Samora Machel - Independence

Independence

Following Portugal's coup of 25 April 1974, the left-wing military regime that replaced the 48-year old Portuguese dictatorship soon decided to grant independence to the five territories administered by Portugal in Africa (Cabo Verde, Overseas Province of Guinea, São Tomé e Príncipe, Overseas Province of Angola and Overseas Province of Mozambique). When Machel's unelected revolutionary government took over, he became independent Mozambique's first unelected president on June 25, 1975. Marcelino dos Santos became vice-president. Uria Simango, his wife Celina and other FRELIMO dissidents such as Adelino Gwambe and Paulo Gumane (former leaders of UDENAMO, one of the National liberation groups in Mozambique) were arrested and later murdered.

In fact, as early as during the transitional government it shared with Portugal, FRELIMO shattered all opposition to its rule. Former militants Lázaro Kavandame, Uria Simango, Paulo Unhai, Kambeu and Father Mateus Gwengere were arrested, under the pretext that they had allied themselves with elements of the white community during the 7 September 1974 upheaval against the transfer of power to FRELIMO (Mateus Gwengere was kidnapped in Kenya, where he had sought refuge, and brought secretly to Mozambique). The same wave of arrests caught Joana Simeão, who, in opposition to FRELIMO's one-party system, had created a political party, GUMO (Grupo Unido de Moçambique – United Group for Mozambique), proposing a model based on pluralism and free market (which FRELIMO would ironically adopt years later, when it eventually renounced Marxism).

They were all accused of "treason" (even though Joana Simeão herself had never been a member of FRELIMO) and subject to a trial in the so-called "revolutionary" and "popular" style, presided by Samora Machel himself. According to the journalists José Pinto de Sá and Nélson Saúte in the Portuguese daily Público, Joana Simeão, the Reverend Uria Simango, Lázaro Nkavandame, Raul Casal Ribeiro, Arcanjo Kambeu, Júlio Nihia, Paulo Gumane and Father Mateus Gwengere were interned in the campo de reeducação (re-education camp) of M’telela, in the Northeastern province of Niassa, when, on 25 June 1977 (the second anniversary of Mozambique's independence), they were told that they would be taken to the capital, Maputo, where President Machel himself would discuss their liberation. At a given moment, the jeep convoy stopped on the dirt road between M'telela and Niassa's capital city, Lichinga. By means of a mechanical excavator, the soldiers had opened a ditch on the road shoulder and had partially filled it with wood. The prisoners were tied, thrown to the ditch and showered with gasoline. Then fire was set to the wood. Frelimo's political prisoners were burnt alive, while the soldiers chanted revolutionary anthems around the ditch. The macabre details of this massacre would only be revealed eighteen years later, in 1995. Frelimo, whose successive governments had up to then consistently refused to release information on the whereabouts of those members of the so-called «reactionary group», resorted to silence.

Domingos Arouca, Pereira Leite (who had nevertheless had some political activity against the colonial regime), Máximo Dias (GUMO's # 2) and another FRELIMO dissident, Miguel Murupa, managed to escape to Portugal. Dr Willem Gerard Pott, a lawyer whose resistance to the colonial regime was well-known, was abhorred for not showing unconditional allegiance to FRELIMO. Following a period of detention during which he was subject to humiliating treatment (such as being displayed half-naked in public), he died in prison.

SNASP (Serviço Nacional de Segurança Popular – National Service for People's Security) and PIC (Polícia de Investigação Criminal – Criminal Investigation Police) began a wave of arrests, using both traditional prisons and the so-called campos de reeducação located randomly in northern and central sparsely populated areas. Even Machel's first wife, whom he had deserted in 1963, was detained, despite her total abstention from political activity. Citizens were under permanent watch by the grupos dinamizadores (movement teams), of control cells set up at neighborhood and workplace level.

Machel quickly put his Marxist principles into practice by calling for the nationalization of Portuguese plantations and property, and proposing the FRELIMO government establish schools and health clinics for the peasants. A land reform was imposed, gathering peasants in aldeias comunais (communal villages) in accordance with the kolkhoz and sovkhoz model. For this purpose, the new Mozambican regime did not hesitate to use the old aldeamentos, or strategic hamlets, in which the Portuguese Army had tried to confine the rural population in order to remove it from FRELIMO's influence in the war-ridden areas of the North (paradoxically, FRELIMO itself then denounced such aldeamentos as "concentration camps"). Deeply contrary to the traditional way of life in the Mozambican countryside, which was characterised by single-family units scattered in the bush, the land reform based on the aldeias comunais concept soon proved to be a monumental fiasco.

As an internationalist, Machel allowed revolutionaries fighting white minority regimes in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa to train and operate within Mozambique. The regimes retaliated by supporting the rebel group called RENAMO. Some sources contend that the group was created by the Rhodesian secrete services, before gaining genuine support later. The Mozambique Civil War would start between FRELIMO and RENAMO. RENAMO would attempt to destroy the infrastructures built by FRELIMO, and to sabotage railway lines and hydroelectric facilities. The Mozambique economy suffered greatly due to war, and began to depend on overseas aid – in particular from the Soviet Union.

Samora Machel was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1975–76).