Samora Machel

President of the People’s Republic of Mozambique (1975-1986)

• Born: September 29, 1933
• Birthplace: Chilembene, Mozambique
• Died: October 19, 1986
• Place of death: Mbuzini, near Komatipoort, Lebombo Mountains, South Africa

Machel is mostly remembered for his able leadership as commander of the guerrilla army of the Mozambique Liberation Front, which fought against the stronger Portuguese army from 1964 to 1974. He was also the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique, from 1975 to his death in 1986.

Early Life

Samora Machel (sah-MOW-rah mah-SHEHL) was born of peasant parents who owned land in the Limpopo River Valley. His family was known and quite respected in the district, as some of its members had participated in the resistance against the Portuguese at the turn of the century. Despite the fact that Machel’s family was Protestant, his father sent him to study at a Roman Catholic mission, where he was baptized a Catholic. Following completion of his four years of primary school, he decided to work in Lourenço Marques (modern Maputo) and attend classes at a nurses’ training school, while at the same time pursuing private secondary school courses, all at his own expense.

The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was created in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1962, under the leadership of Eduardo C. Mondlane, a scholar educated in the United States. Revolutionary change was at the time sweeping through Africa, and Machel, a nurse who was then serving under a female Portuguese doctor at Lourenço Marques, decided to abandon his career and join FRELIMO. He was eventually made a trainer of new military recruits and commander of the campaigns against the Portuguese in the Niassa Province. In this capacity, he was in charge of the Center of Political and Military Training at Nachingwea, earning the respect of his revolutionary colleagues. Soon, while Mondlane essentially became the political leader of FRELIMO, and Marcelino dos Santos (member of the Central Committee) the socialist ideologue, Machel was clearly the promising military tactician.

Machel assumed the position of secretary of the Department of Defense of FRELIMO, thus qualifying to be a member of the Central Committee. He soon became the number-one man in command of the Forcas Populares de Libertacao de Moçambique (Popular Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique). Not only did Machel lead the war of liberation in the north of Mozambique but also he established people’s committees in the growing liberated zones in an effort to educate the people, provide them with the rudiments of health, improve the peasants’ plight, and prepare them for eventual independence.

Life’s Work

During the 1967-1970 period, now in his thirties, Machel became a seasoned military leader and succeeded, region after region, in slowly driving the well-equipped Portuguese army as far down as Tete Province by 1974. His determination and sound military judgment continued to earn for him the respect of all guerrilla leaders and fighters. At the same time, he was developing in his mind and formulating publicly his social philosophy, which was in part based on his Marxist training in Algeria and his experience at the hands of the Portuguese colonialists. He embraced a Marxist-Leninist philosophy in an attempt to see the elimination of the “petty” bourgeoisie that, in his view, exploited the African masses along with the Portuguese, and to advance the cause of the peasants and the workers. The assassination of Mondlane in February, 1969, preceded and followed by the most serious leadership crisis FRELIMO ever experienced, emerged as an opportunity for him to become both FRELIMO’s highest military commander and its political leader. By 1969, his radical philosophy, supported by Marxist ideologue Marcelino dos Santos, had triumphed. Following the assassination of Mondlane, Machel and dos Santos, instead of letting moderate Urias Simango the vice president of FRELIMO succeed to the Front’s presidency, conspired and created instead a triumvirate dominated by Machel. After the ouster of many party members and the defection of others to the Portuguese (Simango eventually followed this path), in May, 1970, the Central Committee appointed Machel president of FRELIMO.

Meanwhile, despite its internal problems, FRELIMO was still making progress on the war front. Unexpectedly, on April 24, 1974, the Portuguese army, tired of an irrational dictatorship at home and the protracted fighting in three colonies (Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau), overthrew its own government in Lisbon and initiated independence negotiations with the liberation movements. As a result of the formal talks held in Lusaka, Zambia, a transitional government was installed to lead the colony to full independence, scheduled for June 25, 1975. Joaquim Chissano, a member of the Central Committee, assumed the position of prime minister of the transitional government, while Machel remained in Tanzania, assured that the latter would not upstage him. In June, 1975, Machel was officially appointed president of Mozambique by FRELIMO’s Central Committee. Almost immediately, the new president embarked on fully implementing his socialist program. By the end of 1977, following FRELIMO’s III Congress (February 3-7, 1977), education, health, justice, property, and major business establishments had been nationalized. FRELIMO was transformed into a vanguard party for the workers and the peasants, following a Marxist-Leninist philosophy; membership requirements were tightened and many old members were purged only those embracing the socialist ideology who exhibited accepted moral behavior could apply for membership, and collective villages, farms, and people’s shops were established throughout the country. The immediacy of the radical changes caused a stir in the country and worsened the fragile political and economic situation.

