3. . Assassinations: Samora Machel and the case of execution by plane-crash
And what of that other fallen comrade, Samora Machel? After a bitter battle both within Frelimo and within the Tanzanian government, Machel became the first and much the most credible of Mondlane’s successors as party president (see Munslow 1985; Christie 1989; and, especially, Le Fanu 2012). Moreover, and unlike Mondlane, Machel did live long enough to also become, after the 1974 army coup in Portugal, the first president of a new and independent Mozambique. But his ‘heroic’ stature had already been established during the liberation war in the role he played militarily in consolidating a viable and successful Frelimo armed wing. Needless to say others were involved in this task beyond Machel, but his own energy and personal charisma were a visible and marked key. Thus he moved from his job as a nurse in southern Mozambique to, in exile, a role within Frelimo’s fledgling military where, by the sheer force of his will and presence, he made things happen … emerging, as noted, as that army’s commander and its inspiration. In doing so he had to step past Uriah Simango1 politically. For after Mondlane’s death Simango initially formed, with Marcelino dos Santos, and Machel, a short-lived leadership triumvirate. But that leadership format seemed most unlikely to last and, with Nyerere’s blessing if against the views of some other prominent Tanzanian politicians, Machel’s elevation to the leadership of Frelimo was confirmed and sanctioned by Tanzania.
Then, as president of Mozambique, Machel and his team faced the new set of challenges of the post-liberation world when, as has often been commented upon, much was accomplished in the early years. True, Frelimo’s overall system of governance, set within a framework of one-party rule but also being the product of many cross-cutting forces, remained a firmly top-down one. Such forces also framed a comfortable environment for Machel’s own larger-than-life personality and his distinctly vanguardist bent. Perhaps it is not surprising then that, by the time of Machel’s death on 19 October 1986, the Frelimo system as a whole (and as carried over from the war experience) was fraying, with many of the cadres – not least within the military – becoming merely older and more comfortable. But so did many corrupt practices, and a stale and rather slipshod bureaucratisation within the dominant structures also became more pervasive, with such distemper particularly evident within the country’s military leadership (which was by then also under considerable pressure from apartheid South Africa and its then ward, Renamo). Indeed, it was much anticipated that, on his return from a meeting in Lusaka, Machel would – as he confided to several colleagues – move to clean up the Mozambican military, beginning with the sacking of its commandant, Sebastião Mobate. Of course, this had once been the sphere of command in which Machel had exemplified his most ‘heroic’ character, but it was now increasingly a focus of his most scathing criticisms. Could he have helped turn such things around? No time for that in any case, the necessary asterisk tells us: such a growing commitment to act was only just crystallising in the period in advance of the moment of his death!
This death, together with those of many of his top advisors, came when Machel’s plane, returning from that Lusaka meeting mentioned above, crashed into a hill across the border in South Africa itself. It was no accident, it seems apparent, although definitive proof that the South Africans had used a false signal to pull the plane off its course has been difficult to come by.2 Nonetheless, this is the picture that emerged in the aftermath of the crash, even though the site had been meticulously scoured and apparently ‘cleaned up’ – with compromising evidence removed – by South African security officials before any word of the crash itself was passed on to Maputo. It is also true that, after the African National Congress’s post-apartheid ascension to power, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did undertake a ‘Special Investigation into the death of President Samora Machel’ as part of its formal duties (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998; as evidence of the continuing interest in this story, see Zimbabwe Herald 2010; Akukizibwe 2014; Gwaambuka 2016; Conchiglia 2017). In the absence of definitive evidence – the apartheid apparatus having had plenty of time to destroy more such evidence prior to the moment of South Africa’s own transition to majority rule – the TRC could conclude only that ‘the investigations conducted by the Commission raised a number of questions, including the possibility of a false beacon and the absence of a warning from the South African authorities. The matter requires further investigation by an appropriate structure’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998, 502). But, to my knowledge, nothing more has been heard of any such ‘further investigation’ – in large part, no doubt, because there has remained little enough extant evidence left to investigate.
