Mozambique's Samora Machel

A Life Cut Short

Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780821447208
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

The precipitous rise and controversial fall of a formidable African leader.

Samora Machel (1933–1986), the son of small-town farmers, led his people through a war against their Portuguese colonists and became the first president of the People's Republic of Mozambique.

Machel's military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed people of Southern Africa. In 1986, during the country's civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain.

Allen and Barbara Isaacman lived through many of these changes in Mozambique and bring personal recollections together with archival research and interviews with others who knew Machel or participated in events of the revolutionary or post-revolutionary years.

1

Living Colonialism

The Making of an Insurgent

Samora Moises Machel was born on September 29, 1933, in the village of Chilembene in Gaza Province, located in the southern part of Mozambique. The son of Mandande Moisés Machel and Guguiye Thema Dzimba, he entered the world as a colonial subject defined by a great number of legal and social restrictions. In Mozambique’s racial geography, there were schools he could not attend, hospitals where he could not be admitted, places he could not live, and occupations he could not pursue. Indeed, forces beyond his control regulated much of his early life.

Racism, economic exploitation, and limited possibilities helped shape the formative years of Samora and his age-mates. Most Africans suffered silently, trying to find ways of coping with a harsh world in which survival was a challenge. A handful, like Samora, defied the colonial order. This youthful defiance earned him a reputation as a rebel. As he matured, Samora began to dream of an entirely different world, finding ways to express his opposition to colonial policies and colonialism itself.

Southern Mozambique: The Colonial Context

Although Portugal established a nominal presence along the coast of Mozambique in the late fifteenth century, Lisbon was only able to impose a semblance of control over the southern hinterland in 1895 when its army defeated the Gaza ruler Ngungunyane. Samora’s grandfather, Malengani, was a well-known warrior who was seriously wounded fighting alongside Ngungunyane. Tales of Malengani’s battle-scarred body and heroism circulated throughout southern Mozambique, and the personal accounts passed down to Samora made him proud of his family’s anticolonial past and became part of his political education.

During the early twentieth century the colonial army, consisting largely of African recruits, was with its superior firepower able to overrun other resisting African polities, allowing Lisbon to impose a highly structured authoritarian regime throughout most of the country. Ranked below the colony’s governor general were the provincial or district governors (usually military officers), district administrators, and their local counterparts, chefes de posto. Each district was divided into European areas, enjoying limited self-government, and non-European ones where residents had few basic human rights. Poorly educated and poorly trained, colonial administrators often ruled as petty tyrants with absolute power to accuse, apprehend, try, and punish their subjects.

The colonial regime similarly depended on African subordinates. Local chiefs (regulos), exempt from taxation and forced labor (chibalo), became state functionaries empowered to enforce colonial policies, settle minor disputes, and maintain public order. African police (sipaios), often recruited from the ranks of colonial soldiers and families of loyalist chiefs, were stationed at every administrative post, where they collected taxes, recruited labor, transmitted the orders of the administrator, and intimidated the local population. Separate legal systems governed “civilized” Europeans and “uncivilized” Africans (indigenas), whose lives were profoundly shaped by harsh labor and tax codes and the particular personality and practices of the local administrator.

A miniscule number of educated Africans who adopted a veneer of Portuguese culture were granted assimilado status by the state. These were a small number of men and even fewer women of African descent who were gainfully employed, Christian, spoke and wrote Portuguese, and no longer practiced “native customs.” Under the authoritarian Salazar regime (1932–68), however, the rights of citizenship meant very little, even for whites. As Raul Honwana emphasizes, noted assimilados were exempted from the forced labor system and offered “a way of seeking a less degrading life for our children,” but little else.¹ In 1950, the 4,380 assimilados comprised less than one tenth of 1 percent of the estimated 5.65 million Africans.² Although the assimilado community expanded with the colonial reforms around 1960, its numbers remained extremely small.

Because Portugal’s own economy was underdeveloped and effectively bankrupt, it lacked the capital to make Mozambique profitable.³ The only resource readily available for exploitation was the colony’s African population. Lisbon turned them into commodities through implementation of the Native Labor Code, which subjected all unemployed African males to forced labor.⁴ Whenever the state needed workers to construct roads, lay railroad tracks, install telegraph lines, or dig irrigation ditches, local administrators rounded up peasants. On occasion, administrators provided chibalo laborers to private Portuguese enterprises. The minimal compensation received by workers was rarely enough even to pay local taxes, and their withdrawal from household labor led to food shortages and other suffering. Although women were legally exempt from chibalo, many were not only forced to work but also made to submit sexually to Portuguese and African overseers.⁵

Lisbon also made the colony profitable by renting African workers to labor-starved South African gold mines and, to a much lesser extent, to white farmers and industrialists in neighboring Southern Rhodesia. Beginning in 1897, the Rand National Labour Association, subsequently renamed the Witwatersrand National Labour Association, paid the government a fee for each Mozambican worker. It also set up a deferred payment system under which workers received half their wages when they returned home and Lisbon was paid an equivalent amount in gold.⁶ By 1910, approximately eighty thousand Mozambicans—representing from 30 to 50 percent of the able-bodied male population in some districts of Southern Mozambique—were working in the gold mines.⁷

Samora’s father, Mandande, and another uncle, Toqouisso Gabriel Machel, like the vast majority of Mozambicans who labored in the South African gold mines, came from Gaza Province.⁸ To earn money for his taxes, plows, and other commodities, Mandande spent most of the years between 1912 and 1926 apart from his family.

