Samora Moisés Machel (September 29, 1933 – October 19, 1986) was a Mozambican politician and revolutionary who served as the first President of Mozambique from the country's independence in 1975 until his death in the 1986 Mozambican Tupolev Tu-134 plane crash which killed 34 people, including several Mozambican ministers and government officials. Machel was a socialist in the tradition of Marxism–Leninism.
Samora Moisés Machel was born on September 29, 1933, in the village of Madragoa (today's Chilembene), Gaza Province, Mozambique, to a family of farmers. His grandfather had been an active collaborator of Gungunhana. Under Portuguese rule, his father, like most Black Mozambicans, was classified as "indígena" (native). He was forced to accept lower prices for his crops than White farmers; compelled to grow labour-intensive cotton, which took time away from the food crops needed for his family; and forbidden to brand his mark on his cattle to prevent thievery. Despite these barriers, Machel's father was a successful farmer who owned four plows and 400 head of cattle by 1940. Machel grew up in this farming village and attended mission elementary school. In 1942, he was sent to school in the town of Zonguene in Gaza Province. The school was run by Catholic missionaries who educated the children in Portuguese language and culture. Although having completed the fourth grade, Machel never completed his secondary education. However, he had the prerequisite certificate to train as a nurse anywhere in Portugal at the time, since the nursing schools were not degree-conferring institutions.
Machel started to study nursing in the capital city of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), beginning in 1954. In the 1950s, he saw some of the fertile lands around his farming community on the Limpopo River appropriated by the provincial government and worked by White settlers who developed a wide range of new infrastructure for the region. Like many other Mozambicans near the southern border of Mozambique, some of his relatives went to work in the South African mines where additional job opportunities were found. Shortly afterwards, one of his brothers was killed in a mining accident. Unable to complete formal training at the Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lourenço Marques, he got a job working as an aide in the same hospital and earned enough to continue his education at night school. He worked at the hospital until he left the country to join the Mozambican nationalist struggle in neighbouring Tanzania.
Machel was attracted to anti-colonial ideals and began his political activities in the Miguel Bombarda hospital in Lourenço Marques (Maputo), where he protested against the fact that black nurses were paid less than whites doing the same job. Machel decided to leave Lourenço Marques when a white anti-fascist, the pharmaceutical representative João Ferreira, warned him that he was being watched by the Portuguese political police, the PIDE. Slipping across the border, he made his way to join FRELIMO in Dar es Salaam, via Swaziland, South Africa and Botswana. In Botswana, he hitched a lift on a plane carrying recruits of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa to Tanzania. Impressed by the young Mozambican, a senior ANC official J. B. Marks (according to Joe Slovo) bumped one of the ANC recruits off the flight to let Machel on.
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 September 25, 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.
Frelimo's founder and first president, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by a parcel bomb on February 3, 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 April 25, 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.
Frelimo's immediate warning was that there was no such thing as democratic colonialism, and that nobody should imagine that Mozambicans would tolerate Portuguese rule just because there had been a change of government in Lisbon.
Frelimo's fears were well-founded. The MFA allowed General António de Spínola to become the first post-coup President. He had been commander of the Portuguese forces in Guinea-Bissau, then Portuguese Guinea, and was believed to be deeply implicated in the assassination of the Guinean nationalist leader, Amílcar Cabral.
Spinola had no intention of letting Mozambique and Angola go. He dreamed of a Lusophone commonwealth run from Lisbon, and wanted a referendum on independence. Machel rejected such plans with the pithy remark: "You don't ask a slave if he wants to be free, particularly when he is already in revolt, and much less if you happen to be a slave-owner".
Initial discussions between Frelimo and the new Portuguese government, held in Lusaka in June 1974, proved fruitless. It was clear to Machel that the Portuguese foreign minister, Socialist Party leader Mário Soares, had no power to negotiate independence. So Machel sent one of his top advisers, Aquino de Bragança, to Lisbon to find out who really held power in Portugal. His answer was that Frelimo should really be talking to the MFA, particular to military intellectuals such as Col. Ernesto Melo Antunes, whose power was on the rise, as that of Spinola waned.
Machel refused to give the Portuguese the ceasefire they wanted. For as long as there was no commitment to Mozambican independence, the war would continue. Frelimo re-opened its front in Zambezia province, and stepped up operations throughout the war zone.