Mondlane and Machel, then, as African heroes in history? No doubt the term ‘hero’ is itself a bit grandiose but it is accurate enough, I would say, in the Hookian sense (see Part I in the previous issue). And both were also killed too soon. Did they change history? Yes. Might they have continued to do so? Harder to say, but at the very least we can suggest the following: both had already bent history enough to have made a real difference in defining Mozambique’s post-colonial prospects … albeit not quite enough to ensure a progressive future for the country. But had they been allowed to live they might have accomplished much more.
4. . Executions as a mode of governance: the fate of Uriah Simango
In short, a Mozambique haunted by such assassinations both then and now. But flip the coin for a moment and consider the spectacle of a strong leader and his party being driven by vanguardist self-righteousness to stumble into the dark waters of … wilfully executing its own critics. For the troubling event here – albeit one not talked about enough in the consideration of Mozambique’s trajectory – is a bizarre set of events that should press itself upon our consciousness and our consciences. Thus, the fact is that, if death was being meted out to Frelimo by its enemies, murder was also a currency that the Frelimo leadership itself was prepared to traffic in. Fortunately, there is nothing in Mozambique’s recent history of the order of Angola’s ‘war of the generations’ and of the killing grounds that its post-liberation history produced (I have crafted an account of these Angolan events in a previous issue of ROAPE, no. 142 [2014]). Nonetheless it is important here to pull to the surface a dimension of Frelimo’s own record that, while little noted, is especially worthy of attention … at least in part because it helps underscore the costs of the movement’s own uncritically vanguardist predilections. For it was this, Frelimo’s overweening leadership style, that helped lead to its own ultimate collapse – even though it is still ‘in power’ – as a progressive force for change in its own country.
The execution of Uriah Simango? Particularly noteworthy in his case is the manner of his removal (with a number of his colleagues, and his wife as well) sometime in the first decade of Mozambique’s independence from the political board by means of execution, with such executions carried out in a wholly secretive and extra-judicial manner. Note, for starters, that this all occurred a number of years after the establishment of a new Mozambican state with a fully constituted legal/judicial system of its own, yet it led to the executions of Simango and others linked to him – on Machel’s watch and at times and in places that have never, up to the present, been publicly much revealed, investigated, explained or vindicated!
So just who was this Simango, the man who became the main focus of Frelimo’s own murderous practice? Recall that Simango had been a founding member of Frelimo and indeed was elected within the movement to serve as vice-president to Mondlane’s president. He was also a fairly conventional ‘African nationalist’, from what one can tell from the historical record. Indeed, in the sixties he was correctly seen by most supporters of broader changes in southern Africa as something of an ‘anti-hero’ – a champion of an unassertive brand of nationalism that sought, as had nationalist movements further north on the continent, to bring just enough pressure on the colonial power to encourage it to promote a kind of neocolonial solution that nationalist movements could then ride to some form of power. But now – with the rise of Machel, with the need for a military response to Portugal ever more apparent, and with the emergence of a radically Marxist ideological tinge to the movement – Simango was, after a rather messy confrontation, encouraged to move on.
Simango did leave behind one written version of his thoughts, his provocative paper in the 1960s entitled ‘Gloomy situation in Frelimo’ (Simango 1969), widely circulated at the time in Dar es Salaam which is where I obtained the copy I still have. This paper sought, not too convincingly, to turn what was to become Frelimo’s version of events upside down, attacking the alternative candidates (alternative to himself) for leadership roles. (Mondlane, Marcelino dos Santos, Joaquim Chissano and Armando Guebuza all were named, as was, even more arbitrarily, Janet Mondlane, Mondlane’s white American wife who was singled out for a particular venomous and threatening tongue-lashing.) This group was accused by Simango of a range of murderous activities against both the more ‘realistic’ nationalist wing of the party and against the voices (like Kavandame) of ‘tribes’ in the north and centre of the country. In Simango’s reading, in short, the Mondlane wing was best characterised as a southern Mozambican clique set to dictate terms to the rest of the population! This, plus the fact that they were