Samora Machel, the leader of Mozambique’s independence struggle and the country’s first post-independence president, was born on 29th September 1933 in Gaza Province, Mozambique.
He was born into a family of subsistence farmers forced off their land to pave the way for Portuguese settlers. This experience made Machel politically conscious at a young age.
After primary school, Machel trained to be a nurse and later worked at a hospital in the then-capital, Lourenço Marques. The poor working conditions for Black nurses at the hospital compared with those their White counterparts enjoyed further politicised Machel.
In the early ‘60s, he left for Tanzania to join the country’s liberation movement, the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), via Swaziland, South Africa and Botswana.
In Dar es Salaam, Machel volunteered for military service, and was one of the second group of FRELIMO guerrillas sent for training in Algeria. Back in Tanzania, he was put in charge of FRELIMO’s own training camp, at Kongwa. After FRELIMO launched the independence war, on 25th September 1964, Machel soon became a key commander, making his name in particular in the grueling conditions of the eastern area of the vast and sparsely populated province of Niassa. He rapidly rose through the ranks of the guerrilla army, the FPLM, and became the head of the army after the death of its first commander, Filipe Samuel Magaia, in October 1966.
According to Wikipedia, Frelimo’s founder and first president, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by a parcel bomb on 3rd February 1969. His deputy, Rev Uria Simango, expected to take over – but instead the FRELIMO Executive Committee appointed a presidential triumvirate, consisting of Simango, Machel and veteran nationalist and poet Marcelino dos Santos. Simango soon broke ranks, and denounced the rest of the FRELIMO leadership in the pamphlet “Gloomy Situation in Frelimo”. This led to Simango’s expulsion from the liberation front, and the election, in 1970, of Machel as Frelimo President, with dos Santos as Deputy President.
Like the late Mondlane, Machel identified himself with Marxism–Leninism, and under his leadership these positions became central to FRELIMO, which evolved from a broad front into a more Marxist party.
The new commander of the Portuguese army in Mozambique, Gen. Kaúlza de Arriaga, boasted that he would eliminate FRELIMO in a few months. He launched the largest offensive of Portugal’s colonial wars, Operation Gordian Knot, in 1970, concentrating on what was regarded as the FRELIMO heartland of Cabo Delgado in the far north. Kaúlza de Arriaga boasted of destroying a large number of guerrilla bases – but since such a base was just a collection of huts, the military significance of such supposed victories was dubious. Machel reacted by shifting the focus of the war elsewhere, stepping up FRELIMO operations in the western province of Tete. This was where a massive dam was being built at Cahora Bassa, on the Zambezi, to sell electricity to South Africa. Fearful that FRELIMO would attack the dam site, the Portuguese set up three concentric rings of defence around Cahora Bassa. This denuded the rest of Tete province of troops, and in 1972 FRELIMO crossed the Zambezi, striking further and further south. By 1973, FRELIMO units were operating in Manica and Sofala Province and began to hit the railway from Rhodesia to Beira, causing panic among the settler population of Beira, who accused the Portuguese army of not doing enough to defend white interests.
The end came suddenly. On 25th April 1974, Portuguese officers, tired of fighting three unwinnable wars in Africa, overthrew the government in Lisbon. The coup was almost bloodless. Nobody came onto the streets to defend Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano. Within 24 hours, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was in full control of Portugal.
He served as the first President of Mozambique from the country’s independence in 1975.
Samora Machel died on 19th October 1986 in Mbuzini, South Africa.
Machel’s state funeral was held in Maputo on 28th October 1986. It was attended by numerous political leaders and other notable people from Africa and elsewhere, including Dr Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Dr Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Dr Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho, Dr Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and Dr Yasser Arafat of Palestinian State. Also present were the ANC leader Oliver Tambo, the U.S. President’s daughter Maureen Reagan, the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union Heidar Aliyev, and the civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson.
At the funeral, the acting leader of Frelimo, Marcelino dos Santos, said in a speech: “The shock of your journey from which there is no return still shudders through the body of the entire nation. You fell in the struggle against apartheid… You understood apartheid as a problem for all humanity.”
Samora Machel was buried in a star-shaped crypt at Mozambican Heroes’ Square, a traffic junction in Maputo.