In April, 1983, Machel was reelected president of the republic and continued to hold his position as president of the party and commander in chief of the Popular Forces. Of medium height, bearded, and fearing no one, Machel became a charismatic leader and accumulated considerable personal power a move away from previous collective leadership. No one could question his authority, and those few who did ended up in jail or in reeducation camps, or lost their lives. He praised the Soviet Union and castigated the West as a group of imperialist racists and selfish capitalist nations. He signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union in 1977. He also closed the Mozambique border to goods from the white regime in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and provided bases to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (a move that cost the country $550 million between 1976 and 1980). He stepped up his rhetoric against the apartheid regime and spearheaded the creation of the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference, established in 1980 by nine frontline states to break South Africa’s hegemony in the subcontinent.

Machel’s problems at home, however, were formidable. Immediately after he assumed power, several reactionary elements opposed the regime. At the same time, the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) emerged in Southern Rhodesia, supported by the white regime and by South Africa after Zimbabwe’s independence in April, 1980. RENAMO systematically aimed at paralyzing the country by destroying the infrastructure and eliminating FRELIMO supporters to force the government to abandon its Marxist-Leninist socialism and accept the concept of free elections, free enterprise, and the principle of a multiparty state.

Unfortunately, RENAMO was actively assisted by South Africa, partly because Machel had allowed the African National Congress to have bases in southern Mozambique. The West, particularly the United States, refused to provide any financial assistance to Mozambique as long as the country was strengthening its ties with the Soviet Union, while blasting the “imperialist capitalist West.” The socialist steps taken at home were failing, as European technicians, managers, farmers, and professionals began a massive exodus out of the country, frightened by the new rhetoric and the nationalization policies. By 1983, some 200,000 Portuguese had left the country. The economy, worsened by RENAMO’s attacks and by droughts and floodings in the south, was in shambles, plagued by inflation, unemployment, and a drop in agricultural and industrial productivity by almost 50 percent in some sectors.

The deteriorating national situation compelled the president to take several drastic measures. He began a diplomatic offensive to garner economic and military support from the West through his visits to Portugal, France, Great Britain, and Belgium in 1983, while toning down his rhetoric against the United States. He invited foreign entrepreneurs and investors to start businesses in the country, returned some of the nationalized property to individuals, put up for sale some of the people’s shops and began reconciliation with the churches to which he had shown only contempt. The most dramatic move of his new pragmatism was the signing of the Nkomati Accord with South Africa on March 16, 1984. In a pompous ceremony at which Machel appeared in his field marshal’s outfit, the president of Mozambique and Pieter Botha, then prime minister of South Africa, pledged not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. While South Africa would stop supporting RENAMO, Mozambique would curtail the ANC’s activities. Thus, by October, 1984, Mozambique had forced the departure of close to one thousand ANC members from the country, allowing only ten staff members to remain in Maputo. South Africa, however, never kept its part of the pact.

In addition, to end corruption and inefficiency, the new Machel shuffled and reshuffled his cabinet, as he did in April, 1986, when he created the position of prime minister (given to Mario Da Graca Machungo) for him to concentrate on the military situation, and appointed four members of the Politburo to supervise the activities of government ministers.

Frustrated by South Africa’s continued assistance to RENAMO, Machel requested military assistance from Prime Minister Robert Mugabe at a Harare summit attended by the two leaders and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. In October, 1986, Machel visited President Hastings Banda in an attempt to persuade him not to allow free access to RENAMO through Malawi. Yet Machel received only vague promises from Banda. Despite the involvement of Zimbabwean and, later, Tanzanian troops in the Mozambique civil war, RENAMO continued to devastate the country, and the economy did not improve. The West promised assistance, but it was not forthcoming in significant amounts, while the Soviet Union continued its supply of military hardware but not of food and funds. As is common when things are in disarray in developing countries, rumors of assassination plots against the president spread, and Machel became, indeed, a besieged man. On October 19, 1986, returning from a minisummit in Zambia where a new strategy against RENAMO was plotted, Machel’s Tupolev-134 crashed against the Libombo Mountains in South African territory, only three miles from Namaacha, Mozambique, as apparently the Soviet pilots were unable to reach Maputo airport. South Africa was accused of having engineered the crash, although an international board of inquiry, of which Mozambique was a participant in the early stages, blamed pilot error for the tragic incident. Two weeks later, Joaquim Chissano, the minister for foreign affairs, was appointed president of Mozambique by the Central Committee.