quite dangerous ideologically, led to their being further denounced by Simango as prepared, in their aggressive leftism, to set the lower classes in Mozambique against proto-bourgeois Mozambicans who sought more open economic opportunities to ground their own ascendancy. Mere nationalists versus those with more radical hopes for a post-liberation world, then: a recurrent story in the sphere of the continent’s liberation struggles. Meanwhile, Simango did move on, surfacing in Cairo and in Lusaka as a Coremo representative (but without any links to Renamo, it bears emphasising) and then, after the coup in Portugal, surfacing fatefully in Lourenço Marques/Maputo as leader of his new party, the National Coalition Party. Was he not seeking to link up with other groupings and individuals who opposed the coming of a Frelimo-sponsored one-party state to Mozambique?3
A one-party state is, nonetheless, what emerged, and among its first acts was to round up Simango and his core grouping, mainly made up of the defeated anti-Samora, anti-dos Santos activists from Dar es Salaam days. This group included Paulo Gumane, Adelino Gwambe, Mateus Genjere and even some more suspect types such as Lázaro Kavandame and Joana Simeão (the former a militant tribalist from Cabo Delgado who went over to the Portuguese after his period with Frelimo in Tanzania and the latter widely suspected of having been an undercover agent of PIDE [Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado], the much feared Portuguese security force). The Simango group was spirited away to Frelimo’s Nachingwea camp in Tanzania and eventually, it appears, to a camp, rough and remote, in Niassa Province, where they were forced to live in isolation under extremely onerous conditions. Just how long they were there remains a matter of some speculation, since Frelimo itself has been entirely closed about just what had occurred and when – although eventually all were, extra-judicially, executed (some speculating that this occurred in the late 1970s, others suggesting a period as late as 1983). There has never been – right up to the present day – a governmental or party attempt to launch a ‘truth and reconciliation’-style effort to carefully investigate and clarify this still-relevant chapter of Mozambican history.4
True, an account of the Simango story – a piece of hagiography (at 466 pages!) but one of considerable interest – was written by Barnabé Lucas Ncomo and published in Mozambique; its title: Uriah Simango: um homen, uma causa (Ncomo 2003). It is a volume that announces itself on its front cover as being ‘the history of the painful political trajectory of a missionary of nationalism whose commitment and dedication to the cause of the liberation of his people are lost to the collective memory of the recent history of his country.’ It gives a very detailed account of just who, from one perspective, Simango was and what he represented. Its publication in Mozambique and its public launch in Maputo in 2004 (with a group of several hundred people on hand) was particularly worthy of note.5 Still, it caused little enough stir, with few tempted to raise key questions publicly that the book might have been expected to prompt. Ever intrepid, however, Paul Fauvet of the Agência de Informação de Moçambique news service did begin his account – in the aforementioned article on the book’s launch (Fauvet 2004) – that ‘Like other prominent opponents of Frelimo, Simango was arrested by the triumphant liberation movement’, and taken to the Frelimo base camp in Nachingwea (in Tanzania) where he was forced to make a 20-page public confession on 12 May 1975, and to request re-education. Simango and the remainder of his new PCN (National Coalition Party) leadership ‘were never [to be] seen in public again’. Simango, Gumane, Simeão, Gwambe, Gwenjere, Kavandame and others were all secretly executed at some undetermined date … with neither the place of burial nor manner of their execution ever disclosed openly by the authorities. Simango’s wife, Celina Simango, was also separately executed sometime after 1981, and, again, no details or dates for her death are on public record. But note: it was also at Nachingwea in 1975 ‘that Samora Machel, according to the Tanzanian press of the time, gave a public promise that the prisoners would not be killed’.
To repeat Fauvet’s graphic phrase in the immediately preceding paragraph, Simango and company were ‘never to be seen in public again’! But as Fauvet then proceeds to write:
One of the major stains on Frelimo’s history is that Machel’s promise was broken. Simango, his wife, and the other ‘traitors’ who had been rounded up were executed. [But] neither Frelimo, nor the government, has ever given details. The Mozambican public does not know when or where Simango was executed, and his sons have never been told where their parents were buried.[6] No explanation has ever been given for why the initial decision to keep them alive was reversed.
