National Liberation Groups in Mozambique - 1950s

1950s

By the mid 1950s clandestine political movements had formed. Above ground intellectual nationalism continued: African intellectuals studying at Portuguese universities established the Movimento Anti-Colonista (MAC) as an outgrowth of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império. A few of the African students in Portugal, including the Angolan Mário de Andrade and the Mozambican Marcelino dos Santos, left Portugal and settled in Paris, where, Chilcote says, they "associated with French African advocates of négritude and others who sought an African culture, traditional in tone but modern and sophisticated in content." In South Africa, Mozambican secondary-school students who had been sent there to study formed an offshoot of the Centro Associativo dos Negros de Moçambique called the Núcleo dos Estudantes Africanos Secundários de Moçambique (NESAM). Its tiny membership included several who would go on to become leaders in the liberation movement, including future FRELIMO president, Eduardo Mondlane.

At the second All-African Peoples' Conference, in Tunis, 1960, the MAC was superseded by the Frente Revolucionária Africana para a Indêpencia das Colônais Portuguesas (FRAIN).

In the 1950s and 1960s, government suppression of radicalism in Mozambique was severe enough that the important national liberation groups all had to carry on their existences outside the country. The first organisation with full intentions toward national liberation was founded by Mozambican exiles in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (now Malawi), on October 2, 1960, and called the União Democrática Nacional de Moçambique (UDENAMO). Its founding leader was Adelino Gwambe. Tanganyikan (now Tanzanian) president Julius Nyerere was sympathetic to the nationalists, and in April 1961 UDENAMO moved its headquarters to Tanganyika's capital, Dar es Salaam. Its members at various times included:

• Reverend Uria Simango (President), a Protestant pastor from the Beira region.
• J. M. Mabunde
• Paulo Jose Gumane