This is the second post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This post is the story of Mozambique until about 20 years ago. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the always popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.
When we last left Mozambique it was 1950 and small percentage of Portuguese were controlling all of Mozambique. This meant limited access to land, wealth, education, and opportunity for the native Mozambicans. Then things started to change in the 1960’s (what didn’t).
Mozambicans, upon hearing about similar efforts in other countries now known as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zaire, the Congo, and Angola, began demanding equal opportunities and control of their lives. They won small concessions at first but it was far from fair, so they kept pushing. Around this time, the Portuguese army and their Special Forces/Blackwater freelance partners had control over cities, ports, and inland trading posts. Because they were no match for a full force assault, the Mozambique bushmen started staging guerrilla attacks with gorilla tactics (jump out of trees, bash a few heads, pound your chest as your enemy flees). They would attack remote outposts that more than anything equated to a small scale casualties and destruction of property.
Under the banner of FRELIMO (an acronym in Portuguese meaning “Stop treating us like crap” or something like that) the Mozambicans started gaining traction and won approval for several reforms like the right own their house and go to school. No matter what rights the Portuguese decided to “bestow” upon the people it was never full equality. And even if it was, they would never be happy because the Portuguese had everything and the Mozambicans had sore backs from working the fields.
Well, it wasn’t enough, and finally after years of gorilla attacks and fighting Mozambique declared itself independent from Portugal in June of 1975. Granted, they just happened to declare independence at the same time there was no control back home in bankrupt Portugal because a military junta was wrapping up a hostile takeover. That’s just one little fact that the Mozambique history books tend to overlook. Don’t get me wrong; I think its great they got out from under the Portuguese, but its kind of like independence by default.
This is where things start to get really really crappy. FRELIMO ordered all of the nearly 250,000 white people, mixed white/native people, or white-loving people living in Mozambique to leave overnight. And when they left, they practically invented the phrase ‘salting the earth’. Soldiers literally salted the earth, poisoned and poured cement down wells, torched buildings and crops, and destroyed what infrastructure hadn’t already been destroyed during the war for independence.
It was at this time that FRELIMO set up how it was going to govern. Let me give you a hint. The capital building is located on Karl Marx Avenue and the main road through my town of Nampula is Avenue of the Workers. Yep, they went full out Communist. At the same time FRELIMO was getting used to calling each other “Comrade”, a new group of people decided that the policies they set up inherently benefefited FRELIMO as well as people located in and around the major cities of the south. This group was known as RENAMO (an acronym in Portuguese meaning “two can play at that game” or something like that).
It wasn’t two years before RENAMO declared civil war on FRELIMO. And it was bad. Now the tables had turned and FRELIMO controlled the cities and trade centers and RENAMO was waging one of those guerilla/gorilla chest-pounding things. This is when things started to get some international attention. Granted, it still probably didn’t make the nightly news in America. Walter Cronkite was probably busy telling Americans what evil commie food Gorbachev had for dinner that night.
So here’s how the next twenty years played out: On one hand you have FRELIMO: independent, anti-white, anti-colonial, and communist. They started receiving money and arms from places like the USSR, China, Algeria, Darth Vader, and the rest of the Galactic Empire. On the other side there was RENAMO: guerrilla, rural, and ready to sink to whatever lows to accomplish their goals. They were rebel militia supported by South Africa, Rhodesia, Europe and the US, Sauron and the Armies of Mordor. These guys failed to gain the support of Admiral Akbar and the rest of the rebel alliance because these guys fought dirty. Well, then again, both sides fought dirty.
Things got interesting in 1986 when the FRELIMO president died in a plane crash. They blamed the United States for using radar jamming and lasers to shoot down the plane or something. The United states pointed the finger to the crappy Soviet technology in the airplanes. The soviets pointed a finger to the substandard aluminum mined in rural Mozambique (RENAMO territory). RENAMO miners refused to take credit for it publicly but privately were happy they mined substandard aluminum.
The new FRELIMO president, in an attempt to extend an alive branch, announced that Marxism was not a viable solution and switched the country over to “capitalism”. Coincidently, this concession came about three months after the Berlin wall came down. Around the same time, with the cold war ending, support for RENAMO died out, and both sides eventually ended the war with peace talks in 1992 and elections in 1994.
In all seriousness, the Mozambique civil war was ugly, ugly, ugly. Both sides raiding random villages and killing everyone in site. Almost an entire generation was lost. From 1977-1992 when a peace was finally reached historians estimate that at least 1 million were left dead from the conflict, and over 1.7 million people were displaced or fled to neighboring countries to seek asylum from the conflict. Countless more millions fled their home within the country to somewhere else until the conflict reached there and they moved again.
The unique thing about the Mozambique Civil war is that unlike other conflicts in Africa in the latter half of the 20th century, it was not about race, unlike other wars happening in the Congo, or the genocide in Rwanda, the ongoing conflicts in Sudan etc.
We’re now at about 1995. Tune back next time when the post-war Government will be on full display and comically lampooned in every way possible.
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