In 1926, a military coup brought down the Lisbon government. Four years later, António Salazar came to power, ruling Portugal and its colonies for over forty years.⁹ Salazar premised his colonial strategy on two broad propositions—that the colonies must remain a permanent part of Portugal to advance its international standing and strengthen its economy, and that Portugal’s role was to “civilize” the Africans. To bolster the metropolitan economy, Mozambique was expected “to produce the raw material and sell it to the Mother Country in exchange for manufactured goods,” which necessarily required the continued exploitation of cheap African labor.¹⁰ The Salazar regime paid only lip service to its civilizing mission: in 1941 it made the Catholic Church responsible for educating Africans up to the third-grade level, which clearly was insufficient to lead the African from “a savage to a civilized life.”¹¹ The only exceptions were the small number of assimilado children who were allowed to attend European schools.

Medical treatment was also primarily reserved for the settler community in the urban centers. Health facilities in rural areas remained virtually nonexistent. Only a handful of doctors worked in the countryside and the state allocated limited funds for rural health services. Africans’ poor diets and the lack of medical facilities and sanitation systems made them highly susceptible to infections and parasitic diseases, such as cholera and smallpox, and diseases caused by malnutrition, such as kwashiorkor.

Life under Colonial Rule

It was into this harsh, uncertain, and often violent world that Samora was born. His first name came from a maternal uncle, Samora Mukhavele, who fought in the Portuguese army during World War I, battling German forces in northern Mozambique, and came back with tales of far-off insurrections there. Samora also reveled in the exploits of his grandfather Malengani and listened intently as his father, mother, and especially his aunt Malungwanya Machel—who was remembered as a “living library”—described in detail the exploits of family members dating back nine generations.¹² Elders also recall that as a boy Samora often rested under a large tree that was a symbol of Gaza resistance, musing on the past.¹³ History was clearly one of his early passions.

Singing was another. Samora was brought up in a culture in which music was an integral part of daily life. People sang when they were happy and when they were sad. They sang at births and deaths and other critical moments in the life cycle. They sang while working in the fields and herding cattle. Samora was no exception.

Thanks to the labors and sacrifices of his parents, Samora was born into a relatively prosperous family. Beginning in 1912, his father, like thousands of other young Mozambicans, avoided chibalo by trekking long distances to the South African mines. Dangerous conditions meant that many Mozambicans suffered from rockslides, industrial accidents, contagious diseases, and even death—conditions that adversely impacted the Machel family in many ways. When Samora’s eldest brother died in the mines, the mining company sent forty pounds as compensation. Other relatives came home without limbs, blind, or deathly sick from tuberculosis or pleurisy—for which they rarely received even token compensation.¹⁴ Nevertheless, men kept going back and some rural families, including Samora’s, whose father worked there for nine eighteen-month periods, became relatively affluent as a result.¹⁵

Samora never forgot their suffering. Half a century later he spoke of his pain and anger with Allen and António Alves Gomes as they walked along the white sands of Wimbe Beach in Pemba, taking umbrage with those who criticized him for signing the unpopular Nkomati Accord with the apartheid regime. “I have spent my life fighting apartheid and there is not one day that I do not remember the suffering [the South Africans] caused my family and the people of the region.”

Samora’s mother and thousands of other women were left not only to perform the household labor necessary to sustain the family, but also to chop down trees and clear brush to create the maize and sorghum fields and small vegetable gardens they spent long hours cultivating. Some of these more strenuous tasks had been performed by women even before colonialism because men were often absent for long periods of time, hunting or visiting relatives. After the opening of the mines, Guguiye had to learn how to plow with the draft animals purchased with her husband’s wages, despite local taboos that barred women from such tasks.

By 1926, Mandande and his family no longer lived off his wages from the mines. They had become successful farmers, using his four plows and animal traction to cultivate upwards of sixty acres in the rich alluvial soils adjacent to the Limpopo River and selling their agricultural surplus at local and regional markets. By the time Samora was ten, he was working in the family cotton fields and learning how to use a plow. Forty years later, Samora’s father proudly told Allen that Samora “worked very hard and was very respectful.”¹⁶

Nevertheless, the family’s relative prosperity was precarious. African farmers were forced to sell their produce at artificially depressed prices because colonial administrators fixed prices in ways that privileged European producers. In a 1974 interview, Samora complained that “we would produce and sell one kilo of beans at three and a half escudos while the European farmers produced and sold at five escudos a kilo.”¹⁷ European merchants would then resell the beans to Africans for almost double the buying price.

Despite their lack of control over the markets, Mandande and other farmers worked hard and were able to save some of their income, which they reinvested in cattle and agricultural equipment. A handful of prosperous farmers who, like Samora’s father, had been schooled at Protestant missions were even recognized as assimilados. Although his family benefited from this relatively privileged status, it never blinded Samora to the suffering of those around him, and he was very critical of those who internalized the colonial civilizing myth and tried to emulate the Portuguese.

Samora was raised in a stern, but loving, home. His deeply religious Protestant parents bestowed upon him the middle name Moises to honor both his father and the biblical figure who led his people out of captivity. A half-century later at the time of his father’s death, Samora described him as a “soldier, successful cattle-keeper, innovative farmer, and a moral giant who fought against paganism, against witchcraft and alcohol. But above all else he was like a giant tree whose resolve against colonialism never wavered.”¹⁸ Although there is no evidence that Mandande was involved in early nationalist activities, like many of his generation he instilled in Samora a sense of pride in his African pas...