Ncomo believes the executions took place in the late 1970s. But 1983 would seem a more likely date – this was the year in which Frelimo, under severe pressure from the South African apartheid regime, adopted a series of panicky and authoritarian measures (such as the extension of the death penalty to cover economic crimes, and ‘Operation Production’, the botched and ill-conceived attempt to evacuate the unemployed from the cities). But we cannot know the date for sure until the people in the Frelimo leadership who took the decision, or who knew about it, break their silence. (Fauvet 2004)
As for the long-absent acknowledgement of the events, the only ones ever pronounced from within Frelimo (as far as I can tell) came many years after the executions – regardless of whether the executions occurred in the late 1970s or in 1983 – and then almost in passing. Thus, as Fauvet reports,
For years, Frelimo wouldn’t even say that Simango and company were dead. This myth cracked in an angry debate in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, in 1997, in which, responding to remarks by Renamo MPs about the fate of ‘the reactionaries’, Sergio Vieira declared: ‘The traitors were executed.’ He gave no details, and his outburst seemed to embarrass Frelimo. (Ibid.)
There were also the words, in 2005, of Marcelino dos Santos, the former vice-president (an office he held both within Frelimo and in the country itself at the time of the executions). Some 20 to 25 years after the events, and speaking of them for the first time in public, dos Santos gave, in an interview with radio and TV journalist Emilio Manhique, a particularly chilling acknowledgement of them and of the official silence that continues to shroud them:
Because one must see that at that moment, and naturally, while we ourselves felt the validity of revolutionary justice, the one built and fertilised by the armed struggle of national liberation, there existed, nonetheless, the fact that one had already formed a state, albeit one where Frelimo was the fundamental power. So it was this that, perhaps, led us, knowing precisely that many people would not be able to comprehend things well, to prefer to keep silent. But let me say clearly that we do not regret these acts because we acted with revolutionary violence against traitors – and traitors against the Mozambican people!
Dos Santos had long had the reputation of being something of a Soviet-lining hack so both his position and his phraseology need occasion no surprise. But note again the texture of the key phrases: ‘knowing precisely that many people would not be able to comprehend things’, this led us ‘to prefer to keep silent’ and that, nonetheless, ‘we do not regret these acts because we acted with revolutionary violence against traitors … against the Mozambican people!’ This is Stalin-speak (however much Africanised), if ever there was such a thing.
As for Joaquim Chissano, he has only ever made passing and entirely perfunctory comments on these happenings, most openly breaking his silence – although then saying precious little even a good 30 years after the event – in 2012! In a TV interview with journalist Simeão Ponguana, who inquired pointedly about the executions of Simango, Joana Simeão and the others, Chissano could only say that
I don’t know what the circumstances were … I knew about their deaths from President Samora himself and thanks to this I can say they are dead. For President Samora at one point ran into me in the Palacio and he exclaimed, ‘Chissano, they killed Simango, do you understand?’ That was his tone. And then someone else came along so we closed our conversation and we never again discussed these matters. (My translation, with emphasis added)
This exchange was described by one observer as ‘a rather miserable and evasive interview’. A strange temerity indeed on the part of the man, Chissano, who, as Samora Machel’s successor, would soon become president of the country for some 20 years (1986–2005)!
Did/does Frelimo know something about Simango that we don’t know and, if so, why won’t they tell the Mozambican people what it was/is? Otherwise, it is all too easy to see the entire Simango tragedy as another instance of the most abusive kind of vanguardism. However lost the fate of Simango and others may have become in the swirl of events that stalked Frelimo and Mozambique in its first independence years, these deaths must be rediscovered and re-evaluated. Indeed, such a hearing might give more resonance and meaning to the freedoms that had seemed to be promised in Chissano’s apparent opening up the terrain of formal democratic contestation in the 1990s. The fact is that any real popular empowerment has been very slow in coming, with, instead, the squabbling between Frelimo and Renamo over proven illegalities and other irregularities (often quite dangerous ones, especially from the Renamo camp) on both sides having reached continuingly threatening proportions.