Significance

Samora Machel was doubtless a self-made man. In spite of the little formal education he had, he was able to rise to the ranks of the modern military and statesmen. Seasoned by his own experience and propelled by an unswerving will, the former nurse was able to defy any personal shortcomings resulting from five hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule and became one of the most important revolutionaries of the developing world. As a guerrilla leader, he successfully waged a war that drove the Portuguese out of Mozambique. As a statesman, however, Machel became too dogmatic and too impatient with the pace of change and with those who served under him. The atmosphere of his cabinet meetings, for example, is only now being discussed openly. It is reported that Machel often humiliated ministers, was prone to sudden outbursts of anger, and displayed a disregard for protocol that sometimes bordered on the insane. His hasty socialist policies, barely understood by the people of Mozambique and those who were supposed to implement them, went unheaded. Ultimately, his economic policies hurt more than helped the country.

His ascension to power was premature, as FRELIMO and most observers expected a long, protracted war against the Portuguese. The collapse of the Portuguese colonial state in 1974 surprised everyone, including Machel, who had not been prepared to lead a new country. As the years passed, however, the president became a pragmatist of sorts, but this pragmatism was forced on him by the country’s miserable state and the questionable future of his own leadership. Tragic is the fact that Machel was unable to see the result of his change of diplomatic emphasis and the country’s new economic direction. If Machel had some major victories as a statesman, however, the accelerated improvements in education and literacy in the country top the list, followed by his implementation of a nonracial policy as president, in spite of the fact that earlier, as a radical Marxist on the Central Committee, Machel sounded antiwhite and antimestizo.

On the other hand, among his major failures stand the Nkomati Accord, which was covertly opposed by Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth David Kaunda of Zambia. Evidently, Machel and his advisers had failed to see that the pact was a South African trap. The fact that Machel made the signing of the pact a momentous occasion, with himself standing in colorful uniform side by side with the perpetuator of the apartheid regime, made the mistake even more regrettable to most observers and analysts.

Regardless of his mistakes, one thing seems to be clear about Machel: He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the peasants and the workers. Unfortunately, the concern was couched either in the wrong developmental philosophy or in a sound philosophy that adopted the wrong strategies. His premature death prevented him from completing the implementation of his ideals, leaving the question of the outcome of his government unanswered. Overall, by 1986, Machel had fewer victories to celebrate. Whether his policies and tactics as president of Mozambique will be repudiated by his successors remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Azevedo, Mario. “A Sober Commitment to Liberation? Mozambique and South Africa.” African Affairs 79, no. 317 (1980): 567-584. The article highlights the dilemmas that Machel encountered in his relations with South Africa in the spheres of trade, railways, harbors, tourism, technical assistance, and employment of Mozambicans, all of which influenced his pragmatism.

Cabrita, João M. Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. A history of the early days of the Mozambique Liberation Front.

Chilcote, Ronald H. Portuguese Africa. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. A general work on the former Portuguese colonies that also looks objectively at the liberation leaders.

Duffy, James. Portugal in Africa. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962. One of the best succinct studies of the Portuguese colonial system. Duffy’s sympathy goes to the nationalist movement; he could not foresee how the new leaders would fare as statesmen.

Hanlon, Joseph. Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. London: Zed Press, 1984. This is probably the best account of the successes and failures of FRELIMO’s policies in Mozambique and the evolution of Marxist thinking within the Front.

Isaacman, Allen, and Barbara Isaacman. Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900-1982. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983. An excellent work on the history of Mozambique that enlightens any reader on the conditions that brought about the nationalist movement in Mozambique.

Mondlane, Eduardo. The Struggle for Mozambique. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. One of the best sources on the development of the nationalist movement in Mozambique, imbued with the personal insights of the first president of FRELIMO.

Serapiao, Luis, and Mohamed El-Khawas. Mozambique in the Twentieth Century: From Colonialism to Independence. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979. Although reviews of the book have been mixed, Serapiao and El-Khawas provide insightful information about FRELIMO and Machel’s leadership style. One of the authors, however, a Mozambican, does not hide his disapproval of Machel’s leadership and FRELIMO’s policies in Mozambique.

“Who Killed Samora Machel?” New African 417 (April, 2003): 16. Examines the plane crash in which Machel and thirty-four others died.