Samora Machel - Machel's Change of Attitude Towards The Portuguese

Machel's Change of Attitude Towards The Portuguese

It is widely admitted that one of the main reasons for the economic and financial collapse of post-independence Mozambique was the hasty departure of the majority of about 200 000 Portuguese residing in the country on the eve of the Portuguese revolution, which had taken place on 25 April 1974, and that such exodus was caused by a sudden change of attitude by Samora Machel.

Indeed, the transitional government that ruled the country from the cease-fire agreement (signed in Lusaka on 7 September 1974) to independence (set for 25 June of the following year) acted in a very conciliatory fashion. Prime-Minister Joaquim Chissano (who would become President of the Republic after Machel's death twelve years later) managed to convince the majority of the white population that only those bearing heavy responsibility for the darkest pages of the colonial era should fear FRELIMO's rule.

However, one month before independence, i.e., in mid-May 1975, Samora Machel crossed over into Mozambique from Tanzania, in the far North, and started a tour heading for the capital city of Lourenço Marques, in the far South, where he would arrive on the eve of Independence Day. Along this tour, he galvanised the masses with bitter speeches, recalling incessantly the most abhorrent and humiliating aspects of colonialism from the standpoint of colonised Mozambicans. Unease gradually got the upper hand in the Portuguese community, many of whose members then decided to rebuild their lives elsewhere.

Several explanations have been proposed for this change of attitude. In his memoirs, Dr António de Almeida Santos, a renowned lawyer from Lourenço Marques who, after the fall of Caetano's regime, became Minister for the Coordination of Portuguese-Administered Territories and who was a close friend of Machel's, sustains that FRELIMO's President was strongly affected by two outbursts of violence involving the white population. The first of such episodes was caused by an upheaval in the capital city on 7 September 1974, with the seizing of offices and transmitters of the Rádio Clube de Moçambique, in protest against the Lusaka Agreement signed by the Portuguese Provisional Government and FRELIMO, which provided for the handover of power exclusively to the nationalist movement. This upheaval was led by FICO (Frente Integracionista de Continuidade Ocidental – Integrationist Front for Western Continuity), a movement mostly composed by whites with which FRELIMO dissidents and other members of the black community unwilling to accept a one-party system had allied themselves. FRELIMO supporters retaliated with bloody riots in the black shantytowns surrounding the city and, during several days, thousands of people, mostly Portuguese, were barbarously slaughtered, along with blacks who had allegedly remained loyal to their employers.The second episode of violence happened a few weeks later, on 21 October 1974, when a quarrel between Portuguese commandos and FRELIMO guerrillas in downtown Lourenço Marques gave rise to another wave of bloody riots in the black shantytown areas, with the murder of dozens of whites. According to Almeida Santos, Machel possibly became convinced that the presence of a numerous Portuguese community in Mozambique would always be a source of instability and a potential threat to FRELIMO's rule. To that was allegedly added pressure from the Soviet Union, to which FRELIMO had contracted a heavy debt, namely of a political nature, and which desired to be rid of the Portuguese in order to better exercise its influence at all levels.