's fourth child with Machel, was born that September, six months after Machel had left the country. Later, Machel expressed remorse for what he had come to see as bad behaviour towards Sorita and Irene.

Machel was born in the village of Madragoa (today's Chilembene), Gaza Province, Mozambique, to a family of farmers. His grandfather had been an active collaborator of Gungunhana. Under Portuguese rule, his father, like most Black Mozambicans, was classified by the demeaning term "indígena" (native). He was forced to accept lower prices for his crops than White farmers; compelled to grow labour-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.

Samora Machel was born on September 29, 1933 in Madragoa, Mozambique as Samora Moisés Machel.