5. . The ‘quiet assassination epidemic’ in twenty-first century Mozambique – on Carlos Cardoso and the country’s more recent ‘hit list’
But assassinations/executions did not end here. For the broader context was one reflected in Mozambique’s depressing slide down the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index in 2018, where the country is ‘to now be classified as an authoritarian state’ (this was republished last year by the Club of Mozambique [2019] – which is not to suggest that either the Economist Intelligence Unit or the Club of Mozambique can be taken as infallible assessors of different countries’ degree of democracy … but in this case they seem to be not far off the mark). The immediate justification for this downgrading has been ‘the running of the then recent municipal elections widely seen as fraudulent’ – a fact, the Intelligence Unit states, that ‘could threaten continuing peace talks with Renamo’. Yet it is the more general political atmosphere in the country in the present century that remains even more unsettling. There was, for example, crusading journalist Carlos Cardoso’s ‘Mafia-style’ murder in 2000 (Ibid.), with this being an early example of Mozambique’s recent ‘quiet assassination epidemic’;7 indeed, as the authors of the ENACT Observer article so entitled write: ‘Assassinations in Mozambique are a worrying sign that violence is increasingly preferred to dialogue’ (Horsley and Haysom 2018). Meanwhile, the assassination scourge has merely surged on. Moreover, adds the Democracy Index, with the ‘[recent] arrest of [journalist] Amade Abubacar in Cabo Delgado, and his ongoing illegal detention in a military barracks, the authoritarian designation seems even more apt’ (Zitamar Weekly 2019) … while other cases can be seen to fully reflect the ‘incapacity and/or unwillingness of Mozambican justice to hold its own powerful people to account’ (Ibid.).8
Has this then meant some sad surrender of Frelimo’s once much-trumpeted leftist version of its post-liberation project – and a victory for elite-assisted recolonisation? This seems to be a conclusion that many otherwise sympathetic observers increasingly feel compelled to come to, with such a ‘recolonisation’ marking a victory for global capitalism, for the greed of the Frelimo elite, and for the shadow world of free-market fantasies. Mozambique is a country now ranked 181 out of 187 countries worldwide in the most recent UNDP Human Development Index, and this is merely one of the many disconcerting statistics that could be cited here. Meanwhile Frelimo is having to work even harder (and play even dirtier) than ever to stay in the saddle, this being reflected, most recently, in the release on 7 May of the report of the Commonwealth Election Observer Group reported by Joe Hanlon in his article of 2 June 2020 in the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin: ‘Commonwealth says elections [of October 2019] not credible, peaceful or transparent’. But this merely echoes an earlier article recording the European Union’s report on the same election in Mozambique which also appeared in Joe Hanlon’s ‘2019 General Elections – 81: Mozambique Political Process Bulletin’ (17 October 2019); its headline: ‘EU hits [out at] “unlevel playing field” and “climate of fear” in harsh statement’ on Mozambique, and with this content:
‘An unlevel playing field was evident throughout the campaign’, said the European Union Observation Mission in an unusually harsh interim statement this afternoon. ‘The ruling party dominated the campaign in all provinces and benefited from the advantages of incumbency, including unjustified use of state resources, and more police escorts and media coverage than opponents.’
‘Frelimo received the largest share of [public media] coverage, often in an uncritical tone’, the EU noted. ‘The President of the Republic was often shown or mentioned in his official capacity, promoting projects and giving speeches.’
[Moreover] ‘Limitations on the freedom of assembly and the movement of opposition parties were often reported.’
The EU mission also highlighted the general lack of trust. ‘A lack of public trust was observed in the impartiality of the national police forces, who were often perceived as more supportive of the ruling party and not managing properly the election related incidents and complaints. … The murder of a prominent national observer by members of the national police force had the effect of exacerbating an already existing climate of fear and self-censorship prevalent in Mozambican society.’ (Hanlon 2019, added emphasis)
*******
‘Murder’. ‘Fear’. ‘Self-censorship’. In sum, crude, high-handed and unapologetic vanguardism – vanguardism as intimidation – has become the Mozambican elite’s preferred mode of politics and this, plus the elite’s own self-serving greed, make for a fateful and often fatal (as the above-noted ‘assassination epidemic’ testifies!) one–two combination that has provided a particularly sad denouement of the once much-celebrated Mozambican revolution. Of course, many apologists for the striking of such a balance sheet on Frelimo in power will argue that any other outcomes were virtually impossible to realise in the ‘real world’ of global capitalist ascendancy … either that, or they charge that Frelimo itself was never really clean, clear or principled enough to carry off any very bold scheme of national resistance to global ‘realities’ in the prevailing southern African context in any case. Whatever may be the truth in that respect, the long-term outcome is not pretty, and, for the mass of the Mozambican population, certainly has not been very ‘liberating’.9