Samora Machel

Samora Moisés Machel was born in Madragoa, Portuguese East Africa, on the twenty-ninth of September 1933, the son of a peasant farmer. He trained as a nurse — one of the few professions open to Black Africans under Portuguese colonial rule — and joined the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in 1962. After the assassination of FRELIMO's first president Eduardo Mondlane in 1969, Machel became commander of the armed struggle.

The war he led was long. FRELIMO fought Portuguese colonial forces from 1964 until the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon. Mozambique became independent on the twenty-fifth of June 1975 with Machel as first President. He inherited a country with a literacy rate below ten percent, almost no domestic professional class, and ninety percent of Portuguese settlers in flight.

He pursued nationalization, mass-literacy, and rural collectivization. Within five years he had quadrupled the literacy rate and tripled the number of children in primary school. He also hosted the ANC in exile and provided the logistical base for the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army — and paid the cost. The apartheid-funded Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) conducted a sixteen-year civil war that killed approximately one million Mozambicans and displaced five million more.

On the nineteenth of October 1986, returning from a meeting of Front-Line State leaders in Zambia, Machel's presidential aircraft crashed into a hillside on the South African border at Mbuzini. The cause has never been satisfactorily established; the South African apartheid intelligence apparatus is widely believed to have manipulated the navigation beacons. He was fifty-three.

He is honored here as the first President of Mozambique, and the most disciplined of the post-Portuguese liberation statesmen.